Page 20 of My Queendom for a Horse

He smiles smugly, and then. . .nothing happens. His face falls, his mouth flattening in frustration.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Is it hard or painful?”

Aleksandr grimaces. “No, but for some reason. . .”

“What?”

“I can’t seem to shift.”

This is bad. “So you’re stuck as a human now?”

“It would seem so,” he says.

I flop back on the ground. This is so how my life goes. I mean, if something insane is going to happen, it’s going to completely ruin everything.

“At this rate, Sean will write me off, too, and we really will lose the farm.”

Oh, no.

Sean’s still waiting for me.

“Kristiana.” The way he says my name sends another shiver up my spine. I want to slide into it—the person I sound like I am when he says my name.

He clears his throat. “Kris.”

I startle a bit, hearing him use my nickname.

“Isn’t that also what they call you? Your father? Your trainer?”

I nod.

“You were the first human whose words I could understand.” He’s speaking in Russian, but I realize that I wasn’t, not until he did.

I switch to Latvian. “I knew you were listening to me.” I change to English. “Even back in Ireland.”

He nods. “I can understand you in every language you speak, and then after hearing your first words in that tongue, I could suddenly understand everyone else as well. That was my first clue that you were different.” He tilts his head.

The hair on my arms rises, and not just because I’m cold. I speak three languages fluently. Russian, thanks to my grade school studies and our housekeeper, Latvian because this is my homeland, and English thanks to my mother and my time at university and grad school.

“In most parts of the world, it’s pretty rare to find someone who’s truly trilingual. Not in Latvia, but in most other places. That makes it pretty strange that you can speak all three of the languages that I can.”

“I couldn’t speak English or Latvian before,” he says. “It must be related to your connection to the curse.”

“That makes no sense.”

He shrugs. “Like it or not, you’re somehow connected to all of this, clearly. So I’d like to propose a deal.”

“A deal?”

“You can likely change me back into my horse form. At least, it makes sense that you should be able to, since you changed me into my human form.”

“And?”

“Assuming you can, I’ll help you win the money you spent on me. After that we’re even, and you’ll free me.”

“As a human.”

He nods. “I’ll go home and figure out the rest from there.”

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