“Yes—and this is Heris, who’s hunted with the Greens at Bunny’s.” Nothing at all, Heris noted wryly, about her main occupation as a ship’s captain.
“Ah—then you can ride. Ever event?” The woman straightened up and offered a hand hastily wiped on her jeans. She was a head taller than Cecelia.
“No,” Heris said. “I came to riding a bit late for that.”
“It’s never too late,” Ari said, with the enthusiasm of one who would convert any handy victim. “Start with something easy—you’d love it.”
“Not this year,” Heris said. “I’m just here to help Cecelia.”
“Next year,” Ari said, and without waiting for an answer turned to Cecelia. “Now. I’ve had the groom warm her up for you—we’ve got two hours in the dressage complex, ring fifteen. Get to know her, feel her out—she may buck a few times, she usually does.”
“Where can I change?” Cecelia asked.
“Might as well use her stall—your friend—Heris?—can hang on to your other stuff until we clear out Corry’s locker.”
Cecelia ducked into the stall and reappeared in breeches, boots, and pullover; Heris took the clothes she’d been wearing, rolled them into Cecelia’s duffel, and felt uncomfortably like a lady’s maid. She followed Cecelia down the long row of stalls and utility areas, past grooms washing horses, walking horses, feeding and mucking out, around the end of the stable rows to the exercise rings.
“The great thing about Wherrin,” Cecelia said, “is there’s no shortage of space. You don’t have to make do with a few practice rings, a single warmup ring . . .” So it appeared. A vast field, broken into a long row of dressage rings separated by ten-meter alleys, and another long row of larger rings with two or three jumps each. Everywhere horses and riders and trainers.
At the far end, Heris saw the number fifteen. A bright bay mare strode around the outside, ridden by a groom in the light blue shirt of Ari’s stable. Cecelia showed her competitor’s pass, and the groom hopped down to give her a leg up. Heris stood back. She thought the horse looked different from those Cecelia usually praised, but she couldn’t define the difference. Taller? Thinner? In the next ring, a stocky chestnut was clearly shorter and thicker, but looked lumpish to her.
She didn’t understand most of what Cecelia was doing, that first session. That it would lead to a dressage test the day after next, yes, but not how Cecelia’s choice of gait and pattern aimed at that goal. Cecelia’s expression gave her no clue, and her comments and questions to the groom, and then Ari, didn’t clear things up. Heris felt uncomfortable, not only because of the hot sun. If anyone had asked her, she thought it was a silly thing to do in the first place, trying to get horses over those obstacles. And for Cecelia, at her age, when she hadn’t done it for thirty years—and on a horse she didn’t know—it was worse than silly. But no one asked her, and she kept her opinion to herself, through the few hours of training that Cecelia had before the event began.
When Brun and Sirkin arrived with Cecelia’s saddle (which looked just like all the other saddles, to Heris’s eye), she noticed that Sirkin reacted as she did, while Brun clearly belonged with the equestrian-enthused. Before the day was out, Brun had convinced Ari to let her work with the horses—for no pay, of course. Sirkin, having been stepped on by the first horse led past her, had even less enthusiasm than Heris.
Early in the morning two days later, Heris found herself perched on a hard seat in the viewing stands of the dressage arena. Cecelia, already dressed for her own appearance, sat with her at first to explain the routine. A big gray, paired with a rider who had won the Wherrin twice before, moved smoothly through the test. Cecelia explained why the judges nitpicked; Heris thought it was silly to worry about one loop of a serpentine being flatter than another. It seemed an archaic concern, like continuing to practice drill formations never used in real military actions.
Then Cecelia left, to warm up her own mount. Heris worried. She still couldn’t reconcile the old Cecelia, well into her eighties, with the vigorous woman who seemed a few years younger than herself. She kept expecting that appearance to crack, as if it were only a shell over the old one.
She was thoroughly bored by the time Cecelia appeared. All the horses did exactly the same thing—or tried to. Some made obvious mistakes—obvious to the crowd, that is, whose sighs and mutters let Heris know that something had gone wrong. One went into a fit of bucking, which was at least exciting, if disastrous to its score. But most simply went around and around, trot and canter, slower or faster, until Heris fought back one yawn after another.
Cecelia and the bay mare did the same, not as badly as some and not as well as the best. Heris tried to be interested, but she really couldn’t tell how the judges scored any of it; the numbers posted afterwards meant nothing to her. She climbed out of the stands after Cecelia’s round, sure her backside would have been happier somewhere else.
To her surprise, Cecelia said hardly anything, shrugging off Heris’s attempt at compliments with a brusque “That’s over with—now for tomorrow.” Tomorrow being the cross-country phase, Heris knew, with four sections that tested the horse’s endurance, speed, and jumping ability. “That’s the fun part,” Cecelia said. Heris had more than doubts, but at least she wouldn’t have to sit through all of it. She could watch on monitors, or walk from one obstacle to another.
Heris watched the start on the monitor, trying not to listen to the announcer’s babble. He had already said too much, she thought, about Cecelia being the oldest rider in the event, on the youngest horse. Cecelia had the mare gathered up in a coil, ready to explode, and when the starter waved, she sent the mare out at a powerful canter. The first fence, invariably described as inviting, didn’t look it to Heris: the egg cases of the native saurids glittered bronze in the sun and their narrow ends, pointed up, looked too much like missiles on a rack.
“We used to use the whole eggs,” someone said in her ear; she glanced around and saw that it was another of Ari’s people. “But someone crashed into them one year, and the stench was so bad none of the other horses would go near the fence. Ruined the scoring, completely upset everyone. Now they have to weight the bottoms of them, but at least there’s no stink.”
Cecelia and the mare were safely over the first fence, and Heris decided to walk across the course to the water complex. Cecelia had said it would be a good place to watch.
Cecelia grinned into the wind. The mare had calmed down on the steeplechase, where she could run freely, and she met all the fences squarely, with the attitude of a horse that knows it can jump. Of course, most horses would jump on the steeplechase course, with its open grassy terrain and its clearly defined fences. The problems would come in the cross-country phase. During roads and tracks, Cecelia tried to feel out how the mare felt about different surfaces, about dark patches of shade and reflections from water. The mare didn’t like sudden changes in light, but she would go on if supported by the rider. She paid no heed to the loose dog that suddenly yapped at her heels—a good omen because the crowds in the event course often had dogs, and at least one always got loose.
On the big course, Cecelia continued to feel her way into the mare’s reflexes. So far, she was amazed at how easy it all seemed. Her own reflexes had come back as if the thirty years since her last big season had never been. They had cleared that first easy fence. The second fence was another straightforward, well-defined obstacle, made of the intertwined trunks of a stickass thicket. The mare flowed over it.
Now the course ran toward the ridge for which it was named, the grade gentle up to a scary but jumpable set of rails over a big ditch. The mare looked at the ditch, but jumped without real hesitation when Cecelia sat tight. Next came the Saurus Steps, a staircase arrangement that required the horse to bounce up a series of ledges, then take one stride and jump a drop fence. Here Cecelia thought the mare was going to run out of impulsion on the last bounce, and legged her hard into the stride at the top. The mare stretched and almost crashed the fence, but caught herself and landed without falling.