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Something looked around the girl, inspecting Onua with a large brown eye. It was a shaggy mountain pony, a steel gray mare. She was plump and well combed, and bore two packs easily.
“Yours?” The girl nodded. “How much would you ask for her?” Onua motioned to a pen filled with ponies at her back. “I’m in the market.”
“I can’t sell Cloud. She’s family—all the family I got.” Again Onua saw a flash of sorrow that was pushed aside.
“What’s your name?” The K’mir stuck her fingers into a pouch filled with a powder known as “eyebright.”
“Daine, mum,” came the soft reply. “Veralidaine Sarrasri.”
The eyebright made her fingers itch when Onua called on her magical Gift. “How old are you, Daine?”
“Fifteen.” An aura of red fire, visible only to Onua, flared around the girl’s face. The lie was a good one—she must have practiced on the way, the trader thought wryly—but a lie nevertheless. She looked about thirteen.
“Where are you from?”
“Snowsdale, up north. About two weeks’ walk.”
There was no flare of red—she had told the truth. Onua sighed. “Are you a runaway? From home, or a bad master—”
“No, mum.” The soft mouth trembled. “I got no family—just Cloud.”
No red fire this time. Onua dusted the powder from her hand. “I’m Onua Chamtong, of the K’miri Raadeh.”
Daine looked puzzled. “The k-k—the what?”
“The K’mir are a people to the east. Raadeh is the name of one of the K’miri tribes.” Daine looked only slightly less baffled. “Never mind. You say you’re good with animals. C’mere.” She led the girl to her pen. Inside, twenty-seven shaggy ponies in all colors and sizes milled around.
“I buy horses. I had an assistant, but he got offered a better job working for a horse merchant here, and I wasn’t about to hold him back. If you hire on—and I didn’t say I’d hire you—you’ll help me take these south. It’s three weeks’ drive—if we don’t bog down in mud, if we aren’t hit by raiders, and if we go before all these people take the road to the next fair. It’ll be just you and me, and my dog, Tahoi. Why don’t you climb in and look ’em over? I want to see how you manage ’em.”
Daine glanced back at her mare, Cloud. “Stay put, and no biting,” she ordered sternly, and clambered over the fence and into the pen.
Poor thing must have been alone a long time, to be talking to a mare as if she could answer back, Onua thought. She sat on the fence rail to watch.
The ponies watched as Daine passed among them
. Ears went back. Those close to her appeared to wonder which would do better: a bite or a kick.
When a yellow stallion, the king of the small herd, minced into place at her back, the girl spun and put both hands under his muzzle, lifting his head to stare into his face. “No, sir,” she told him firmly. “I’ll not stand for any tricks. I may be human, but I’m not stupid.” The stallion tried to rear. She forced him down, then blew gently in his nostrils, to teach him her scent. He shuffled, then fidgeted—then bowed his head in submission.
Horse Lords, Onua thought. She’s establishing domination over him and the entire herd!
