Chapter 48

Mist ran the way she had run the first day I sat on her: as if the ground were something she was trying to get away from.

I let her. I lay low on her neck with her mane whipping my face and let her take the north meadow at a flat gallop, through the long grass gone gold in the last light, past the hay ricks and the old stone sheepfold and the line of hawthorns where Rowan used to stop to let the horses breathe. The noise of the Fair went thin behind us and then went out altogether. There was only her breath, and her hooves, and the wind roaring in my ears, and nothing at all in my head.

It was wonderful. For the length of one meadow, it was the most wonderful thing I had ever felt.

Then the meadow ended, and the forest began, and she came down to a canter and a trot and a blowing, head-tossing walk, and all of it came back.

***

I let her walk along the forest edge until we came to the brook.

It ran out of the trees there, shallow and quick over br