Raphael by R. A. MacAvoy

yours!”
    Festilligambe cocked an ear and his large nostrils twitched. While not disputing Saara’s character as a friend, he seemed to deny that it implied such a heavy responsibility. But after a moment’s reflection, the horse allowed her to be laid gently across him like a sack of meal.
    â€œNow,” muttered the redhead, “let’s avoid prying eyes, shall we, horse? I know I have a reputation for being a rake, but the picture we present here is not charming.” On sudden thought he removed his shirt and lay it over the naked woman. It didn’t cover much.
    At the end of the alley was a pile of rubble. Gaspare, leading the horse by the mane, turned left and walked through a gap in a wall and found himself abruptly out of the village of San Gabriele.
    Down the grassy hill and into an open pine wood. Not five hundred feet along there was a stream and a clearing beside it where a crude thatch of branches was upheld by rough wooden poles.
    This was Gaspare’s retreat, where he had lived since the spring made it possible: a mansion perfectly suited to one who liked his privacy and also hadn’t two pieces of copper to rub together.
    He laid Saara down upon his crackling, piney mattress and regarded her long. When he was done regarding her he dropped the shirt once more over her middle.
    Festilligambe, too, peered at Saara, whom he had never before thought of as the sort of creature that rides on a horse. He whuffed her singed hair.
    The horse sneezed and Saara woke up.
    Her eyes snapped open like shutters caught in a wind. She woke up with jaw clenched and nostrils flaring. Color splashed her cheeks as she sat bolt upright on the bed of branches. Gaspare’s shirt fell. She said one word.
    â€œNo.”
    She said it quietly, almost absently, and she said nothing else. But the horse, who had been leaning with herbivorous curiosity over her vegetative couch, leaped stiff-legged into the air and came down running. Gaspare heard his receding hoofbeats but paid them scant attention, for he was lying flat on his back where the blow had knocked him, both hands wrapped protectively around his own throat.
    As she sat there rigidly, amid no sound except that of Gaspare gasping and choking on the ground, the red in her cheeks faded to white. The rage which burned behind her tilted eyes faded, so once more they shone like the gold-green of a river in sunlight. She sighed and rubbed her face with both hands.
    Gaspare took a long, shuddering, welcome breath. “Sweet Gesu, woman: what did you do to me?” he cried shakily, struggling up from the earth.
    Saara became aware of the youth. “There you are, Gaspare.” Her regard became awkwardly intense. “What a terrible trouble you have gotten me into!”
    His long jaw opened and closed rhythmically. He made fish mouths. “I? Got YOU into trouble? My lady, you nearly killed me just now; I couldn’t breathe!”
    She waved aside this discursion.
    â€œDo you know who that spirit was, who came up the path in the shape of Damiano?”
    He frowned heavily and shrugged. “I guessed myself that it wasn’t —wasn’t Damiano, I mean. When it turned into a dragon…”
    â€œA wyvern. It had only two legs.”
    â€œâ€¦ when it turned into a scaly monster. Damiano, in all the time I knew him, never showed any signs of doing such a thing. Who was it, then?”
    â€œIt was the Liar,” and she hid her eyes behind her hands once more.
    â€œAh!” Gaspare nodded sapiently. “That’s better. I had half a notion it might have been Satan himself. After me for my sins.”
    Hazel eyes popped open again. “But it was. It was the one you call Satan, and he had come for you. For your sins.”
    Gaspare collapsed again to the earth, and he stuck all eight of his fingers into his terrified mouth. He gave one high, thin wail.
    Saara glowered at this lack of discipline. “Don’t