Blood Ties (21 page)

“I’ve got to go,” he said at the gates. “Osyth’s having a special postrace morning tea for the town council and the winning owner and rider.” He paused. Osyth wouldn’t thank him for inviting Bramble home, but it seemed rude to just leave her standing there.

“Better you than me,” Bramble said, grimacing, releasing him from his predicament. She smiled, pleased that he had wanted to invite her, relieved that he hadn’t, and knowing he had seen her relief. So they nodded and went their ways.

But later that afternoon Gorham arrived at the farm, rubbing his hands as he approached her, and comfortably back in his work clothes. “Well, no time like the present to find out if you’ve got a chance. He hasn’t had any hard work today, we’ll try him over a few small jumps,” Gorham said, and Bramble realized that he was as excited as she was.

Yet when she had changed into her oldest clothes and was taking the roan out to the training paddock where Gorham was dismantling the big jumps, to leave small logs for her first training session, he stared disapprovingly at her.

“Where’s his saddle?”

“I don’t use a saddle. You know that.”

“You have to when you jump — at least if you’re jumping high fences at speed. You’ll fall off if you don’t.” He watched as doubt crossed her face. “Trust me,” he said. “You need to keep your own balance or you won’t be able to balance the horse and he’ll fall. Do you want him to break his leg because you have a fancy to ride bareback?”

It wasn’t the words so much as the tone that convinced her. She realized that he used the same tone with uppity two-year-old colts who thought they could get the better of him, and laughed, but she went and got the saddle. The roan flipped his ears back at her as she put it on, but resignedly, as though he’d always known that the bareback days were too good to last.

That first day of training, the roan had lifted himself over the small logs as though they weren’t there. Bramble, solid in her saddle, barely felt the motion. The fog didn’t lift as she had hoped, but this was only the first step. She knew that when she was racing she would come alive again. She had to.

“Well, you might be lucky,” Gorham said. “Seems he’s done this before, and I’d say he knows how to set himself right.”

He put up the next level of jumps. The horse dealt with these easily — it was Bramble who had to learn the skills, then, and on the days that followed, as the jumps grew higher.

“Keep your weight over his center of balance. No —
forward!
” Gorham yelled. “Keep your elbows in — one of the other riders is just as likely to grab one and hoist you off.”

She stopped and stared at him, the roan snatching a mouthful of grass when he realized she was distracted.

“What, you thought this was a nice family outing?” Gorham laughed. “They’re out to win and some of them don’t care how. The winning rider gets a purse of silver, you know.”

Bramble nodded, smiling tightly, and fleetingly thought of her foot snapping back that man’s head. Anyone who meddled with her was going to get worse than he gave, she thought, then she put it out of her mind and concentrated on crouching in her stirrups to take her weight forward.

“It’s not just jumping,” Gorham said, over and over, as they cleaned tack or mucked out the stables. “It’s strategy, and cunning, and knowing when to push your horse and when to let him take a rest.”

Bramble shook her head. “Maybe. And maybe it’s just a matter of going faster than anyone else.”

Gorham shook his head back at her, but he chuckled as he did it. “If you can, lass, if you can.”

Gorham had a long, unfenced stretch of land that bordered the forest: a smooth, rabbit-free length of grass, close-cropped by sheep that were folded each night by the farmer next door. She had tried the roan out there the morning after the chase, just on sunrise.

She had galloped the roan before, of course; how could she have resisted it? But racing speed was to everyday galloping as a full rose was to a bud. That morning as she steadied him, wanting to set off from a standing start, as though they were racing, she thought that she had forgotten what it was like to really look at the world. The fog was still with her, but there was a break in it now, and she could look through it, even feel through it.

The autumn air was rich with loam and mushroom scent, with moisture and the promise of a fine day. It was so early that not even the thrushes were singing. The horse moved like an extension of her, so that she was as strong as he, as fierce and agile and elemental. She sat, poised in a moment of perfect balance, perfect calm, and then pressed hard with her legs and said, “Go!” then, “Faster!” pressing harder, and “
Faster!
” leaning down on his neck, feeling the exhilaration sweep through the roan first and then up into her, the intoxication, the rushing splendor of speed.

