at her and not see the perfect proportions, the perfect muscle balance, the fine shape of that proud head. Toragan Himself could not have crafted a more magnificent creature…which made her disfigurement all the more shocking. A line of startling white marred her coat’s smoothness, marking the scar where some long-ago claw or fang had ripped her flesh from the point of her left hip forward almost to her shoulder. Another ugly scar ran downward along her right knee and cannon, and a dozen other patches of white marked where other wounds-long healed, but obviously terrible-flawed her coat. Her right ear was only a stump, and her maimed right eye socket was empty.
Whatever “unseemly choices” Leeana Hanathafressa might have made in her life, she was a Sothoii to her toenails, and her stomach twisted around her recent breakfast as she saw those scars, those long-ago wounds. They were more than simply confirmation of the terrible damage this courser had suffered; they were a desecration…and they were unforgivable.
Yet even as she thought that, the mare raised her head, turning it sideways so that she could focus her remaining golden eye on the newcomers. No, not on all the newcomers, Leeana realized-on her.
“This is an unexpected pleasure, Milady,” Hanatha said, leaning on her cane as she swept an abbreviated curtsy to the courser. “Welcome to Hill Guard, Gayrfressa.”
Leeana’s eyebrows shot up Of course! She ought to have recognized who this courser had to be from those scars, from that missing ear and eye. Who could it have been but Gayrfressa, one of the only seven adults of the Warm Springs herd to survive Krahana’s attack…and Walsharno’s sister? And a worthy sister she was, Leeana reflected, trying to imagine what it must have taken for those seven surviving mares- none of the stallions had lived-to fight free of Krahana’s shardohn demons with the handful of foals they’d managed to save. And Gayrfressa had been the youngest, and the most savagely wounded and maimed, of them all. “Daughter of the Wind,” her name meant in Old Kontovaran, and the north wind itself should be proud to call her its own, Leeana thought, her own eyes burning as that big, intelligent eye considered her.
Gayrfressa gazed at Leeana for another moment, then glided across the stable yard towards Hanatha. She moved with the impossible grace which no one who’d never seen a courser move would have believed was possible in something so massive and powerful. She stopped directly before the baroness, head turned aside so she could see her, and then leaned forward to just touch Hanatha’s hair with her nose. She exhaled gently, then raised her own head once again, and Hanatha smiled up at the huge creature towering over her.
“You’re most welcome, Milady,” she said, “but I fear Dathgar and Gayrhalan are both stuck in Sothofalas with Tellian and Hathan, and Walsharno is somewhere between there and here at the moment, so we have no one to translate for us.”
Gayrfressa snorted and shook her head in obvious amusement. Then she looked away from Hanatha at Leeana once more, and the baroness cocked her own head. She looked at her daughter for a moment and then shrugged.
“I think Gayrfressa’s business may be with you, love,” she said.
“With me?” Leeana’s voice sounded entirely too much like a teenager’s on the pronoun for her own satisfaction, and her mother chuckled.
“Well, she’s not being discourteous, but she’s also not looking at me at the moment, now is she? May I ask if I’m correct, Milady?”
Gayrfressa looked back at Hanatha and then tossed her head in clear, unambiguous agreement. The baroness shrugged.
“There you have it, Leeana. I would suggest that since Gayrfressa has clearly come quite some distance, it would only be courteous for you to see to the quality of our hospitality.” The baroness let her eyes sweep the watching stablehands and raised her voice ever so slightly. “In this, you act for me and for your father,” she said. “I’m certain you’ll be able to find any assistance you might require.”
“I-” Leeana changed what she’d been about to say and bent her head in a respectful bow. “Of course, Milady.”
“Good.” Hanatha let her gaze circle the stable yard one last time, then held out her free hand to Sharlassa. “Come with me, my dear. I’m sure some of that tea is still left. Until later, Milady.”
She gave Gayrfressa another one of those half-curtsies, and then she and Sharlassa departed leaving Leeana nose to nose with the towering courser.
“Well, this is the first time I’ve had this problem in years,” Leeana murmured wryly as she stepped up onto the stool.
She’d already checked and picked out Gayrfressa’s feet, noting in passing that it was time the courser was reshod. Now it was time to work down the mare’s coat with the dandy brush, starting at the poll, which posed a slight problem, since the top of Gayrfressa’s head was over ten feet off the ground. That was quite a reach, even for an overgrown war maid, hence the stool.
Gayrfressa made an amused sound as Leeana lifted her mane to the far side to get it out of the way and began working the dandy brush down her neck. Coursers, like horses, spent a great deal of their time in the wild grooming one another, and they were cleverer about it than horses because of their greater intelligence. Nonetheless, they didn’t have hands, and on the occasions when an un-companioned courser came calling on the two-footed inhabitants of the Wind Plain, simple courtesy required those who did have hands to groom them properly and completely. Of course, Gayrfressa wasn’t leading a stabled existence, so it wouldn’t do to give her the complete rubbing down with body brush and scrubbing cloth Leanna gave Boots each day. Horses-or coursers- exposed to the elements needed a little grease and oil in their coat. On the other hand, Gayrfressa was a lot of mare to groom at all.
“Oh, I don’t know as it was all that long ago…Ma’am.”
Leeana looked over her shoulder and Doram Greenslope smiled at her. Greenslope had served in Hill Guard’s stables at least since the creation of the world. As a senior undergroom, he’d taught Tellian himself how to ride, and he’d become stablemaster years before Leeana was born. He’d taught her how to ride, as well, and schooled her rigorously in the care, treatment, respect, and courtesy to which any horse was entitled. Along the way, he’d also pulled a rambunctious girl child out from under various horses when she’d gone darting into their stalls, helped set the left arm one of those horses had broken, and-at least once that she could remember-hauled her out of the stable yard fountain after the gelding a six-year-old Leeana had been enthusiastically riding bareback decided to stop unexpectedly for a drink.
Now he stepped up beside her with a polite bob of his snow-white head to Gayrfressa.
“I seem to remember someone needing a ladder to groom Dathgar,” he went on to Leeana. “Yesterday, that was, or maybe the day before.”
“Trust me, it was longer than that, Doram,” Leeana said, moving the dandy brush in long, sweeping strokes to break loose the sweat and dust clinging to Gayrfressa’s coat. The courser’s remaining ear moved and her eye half-closed in pleasure, and Leeana smiled. But then her smile dimmed, as she looked back at the stablemaster. “It was a lifetime ago,” she said softly.
“Ah, now, that’s a weighty thing, a lifetime,” Doram replied. “So far, mine’s been a mite better than three of yours…Ma’am.” He smiled. “And I’m planning on being around for quite a few more years, you understand, so maybe a lifetime’s just a bit longer than it might be seeming to someone your age.”
“Maybe.” She shook her head, her eyes going back to the steadily moving brush. “But you can measure lifetimes in more than just years. There’s what you do with them, too.”
“And you’ve gone and used yours up already?” The irony in the stablemaster’s voice pulled her gaze back around to him, and it was his turn to shake his head. “Seems to me you’ve time enough to be doing just about anything you choose to with your life…Leeana.”
Tears blurred her vision for a moment. It was the first time in her life Doram Greenslope had ever addressed her simply by her name. No honorific, no “ma’am,” simply “Leeana.” He never would have dreamed of doing such a thing when she’d been heiress conveyant to Balthar…and how many “properly reared” Sothoii men would ever have called a war maid by her name at all, she wondered?
“Was a time,” Greenslope continued, looking back up at Gayrfressa and reaching up to stroke the white blaze running down the mare’s forehead, “when you just about lived in this stable. Learned a lot about you when you did,
