Courage (The Eventing Series Book 3) Read online

  The filly’s long-striding walk tipped me gently from side to side. The exercise saddle felt strange, disorienting. How could sitting on a horse’s back, arguably the one thing I was best at in the world, feel alien to me now? The saddle reminded me of a bareback pad, with less cushioning. With no steel tree between us, I could feel the filly’s spine; with no leather flap under my leg, I could feel her ribs, the sleek lines of her muscle, the fluttering of her heart. Or maybe I was just imagining all of it.

  “What took you so long? My God! Women!” Beel-ee Joe—no, Billy, I reminded myself—cackled at me and turned his colt down the hillside path beyond the barn with a jerk of the reins. I winced on behalf of the youngster’s mouth and nudged my own filly, who suddenly seemed to have left her gas pedal in the barn, to follow.

  Ocala was putting on her autumnal best this morning, and it should have been perfect for an early ride, what with the fog writhing through the trees, and a touch of coolness to the humid morning air which gave away we were in late September and it almost wasn’t summer anymore. The hill we rode down was studded with live oaks, their branches reaching like the arms of giants over the path, limbs dripping with curlicued ribbons of Spanish moss, nearly reaching the ground in places. There was no better way to experience a fall sunrise in Ocala than on horseback; this countryside had been designed for horses, from the limestone seeping its bone-building calcium into the water and grass, to the gently rolling hills perfect for growing strong young horses.

  Ocala might have every sort of discipline and breed roaming its hills now, but the town had first been discovered by Thoroughbred owners and racing was its horsey heart. I should have been thrilled to be out here, finally seeking out the holiest ground of my adopted home, but the truth was, I was scared.

  Jules Thornton, three-day eventer, was scared of a ride. It didn’t sound right to me, either.

  Well, I’d never ridden a racehorse—it was that simple. I’d taken ex-racehorses and trained them to do other jobs: eventing, hunters, jumpers. That was a matter of getting inside their heads and understanding their past. Racehorses came with a history which made them razor-sharp, horses on the edge of leaping or bolting or rearing at the slightest provocation because they were just so ready to go. I brought them back to earth, taught them to take life a little more slowly, explained the art of relaxation. I was very experienced at teaching a horse not to be a racehorse. It was going in the other direction I hadn’t experienced.

  Pete said exercising racehorses was simple for any rider with a good seat, steady hands, and nerves of steel; technically, I had all of those, or I wouldn’t be able to pilot horses around Intermediate level event courses, with logs and ditches and banks designed to scare the breeches off the bravest of equestrians. Simple work, and good money, too: right now I was getting paid fifteen bucks to take this filly down to the training track, take her for a gallop in a circle, and then ride her back to the barn to hand her off to the groom. Add in that we were riding at six in the morning, before I would think of riding my crew back at home, and it was a good source of extra income which really only disrupted my sleeping patterns, not my actual work-day.

  It also got me away from Pete, and his silence.

  The sloping path ended at the rickety wooden fence of a training track, its oval disappearing into the fog. The wooden railing was raw and new; the sand footing was pocked with a few days’ worth of hoof-marks, and speckled with weeds. It wasn’t the kind of ground I’d usually gallop a horse over. The filly pranced beneath me; she knew what was up. Billy Joe pointed at a flimsy-looking red-and-white striped pole, its crooked white cap just visible through the thick fog.

  “Okay Miss English, we trot up to that pole, and then we turn around, stand ’em up for a sec, and then we gallop back to here. You got it?”

  Seemed simple enough. I didn’t know what “stand them up,” meant, but I figured I could follow along. I nodded at Billy Joe, gathering up the thick reins again, gripping them just past the knot I’d tied into them. By now, Billy Joe was already trotting away, which annoyed my filly very much. She took off at a fast clip after his colt, who was already doing some serious Standardbred action on the weedy sand of the training oval, trotting with an extension that would’ve made a dressage queen drool.

  “Catch up if you want,” I sighed, letting her pull against my hands. I wasn’t exactly going to ask her to soften her mouth and accept the bit, after all. All that was needed this morning was a measure of speed. Manners were just a bonus. I posted like a D-Level Pony Clubber, balancing against the filly’s mouth, leveraging against the knot in the reins.

