GUNPOWDER MAGNOLIA Chapter 7: Godmarked (Patreon)

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Here's the seventh chapter of Gunpowder Magnolia ahead of the newsletter. Not caught up yet? Find links to previous chapters here.

Lanthe thanked Heaven for her terrible horse. The ride along the Seizang River could have been a misery of nerves had she spent it in her own head. Instead, all her focus went into keeping her unruly mount under control.

She wasn’t a bad rider—for a peasant, anyway. Like all soldiers, she had learned to sit a horse in her mandatory training at the capital. In subsequent years, as Ro moved her to different fronts, she had learned to shoot and wield a glaive from the saddle. But the horses she’d ridden in the past had all been native animals, bred and trained for Ro military formations. The sand-colored mare bearing Lanthe to the Yao border was a bandit’s horse, seized after the slaughter. The half-wild thing was plainly distressed from the earlier carnage, nippy with the Ro horses, unused to Ro tack, and unresponsive to Ro commands. In battle, all warriors steered mainly with their thighs, but there were subtle differences in the way men of different countries handled that movement. Lanthe and this horse had yet to learn each other, and Lanthe often found herself hauling at the reins just to keep Fidget pointed in the right direction.

“Fidget?” Tairo laughed when Lanthe grumbled about the difficult animal. “You gave her a name? Like a noble’s horse?”

“How else will she know who I’m snapping at?” Lanthe said.

Though, in truth, she hardly snapped at Fidget at all. Whenever they stopped, Lanthe spoke softly to the creature, told her she had done well, pressed slow strokes down her neck.

“You seem eager to make friends,” Tairo observed as he tethered Cloud next to Fidget on the third night. “You know, you don’t need to be the perfect team.”

He didn’t speak explicitly of the plan, but Lanthe knew what he meant. The two of them would not be riding into battle with Tenro’s battalion. Fidget’s only job was to get Lanthe to Yao.

“I know,” Lanthe said but didn’t stop petting the horse’s neck.

If she stayed calm, Fidget stayed calm. This simple connection—twitchy warm muscle beneath her palm—was easier to master than the future sprawling ahead in her mind.

Fidget’s previous rider had braided beads into her pale brown mane. It felt oddly intrusive to remove them, but they weren’t standard. Lanthe had picked at Fidget’s mane at each stop, unknotting the ties, letting the clay beads fall to the earth, and slowly combing the braids free with her fingers. Here on the third night, she was down to the last braid up between Fidget’s flicking ears. She fiddled absently with the leather tie at the end, not quite wanting to undo it.

This was their last night with the battalion.

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