Free Wings of Flame by Nancy Springer

eluding the weasel-faced man and his brigands. She had come back to the copse at last only because they had already hunted through it twice and might not search there again.… Safe, now. She settled comfortably into her place behind the prince. It would be good, this one last ride before he entered the city. The sun beat down hotly, sending clouds piling high overhead in the brilliant turquoise sky. She dozed.
    Crack of thunder, and torrential rain poured down. Seda awakened with a jolt to darkness and confusion. The storm had brought on an early nightfall, and Kyrem had slowed Omber to a walk, peering about him. In the gloom and blinding lightning nothing could be seen clearly except the occasional momentary sheen of the river off to their right.
    â€œVashti is a senseless country,” Kyrem muttered. “Dry as old bones one moment and all in a flood the next. Well, it is time to double back toward Avedon, I suppose.”
    The river made a maze of itself, meandering around the city. They rode toward where Kyrem thought he remembered a bridge, and failed to find it. Then they thought they had strayed onto a spur of land within a river loop, and they changed direction and lost the river altogether. Lightning showed them a flash of white somewhere off to the left; might it be the white clay walls of the city? They rode toward it and found nothing. During the next hour they rode in several directions as the darkness deepened and the rain poured down, until at last they admitted to themselves, though not to each other, that they were wet to the skin and quite lost.
    â€œWhat now?” Kyrem complained. “Trees. Surely we cannot have come all the way back to the foothills.”
    They rode under the shelter of—what? They could see little, but they could sense the branches far above them that rustled in the rain and broke the force of its fall, sending down large, plopping drops instead of stinging spicules. No undergrowth impeded them, and a sort of hush, a distancing of the thunder and roar of the night, told them that the trees were mighty, the woodland large. They came up against a steep slope and turned away from it.
    â€œWe cannot have come back to the foothills!” Kyrem insisted, although no one had contradicted him. “No, wait, here is a clearing.”
    They could sense the space by the pouring of the rain. Then lightning blazed, turning it all at once brighter than a dozen suns, and they both screamed.
    A horse, a monstrous horse perhaps fifteen feet tall, towered over them, curveting, collected to spring; their startled, fearful eyes stared up at its flexed head, the gaping mouth with teeth bared, the distended nostrils, the fearsome, white-ringed, staring eyes—and between those eyes, set just at the center of the forehead, a great gemstone that flashed blue in the lightning—but there was no lightning, yet the stone continued to blaze! Omber reared with a scream of his own, a stallion’s scream of fear, for he was as unnerved as his masters. With a squelching thud, Kyrem and Seda landed on the ground, and Omber plunged away.
    Prince and girl sat where they were, staring. On that huge head above them the jewel flared purple, then red, giving off its own fiery light in the dark woodland clearing. And on the shoulders of the steed … were those wings of flame? It had not moved from its gathered stance. With a shaky laugh, Kyrem stood up.
    â€œIt’s made of stone,” he said. “A sort of statue—but, Suth, doesn’t that flickering light make it look alive?”
    â€œDon’t touch it!” Seda warned, still seated and gasping.
    â€œI wouldn’t go near that jewel yonder for anything.” The gemstone had turned a greenish hue, then yellow. By its light Seda could see Omber peering cautiously from between the trees at the edge of the circular clearing.
    â€œBut the horse itself I dare touch,” said Kyrem, and stepping onto the