The Night Ride Page 7

  “No.” It comes out panicky. “Please. I can’t.”

  “It’s not like you’re forced to be here. This isn’t royal service, and it’s not a hiring fair contract. I thought you came because you wanted that horse.”

  I came because of Ricochet. I stayed because I can’t imagine any other job but taking care of horses.

  “But I made a mistake,” Deirdre goes on. “I shouldn’t have fought so hard to get you a position. I shouldn’t have promised the track stablemaster that you were going to stick it out. I’m sorry. It was mean of me.”

  I study my feet, my belly full of hot worms. She’s done so much for me already, and this makes her look bad.

  “I thought you were ready to fight for what you wanted—no, not wanted, deserved—regardless of what anyone said. That we had that in common, you and I.” Deirdre shakes her head, slow and disappointed. “It’s a shame, because that horse you love? He clearly loves you. But you do what you need to do.”

  I look down at the coins in my hand. It seems like a lot until I consider how Father hands over five times as much to the shadowy, moustached creep that the landlord sends to collect the rent. I’ve seen Mother count out half as much to the butcher for our meat for a week. The ponies need hay and we need shoes and there’s always something wrong with the roof—

  He’s not a want.

  “I’m staying.” I grip the coins tighter. “I told you I’d be the best stablehand, and I will be.”

  Deirdre considers me, like just maybe I measure up. “I hope so.”

  I wait, hoping she’ll say something else. That she wishes things were different. Even that she’s sorry.

  Instead she glances pointedly at the doorway, and I take the hint.

  There’s a pile of straw bales in the corner of the stable, and when I get downstairs, I collapse onto one. My hand stings from clutching the coins so hard, and I open my fist slowly, hoping I was wrong somehow. That a few of the coins that looked like coppers are really half-dinars, and there’s more money here than I thought.

  In my palm are a single bronze half-dinar coin and—I count carefully, twice—thirty coppers. There are a hundred coppers in a dinar, so that means half of a hundred is…

  Not enough.

  Even if I send home every copper, it still won’t make up the difference.

  Behind me, the door to the staircase squeaks, and I turn in time to see Paolo pulling it open and stepping inside. He must not have seen me tucked away back here, so I settle into the straw bale, tip my head back, and swallow down tears.

  It must be payday for companion horse keepers, too, and when Paolo comes down, I’ll wave him over and he’ll make a joke about light pockets and we’ll laugh and I’ll feel better for a moment or two, before I have to think of what I’m going to tell Father.

  I jingle the coins in my hand. Part of me wants to throw them across the room, but instead I dig an empty drawstring bag out of the cleaning cupboard. At one time it had soap flakes in it, but I dump out the last of them, slide in the coins, and cinch the string closed.

  These don’t belong with my pony ride coppers. I wasn’t allowed to keep every coin that Hazy and Boris and Buttermilk earned, but at least Father was honest about how many I’d get.

  Footsteps echo and squeal on the stairs, and Paolo’s voice is suddenly distinct. “Look, they know you’re here, and yes, you’re right—I’m supposed to find out why, but I’m also supposed to tell you it’s okay for you to come home.”

  I go still. If I move now, Deirdre and Paolo will hear me. They’ll think I’m eavesdropping on purpose.

  Deirdre snorts. “Should be pretty clear why. Even to them.”

  “They miss you. Even with you leaving like you did.”

  “Tell them whatever you want. It won’t change anything. I’m staying. There’s more dinars in a pay table.”

  Paolo laughs. “I told them you’d say something like that.”

  I stay frozen as he reaches the bottom of the stairs and breezes out of the stable. Deirdre is behind him. She leans out the entrance and glances both ways, quick, cautious. Then she kneels beside a wooden feed chest. She puts the cash box inside and locks the chest with a key on a long string around her neck, then disappears into the horseway.

  They probably tell you it’s foolish, right? Wanting something so big? So unimaginable?

  Deirdre’s family must not want her to be a jockey. Maybe they’re the sort of people who think it’s a man’s job, or they’re worried for her safety.

