Rocking Horse War

by Lari Don

  “You must be Emerald. The third gemstone in my crown. What a gorgeous little thing you are.” He grabbed Emmie’s small white hand with his large brown one and shook it up and down.

  He slapped Thomas on the shoulder. “Well done. Well done. You’ve given me them all. Aren’t they lovely!”

  He patted Emmie on the head. “Plenty of time to make friends later, dear little Emerald. Right now we have to catch the bad man and take him to the big grey castle. Then there might be time for cream cakes and ginger beer, do you think, Thomas?” He strode off towards the bridge.

  Thomas smiled affectionately at his grandfather’s wide back, then led the black horse after him. Pearl and Emmie followed, a safe distance behind the large dark hooves.

  Thomas called out, “Emerald isn’t just lovely, my lord, she’s already able to hold and use the power of the land. Don’t underestimate her.”

  “Really? How wonderful!” the Earl yelled over his shoulder. “The more power the better, I always say.”

  Emmie giggled, then whispered, “What a strange man! He thinks if he’s hearty and enthusiastic, he’ll make us all join in without asking any questions. I wonder if it worked with Jasper and Ruby?” Pearl shrugged, but she was afraid it might have done.

  “And who is this?” The Earl suddenly whirled round and bared his teeth in a snarling grin at Pearl. “Another triplet? Surely not. That would make four, and you’ve always been better at arithmetic than that, Thomas.”

  “I am Pearl. I am the oldest Chayne sister.” Pearl stood firm under the Earl’s heavy stare. “I’ve come to take my brother and sisters home.”

  “Have you indeed? Thomas?” The Earl looked to his grandson for an explanation.

  Thomas shrugged. “She doesn’t hear the land. The land doesn’t hear her.”

  “Ah,” said the Earl, and immediately turned his back on Pearl.

  Soon, Thomas and the Earl were talking in low voices ahead, so Pearl leant closer to Emmie and muttered, “You aren’t going to take part in this crowning, are you? You do have a plan?”

  “I think so.”

  “You only think so? Because if you can’t use your fancy music to get us away from these madmen, I’m just going to throw you all on that great big horse and ride us out of here.”

  “Don’t be daft. His horse won’t do what you say. Anyway, if we run, they’ll chase us. If we make it home, they’ll steal us again. We have to finish this today, or we’ll never be safe from them.”

  “Finish it how?”

  “We have to make our own destiny.”

  They crossed the humpbacked bridge to the gathering of four horses and two children.

  Thomas rushed to the only horse Pearl didn’t recognise, a muscular dappled grey almost as tall as his grandfather’s black. Thomas spoke softly to her, then leapt on her back.

  Pearl recognised the three other gleaming, snorting, stamping horses. The warm stable smell of the Horsburghs’ mounts mingled with the scent of woodshavings and walnut oil from three cold wooden rocking horses.

  The palomino rocking horse stood beside Ruby; the chestnut stallion stood beside Jasper. The Earl walked Emmie over to the white mare and lined the triplets up in front of their horses. “You are all so perfect. So exactly as I wanted you. My precious stones.”

  They did look like a matched set of gemstones, unblemished and exactly alike. But Pearl could see their eyes: Ruby looking down at the ground; Jasper gazing up at Thomas; and Emmie looking past everyone else at the mountains.

  When the Earl turned to get on his horse, Ruby and Jasper greeted Emmie with hugs, but looked nervously at Pearl.

  Pearl stepped close to Ruby, who was stroking the palomino’s nose. “I thought you hated that nasty beast.”

  Ruby slid behind the mare’s shoulder. “She let me groom her.”

  Pearl shook her head. “And who did I say you should open the door for?” Ruby bit her lip and the tip of her nose turned red.

  “Did I say you should open it for wolves? Or strange men? Or sneaky treacherous little brothers?”

  She turned on Jasper. “And you! Why did you help the Earl? Why did you help him steal your sister?”

  Jasper stood tall and confident. “Because they will teach me to use my power. Because the normal rules don’t apply to people like us.”

  “Honour? Loyalty? Honesty? They don’t apply?”

