Wild Blood

by Kathryn Lasky

  “All the horses, even the new ones from the corrals of El Miedo, began nickering softly, for they, too, were seeing the flashes of the tiny sprinting figure. We are coming close to something, Estrella said. The scent of the sweet grass grew stronger. And that scent along with the fragmented visions of the tiny horse was being shared. The horses picked up their pace despite the steepness.

  They were far above the tree line and a bitter wind scoured the hallum. A silence had fallen on the horses and mules. There was a rasping sound as the wind churned through the wiry twigs of the scrub bushes.

  The creature himself went unnoticed for several minutes. Even Hope had not detected his scent although they had encountered many big-horned sheep. The sheep stood like an immense rock and seemed to blend in perfectly with the boulder behind him. The herd stopped. He appeared immovable, and although he was not blocking their way or making any aggressive gestures, Estrella felt compelled to speak.

  “May we pass your way?”

  “This is a pass. My way? Perhaps.”

  Arriero was nervous. He recalled in the old country that there were brigands who preyed on the Ibers, demanding money or silver or gold. Stand and deliver, they would say. The words came back to him.

  “We have no money, or silver, or gold, sir.”

  “I want no money, no silver or gold. Such things are worthless,” said the creature in a low but gruff voice.

  “What do you want?”

  “Respect.”

  The herd was bewildered. “But who are you?” asked Hold On. “We do not even know your name to offer our respect.”

  “Buck.” He was an odd-looking animal. He had a noble bearing and wore his immense, curling horns like a crown. “You are entering a sacred place.”

  “A sacred place?” Corazón asked, imagining one of the great churches in the Old Land.

  “Hallowed,” he replied.

  “Hallum?” Estrella asked.

  “If a hallum is a passage from one place to another, an in-between place, there must be a place where it all begins and this is that place. The Place of Firsts.”

  He stepped away from the rock. The horses could now see that the overhang of the rock sheltered a shallow den. Hope caught his breath. There was a slight mound with some very small bones arranged carefully on top. Scattered in and around the bones were beautiful petals, some pink and some a pale lavender. “I’ll see you when the Aurora salix blooms.” The words came back to Hope. Every guard hair on his body bristled. His eyes opened wide. How could flowers bloom on this cold and desolate hallum? There was barely enough soil for the tough earth-clinging plants, and all of these had been stripped of their foliage. Was Grace near? Where had these blossoms come from?

  At that moment, the figure of the tiny horse glittered in the sun, and the first herd knew that they were most certainly in a hallowed place. They lowered their heads, and many began to swing them from side to side and then stretch their necks. Slowly they put one foreleg far in front of the other, which began to bend at the knee joint, and they sank down until their muzzles touched the ground. Estrella felt a breeze stir her forelock. The star on her brow, for which she had been named, seemed to tingle. The voice of her dam came back to her so clearly: “I shall name you Estrella. I am naming you for all things bright and luminous in the world.”

  High above, the eagle circled. And the voice of Haru spiraled down. Tijo heard it first. “These are good creatures all. Good creatures now woven together in time.” A feeling coursed through Haru that she had often had sitting at her loom when she had almost completed a weaving. The shuttle with the threads would pass through the warp and the weft only a few more times before the rug or the blanket was finished. Haru was not tired, not now. The lodge had not worn thin, but the weaving was nearly complete. She had in her spirit life been the shuttle between the warp and the weft of the living and the dead. It would soon be time for her to return to the spirit camps for good. For the cloth would be finished.

  Tenyak swooped down close to the sheep Buck. A big-horned sheep like Buck had also been a lodge for another spirit in another time. That of First Girl. The river that cut through, the earth that had lifted to create the Mighties. They were all now part of that fabric woven by time and inscribed in rock.

  How could flowers be blooming in this cold? Hope kept asking himself. The wind was enough to blow the fur off his back. However, gradually, as the herd made its way down the other side of the hallum, the coyote noticed that there was a thread of warm current embedded in the stiff breezes. As they continued their descent, the thread became thicker like a stream. And the overpowering scent of grass filled the air.

  Old dreams began to wander through the horses’ minds. Dreams that were somewhat familiar but perhaps frayed from time, or it might have been a time before time. The figure of the tiny horse was becoming brighter as the herd slipped away to another day in another world, and the last of the sun’s lingering light sprayed pale lavender shadows across the land. The sky became a blue-black dome over their heads, chinked with stars in the crystalline air.

  Estrella realized that they were all now sharing the vision of the tiny horse, but soon another figure began to emerge beside it, walking easily on two legs. It was human and small, like a child. She scrambled easily over the rocks. She walked in a companionable silence close to the tiny horse, as if they had known each other for a long time. Her hair fell like the silvery ropes of a waterfall to her shoulders, and surely, Tijo thought, she seemed to be made of mist and vapor rather than flesh and bone. But of course, she has left her bones behind. The thought came easily to him and in that moment, she turned and smiled at the coyote. The others soon saw her, too, walking at the side of the tiny horse.

