Belron
An Ashmarch Tale

The parchment said the mare was surety against her lodgings, and that if the owner did not return within the season she became the property of the stable. It did not say what a man was supposed to do with her in the meantime.

The master read it twice by candlelight, though he had read it a dozen times already and it had never once said anything different.

He set it down and went out to look at her.

She stood in the far box with her head low, a silver-grey with a belly on her like a grain sack and not enough flesh anywhere else. Vhelt stock, he’d have wagered — that hard, dry look about the legs, the kind of animal bred to walk further than it was fed. Whatever she’d been once, she wasn’t it now. She’d been going downhill since the day the man led her in and paid a fortnight up front, and she’d kept going downhill every day since he didn’t come back for her.

The master did the arithmetic standing there, because it wasn’t a sum that improved for being done sitting down.

Feed her to term. Straw, bedding, the boy’s time. Against her: little enough. She’d not carry a rider again and there wasn’t much meat left on her worth the name.

Against the foal: rather more. If it came out alive. If it stood.

He looked at her a while longer.

“Slaughter for you,” he said, “and coin for the little one.”

She didn’t lift her head. He hadn’t expected her to.

Then he went back inside, sat down at the table, and pulled the tally toward him to work out where the feeding of a dying horse was going to come from, and it was somewhere in that column of small figures that the idea arrived, and he found he rather liked it.

The new lad could be her mother.

It would be a test, of a sort. And it cost nothing at all.

* * *

The boy was cleaning her flanks with a twist of straw when it started, working the way he’d been shown, which was to say badly but with great seriousness.

He had never seen a birth. He didn’t need to have seen one to know this wasn’t how it was meant to go.

“Should I help?”

“Not yet.”

The master went to the back of the stable and came back with two lengths of rope, each worked into a loop at one end. He pushed them into the boy’s hands.

“Round the legs. When she pushes, you pull. Not before. You understand me?”

The boy nodded, because it was easier than admitting he didn’t.

She pushed hard at first, and he pulled on each one, and each time there came a grunt from behind him that he chose to take as approval. Then the pushing weakened. Then it weakened again.

“This one,” the master said, and his voice had changed. “This one you pull like Nyxara’s stood behind you watching. That foal comes now or it doesn’t come.”

The boy planted his feet. He was all elbows in those days.

She managed something that was barely a push at all, and he hauled with everything he had, and then the master’s hands came in over his own and the rope went taut in a way it hadn’t gone taut before, and the boy found he had stopped pulling entirely and was simply watching the man work.

He was frightened of pulling too hard. He said so afterwards, once, and never again.

“The head, I can see the head…”

“Pull, you twit,” the master growled.

The foal came free all at once and landed in the straw in a rush of gloop and steam, and the master was down on his knees clearing its mouth and nose before the boy had finished understanding that it was over.

The boy went a colour he’d have been embarrassed about later.

“Well done,” the master said.

He recovered from the colour quite quickly after that.

* * *

The mare faded over the next few days, the way they do, and then she stopped.

The slaughter team came for her in the morning with a cart. She went for pies. The master stood in the yard afterwards turning the single coin over in his fingers, and the boy heard him say, to nobody:

“Well. I hope the little one’s worth it.”

* * *

The filly grew faster than the boy’s brother had.

His brother, dead of the fever two winters back, was the only measure he had.

He fed her. He mucked her out. He was awake for her at hours that had no name and slept in the straw beside her more nights than not, and it never once occurred to him to think of it as work, which is how he came to be quite so good at it.

The master taught him the hoof pick that spring. Made him kneel in the muck and take her leg up properly, hand over hand, the way you do it so the animal gives you the foot instead of you taking it.

“Not like that. She’s not a boot.” The master’s hands came over his again, patient. “Feel for it. There. Now out, and away from you — you don’t dig at a horse, lad, you ask her.”

He got it wrong four times, right on the fifth.

The master grunted, and that was the whole of the praise, and the boy carried it around for a week.

He kept the pick clean after that. Kept the point honest. It was his, in the way a tool becomes yours once someone has taught you to use it properly.

* * *

He didn’t notice his rations dropping.

The stable was running thin, a bad month, then another, and somewhere in it the boy’s plate got smaller and stayed smaller, and he was so occupied with getting milk into a growing filly four times a day that he simply failed to register that he himself had gone from thin to something past it.

The master noticed. The master noticed and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t have cost money.

It was on an afternoon in that same stretch that he came through the stable and heard the boy talking.

“So, Belron. Today it’s milk.” A laugh, delighted with himself. “It’s always milk.”

The master stopped where he stood.

“Here. Lad.”

The boy looked up, grinning, expecting nothing.

“No names.”

The boy’s face did something complicated. But the master had already gone.

* * *

Time went on the way it does when the days are all the same shape. Spring turned. Customers came and went. By midsummer she was up past his shoulder and still growing.

The boy did his duties and did them well, and once, just once, a client in a good mood pressed a jat into his hand on the way out.

He brought it straight to the master and held it out.

“For her upkeep,” he said.

The master looked at the coin a long moment. Then he looked at the boy, and something moved behind his face that he got hold of before it arrived properly.

He took the jat.

“You know she’s off, lad.”

He said it flat. He’d been working out how to say it for two days and flat was all he’d managed.

The boy straightened up.

“We need the money. Extra mouths, even with this.” He flipped the jat once, caught it, didn’t look at it. “We can’t keep her. We’re a stable, not a yard.”

The boy stood there with the straw still in his hand.

“Stable comes first,” he managed to finally get out.

The master shook his head.

“No, lad. We come first.”

* * *

A short while later the boy came through the stable with the barrow and found himself stopped at the empty stall.

Clean straw. Fresh water in the pail, filled that morning out of habit, before he’d remembered.

He drove the hoof pick into the doorframe.

He stood a moment. Then he worked it free, and tested the point against his thumb the way the master had taught him, because a blunt pick is no use to anyone.

It wasn’t blunt.

It opened his thumb, and he watched the blood come up, and he went back to work.

A story from the world of The Ashmarch, beginning with Book One: The Trader’s Reckoning.