  She rewarded me with an impressive plow-horse impression, digging her head down and dragging me into a faster and faster stride as Billy Joe’s colt went skimming ahead of us. I soon gave up attempting a ladylike rising trot and imitated his position: I planted my hands on the filly’s withers and lifted my backside into the air, a sort of really awful two-point position. My heels dropped obediently and my lower leg slid ahead of the girth once my weight was on the stirrups instead of the saddle, and suddenly that “longer you ride, longer you ride” line made sense. Now I had too much leg in front of me to get thrown forward if she did something stupid, like stop dead, or drop her head to buck. I felt secure for the first time since I’d slid into the exercise saddle.

  The lack of tread on the stirrup iron was still worrisome, though. My boot’s grip on the stirrup was tenuous, sliding back and forth a little if the filly took a misstep on the hillocks of sand. With such uneven footing, the chances she’d take a hard stumble and throw me right over her head seemed decent.

  My apprehension rose as the striped pole loomed before us. A quick trot was one thing, but galloping was going to be a whole other story.

  Billy Joe had already pulled up and turned his colt around, and I did the same, the filly tossing her head and gaping her mouth against the bit. I pulled her up next to his horse, as if we were finishing a hunter under saddle class and lining up for the judge. He tossed me a gap-toothed grin. “You ready, Miss English?”

  “I’m ready,” I said, with all the false confidence I could muster. “I’m Jules, by the way.” There’d been no introductions this morning. I’d driven into the barn driveway at five thirty, found a hard-faced woman in the first barn who said she was the owner and gave me directions to the training barn down the drive, where the groom took the sudden appearance of a strange rider in boots and hard hat completely in stride, as if new faces were a normal thing around this farm.

  Probably not a good sign, I thought in retrospect.

  “Billy Joe,” he returned, still grinning. “Joey and Jules, heheheh.”

  “Joey and Jules,” I repeated weakly, praying this wasn’t going to become a thing.

  “Okay, then, Julesy, let’s gallop!” He picked up his reins and kicked his horse into a trot, and then a canter, and then—they were gone, streaking away from us, literally leaving my filly and I in a trail of dust. Hadn’t this guy ever heard of a warm-up?

  “Oh, fuck me,” I muttered, and kicked the filly after them.

  She was fast, but Billy Joe’s horse had the lead and the fear of God in him, so we didn’t even begin to close the gap already opened between us. I was pretty sure there was more to training a racehorse than just galloping them full-tilt around a track—as we went around the first turn it occurred to me that racehorses changed leads before turning into the short sides of the track, and changed them back again to go down the long sides—but I had no idea how to get this filly to change leads and anyway, I was losing my stirrups. Without any tread to grip my boots, I was slipping and sliding on bare metal, trying to bear as much weight as I could on my hands and my knees, but slowly failing as my muscles, unaccustomed to this position and this saddle, tried to revert to more familiar poses.

  I knew I was going to lose my irons; now it was just a question of what would happen when I did. I couldn’t pull this horse up, obviously. I needed this job, had to have it if bil
ls were going to get paid and horses were going to eat. Horses would always, always need to eat—there was no getting around that. If I pulled up, they’d fire me, and I’d have hungry horses. There was no job security in galloping racehorses, you just showed up, rode, and got paid… or you didn’t.

  As my right stirrup finally went, my toe losing its last bare millimeter of metal, I made my decision.

  I let the other stirrup go as well, allowing them to bounce wildly along her sides, and dropped back into the saddle. At least I had a tight seat, no matter what kind of tack I was sitting in. As the filly galloped on, head high and mane streaming, spurred on by the stirrups banging around her shoulders, I realized Pete had been right: a good seat and strong nerves really were all I needed. I knew how to stay on a horse. I’d stay on this one.

  It was a cheering thought. I felt much better about the entire morning, even though things probably looked pretty dire. Oh well, I thought, as we finally reached the point where Billy Joe had reined back his horse. I bounced a little as we came down to a fast jog, and then a walk. At least I didn’t die. I should get brownie points for that.

