Reviews, Recipes, and Random Slices of Life

Madam Dorothy's warded stable probably did the same and more, Saul thought as he walked towards it. She took good care of her...collection. The word left a bad taste in his mouth. He'd never seen one of her special khel sick. He knew the stable's wards guarded against thieves somehow. It was a palace for her treasures, but the common herd didn't get so much as their noses inside.

They didn't want to, either; when he put them through their paces on a long lead they shied away from the special stable. Even highbred horses, usually more intelligent and less likely to spook at a whiff of enchantment, fought the bit when they were first led between the horseshoe-studded doors to their new home.

Once inside, they didn't want to leave, acting perfectly content with their strange new companions. The highbred beauties and breeding stallions were stablemates with fickle, wilder beasts. Some of the khel were vicious, some were impossibly fair of form, but when you sifted out the chaff, they were still horses. Saul knew how to deal with horses just fine, which was more than he could claim when he worked with other folks. And the amount of dung Madam Dorothy's darling pegasus produced was surely every bit as much as a regular horse would. It stank, too. Saul didn't envy the stableman in charge of the pegasus.

Still, when the rainy season ended, he had hopes of being permanently promoted to working the warded stable. The job got under the skin of the ranch hands; most rattled their hocks and moved along after a while. The last stable hand that left had been roped into clipping the pegasus' wings; after his ribs healed, he'd signed on for a cattle drive to the Green and hotfooted it on out of town.

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