  But as these two beings traveled on through the long night, they seemed to grow larger. Soon the girl swung herself up onto the tiny horse, who now was almost as big as Estrella. The night was ending, and the dawn was breaking. The skies appeared bruised with purples and soft pink. There was a thread of gold on the horizon.

  The horses were suddenly aware that Abelinda was breathing hard and had slowed. The girl slipped off the tiny horse and walked back to where Abelinda had stopped. She whispered to her and then, patting her softly, urged her forward.

  “Not far, not far.” It seemed she almost sang the words. There was a lovely rhythm that appeared to coax the mare on.

  Soon the horses felt soft long grasses stirring around their legs. The smell suffused the air. They knew they had arrived. That their long journey was ending. Abelinda gave a deep agonizing groan. It was discordant with the headiness of the moment.

  “Bless my withers!” Corazón blurted. “Abelinda is foaling! A new foal is coming!”

  Abelinda had lain down in a bed of the soft fragrant grass. Her eyes had rolled back in her head, and then they closed with relief as a little filly slipped out into the lingering light of the dawn.

  “A new dawn horse!” Estrella whinnied. For a moment, her mind flashed back to the very beginning, before the beginning of their journey, to that time on the ship in the seconds after she was born and tried to stand. She had fallen of course. “Too many legs!” Her dam, Perlina, had laughed softly. “Well, little one, you’ll have time to sort them out.” The groom had quickly come and put her in a sling like the rest of the horses in the hold. None of the horses were allowed to stand free, for fear they would fall because of the ship’s rollicking motion in the turbulent seas.

  “Abelinda,” Estrella said softly, “I was born on a ship. I never was allowed to stand. They put me in a sling. Imagine that!”

  “No, I can’t,” said Abelinda. “For this one is born free.” And at precisely that moment, a little mason bee swooped down and dropped some petals right on the foal’s head.

  “Grace!” Hope yipped. “You came! You came!”

  “I told you that I would see you when the Aurora salix blooms. And these are the blossom of the dawn willow. The Aurora salix.”

  “So you did.”


  The air now swirled with a small storm of petals. The horses gathered as close as they could to look at the little filly as she tried to stand on her wobbly legs.

  “And what will you call her?”

  “For the dawn, of course. This is the Valley of the Dawn. And so I shall name her Aurora, for the dawn. The same as you.” Abelinda nodded toward the tiny horse, who now stood shoulder to shoulder with Estrella and dipped her head a bit. “And for short, we’ll call her Rory.”

  “I am honored,” the tiny horse whinnied. First Girl slipped onto the horse’s back again.

  The horse and the girl began to walk away. The herd watched them. The sparkling horse seemed not to fade but to become transparent, and within her, they began to see all the other horses that had come through time from that first horse. Each horse appeared to melt into another one with features more like their own, the ones of the first herd. The horse stopped, and First Girl turned around and looked directly into Tijo eyes as if to say, And this is where you began. Both Tijo and Estrella understood. It was as Tijo had told her once:

  We are long spirits. Time weavers. We weave between the oceans of time like the shuttle of Haru’s loom. We see the cloth of the future and that of the ancient past. We are both of us threads in the same blanket.

  The sun rose. The foal stood. The herd grazed in this place of the sweet grass, where time had briefly stopped and so many threads had merged into this flow of life since the very beginning of a new world.

  Kathryn Lasky is the author of the bestselling Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, which has more than seven and a half million copies in print, as well as the Wolves of the Beyond series. Her books have received a Newbery Honor, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and a Washington Post–Children’s Book Guild Award. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Copyright © 2016 by Kathryn Lasky

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lasky, Kathryn, author.

  Wild blood / Kathryn Lasky. — First edition.

  pages cm. — (Horses of the dawn)

  Summary: The filly Estrella, her human friend, Tio, and her small herd of horses have temporarily escaped from the evil El Miedo, but he has not given up, and as the dawn horses keep searching for the sweet grasses that will give them strength, new friends — and enemies — both human and animal, will emerge from the shadows.

  ISBN 978-0-545-68300-5 — ISBN 0-545-68300-9 1. Horses — Juvenile fiction. 2. Human-animal communication — Juvenile fiction. 3. Human-animal relationships — Juvenile fiction. 4. Leadership — Juvenile fiction. 5. Adventure stories. 6. North America — History — Juvenile fiction. [1. Horses — Fiction. 2. Human-animal communication — Fiction. 3. Human-animal relationships — Fiction. 4. North America — History — Fiction.] I. Title. II. Series: Lasky, Kathryn. Horses of the dawn.

  PZ10.3.L3773Wi 2016

  813.54 — dc23

  [Fic]

  2015028848

  First edition, January 2016

  Cover art by Richard Cowdrey,

  © 2016 by Scholastic Inc.

  Cover design by Ellen Duda

  Illustrations by Richard Cowdrey

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-68302-9

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