  Jasper flinched. “You don’t understand, Pearl. You’re trying to save us from something we want! Just leave us alone. We’re in good hands.”

  Pearl looked at the Horsburghs, high on their horses, reins held negligently in their fingers.

  The Earl laughed. “The land doesn’t listen to her, Thomas, and neither does anyone else! Ha! Ha ha!”

  Thomas laughed with his grandfather, but kept his face turned away from Pearl.

  “Ready, troops?” bellowed the Earl. “Time to capture the Laird.”

  Chapter 23

  The triplets climbed on their horses, and all five riders set off for Swanhaugh Towers. Pearl was left standing alone on the riverbank. Had they forgotten her? For a moment she hoped they had, then Emmie reined in her horse on the bridge and asked if Pearl wanted to ride with her.

  Pearl pulled herself up onto the shining white rocking horse and sat perched on the back of the red leather saddle. Her legs gripped the mare’s hard flanks. The horse cantered after the others.

  The Earl led the way, but Thomas held his horse back to ride behind the triplets. If it was a precaution to stop the triplets escaping, it was unnecessary: Emmie’s white horse followed the Earl’s black like a foal follows its dam.

  The rocking horse cantered with the same rhythm as a real horse. But the creaking as the mare stretched, and the echoing boom as each hoof hit the ground, reminded Pearl she was sitting on a hollow wooden horse.

  Though Pearl had never approved of these unnatural creations, she enjoyed the speed, after a day of slogging up and down hills on her own tired feet.

  Earlier in the afternoon, Pearl had thought the Laird’s castle looked uncared for; as she hurtled towards it this time, it looked broken. The towers were now squint, the front door was blown outwards and the walls bulged.

  The Earl pulled his horse to a halt just a few steps from the columns struggling to hold up the front of the castle. The three rocking horses slammed to a stop in a perfect line behind him.

  “Where is he, my boy?” roared the Earl.

  “I pinned him down under the minstrels’ gallery,” answered Thomas. “And I shattered his lorefast, so he has nothing but his skinny old arms to help him escape. He’ll still be there.”

  “Are you sure he isn’t dead?”

  “I hope not. I didn’t mean to kill him. You know how Mother feels … felt … about using death or bloodlore. I just walled him in so we could dig him out later. But it will need both of us, my lord, one to get him out and the other to control him. So we’ll have to take the children in with us, or they might …” Thomas frowned at Pearl, “… they might wander off.”

  Everyone slid from their horses. Pearl said, “You can’t take children in there. It could collapse in the slightest breeze.”

  Thomas laughed. “It might not last a Perthshire winter, but I think we can tiptoe in on a summer afternoon. If you’re scared, Pearl, stay out here. But the triplets are coming with me. Come and see what happens to our enemies, children. Bring the rocking horses. We might need their strength.”

  He marched towards the southern wing of Swanhaugh Towers, followed by his grandfather, the triplets and the rocking horses. Pearl walked behind them. As she turned the corner, she saw her family enter the castle through an uneven archway blasted out of the ballroom wall, exactly where she and Emmie had stood watching the rat’s blood feed the earth.

  Pearl stepped cautiously over the rubble and into the ballroom. The wooden floor was scarred by jagged lumps of stone fallen from the walls and ceilings. Coloured glass and lead from the windows lay in drifts at each corner.
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br />   The minstrels’ gallery above her head had come away from the wall at one end and was still attached at the other, so it hung down like an impossible staircase with no steps.

  The gallery on the other side, where Pearl and Thomas had first watched Emmie fly, had collapsed onto the ground in one piece. It formed a solid fence, blocking off the far side of the room.

  “He’s under there.” Thomas pointed to the fallen wooden platform. “If we harness the rocking horses, they can haul it away. Do you have any rope in those pockets of yours, Pearl? No? Then I’ll use this.” He walked to a smashed window and started ripping down the golden ropes which looped the curtains to the wall.

  “Isn’t he wonderful?” the Earl called to the whole room. “Just wonderful.”

  Emmie was describing the chase in the air to Ruby and Jasper, swooping her hands high, keeping her voice low. They gazed at her, looking up even though they were all the same height.

