Shadowkill

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She pushed hard at first, letting the ponies alternate between a fast walk and a canter; riding the little bay was like sitting a jit on a corduroy road, but she spared neither herself nor her mounts.

The day heated up as the morning winds dropped and finally she knew she couldn’t go much longer. She let the pony slow to a tired shuffle and fished out the map. The brush on both sides of the rutted dirt road was a meter higher than her head. There was nothing else to see but the tan road and a sky yellow with a punishing heat. She checked the angle of the sun. Almost directly overhead, around a half-hour past sunhigh. She pulled the map into the shade of her hat brim to cut the dazzle of the parchment, squinted at the tiny black writing. There was a bridge some way ahead, built over a wide swooping bend of the river that ran past the Rinta. Water and browse. A good place to stop and wait out the worst of the heat.

She folded the map again, tucked it into the saddlebag, and slumped into the sway of the pony’s walk.