  I sit for a long moment, waiting for her to be absolutely gone, and to distract myself, I try hard to remember Paolo from when I was small. He and Deirdre clearly know each other, and have for some time. Maybe she brought him with her sometimes when she watched us. A cousin, maybe, or a neighbor.

  In a while, the stable is quiet, and so is the horseway outside. I tuck the soap flake bag into my barn jacket alongside my pony ride coppers and head to the outrider stable. It’s midmorning, free time, so I grab a grooming box and call Ricochet from the pasture with our whistle. I crosstie him outside, under the covered overhang, and pick up the stiff bristle brush.

  Flick. Flick. Flick. I whip the bristles up and away from Ricochet’s coat so the dirt flies behind it. Just like Father showed me when I had to reach up to curry Buttermilk.

  They’ll go hungry. That’ll be the first thing. Mother and Father, then Greta.

  “Sonnia?” Lucan stands a generous horselength away, holding Hollyhock by the halter. “We’re getting ready to—are you crying?”

  Having an older brother means you know the answer to this question is always no and sometimes shove off, of course not. But right now I don’t care what anyone thinks of me.

  “It’s just… I have to send coppers home to help my family, but I hoped to save some, too.” I scrub my eyes with my wrist. “It’s not enough, though. What I got today. Not even to make the rent.”

  Lucan doesn’t reply, and he’s like Mother or Father in that moment. There’s something he means but doesn’t want to say.

  “No.” I face him, gripping the brush like a club. “I won’t join the Night Ride. I refuse to have anything to do with it.”

  If things get really bad, one of the ponies will have to go, and it will be Buttermilk. She’s old, older than me, and she needs medicines and expensive special mashes that Hazy and Boris don’t.

  “Hey, maybe this will help.” Lucan fishes through his pockets and pulls out a cylinder wrapped in brown paper. He snaps it in half and hands a section to me.

  A series of metal circlets tumble from the broken paper into my palm. Toll road tokens. Lucan has a whole roll of them.

  “They’re just sitting in my pocket. I keep getting them, and there’s no way I’ll ever use them all.” He glances at me sidelong. “You won’t be the only one who sends coppers home.”

  I poke the tokens back into the paper roll as the world expands again and again. If I can use the toll roads, it won’t take most of a day to get to Edge Lane and back.

  I can visit home. I can see my family.

  It’s a gift out of nowhere. A gift of the possible.

  “Thank you. It helps a lot, actually.” Not as much as it could, but it’s more than I had a few moments ago. I manage half a laugh. “Maybe I should try selling them to the other stablehands to make up the difference. Looks like I won’t be getting to five hundred coppers any other way.”

  “Won’t work. Everyone’s got their own tokens.”

  I open my mouth to ask why I’m not included in everyone, but I see it in his face. If the Night Ride has a pay table and a five-dinar purse for the winner every time, there’s someone with deep pockets making a fortune on the wagering. Probably many someones, noblemen and the townhouse wealthy who love dinars more than they fear the king, and way more than they care about the well-being of stablehands and outrider horses.

  The kids who go along, even half willingly, have their feed bins topped up with grain and treats.

 
The rest of us stand on our cracked hooves.

  “Five hundred coppers, eh?” Lucan forces a smile. “Please tell me you’re saving for a pair of decent boots. Those belong on the scrap heap.”

  “Just as soon as I buy this gorgeous boy right here,” I reply, and I pat Ricochet’s gleaming chestnut shoulder lovingly.

  Lucan frowns. “What? That can’t be right. This horse has to be worth more than five dinars.”

  “No, he costs fifty.” I smooth a section of Ricochet’s mane. “The royal stablemaster told me so.”

  “Then you’re going to need way more than five hundred coppers.”

  “No, I did the figuring,” I tell him, but a cold, sinking feeling is spreading through my insides. I did it on my own, without thinking to ask Greta. When the idea of owning Ricochet was so far away and impossible that I didn’t want anyone making fun of how silly it sounded.

  “I hate to tell you this,” Lucan says slowly, “but fifty dinars isn’t five hundred coppers. It’s five thousand.”

