The Last Knight Read Online Free PDF Page B

the yard, right behind the heels of a pair of oxen, which were yoked to a cart from which the carter was pulling a keg.
    I’m told oxen are placid creatures, but few animals are that placid. The pig was between the oxen and the cart and they couldn’t see what it was. They kicked, and one heavy hoof connected. Rolled under the cart by the force of the blow, the pig screamed, and that finished the matter as far as the oxen were concerned.
    The wagon’s brake snapped like a twig—only much louder—as two determined oxen headed away from the monster behind them and toward the gate, where we were. I’ve also been told oxen are slow, but you couldn’t prove it by this pair.
    There was barely time to react. The men-at-arms and I were riding in the rear. Man and horse in complete agreement, Tipple and I veered off to the side. Sir Michael and his father were already in the gate—too late to go back, too narrow to turn. With a shout, Sir Michael clapped his heels against Chanticleer’s gray hide. The gelding leapt forward and right, with so little space to spare that his tail swept over the ox’s back.
    The baron was trapped. Without a flicker of doubt in his face, he sent his ugly dun stallion straight toward the charging oxen. The dun sank on its haunches, gathered itself, and leapt, right over the length of oxen and cart. It landed neatly and pranced, snorting.
    The pig rose to its feet and limped off. The servant ran after the pig and the carter ran after his oxen, swearing. The baron controlled his horse, and Sir Michael slid from the saddle and walked Chanticleer back and forth, looking for any sign of injury. The men-at-arms rode past me through the gate, one of them pausing to give my shoulder a brisk punch.
    “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You never seen magica before?”
    As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. I closed my hanging jaw and kicked Tipple forward. It’s one thing to hear about horses that can outrun the wind and leap six times their length, but it was different to actually see that great body floating through the air.
    No wonder no one cared that the dun was ugly.
    The citybred have little contact with magic since it belongs to the realm of plants, animals, and those few humans whose minds are not strong enough to suppress their instincts. The philosophers say that intelligence and magic are antithetical, and can’t exist in the same body. The old myths say that when First Man grew more intelligent than the gods, they took away his magic out of jealousy. The Savants, who are the only ones likely to know, have said nothing about why some plants and animals are born with magic that enhances their natural properties. No one really knows. Just as no one knows why men can inherit the Gift for sensing magic but only women can pass it on to their children.
    I have no sensing Gift, and might not even have believed in magic if it weren’t for Potter’s house.
    Potter lived about five streets from the small, ram-shackle house where I grew up. City born and bred, he didn’t believe in magic. So when he bought a load of lumber to replace the decaying floor in his workroom, he scoffed at the herbalist’s warning that there were boards from a magica oak in the load. “The stouter to build with if they are,” he said. He wasn’t the one who’d cut the tree. The Green God was a moon myth, Potter said…until the plants began to grow.
    They were ordinary plants, grass and weeds, and they grew at a normal rate. But they grew between the new-laid floorboards of Potter’s workroom and pulled them apart. They grew in his foundation, tearing jagged cracks in the brick walls. They grew despite all the pulling, burning, and poisoning Potter and his wife could do. Finally, with their house falling around their ears, Potter and his wife moved out.
    Today a thriving meadow grows over the ruins of Potter’s house, with a young oak in its center that the herbalists say is magica. No one dares build on that lot,