Frightened to the point of hysteria, she brought the horse around again, backed him up and dug her heels into his glossy flanks, "Go!" she screamed, and after a moment's hesitation, the huge horse gathered his hindquarters beneath him and gave a mighty leap. A human scream split the night almost instantly as Jenny lost her balance and slid off the leaping horse, hanging for a suspended instant by his thick mane, before she fell with a crash into the limbs of the fallen tree. And then there was another sound-the sickening thud of a huge animal plunging down a steep incline and rolling to its death.

Jenny was climbing unsteadily from the tangle of tree limbs as Royce vaulted down from his horse and ran to the edge of the cliff. She shoved her hair out of her eyes and realized there was nothing but blackness a few feet beyond her, then she dragged her eyes to her captor, but he was staring down the steep slope, his clenched jaw as hard as granite. So unnerved and disoriented was she that she made no protest when he grabbed her arm in a painful grip and yanked her with him as he deliberately slid down the steep hill.

For a moment, Jenny couldn't imagine what he was about-and then her mind cleared a little. Thor! He was looking for his horse, she realized, her gaze flying wildly over the rugged terrain, praying somehow that the magnificent animal might not be harmed. She spotted him at the same time Royce did-the still, black form lying only a few yards away at the base of the boulder that had broken his fall, and his neck.

Royce flung her arm aside, and Jenny stayed where she stood, paralyzed with remorse and anguish as she gazed at the beautiful animal she'd inadvertently killed. As if in a dream, she watched England's fiercest warrior kneel on one knee beside his dead horse, slowly stroking the animal's glossy black coat, and speaking words she could not quite hear in a voice that was raw.