  Ricochet shifts his weight and takes a mouthful of hay. The sound of him chewing fills the silence.

  Five thousand coppers.

  I could give pony rides until my hair goes gray. I could go to the hiring fairs and take contract after contract.

  There is no way on this green earth that I can ever in my life earn five thousand coppers.

  Master Harold must have known. All this time he smiled into my face and politely asked how my saving was going, always well aware that Ricochet would live a nice long life and find his way to the big paddock in the sky long before I had anything close to coppers enough to buy him.

  “Sonnia?” Lucan shifts awkwardly. “You all right?”

  “No,” I whisper, and I lower my forehead onto Ricochet’s warm back and fight tears with everything I have.

  Master Harold could have simply told me. Instead I’ve spent all this time believing Ricochet was within my grasp. That all I had to do was work hard and scrape my coppers into a pile, that the king valued Ricochet as a fleet horse and wouldn’t sell him to anyone but me.

  Instead Master Harold said nothing. Like Deirdre. They both said nothing and let me make a fool of myself.

  “You keep saying you’re here to stay.” Lucan’s voice is gentle. “Maybe you should give the Night Ride a chance.”

  I don’t reply. Tears are slipping out and sliding into Ricochet’s silky back. I’ve done all these things for him, to be near him, to make it so we could always be together, and now he’s further away than he’s ever been.

  9

  TWO BARNS DOWN from Perihelion’s, I find Deirdre trying to sweet-talk the head trainer of a glorious bay named Hesperides into choosing her to ride him in the next race.

  “I know Benno posted better times this week,” Deirdre is saying, “but my times were better than his last week, and no one can get a horse to come from behind like I can. Hesperides is not going to set the pace with that prince’s chestnut filly, and you know it.”

  “Ehhh, I’ll think about it.” The trainer is a graybeard, scruffy and round, with the kind of weathered face that’s seen generations of horses win and place and show. Not the sort of face that’s easily flattered and persuaded, and Deirdre’s big-eyed sugar-bomb smile doesn’t last once she turns away.

  It goes smooth as granite when she sees me coming. “If this is about your wages, there’s nothing—”

  “No. Not that.” I glance at Hesperides’ trainer, directing a handful of grooms and someone who must be his exercise rider. “I need help. There’s no one else I can ask. Please.”

  Deirdre steers me into a narrow gap between two racehorse barns. It’s pleasantly cool here, a refreshing pour of shade, and her face is carefully blank, like the yard just after it snows.

  I pull in a long, shaky breath. “I know the track stablemaster has a crush on you. Can you get him to send Ricochet back to the royal stables?”

  “He what? Eew. No! Why would you think that?” Deirdre laughs and makes a show of shuddering. “Definitely not. On both counts. Ricochet’s staying here.”

  “But why?” I keep my voice calm. “However he feels about you, the track stablemaster listens to you. I know you kept Ricochet here as a favor to me, but he needs to go back. Today, if possible.”

  “I didn’t—” She breaks off, peering at me. Then she says, “The track stablemaster listens to me because I’m one of the king’s jockeys. We have many interests in common. Well, one interest: dinars. When I win, he wins.”

  “Please,” I whisper. “If Ricochet’s not at the royal stables, he won’t be safe.”

  “What do you mean?” She leans closer. “He can’t go back there. Why wouldn’t he be safe at the track?”

  The dark horseway lit silver. Kids on horseback disappearing into the night with dinars on their minds. Jubilee with her hoof in the air, huddled in the shelter till I noticed her.

  “Hey. Whatever it is, you can tell me.” Deirdre’s voice is warm and reassuring, nothing like the sharp stabbiness of the Deirdre with the strongbox from earlier, and all at once it’s like I’m five again and I dropped my honey-on-a-spoon and she’s going to fix it for me.

  So I tell her everything I know about the Night Ride.

  As I speak, Deirdre’s arm tightens over my shoulder till I’m snugged against her, and all I can think is how long it’s been since I’ve seen Mother, since she’s given me a hug before I climbed into the loft to go to bed.

