So it was mutual!
Among this crowd she made out several who had been with Azak earlier, and many other men in green—some already mounted, others inspecting steeds and equipment—and obviously they had waited around only to view the extraordinary phenomenon of a woman on a horse. Once that was concluded, they were going hunting. The unfortunate five, Azak and brothers and uncles, gazed with undisguised longing at this mob of men and horses, grooms and kennelmen, bystanders and attendants. Dogs strained at their leashes and cadgers stood ready with birds.
Inos felt a twinge of real guilt. “I see that I am intruding on your sport, Cousin. I was very presumptuous. My sight-seeing must wait until another day.”
Azak glanced down at her with exasperation-a sultan who had announced a decision could not then change his mind. “There will be many more days for hunting, Cousin.”
“I would almost prefer to come along and watch,” Inos said with maidenly innocence, “if that were permissible. I have never witnessed hawks flown. Those are hawks, are they not?”
“Goshawks.”
“Ah. We used gyrfalcons in the north, of course.”
Ten royal eyes lighted up like signal lanterns. “Gyrfalcons!” the two young uncles echoed in awed tones.
“You . . . yourself?” Azak said. “Certainly.”
Five royal faces went stiff with shock. Obviously a woman on a horse was a minor obscenity compared to a woman hawking.
“My favorite was Rapier. Very fast, very responsive—oh, how I miss her! Father flew a golden eagle for a while, but he had very little luck with her. I tried peregrines a time or two at Kinvale, but I learned with gyrfalcons. There are no others at Krasnegar.”
The princes exchanged glances that might have conveyed doubt or outrage or both.
“Let us see you mounted first.” Azak almost put d hand on her shoulder and then withdrew it hastily, gesturing her forward. With the four princes trailing behind, they paced over the springy turf to where two horses stood apart from the others within a cluster of stablehands. One was a gigantic black stallion, undoubtedly the largest Inos had ever seen, jerking and prancing, stamping, keeping three grooms both busy and worried. Krasnegar’s ponies were hardy, shaggy beasts, but she had thought that Kinvale’s were the best that wealth could buy. This polished ebony marvel could have eaten them alive. She knew who would ride that one.
She turned her attention to the sad little plug standing beside it, and any residual guilt she was feeling dissolved in a wave of indignation. A longer look turned indignation to fury.
“Cousin!” she said in a slender voice that would have frozen any member of the palace staff in Krasnegar. “What is the meaning of this? My father would have had his hostler flogged for that!”
“Your Majesty?” Azak stared down at her, his rosewood eyes filled wide with puzzled innocence. He really was a terrible actor.
Inos’s voice went even softer. “Well, if you can’t see from the way she’s standing, then perhaps you should ask the groom to lead her around for you—if he can!”
The old mare was back on her heels, hopelessly foundered. With a rider on her back she would be as immovable as the palace itself. The quartet of princes exchanged glances of appreciation that Inos found both satisfying and infuriating.
“Ah!” Azak threw up his hands in sudden enlightenment. “My apologies, Cousin. I had not recognized . . . I thought it had been fed to the dogs already. The groom responsible was hard dealt with, I assure you. You! Take that rubbish away and bring a more suitable mount for the queen.”
“Something more like that one,” Inos said. Error!
The watching princes guffawed. Hairy gibbering apes! Azak’s teeth flashed in the sunlight. “You are welcome to ride Evil if you wish, Queen Inosolan. ”
She had pushed too far. She had been angered by the cruelty of allowing a dumb horse to eat itself to death, and infuriated by the arrogant assumption that she would not know a foundered horse when she saw one—and so she had pushed too far. Eagles and gyrfalcons and now this. She opened her mouth to make a smiling refusal, and her anger said, “Well . . .”
Dare she try? She had just completed weeks of riding through the taiga—she had never been in better practice. She had ridden Firedragon once, although Rap had been present then and horses were always well behaved when Rap was around. Stop thinking about Rap!