  Pearl had no one to talk to, no one to admire. She stared at the floor, poking the toes of her scuffed boots into the debris: slices of dark varnished wood from the carved ceiling; crystals from the chandeliers, grey with years of grime; fistfuls of crumbling plaster; and, still shiny and clean because they lay on top of the dust, a couple of long white feathers.

  Pearl tilted her head up. Through ragged holes in the ceiling she could see painted walls in the room above.

  She turned towards her brother and sisters. “Get out!” she mouthed soundlessly, gesturing with her hands, trying not to draw the attention of Thomas, the Earl or the rocking horses.

  “Get out now!” But the triplets were too busy discussing the Laird and the mountains to notice her.

  Pearl’s eyes flicked between the ceiling and the people scattered round the ballroom. The triplets were chatting in the middle of the dancefloor. The Earl was throwing a golden rope round the stallion’s chest, and Thomas was crouching down, tying the other end to struts of the overturned gallery.

  Pearl saw a white blur move across the hole just above her. She looked back down to the dancefloor. Thomas’s head was bent, his long pale neck exposed to the air above.

  Pearl couldn’t bear it.

  “Swans!” she yelled. “There are swans up there!”

  The horses reared, the children leapt apart, and Thomas whirled up and round.

  Then the noise began.

  First a hoarse scream from under the collapsed gallery.

  Then a thrumming, vibrating, churring noise from above, like thousands of fingers stroking thousands of drums.

  The holes in the ceiling filled with white movement.

  Pearl flinched, expecting hundreds of swans to swoop down in violent v-shapes. But nothing came down except a few feathers. The white shapes stayed in one place, beating their wings.

  She stared up, not understanding what the birds were doing.

  But Thomas understood, and said calmly, “Pearl, get the children into the fireplace.”

  The fireplace? She was confused, wondering if she’d mentioned Hansel and Gretel out loud today. She didn’t want to push anyone into an oven or a fireplace.

  The thrumming was getting louder.

  “Now, Pearl!” he yelled.

  Pearl used her outstretched arms to guide the triplets ahead of her into the huge fireplace.

  Soot coated the wide chimney above them, charred wood from small fires darkened the stone underneath. Their shifting feet crunched on burnt bones.

  She judged the distance from the fireplace to the hole in the wall. Could she get the triplets out while Thomas and the Earl were busy?

  Thomas was working frantically to secure a third rope to the gallery, and his grandfather was trying to keep the palomino calm so she could take the strain and pull the gallery forward.

  Before Pearl could choose the best escape route across the floor, her view of the exit was blocked. Now it wasn’t just feathers floating into the ballroom. Dust and specks of plaster were spiralling down.

  “Why aren’t Thomas and the Earl fighting back?” whined Jasper. “Surely they’re more powerful than those birds?”

  Pearl shook her head. She’d finally worked it out. “The swans are beating their wings to make the rafters and plaster shake, to bring the whole ballroom ceiling down on our heads. If the Horsburghs fight back like Thomas fought the Laird, their power will pull the whole castle down.”

  Emmie added, “So they’re just trying to shift the gallery as fast as they can.”

  Ruby snivelled. “That thumping noise is giving me a headache.”

  “Then let’s get out of here. Everyone grab hands.” Pearl seized Jasper’s hand and tried to drag him out of the fireplace. Jasper yanked his hand away and cowered into a corner of the chimney.

  The three horses pulled together and the gallery groaned and shifted.

  The ceiling fell in.

  And Pearl’s world turned grey.

  Black soot poured onto the children in the fireplace. White dust exploded to fill the whole ballroom. Great weights crashed through the clouds to smash on the floor. Finally the clumsy shapes of swans swooped down and out of the broken wall.

  Everything was silent. The dust drifted down slowly and the air cleared.

  Pearl wiped her eyes on her cuffs. The floor of the ballroom looked like a model landscape: long mountain ranges of rafters and glacial valleys of snowy dust. But no movement.

  Then she heard a cough, and looked over to where the Horsburghs had been working. The gallery was a few steps further from the wall. Several dusty hills started to move in front of it.

