FOR A HORSE AND HORSEMAN
Osmund was a stupid, meek, bumbling, ridiculous, worthless prince.
At least, that was what his royal father was fond of saying, and anything proclaimed by His Highness Valen Haldebard in his booming, kingly voice was truth. Osmund was stupid and meek and worthless. He knew that.
But even so – he was a prince of Valcrest. For all else that he was, he was still the firstborn son of the Haldebard family, heir to a royal and noble line.
How did he end up here – dirty, reeking, his tattered clothes caked in dirt and manure and foreign soil, working like a beggar just to earn the food in his belly?
And was it maybe somehow just a dream he could wake up from?!
Unfortunately, this nightmare was real. And he knew it, because no matter how many times he pinched himself here on the floor of the hovel he called home, he awoke not in a soft bed in the castle, but on the hard ground with his cheek in the dirt. Sometimes to a street cat attempting to raid his meager belongings. Like right now.
“Stop, you… wicked creature,” Osmund attempted, words slurred with exhaustion. He kicked a foot out in the direction of the cat. The animal, perhaps seeing how stupid and meek and bumbling he was (and that he had no intention of actually landing a hit), ignored him, and Osmund didn’t protest further.
He pulled his body upright and watched his feline visitor instead. The cat was wiry, but moved with confidence, every bit the seasoned and worldly urbanite that Osmund, the spoiled palace brat, wasn’t. Its body language seemed to say, “I belong here and you don’t”, or maybe, “I deserve to eat your food because you’re too meek to defend it from me. Maybe you should just die?” and that seemed a little mean-spirited, honestly. But Osmund couldn’t argue.
Just like the stray, he was hungry and thin and wretched. The difference between them was that Osmund hadn’t accepted his lot yet. “I want to go home,” Osmund whimpered to the cat, and when the creature finally made off with the contents of his bag – nothing more than the crumbs from last night’s bread – he felt somehow lonely. If only he’d had more to offer.
The family on whose hospitality he was encroaching were local Meskato who’d taken pity on his frankly, pitiful state and let him do odd jobs in return for food from their table and the use of an old shed in their courtyard. During the day, he wandered out into the streets of Shebyan and hunted for work. This was difficult because his Meskato was, to use a phrase his old palace tutor was fond of, “an utter disgrace”.
Nonetheless, he employed it now. “Work! Need work!” Osmund called out as he walked, using the few words he’d learned since arriving here. “Clean houses, I clean! Horses, clean horses, clean houses!”
He wandered around like this until the sun was high and the smells from the colorful market stalls watered his eyes and taunted his aching stomach. He’d gone over twenty years not knowing what it was like to be hungry, really hungry. He missed the irate castle cook and the servants who dutifully ignored him as they brought him his breakfast. He missed the heaps of bread and cheese and meat that accompanied every meal. He missed—
No! He couldn’t think about them. Osmund moved his body forward and stared ahead past the crowds of people doing their shopping and gathering their daily gossip. He could only carry on if he didn’t think about……
But alas. Too late.
With every little piece of his wretched soul, Prince Osmund Haldebard missed his girls. His darling, beautiful girls.
Bella, with her rippling smoky mane and eyes like a pool of reflected twilight. Minerva, a palomino he’d raised from a foal, who could ford a river in a single jump. Callista, roan red and proudest of the bunch, with a strut that said she knew she was a prince’s steed. An empty stomach he could handle, but the hole in his heart was agony. They were on the other side of the sea without their princeling, possibly as hungry as he was. Or, very possibly, dead.
“Need work,” Osmund continued to croak to anyone who would listen, willing back the foolish tears, nearly not noticing the local Meskato woman who approached him. She was a familiar face who treated him like a neighbor, not a beggar. A number of the city folk were kind that way— to a complete stranger!— for reasons a Tolmishman like Osmund couldn’t understand.
“Hello, ███,” the woman greeted, smiling. “Have you ███ work today?”
Osmund only understood every other word, like usual, but he could piece together what she was saying well enough. “No work today,” he admitted miserably. Even to these ordinary people off the street, he was embarrassed of his poverty.