When they were forced to draw up by the fence at the end of the paddock, she looked back on that moment of blissful calm before the run and wondered why she had thought she was so happy. It was nothing compared to a flat-out gallop!

She had been grateful for Gorham’s training: the discipline of the training paddock, where each jump had to be attempted with calm and precision, was, she knew, necessary for both her and the roan. But on its own she knew it wouldn’t help her win. She had to learn to jump at speed, across country, over streams and stone walls and brush fences and wooden rails. And this she had to do alone.

That training took up all her midday hours, the time she had liked to spend in the forest. Although she had loved those rambles, she let them go without a thought, and bought food from town instead. Chases were run in the midmorning, Gorham told her, or at noon, so she and the roan had to get used to racing in the full sun.

She started with the fences around the farm, learning to approach them at increasing speeds. When she could manage them easily at a half-speed gallop, she set out across country, jumping as many obstacles as she could, trying to improve their form in the time they had before the iron-hard ground of winter frost made riding dangerous for the roan.

By then she knew that a chase was to a gallop as a gallop was to a canter: the rush to the fence, the takeoff, the soaring speed through the air, the landing and swift, powerful thrust that got them to full speed again, were like drinking spirits on an empty stomach, like diving into the quarry, like love. And perhaps, she thought, this was what the Love stone had foretold in her casting.

She fell, of course. She fell into mud and onto gorse, pitched headfirst over stone walls and backward into cowpats. She fell, and learned to fall, and learned to keep hold of the reins as she fell. The horse, by some magic of his own, never hurt himself, although he, too, often fell. Always, she realized, it was her fault.

Because the roan was a natural jumper who loved speed as much as she did, it was usually imbalance, hesitation or stupidity on her part that set him wrong for a fence. She berated herself silently after each fall, and apologized to the horse, who snuffled in her hair and never held it against her. Even after the worst fall, standing wet with mud up to her armpits, her head splitting from contact with the ground, her shoulder almost dislocated from being wrenched by the reins, she was full of hope. But the rush of feeling died away when she was off his back and the training sessions were finally over.

She waited for the spring thaw with a little girl’s impatience, and as soon as the ground was soft enough she and the roan went out in the early morning and at noon again, getting stronger, growing closer, and building on that wordless understanding that allowed them to act as one. The roan’s jumping was flawless, joyful, exuberant; the only thing that concerned her was that he’d had no practice racing against other horses.

“Well, he’ll either like it or hate it,” Gorham said cheerfully, as they watched the first of the spring foals being born late one night. “Some horses just take to it, others never do. Try not to frighten him, that’s all.”

She snorted. “He doesn’t know how to be frightened.”

Gorham turned his head slowly to look at her, grinning. “That’s because you haven’t been frightened so far.”

At that moment the foal began to slither down the birth canal onto the straw, and it took all their attention.

A little later Gorham continued as though there hadn’t been an interruption. “What are you going to call him?”

It took Bramble a while to work out what he meant. “Call him? The Roan, I suppose.”

“You can’t call an entry in the chases ‘The Roan.’” He shook his head decisively.

She smiled at him. “Well, you pick one.”

He pulled at his lip. He’d always wanted to do this, to name a chaser. He had all sorts of names picked out: Gorham’s Pride, Gorham’s Mane, Silverfleet (chosen, he remembered with a chuckle, when he was very young and romantic). But naming a horse for someone else was a big responsibility. He looked at Bramble, her dark eyes and curling black hair, tanned skin and crooked smile.

He smiled back. “What about Thorn?” he said, and she laughed and laughed.

“Bramble on Thorn,” she agreed, still chuckling as they walked back to the cottages. She paused at her door. “But that’s not his name, you know.”

Gorham nodded. “Not around here,” he said, and she nodded back, a compact.