  “What the hell happened, English? You ride with no stirrups?” Billy Joe did not look nearly as impressed with me as I thought he should. I noticed he stopped using my name pretty quick. We weren’t Joey and Jules anymore.

  “They didn’t have any tread,” I explained. “If you have any latex in the tack room, I can wrap them real quick before the next horse.”

  Billy Joe looked at me like I had suggested we tack up the gators in the barn pond next. Then he wordlessly turned his colt back towards the gap in the railing, leaving me to follow.

  We rode back to the barn in silence, the horses huffing and blowing, while I tried to figure out who was wrong here. I used latex wrap on my cross-country saddle’s stirrups. It was totally normal. Laurie, my old trainer from my riding-school days, had said eventers learned that trick from racing people. Did she make that up?

  Nope, I thought. I wasn’t wrong. Something about this place was off. That scruffy little training barn with only six horses in it. The groom who showed me a horse to ride without even asking who the hell I was. The way we just galloped flat-out around the track, no attempt to rate or teach the horses anything. This farm was wacky, not me.

  I untacked the blowing filly in her stall and hesitated in the doorway, looking for the groom, but he’d gone missing. I looked at her regretfully; she was hot as hell and I couldn’t leave her there that way. I led her back out and took her for a few turns around the shed-row, the way I’d seen racing grooms cool hot horses when I’d visited training barns to look at sport-horse prospects.

  Billy Joe stood in the tack room doorway, sipping at coffee and staring at me blankly every time I walked by. I had no idea where his horse was. When I turned around to see if anyone was walking behind me, he would step back into the tack room, pretending he hadn’t been staring at my ass in my tight jeans. Another reason I hadn’t wanted to work at a racing barn: too many men. Pete said if anyone could handle rude men, it was me, but I didn’t feel up to challenging the patriarchy this early in the morning.

  After the fourth walk around the shed-row, the groom came and took the filly without apology. I looked for Billy Joe, but the tack room was empty. I found him in a stall, where he’d gone to tack up his next ride.

  “Who do I ride next?” I asked through the bars, and he snorted.

  “You don’t have another horse,” he laughed. “Boss saw you ride. She was up the hill. Said you scared her. They’ll write you a check in the office up at the main barn.”

  The hard-faced barn owner took a cigarette out of her mouth long enough to tell me thanks for riding, and good luck. Then she wrote me a check for fifteen bucks and handed it over without a smile. She’d written “barn supplies” on the memo line. “So there’s no taxes,” she explained, but I knew that—that’s what everyone in Ocala put on their paychecks. “Good luck,” she said again.

  “Same to you,” I said, and I meant it, even if she’d called my riding scary. With the fog burning off and revealing sunlight pouring through the oak trees, daytime was spotlighting the flaws that hadn’t been visible when I’d arrived in the pre-dawn darkness. The entire place had a rotting feel: the fences were coming down, the weeds were taking over the driveway, the barn aisle was deeply rutted and smelled faintly of cow. The stalls were mismatched, as if they’d been made of found wood and abandoned panels. I wasn’t the one who needed luck.

  “You said you event, right?” The barn owner looked at me as if she was trying to place my face, but I knew I’d never laid eyes on her before. She was the hard-bitten varietal of horsewoman—a permanent frown carved into a face of deeply rutted skin, bronzed from a lifetime in the sun, and bone-thin in a way that made you think more of mineral deficiencies and rough living than Instagram models and kale shakes.

  “Yeah.” I slipped the check into my back pocket. “I’m a professional event rider.”

  “You know a Lucy Knapp? I gotta horse for her to pick up, but she won’t take my calls.”

  “No,” I said. “But there’s a lot of eventers here. It’s hard to know everyone.”

  She nodded. “Same with racing.” She peered at me. “You want a horse?”

  “Is he sound?” I asked, automatically interested, even though I knew I shouldn’t take anything off this farm.

  She shrugged her thin shoulders.

  “I can’t take another horse right now, anyway.”

