She gave the stallion nothing that Edmund could see. No heel, no rain, no word. The horse went from stone to flight in the space of a heartbeat, and the frost came up off the turf behind them in a white spray that hung in the air and fell. "Someone swore. Somebody's hat went into the grass." "She is riding a stride," said a voice in the line, in the tone of a man reporting a fire.
Edmund was on his own bay, and through the line before he made the decision to do it. The field dropped away from the house in a long green fall toward the beachwood, and she took it the way water takes a hill. She did not sit the horse. She belonged to it. Edmund rode from the age of four, and he never in his life saw a rider do so little and be obeyed so completely.
No fight, no correction, only a thing agreed on between the two of them before either of them reached the slope. The wind pulled tears across his face. His bay ran full out and lost ground on every stride. At the bottom she turned along the woodline, and the black stallion came around under her in a curve as smooth as a signature, and Edmund, 20 lengths behind and falling further, heard something he could not account for. She was laughing, not loudly.
A small sound torn away by the wind almost as soon as it left her, the laugh of someone who never expects to be heard, and therefore never bothers to hide it. The sound went into him, and sat there. She slowed at the gate. She brought the stallion down by degrees, galloped to Caner to trot to walk. By the time Edmund closed the distance, the horse was blowing steam in great white columns and walking on a loose rein, and she was leaning forward with both hands flat on the black neck.
Edmund pulled up beside them. His own breath came hard. Hers did not. "Who taught you?" He said. She did not answer.
He tried again and heard his own voice do something it never did. Falter. That horse put three men in the surgeon's hands between June and September. She straightened in the saddle. She reached down and ran her hand once from the stallion's pole to his shoulder, and the animal dropped his head into the touch like a dog.
Then she swung her leg over and came down to the frost. She stood a head shorter than the horse's crest, and her boots were cracked across the toe, and her braid came loose down her back with frost melting in it. She gathered the reins over the stallion's head and put her forehead briefly against his cheek. "Edmund dismounted. The whole field was coming down the slope toward them now, and the noise of it was still far enough away to be nothing." "What is your name?" He said.
She held out the reins to him. He took them. Their hands did not touch. Corvis turned his head and watched her go, and she walked three steps toward the gate and stopped. Then with her back to the Duke of Ravensmere and her hand flat on the gate post, she spoke out loud for the first time in 9 years, and it was not to him.