I am Gideon: Chapter #23

Grayson

Grayson was a striking individual.  He was very tall, which made him intimidating. He had a close-cropped beard and shoulder-length brown hair.  His eyes were a sooty black and he moved with a fluid grace like nobody I’d ever seen.  The horses loved him and I swear he could talk to them.  He spoke very little after that first night, and seemed to be carrying grief on his shoulders.  I soon learned that, like me, he didn’t particularly enjoy spending time with the others in the bunkhouse.  He walked in the woods, I guess, and spent time with the horses in their stalls.

I wanted to ask him how he knew so much about the horses – how he’d known how to calm the stallion, but I was afraid of him.  I honestly think everybody was a bit afraid of him.  I worked on how I’d ask him – casually, not awestruck, and when I got my chance, I choked.

“You’ve been wanting to ask me something,” he said, and I was scared to death he was reading my mind.  He wasn’t.  It was my body language.  Just like the horses, or so he said.  I asked, and he listened …like I was someone worth listening to.

One night I was in my hiding spot in the barn staring at my computator when I became aware that I was not alone.  I turned to see a pair of worn brown riding boots and there was Grayson.  I hadn’t seen him or heard him or smelled him.  He stayed so clean.  He asked me about the computator, and I told him, and the next night it worked for me and I knew it was him.

After that, we talked a lot in the evenings, sometimes before his evening swim and bath, sometimes after.  I walked with him and he showed me the herbs and natural substances he used for bathing, and I started bathing again, as well.  Times when he wasn’t there.  And I washed my clothes.  That made me feel better.

The others noticed and teased me, but I ignored them, as always.

One morning early one of them tried the old, “How high can you piss” trick on me, and found himself picked up like he weighed nothing and tossed out the bunkhouse door by Grayson.  My protector.  I loved him. For him.  Not because we owed each other anything but because he was my friend, and he allowed me to be his peer.

And then against all odds, in the face of everything I knew about myself, Grayson needed me!

I’d sensed from the beginning that he was too good for that place, but the Thirteenth Dragonhorse in disguise?  I was not ready for that.  And yet – ready or not – there he was.  The truth was overwhelming. The circumstances beyond anything I’d ever had to deal with.

He’d been discovered by two beings too primitive to know their theory was ludicrous … but correct.  Grayson was injured, chained, awaiting a wider discovery that probably meant death. And there I was, bumbling around as usual.  But for the first time in my life, I was being driven by something bigger than my own needs.  I was trying to save someone I loved, and it gave me courage.  It made me bold.  I actually told him what was going to happen and that I was going with him regardless of what he wanted me to do.  I belonged with him, and to him, and I knew it even then.  I saved him.

I think that’s the first time I actually amazed myself.

My first time on a horse I found myself fleeing away from Fidel’s plantation and into the darkness – and into the light – with Ardenai.

“Now my life is going to change,” I thought, and this time I was right.

Photo by Hollis.