Free The Bitterbynde Trilogy by Cecilia Dart-Thornton Page B

the stamp of a hoof or the clatter of a rope. On the floor, wisps of straw mingled with horse-feathers. At the far end, a fledgling colt paced restlessly around a loose-box.
    To the southwest, the stables overlooked Isse Harbor; to the north lay the green, fenced fields where eotaurs and landhorses grazed. Westward, the orchards. Beyond the acres of fruit-trees stretched the forest, apparently without end.
    â€œYou’ll be the lad they sent!” called a gruff voice. Keat Featherstone, the second groom, looked him over, nodding his closely shaven head. Light stubble dusted the jawline of a bluff face.
    â€œYou be a sorry sight, as they told me. Still, I suppose it be not your fault, and horses don’t take fright at ugly faces, thank the Star, or I’d be out of a job by now. They said you don’t talk, neither, but that makes you all right by me so long as I don’t have to look at you overmuch. I suppose you can polish tack?”
    The youth nodded eagerly, willing to please any person who offered a way out of the servants’ quarters if only for a few hours, but particularly willing to please the first man who had not spontaneously displayed active hostility toward him.
    â€œAye. Well, here’s the tack room, so go to it. And keep your taltry tied on tight.” The second groom rolled his eyes.
    The tack room walls bore an interesting clutter of saddles, bridles, rope halters, and baffling contraptions of leather and iron. Benches were strewn with tools, leather skins, bits of metal, rusty horseshoes, and nails. Horse-brasses cast in the shapes of roosters, daisies, loaves, rowan-berries, and hypericum leaves hung on tanned boars’-hide strips alongside strings of little bells. Canisters and bottles of simple equine physic stood arrayed along a shelf on one wall. Crude labels had been stuck on. Pictures were drawn on them, since most of the stablehands were illiterate, but there was also painstaking lettering that proclaimed the contents to be castor oyl, tarre, magneesya, malanders-oyntmente, jinnjer, and spyryts of wyne. A couple of horn darklanterns swung from iron hooks.
    In these comfortable surroundings the lad worked hard all morning to please Keat Featherstone, rubbing in the mellow oils and pungent polishes until leather glowed; setting aside whatever needed stitching or replacing; creating order out of chaos caused by strappers who had thrown down tack and other equipment anywhere in their careless haste; picking up, hanging up, arranging, storing, always blending with shadows in case attention should bring the usual vilification. But there were unshuttered windows and an open door through which blew the sound of voices, barking dogs, hooves on the cobbles, metal on metal, seagulls on the wing.
    Stableboys hurried in and out and past the windows. Through the doorway, the new polish-boy could see the smithy, its stone floor raised three feet above the andalum lining that spread between the building and the ground—an essential foundation for any place where sildron was worked freely. The high-chimneyed workshop, its windows barred against theft, was roofed with gray slate and shaded by antique chestnut trees, over a hundred feet high, dropping their alabaster flowers like snow. A roan eotaur mare, bronze-winged, was being ushered, unshod, up the ramp—a champion by the sleek, fine-muscled look of her.
    A brass horn blared a signal; the fanfare, the lad had learned, that heralded the arrival of a Windship and a cause for excitement. It was silver for Relayers, bold brass for Windships, the Greayte Conch for Waterships, and the drum tattoo for land approaches.
    External hubbub increased. The temporary stablehand craned his neck to get a better view out of the window and up toward the Tower.
    She came in over the treetops, her masts, yards, and rigging appearing first. Festooned with a brave display of heraldry, she flew a pennoncel at the masthead, the standard of Eldaraigne