  Thomas stood up, wiped his face on a handkerchief, and pointed his staff towards a heap by the wall. “Up!” he commanded, and the Laird uncurled his skinny length from the floor.

  Then the Earl stamped himself free of dust and pointed his hunting horn at the Laird. “Out!” he ordered. “And keep those swans at a distance.”

  The Laird snarled, but picked his way across the floor towards the hole in the wall.

  Pearl started to lead the triplets out too: Ruby sneezing, Jasper grinning, Emmie staring up at the few remaining rafters.

  The white mare and the chestnut stallion sprang from the rubble and flicked their dusty tails. They trotted out to the grass, where they both lay down and rolled their flanks clean.

  Pearl looked round. Where was the third horse?

  She saw a feeble movement by the gallery and ran over.

  The palomino was trapped under a lump of carved stone, the huge weight lying across her belly and back legs.

  This was the horse Pearl had fooled with a mirror; the horse whose golden bridle ring had led her to Thomas and started this day’s journey; the horse who had tried to trample her in the deer forest. Pearl knew she was a vain, violent beast. But now the mare lay gasping at her feet, crushed between the hard wood floor and the heavy stone block.

  Pearl couldn’t move the stone. She wasn’t strong enough to lift it, and she didn’t want to hurt the horse by rocking it off.

  Pearl blew lightly to shift the fine grit from the horse’s face, then blew harder to reveal the damage on her flank.

  The horse’s wooden body was splintered. Sharp points of broken wood jutted up through the saddlecloth.

  Thomas crouched down beside Pearl, moving his fingers expertly over the mare’s side and belly. After a look under her saddle, he sat back on his heels and just put his hand gently on her neck.

  Ruby ran up to them, and stroked the horse’s nose. The mare’s rattling breathing slowed. The rasp of her broken ribs scraping together quietened.

  The horse lay still. Suddenly completely still.

  Pearl watched as the varnish on the horse’s sides faded and flaked. Her eyes, open and staring, lost their wet shine, and her limbs became stiff.

  Ruby wailed. Pearl put her arms round her little sister and hugged her.

  The low evening sunlight sliding through the shattered windows shone on a discarded toy: carved, painted and varnished, then used, broken a
nd thrown away.

  Pearl stretched out her hand to close the horse’s eyelids. They didn’t move. They were made of solid wood.

  Chapter 24

  The three children knelt by the rigid wooden horse.

  Thomas took the gold ring from his waistcoat and placed it by the rocking horse’s neck. It turned once, then lay down. He said quietly, “Let’s get out of here; it’s not safe.”

  Pearl hissed at him, “It was never safe.”

  He just repeated, his voice flat. “Let’s get out of here.”

  As they left the ballroom, the Earl put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Sorry, my boy.”

  “Why are you sorry?” Pearl said bitterly. “You gave false life to these creatures, you forced them into danger, then took that life away. Is that what you’ve done with the triplets? Created lives for your own selfish ends, planning to take them away?”

  The Earl glanced at her, then turned to Thomas. “Why is she still here? She annoys me. Come and secure Swanhaugh for me.”

  Thomas took one last look at the ballroom floor and walked out of the castle past his grandfather and the Laird, who was still controlled by the constant threat of the Earl’s lorefast.

  Thomas picked a handful of pliable green reeds from the edge of the nearest canal, sat down and began to pleat them into a rope.

  Pearl stood protectively beside the triplets, as Ruby wept and Emmie comforted her. But Jasper sauntered over to Thomas. “Can I help?”

  Thomas looked up sharply, and Pearl thought he was going to snap at Jasper for disturbing him. But he nodded. “Yes, you can fetch me more reeds.”

  By the time Jasper brought more, Thomas had finished the length of rope. He smiled at Jasper, and added one of his reeds anyway.

  Thomas wound the rope round his lorefast, like a vine round a post or a snake round a branch. Then, holding his staff at the top, he pulled the rope steadily so it slithered all the way down the length of the staff.

  Then he approached the Laird, threw the green rope around the old man’s arms and chest, tied it swiftly in a simple knot and stood back. “Now my power holds you prisoner,” he said with satisfaction.