THE FEY HORSE
When I regained consciousness, my hands were bound at the wrists, but it didn’t bother me much. Dazed as I was, Ugh had to half-carry me through the passageways of the Duke’s dungeon. The walls were the same hard stone that formed the base of the palace and the promenade out front. Here truly was the Rock of Rijou: an inescapable prison for the Dukes to use to entertain themselves with the suffering of others.
I was crying, not for any reason I could put into words, but because as much as the mind may grow to disdain the body, the body will always mourn the desecration of the spirit. Ugh was singing softly as we walked, and I wondered if he knew he was humming the King’s Law Against Unjust Punishments. If not, it was ironic, and if he did, that was something I couldn’t really understand.
‘We say goodbye soon, I think,’ he said in his thick accent that I still couldn’t place. Perhaps he was from somewhere from the far north?
‘Goodbye?’
We reached the end of a long passageway that ended in a set of narrow stairs going up. There was a door at the top with bars revealing fading afternoon light.
‘I take you through this door, then to stable. She commands. When horse is done, nothing left to bring back.’
‘Horse?’
‘Shush now,’ he said. He threw me over his shoulder and started up the stairs. ‘Talk gets me trouble with Lady. But you interesting man. Funny songs. No music for me usually. Maybe not such a bad man as they say. Makes me want to say goodbye.’
At the top of the stairs he pounded hard on the door, six times. A guard on the other side looked through the bars and then pulled a key from his neck and opened it up. ‘Destination?’ the guard asked.
Ugh set me back down on my own feet, still holding me up, but more roughly now someone was watching. ‘Stable. Lady give him to horse.’
‘Orders?’
‘Orders are in my fucking fist, like always. You want to see them closer?’
The guard stepped out of the way and let us pass.
‘Guards are like fucking dumb animals here,’ he said to no one in particular as we proceeded along the open courtyard, then, ‘Maybe you like to run, eh?’
‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘Just need a bit of a head start.’
‘They say you Greatcoats fucking tough guys in the day. Tricky, eh? Maybe you have trick to use on me, too?’
I looked at him. ‘I’ve used up all my tricks, I’m afraid.’
Ugh pushed me forward. ‘Is not important. Guards from here to palace gates. You not get ten paces before they pull you down.’ He turned me and looked me in the eye. ‘So no trouble, yes? No point, yes? No making trouble for me, yes?’
‘Let’s go see the horse,’ I said.
He grunted, turned me back around and pushed me onwards.
It was a short distance to the stable – I’d imagined he was talking about the palace stables but this was different. We entered through the wide doors into a single large building that stank like sixteen different hells. Inside was almost completely empty, except for a cage made of iron bars in the centre. Next to the cage was a chair, where the Duchess Patriana sat sipping something from a small cup. Inside the cage was a monster.
The beast was massive, almost twice the size of a Knight’s charger. The head was huge, and stood almost an arm’s length above even a tall man. Its coat was tattered, almost skinned, and every inch of its body was covered in welts and scars. Its ears were flat against its head and its eyes were black as coal. When it opened its mouth, I saw its teeth had been filed to points. The sound that came from its mouth was closer to a growl than any sound I had ever heard a horse make.
Patriana motioned for Ugh to bring me forward. When we got within a few feet of the cage he let me go, but I started to fall and only his sudden grip on the back of my neck saved me from having my head ripped off by the creature inside the cage. Its eyes were mad with fury at being denied its prey.
‘Saints,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
Patriana smiled. ‘This? This is one of my pet projects, if you’ll pardon the humour.’
Inside, the cage was filthy. It had likely never been cleaned, so the horse’s waste just piled up until it dripped through the bars. Hanging from the ceiling of the cage were the torn corpses of some kind of creature, although it was hard to make sense of their shapes, stripped of skin and sinew as they were.
‘You need a different hobby,’ I said conversationally.
She smiled again. ‘You don’t recognise it? I would have thought a romantic like you might recognise one from the storybooks. After all, they are a sort of namesake for your kind, aren’t they?’
My stomach fell and my heart came up into my throat. ‘It can’t be—’
‘Oh, trust me, it is. And very expensive it is to find them, I can assure you.’
‘A Fey Horse … you did this to a Fey Horse?’
‘Come now, don’t be modest. Didn’t they also used to be called Greathorses? I would’ve thought you’d feel a connection.’
I’d heard of Greathorses, of course, or Fey Horses as they were more commonly known. But they didn’t look anything like this. Fey Horses were noble and wild. The few herds rumoured to exist were the subject of children’s fantasies, mine maybe even more than most. The dream of finding a Fey Horse, of riding a beast that ran faster than anything else in the world, that could run for days, that could face down a pride of mountain cats or any other beast … The Fey were to horses what Saints are to men – but better than that, for Saints can be capricious, even evil. The Fey Horses in the storybooks were noble protectors. But not this …
‘Yes,’ Patriana said, reading my expression perfectly, ‘this really is one of the Fey. She is the last of her herd, in fact.’
I remembered the old stories, some that Bal Armidor had told at the inn near my childhood home and others from books in the royal library. Paelis and I used to joke about how much faster the Greatcoats could travel if we only had Greathorses to match. ‘Four days’ ride to Warrelton, I think, Falcio, or two if by Greathorse,’ he used to say. There was one book, a favourite of both the King’s and mine, about a boy who learned the language of the Fey Horses and rode them to battle against the Knights holding his mother captive. ‘Dan’ha vath fallatu,’ the boy would say in their special language. ‘I am of your herd.’
‘What happened to the rest?’ I asked, my eyes still locked on the mad creature held inside the cage.
She sighed. ‘Failed experiments, I’m afraid. Can you imagine, twenty of the beasts and only one comes even close to my desires? No, I must be honest with myself, this was not a very good investment.’
‘But why? Why in the name of every God and Saint would you take something so beautiful and—?’
‘And what? And ruin it? What use is a Greathorse running around in the plains, Falcio? What purpose does it serve? The beasts exist to serve, just as the peasants do, just as you do. What use is a beast that doesn’t pull a plough, or provide food, or carry a Knight to war?’
‘Twenty,’ I said, my throat numb. ‘Twenty Greathorses and you destroyed them all …’
‘I trained them, after a fashion, but it wouldn’t take. I burned them. I cut off pieces of their flesh. I fed them poison, beat them bloody, had them strangled with ropes, pulled out their eyes. Nothing would turn them to my purpose.’
‘What possible purpose could you mean for them with such practices?’
She looked genuinely surprised. ‘Why, to make them into war horses, of course. Imagine a division of Knights riding into battle on these brutes: they’d be unstoppable. Do you know you can fire arrows into these things and their hide is so thick they won’t die? They’d just keep going, and oftentimes as not the arrow will eventually fall out and the bloody thing will recover completely from its wounds. Truthfully, killing them was so much work that I still wonder whether it was worth the bother.’