  “Yeah, you and me both.” She laughed. No hard feelings, I guessed.

  “You know anyone else hiring?” I figured it was worth a shot, even if she thought I couldn’t ride. “Your neighbors, maybe?” There were farms on either side of this place. Both of them looked much nicer from the road, which I now realized meant I should have tried one of them out first.

  Her cracked lips opened and she coughed out a barking cackle. “You go next door, don’t tell ’em Mary Archer sent ya. That’s all I can tell ya.”

  She turned, still chuckling, and walked off down the dirt aisle, which I guessed meant she was done with me. Okay then, Mary Archer, I thought. Thanks for the opposite of an endorsement.

  Grooms were mucking stalls, but no one looked up from their work when I walked up the aisle, passing the cobwebby stalls one by one. Or maybe they did; I felt eyes on my ass as I left the barn. I didn’t begrudge them the view. By the look of things, they’d all be out of work soon. They could use a treat.

  Back in my truck, I looked at the check for fifteen bucks and sighed. All that, and I got a paycheck that wouldn’t even cover a bag of grain. The clock told me I had more time: two more hours, officially, until I needed to get back and ride my own little crew. I looked to the left, looked to the right: farms on either side of me, each with their own training tracks, each with their own barns full of horses. The beautiful thing about Ocala was there was always another farm. It would take years to work my way through all of them.

  I pulled out onto the highway and considered. North, south? Did it matter? The road was empty. I swung the wheel to the right, headed north a few hundred feet, and made an immediate right at the next driveway. At least this one was classy, I thought with a sigh, driving through arching black gates like the ones back at Briar Hill. Maybe their stirrups would actually have latex on them.

  I HAD ALREADY been home for half an hour when Pete came inside, saw me sitting on the couch in bare feet and a clean shirt, and shook his head ever so slightly, as if he wasn’t surprised at what he saw.

  I felt a rush of blood warm my cheeks. How dare he judge me like that! I supposed he just rode ten horses and made a hundred dollars or something, and then stopped off and had a pancake breakfast before coming home looking beautiful and smelling like violets. Bastard. “I just got home a little bit ago,” I snapped. “I rode one horse. No one else needed riders today. So you can lay off the dirty looks.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” he retorted.

&n
bsp; “It was just the way you looked—” I heard my own voice in my ears. Is this how you’re going to fix things? I pulled it together. I shut my mouth, swallowed, bit my tongue a few times, regrouped. “I’m sorry,” I said uncomfortably. I hated apologizing for anything, to anyone. I was already tired of apologizing to Pete, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  Pete dropped his hard hat on the kitchen table and wiped sweat from his forehead. He’d worn the hat inside, which meant he’d been driving around Ocala with a riding helmet on, like he was piloting a golf cart at a horse show. Anywhere else that would get some strange looks, but it was common enough around here.

  He ran a hand through his dark chestnut hair, roughing up the helmet head. “I rode six at Plum Meadow,” he announced huskily.

  “Six!” Such a show-off, my god. I glared at my coffee.

  “Just babies. We mostly trotted around a big pasture. It wasn’t too bad, like trail-riding with a few more spooks than usual.”

  Nine o’clock in the morning, and Pete had already ridden six horses to my one. He was beating me at this whole “earn money to eat” thing we were trying out.

  I considered different ways to spin my own unimpressive debut into the working world. The more prosperous-looking farm I’d tried after leaving Ms. Archer’s fabulous No-Name Acres had turned me away, as had the next two. “I rode one, and that was all they had,” I fibbed, not wanting to admit I’d been sent on my way. “Everyone wanted experienced riders for their older horses, and they kept saying they didn’t have babies yet.” I wasn’t sure what that line had meant, but Pete seemed to have stumbled onto a farm which already had these mythical babies.

  “I even tried Windsong Arabians,” I added dolefully, to express just how wide I’d cast my net. The idea of riding short-backed, short-legged Arabian racehorses had been even less appealing than regular ones. Way too much agility in those close-coupled little bodies, like trying to ride a coiled spring with a mind of its own. “They said to try them next month, when they have horses coming back from up north.”