Caewen got to her feet quickly, if also somewhat unsteadily. She reached out with both hands for the saddle. Regardless of what she’d said, the boy couldn’t sit and do nothing–he reached for her with one free hand, while he tangled his other, loop upon loop, in a length of bridle leather. Dapplegrim said, “Ouch!” angrily, and the boy guessed he must have pinched something. Caewen scrambled up just enough to get one leg over the saddle. The moment her toes left the ground, Dapplegrim shot forward like a blast of grey-black cloud at the head of a storm.
The walking gorse must have realised that there had been a trick. Walls of thorns and bright beautiful yellow flowers rushed in from all sides, rolling shut like two waves coming together, cresting and churning. The gorse wasn’t even pretending to move subtly now. It came at them with rage. Dapple’s headlong rush was at a speed faster than anything the boy had imagined possible. Faster even than Dapplegrim had run before. Though the gorse came at them quickly, it was not quick enough.
Hooves pounding, Dapplegrim burst out of the thickets. They were on open ground, galloping it seemed for a long time. Then, Dapplegrim leapt, and scrambled for purchase up the side of a rocky strew of boulders. The greyness of cliffs loomed ahead and above. The boy assumed they would be safe now they were at the foot of the mountains. But as Dapplegrim paused, and all three of them turned to look, they saw the gorse keep on coming after them, twisting and contorting, flowing over and around rocks like green-grey-gold water in flood.
“Stops at the rocks, hur,” muttered Dapplegrim. “My great hairy hocks, it does.” He resumed his canter, pressing upwards and upwards, running, then jumping from ledge to rocky boulder-top. It was all the boy could do, just to hold on. Finally, the the gorse fell back–just a little–and then it slowed and it stopped. Dapplegrim climbed up one last low ridge of rock, and he hung his head, exhausted, wheezing. He spat out a sticky ribbon of what looked uncomfortably like phlegm and blood. “Off,” he managed to say between gasped. “Off, now…”
They both slipped off him. Caewen collapsed to her knees, and then sat in a crumbled heap. She was bloodied all over her hands and face with little streaks of faintly drying red. Dapplegrim collapsed too, but with more of a thud, and lay on the ground. He looked very much like an ordinary, unwell horse heaving for breath.
The boy found that by comparison, he was not too badly hurt. With no idea what to do, he starting pacing back and forth, from Caewen to Dapplegrim, and back again. He talked to them, and offered them water from one of the skins. As he walked back-and-forth, worrying, a brown-grey shadow coasted towards him on the air, letting loose nonchalant half-rattling, half-hooting noises. The boy realised with mild shock that the noise was belly laughter. He watched as the owl–which was nearly as big as he was–flapped its wings in great gusts, stalled in the air, and then became a cloud of brown and black feathers blustering outward in a swirl. Many of these feathers blew into the boy’s face. He had to cover his mouth and nose to avoid sneezing. When the feather-cloud gave way, the little nut-skinned boy was standing there on the ground, with his weird orange eyes, and a very slightly queasy expression on his face. It looked as if he wanted to vomit.
“I do not like doing that twice such a short time. No, I do not. Not at all.” He sat down with a heavy thump on a stone and leaned his chin on his arms, and his elbows on his knees. His wild hair fell forward in curtains. “It’s not pleasant getting all twisted up inside and feeling afront-aback and arsy-versy and all a-whummil.”
“I don’t think I know any of those words,” said the boy.
“Well you wouldn’t need them, would you?” Fleat fixed him with a slightly impatient stare. “You don’t go changing into one thing or another, so you don’t be needing no words to describe the feeling of it, do you now?”
“No,” admitted the boy. After a moment of reflection he added, “Thank you for saving us.”