To Osmund’s mixed mortification and amazement, she reached into her basket and offered him a firm, palm-sized plum she had clearly just purchased at the market. His mouth was already swimming, imagining the sweetness of the juice. “Take it,” she urged, and held it out in front of her more and more insistently.
Osmund didn’t know how to refuse. Literally. And even if he had, he couldn’t, he realized with shame — he was simply too hungry. But he did know how to sputter a meager “thank you”, bowing his head as the humiliation burned his skin red.
The woman wasn’t done with him. She patted his shoulder and gestured somewhere far down the street. Osmund squinted his eyes and tried to see what she wanted him to see. “There, you talk to him,” she said, enunciating clearly for his benefit, like she was speaking to a very young (or very slow) grandchild. “He always ██ ████ his ██ ████. █████ find work.”
She was pointing to – was that a cart? – at the end of the paved road, in front of a large building enclosed by a stone gate that stretched out of sight on either side of the avenue. Several busy shapes around it might have been men. It was impossible to tell which person exactly she wanted him to talk to; Osmund mumbled out a “thank you” again anyway. Then, he started to move his legs up the slowly inclining road, teeming with those who knew their place in this city. The plum was gone in a matter of desperate bites.
He rehearsed what he would say when he reached the men. He could see that there were three of them fussing around the cart, and beside them a young boy – an apprentice, or cheap hired help perhaps. Merchants making a delivery, he realized, seeing the pots and large tweed- and cloth-bound bundles they were unloading.
They were parked in front of what Osmund figured was some kind of government building, and the stone gate, which he could see more clearly now, was stately with fine ornamentation. More than the surrounding sprawl of the city, this place had the feeling of wealth. That feeling had Osmund’s stomach twisting in knots and the hair on his arms standing on end. Once, he would have belonged in a place like this.
Or would he? He remembered the way that rich, important men in his homeland had treated him back when he was a disappointing prince. He didn’t want to imagine what could happen now that he was lowlier than the dirt on his feet.
His rehearsed words abandoned him completely when he found himself in hailing distance of the men. Their layered clothes were spotless and tailored, their hair clipped short and neat; even though they were mere craftsmen, they were part of the same universe as the occupants of this beautiful building. They would take one look at him and the long, unwashed blond mess on his head and their lips would curl in disgust. What might they do to him just for the crime of offending their eyes? Have him beaten or thrown in the stocks? He could imagine his father doing that. If, he thought with dizzying absence of feeling, Father were still alive.
One of the men glanced up. Osmund prepared to be thrown in the stocks or called a dirty Tolmishman or any of those other scenarios he’d just made up, but what happened instead was far stranger.
In the space of one terrifying breath there came a shout and a loud smash from somewhere on the other side of the stone wall just as a large, dark shape came sailing over it. Osmund at once became aware of two things:
One – he was terrified! Good heavens!
Two – A scream. The dark, sailing shape was going to land its full weight on the hapless little apprentice boy.
Scratch that, Osmund was also, somehow, innately aware of a third thing:
He was beholding the most beautiful horse he’d ever seen in all his life.
There wasn’t more than an instant to react. He didn’t even know he had moved, or how he had moved so quickly. All he knew was that when he came back to himself, the boy had fallen on his bum unharmed behind him, with Osmund standing in front, and before him, the bucking beauty.
“You’re okay,” Osmund murmured in his native Tolmish, moving on instinct to comfort the huge horse who had come from over the wall, black as midnight. She was shuffling and kicking in place, anxious and indignant. One wrong move and the mare would flatten him, and the little boy too, but Osmund wasn’t afraid.
How could he be? Who would be wasting time with something boring as fear?
She was a living, breathing work of art, one of the famous Meskato horses that that people’s ancestors had tamed on the steppes of their ancestral homeland. Her white nose and hooves could have been a diadem and fine boots. His own mare, proud Callista, wore her pride like a noblewoman, preening and self-satisfied, but this horse… this horse was proud like a queen who had spent years outmatching her enemies. Osmund’s mind was empty, every thought happily clean. It had only been good fortune after all that had led to him being here, in this impossible place so far from home, because of the existence of this one moment.
To be honest, only a horse this beautiful could have made him miss the man that had emerged from the gate behind her.
“You,” the unfamiliar man spoke, and Osmund’s world skidded to a halt.
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