  “The track stablemaster listens to you,” I remind Deirdre. “If he knew about the Night Ride, he’d put a stop to it right away.”

  “Perhaps,” she replies, “but then he’d want to know how I knew, and I’d have to tell him the truth—that you told me. He’d call you in and demand the whole story. If even half of what you said is happening, he’d have no choice but to turn all the stablehands over to the king. If he didn’t and the king found out somehow, he’d be branded and exiled too. Horse harm is horse harm.”

  “But someone must be forcing the kids to do the Night Ride!” I insist. “How is it their fault if they have no choice?”

  “The track stablemaster would likely turn you over to the king as well,” Deirdre goes on. “He might not believe that you had nothing to do with it. Or he wouldn’t want to take the chance.”

  I shudder, but still I whisper, “I have to protect Ricochet, though. I won’t see him hurt. Whatever it costs.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. There has to be a way to stop the Night Ride without anyone getting in trouble.” I make a helpless gesture. “There could be extra security, maybe. If grooms stand in the horseway with safety lamps, no one’s going near the outriders. Maybe Master Harold at the royal stables could help. He loves Ricochet too, and he and my father have been friends a long time.”

  Deirdre’s jaw works. She hasn’t taken her eyes off me once, and it’s a little unnerving. “I see. Well. There’ll be real trouble for all of us if the king so much as suspects. So leave this with me. Like you said, people listen to me. I’ll take care of everything. Okay?”

  All at once I can pull in a whole breath, down to the bottom of my belly, and let out every terrifying thought that’s been gathering there. Deirdre is going to fix this for me. For all of us.

  “But that means you can’t tell anyone else,” she goes on. “There’d be a big reward for this information, and whoever you tell might go straight to the king. Then there’s nothing I can do for Ricochet, or you, or any of my stablehands.”

  “No. I won’t tell anyone.” I shake my head like that will prove it.

  Leave this with me. I’ll take care of everything.

  It’s like being tucked into bed or handed a steaming mug of tea on a freezing winter day. I pull the warmth of it around me like a blanket, as tight as a hug.

  The other kids are already cleaning the outrider pasture when I arrive, and as I watch Ivar pretend to stab Julian in the rear with a pitchfork, it occurs to me that Deirdre call
ed them my stablehands, as if she’d bought their labor at the hiring fair.

  * * *

  It’s been three days since I was paid. My soap flake bag sits untouched in my apple crate.

  I can’t keep putting it off. Even if it’s not enough, something is better than nothing. So one afternoon, once the horses are put up after the trail ride, I palm some of Lucan’s toll road tokens and head home.

  The cobbles are smooth and perfect under my big clunky boots, and passing the tollbooths makes me think of the coins in my pocket, how the right thing to do is give them all to Mother and Father and smile big like I’m happy about it.

  I try to do some figuring. Half of eighty is… still not enough.

  As I get near the house, my footsteps slow. The coins get heavier, and I seriously consider tossing the soap flake bag through the window and running away hard.

  I can’t, though. I miss my family. If I wanted to avoid them, I’d have come in the morning when they were all at work or school.

  I just wish I could be sure they’d understand.

  When I hear Boris and Hazy and Buttermilk out back, I duck into the rear yard to say hello to them first. They nicker and whuffle when I poke my head into the stable, and they crowd to the half doors like they’ve missed me.

  I pet Boris’s neck and scratch Hazy’s forehead and run a corncob along Buttermilk’s back. It’s cozy, and I pull up a bucket and sit with them, petting and fussing.

  A shadow falls across the doorway and Father appears holding a cudgel. When he sees it’s me, he drops it and flings his arms wide. “Sonnia!”

  I’m up the short aisle in three steps and holding him tight. His leather coat is smooth and stiff and smells like sheep grease and I am home.

  “I thought you were a bandit!” he says with a straggly laugh. “It’s so good to see you. Greta will be especially happy. She can’t wait to go back to school.”

  “But why hasn’t—” I turn it into a cough. I know very well why. Since I’m not here to give pony rides, Greta has had to take my turns as well as hers.

  In that moment, I know I have no choice but to give my family every copper.