She’d never felt she had the right to name the roan. Maybe it was because he came to her through death, or that she owed him her life, but more likely it was because in her thoughts he didn’t need a name. He was
the
horse: the others needed names because they were not. And it had to do with his own nature, with his sensitivity to her thoughts, and his courage. It had to do with all the reasons why she was sure they would win.

They arrived two days before the race, to give the roan time to rest. Gorham had registered the horse for the first available chase of the season; he wouldn’t be eligible to enter any of the important races until he had won at least one. It was at Sendat, farther north, in Central Domain.

Maude, Gorham’s fancy woman, came too. It was the only thing Bramble didn’t like about Gorham, the fact that he kept a fancy woman. Not that he tried to hide it — the whole town knew. But having dealt with Osyth, Bramble was a little more forgiving of Gorham than she would have been otherwise.

Maude came up to Bramble at the beginning of the journey to Sendat and said that she had no mind to let Gorham go off on his own. “Not ’cause I’m suspicious-minded, like, lass,” she said cheerily. “I just like the outing.”

Bramble smiled at her; no one could help liking Maude, who carried her generous nature on her face as clearly as Osyth carried her miserliness.
Still
, Bramble thought,
I wouldn’t put up with it. No man of mine would go off with a fancy woman and have me still there to come home to.

They stayed in a comfortable inn in the center of town. The rooms were bright and smelled of lemon, but Bramble intended sleeping in the stable. In the afternoon she walked through the town to the chase fields. Sendat nestled under a tall hill, topped, as usual, by the local warlord’s fort. At the base of the hill, where the smell wouldn’t offend those in the fort, was the execution place. Instead of just one gibbet, this warlord had set up three, next to the scaffold and rock press. They were all full, and the bodies, only a few days old, showed the obvious marks of torture: burns, broken bones, scars that hadn’t had time to heal. Bramble wondered if the warlord was using the spring chase to make a point; the gibbets were eloquent of power and control.

The warlord was called Thegan, the same name as Acton’s son. No one was sure if it was his proper name or one he had assumed. Thegan was a new warlord, from the cold north, and he had married, a local told them, the old warlord’s daughter, the Lady Sorn, and taken control. He still kept his old Domain in the north, which a son from an earlier marriage was overseeing for him. That was unusual. Bramble wondered whether the other warlords were happy about it, or if the long peace that had kept the Domains prosperous in recent years was at risk.

The waitress who told them about Thegan spoke with a mixture of admiration and circumspection, careful not to criticize him directly. That and the gibbets told Bramble all she wanted to know about him. She and Gorham had trained all the old warlord’s horses, but she suspected they would look elsewhere for custom in the future. She felt vaguely sorry for the girl the warlord had married so conveniently, but her thoughts soon returned to the chase ahead.

Most Kills were experienced chase riders, and it was considered an honor if the warlord or town council asked you to set the course. The Kill could take any route he chose within set boundaries, any combination of fences, any direction, doubling back or straight ahead. Some Kills waited until the chase itself to decide their course, letting whim take over, while others planned obsessively, in secret, to make their course the most challenging.

Aside from the spectacle, the chase was now used mostly as a means of identifying good bloodlines for the warlords’ messenger horses, and for gambling. The first Spring Kill was always the youngest person possible, for luck, to represent the new-born earth. And maybe, Bramble thought, always suspicious, to give the riders the best chance of catching the Kill and having a Kill Reborn, bringing luck to the town. But perhaps not. The Kill Reborn was the stuff of fire talk and bedtime tales; it hadn’t happened for over thirty years.

The first Spring Chase was often dangerous, as a young, inexperienced Kill could choose the route badly, pick fences that were fine for one riding alone but death traps for three or four horses jumping at once.

She tried to plot all the potential courses, but it was impossible. She decided to follow her instinct: take the roan to the front immediately and stay there. She was certain in her bones that he would be faster than any of the others, and he was used to jumping alone. Staying in front would protect her from the underhanded tactics of the more experienced riders. She was not a cunning person, but she was determined to be very good at winning.