The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,155
to be heard across the border, and Nettie dove into Mam’s old wool cloak and ran toward the stockyard with her long, thick braids slapping against her back. Mam said nothing, just rocked in her chair by the window, a bottle cradled in her arm like a baby’s corpse. Grabbing the rawhide whip from its nail by the warped door, Nettie hurried past Pap on the porch and stumbled across the yard, around two mostly roofless barns, and toward the wet black shape taunting her in the moonlight against a backdrop of stars.
“Get on, mare. Go!”
A monster in a flapping jacket with a waving whip would send any horse with sense wheeling in the opposite direction, but this horse had apparently been dancing in the creek on the day sense was handed out. The mare stood in the water trough and stared at Nettie like she was a damn strange bird, her dark eyes blinking with moonlight and her lips pulled back over long, white teeth.
Nettie slowed. She wasn’t one to quirt a horse, but if the mare kept causing a ruckus, Pap would shoot her without a second or even a first thought—and he wasn’t so deep in his bottle that he was sure to miss. Getting smacked with rawhide had to be better than getting shot in the head, so Nettie doubled up her shouting and prepared herself for the heartache that would accompany the smack of a whip on unmarred hide. She didn’t even own the horse, much less the right to beat it. Nettie had grown up trying to be the opposite of Pap, and hurting something that didn’t come with claws and a stinger went against her grain.
“Shoo, fool, or I’ll have to whip you,” she said, creeping closer. The horse didn’t budge, and for the millionth time, Nettie swung the whip around the horse’s neck like a rope, all gentle-like. But, as ever, the mare tossed her head at exactly the right moment, and the braided leather snickered against the wooden water trough instead.
“Godamighty, why won’t you move on? Ain’t nobody wants you, if you won’t be rode or bred. Dumb mare.”
At that, the horse reared up with a wild scream, spraying water as she pawed the air. Before Nettie could leap back to avoid the splatter, the mare had wheeled and galloped into the night. The starlight showed her streaking across the prairie with a speed Nettie herself would’ve enjoyed, especially if it meant she could turn her back on Pap’s dirt-poor farm and no-good cattle company forever. Doubling over to stare at her scuffed boots while she caught her breath, Nettie felt her hope disappear with hoofbeats in the night.
A low and painfully unfamiliar laugh trembled out of the barn’s shadow, and Nettie cocked the whip back so that it was ready to strike.
“Who’s that? Jed?”
But it wasn’t Jed, the mule-kicked, sometimes stable boy, and she already knew it.
“Looks like that black mare’s giving you a spot of trouble, darlin’. If you were smart, you’d set fire to her tail.”
A figure peeled away from the barn, jerky-thin and slithery in a too-short coat with buttons that glinted like extra stars. The man’s hat was pulled low, his brown hair overshaggy and his lily-white hand on his gun in a manner both unfriendly and relaxed that Nettie found insulting.
“You best run off, mister. Pap don’t like strangers on his land, especially when he’s only a bottle in. If it’s horses you want, we ain’t got none worth selling. If you want work and you’re dumb and blind, best come back in the morning when he’s slept off the mezcal.”
“I wouldn’t work for that good-for-nothing piss-pot even if I needed work.”
The stranger switched sides with his toothpick and looked Nettie up and down like a horse he was thinking about stealing. Her fist tightened on the whip handle, her fingers going cold. She wouldn’t defend Pap or his land or his sorry excuses for cattle, but she’d defend the only thing other than Blue that mostly belonged to her. Men had been pawing at her for two years now, and nobody’d yet come close to reaching her soft parts, not even Pap.
“Then you’d best move on, mister.”
The feller spit his toothpick out on the ground and took a step forward, all quiet-like because he wore no spurs. And that was Nettie’s first clue that he wasn’t what he seemed.
“Naw, I’ll stay. Pretty little thing like you to keep me company.”