to do except Judah, and she’d felt the loss of the others like she’d feel the loss of a limb, so yes: she came back to the stables a few days later, and yes, the foals were calmer. Her favorite, a pure black colt who shone like onyx in the sun, pranced around the paddock as if it belonged to him.
“Something, that one,” Darid said when he noticed her watching the colt.
“He’s beautiful,” she’d said.
That time, he did smile—for all that he bit it back quickly. Then he clucked his tongue and patted the flat of his hand on the inside of the pasture fence. The colt came over to investigate. Darid handed Judah something small and wizened. It was an apple, or had been once. “Give him that, if you like. Hold your hand flat. Watch out for his teeth.”
Now the colt was a yearling, as bold and glorious as ever, and she and Darid were friends. As much as they could be, anyway, since he was staff and she was...whatever she was. But he smiled more easily now, and if the other stablemen found other places to be when she arrived, they were polite enough about it. Darid had told her about all the different shades of black a horse could be, in the sun and out of it: rusty black, coffee-colored, even faintly blue. The colt was jet black. Elban preferred jet blacks, for the impression they made with his white hair and black armor. (The Wraith Lord in the lowlands, the Ghost King across the sea, where it was said the Nali thought he was risen from the dead and wore charms against him.) The nimble little colt would someday carry Elban into battle, and he would probably die there, and so Judah tried not to care about him.
He made it hard. His ears pricked up at the sound of her boots crunching on the near-frozen ground and when he saw her, he trotted over to the fence, whickering. She’d brought him an apple, not one of the sad orchard rejects the stablemen were given but a firm, juicy one that she’d slipped into her coat at breakfast. “You only love me for my apples,” she told the colt, as he ate it greedily and then pushed his warm nose against her hand, hoping for more. “It’s okay. I’ll take what I can get.”
There were a lot of stablemen around that day: mending the pasture gate, hauling hay bales up to the loft, mucking out the stalls vacated that morning by Wilmerian horses. One of them had probably gone to find Darid as soon as she’d rounded the bend in the path, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before he emerged from the stable and joined her at the fence. He was bareheaded but wore a heavy wool scarf against the chill. “Didn’t expect you today,” he said. “Figured you’d be sleeping in with the rest of them.”
“Are you too busy?”
“Not at all. You want to help me mend tack?”
She did. She wanted to mend tack or clean out stalls or oil leather or mix feed or do anything he suggested, as long as it was real work that he would have done anyway; as long as she was useful. The tack room was warmer, if not exactly balmy, and the air was fragrant with oil and leather and horse. There were stools but she preferred to sit against the wall on the floor. She wasn’t very good at cutting leather, but she was good at stitching it—ironic, given how awful she’d always been at sewing. But this wasn’t embroidering a handkerchief or a throw pillow. This was making something.
They worked in silence for a time. “I like your scarf,” she said eventually.
The wool was rough-spun and undyed, but it looked warm. “My sister made it,” Darid said, an unusual note of pride in his voice. He had several sisters. He wouldn’t tell her exactly how many, or their names, or how old they were. He hadn’t seen any of them since he’d come inside the Wall when he was ten. Once you came inside, you didn’t leave. His family fascinated her. She was as persistent in asking about them as he was in refusing to answer.
“Which sister?” she said now.
“The one who knits.”
“Did she send a letter with it?” Because he’d let slip that only one of his sisters could read and write well enough to send a letter.