My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies, #1)

by Cynthia Hand

He thought he finally understood the Meaning of Life now, the Great Secret, which he’d boiled down to this: Life is short, and then you die.

King Henry had gone on to have three more wives (respectively: annulled, beheaded, and the lucky one who’d outlived him, ha), but no more children.

“A horse. Your son spends his days as a horse,”

“I’m marrying off my cousin to a horse,”

Through books she could see the world.

So. Her husband-to-be was a philanderer. A smooth operator. A debaucher. A rake. A frisker.

But the affliction of unwanted-hay-in-the-mouth-itis (or “hay-mouth” as his mother referred to it, like someone else would refer to morning breath) was not to be avoided when one ended each day as an undomesticated horse and began each night as an undomesticated man.

There was nothing, he imagined, that could compete with the feeling of a life without boundaries or borders, and the wind running through his hair. Mane.

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm,”

“Mah Lavy? I ammmm a horrrrrrfffff.”

If it is a gift, I do not deserve it. If it is a curse, I do not deserve it.”