But wait! Yesterday she had lamented the uselessness of her Kinvale training. She had forgotten that she had other training. She had been taught to ride by a young man who knew horses as no one else did, who could always tell you exactly what a horse was thinking. Here was a chance to pay tribute to his memory.
With her heart going insane inside her chest and every nerve screaming warnings, Inos walked over to take a closer look at Evil, a mountain of shiny blackness without a single white hair on him. If Gods were horses, They would look like this one. She offered to pat his neck as Rap would have done. Evil lifted a groom off the ground and rolled a menacing eye at her. The men clinging grimly to reins and cheekstrap glared at her resentfully.
Inos glanced around the wide paddock. There was lots of room.
She was a queen now. They had tried to foist a decrepit jade on her first. What sort of hack or vicious beast might they try next? A sultan’s mount could be nothing worse than highspirited.
“Shorten the stirrups!”
Azak’s stupid smirk became instant fury. “No man has ever ridden that horse but me.”
“That will still be true.” Inos met his stare, trying to show much more confidence than she felt.
“Queen Inosolan, that horse is a killer!”
Possibly so, but she could not back down now. Besides, Rap had always insisted that there were no such things as one-man horses. Of course, Krasnegar’s little herd had contained a couple of rogues that no one but Rap had ever dared approach—but that was irrelevant. Certainly Azak would be a superb horseman; in whatever he did, he would settle for nothing less than mastery. So the horse had been well trained. Anything more was just a matter of manners.
“Did you or did you not say I might ride him?”
Now Azak was boxed in, also. He was too furious to back down, but the ember-red eyes studied her for a long hot minute before he growled, “Do as she says!”
Grooms flocked around to adjust the stirrups, then retreated hastily, leaving one man waiting with cupped hands and another at the stallion’s head. Both looked terrified. A third was poised on the far side.
Inos eased out of her cloak and passed it to someone. She stepped closer, Evil showed his teeth and laid down his ears. His withers were higher than her head, his saddle the size of a barn roof. How would her knees ever find a grip on such a monster! It was a type unfamiliar to her, with a very high pommel, but she had seen its like at Kinvale, and she remembered a trick she had heard mentioned there. Certain that an instant’s pause would snap her nerve, she took the reins and reached up to bind her left hand to the pommel with them. She had to stand on tiptoe to do it. Evil rolled an angry eye. Inos raised a boot for the waiting hands.
She seemed to fly higher than the highest dome of the palace. Men grabbed her feet and thrust them in the stirrups, leaping out of the way in the same moment. The groom at Evil’s head was hurled aside by Evil himself and the saddle rose straight up . . . Inos had never been hit by anything so hard as the impact of that saddle. She was staring down at a fleeing Azak, seemingly far below her, framed by Evil’s ears. Hooves hit the grass. Impact!
He bucked. Impact! Impact! Impact!
Then Evil was standing erect, front legs dark against the sky. With her face buried in his mane, Inos felt as if she were trying to climb a marble pillar. Her knees and thighs screamed at the strain. Came the sudden reversal and she hurled herself back to meet the rising rump . . .
Impact! More bucking . . . Impact! Impact!
Without warning, Evil took off, cracking Inos’s neck like a whip. She was moving faster than she ever had. The paddock was suddenly tiny, the blossom trees at the far side rushing straight at her in a blur of white and pink. He would leap that fence or go straight through it. He would smash branches with her. She kicked and tugged to turn him, and the stallion stopped dead. Her knees slid, her shoulder struck in his mane, and only her hand bound to the pommel saved her from disaster. A moment later he tried to bite her and she kicked him in the jaw. Then he wheeled, bucked again, reared again, was hit again, screamed with fury and launched himself forward again. Grooms and princes scattered like leaves as she bore down on them. He turned in midair. He skittered sideways on four straight legs. He had more tricks than a prestidigitator.