by Marc Secchia
The Horse Dreamer
By Marc Secchia
With S. J. Secchia
Equinox Cycle
Book 1
Copyright © 2016 Marc Secchia & S.J. Secchia
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Author Website: www.marcsecchia.com
Cover art copyright © 2017 Marc Secchia & Joemel Requeza
Cover art: Joemel Requeza
Cover font design by Victorine Lieske
www.bluevalleyauthorservices.com
Table of Contents
The Horse Dreamer
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Double Loss
Chapter 2: Dreams
Chapter 3: Rehabilitation
Chapter 4: Storms
Chapter 5: When it Rains
Chapter 6: Swamped
Chapter 7: Unforeseen Aid
Chapter 8: Pony o’ the Wisp
Chapter 9: Equinox
Chapter 10: Where Horses Fear to Tread
Chapter 11: Hidden Ways
Chapter 12: Obscurant Vale
Chapter 13: Angels and Darkness
Chapter 14: Into the Outland
Chapter 15: He’s a Whiz!
Chapter 16: Improbably Surfing
Chapter 17: Kesuu’s Tribe
Chapter 18: Darkwolf Clan
Chapter 19: Azoron’s Gorge
Chapter 20: Volcanic Hell
Chapter 21: Glorious Equines
Chapter 22: When Kings Conspire
Chapter 23: So not a Princess
Chapter 24: Accidentally on Purpose
Chapter 25: Revelations
Chapter 26: The Crystal Ocean
Chapter 27: Dragonstone
Chapter 28: Taboos? What Taboos?
Chapter 29: Families and Fingers
Chapter 30: Amorix
Chapter 31: Scorched
Chapter 32: Hey Presto
Chapter 33: It’s Raining Thieves
Chapter 34: Equinox Reprise
About the Authors
Chapter 1: Double Loss
The car PLUNGED over the barrier.
A flurry of branches shattered the windscreen. Glass sprayed Zaranna’s face. She heard a shriek – but had it been the sound of the car’s roof peeling off, or the voice of her own terror? The seatbelt slashed her neck as the car careened along, rattling her teeth like beans in a gourd shaker.
Momentarily, something eclipsed the full moon. Leathery arches. A flash of furnace-hot fire, suddenly snuffed out. There came a horrendous, unending series of collisions. Her mother’s blue Ford Focus bucked like a wild horse fighting its first taste of the rope. Zaranna choked on a slurry of mud, bitter leaves and glass shards. She flung out an arm as the dark earth reared up, but the force of the final impact hammered her forehead against the dash nonetheless.
She blacked out.
* * * *
“Zaranna! Zara! Oh, God, someone please help!”
A hand slapped her cheek, twice. Zaranna moaned, “Uh … don’t hit …” Her eyelids fluttered. “Mom? Is it morning?”
“Come on, baby girl. We’ve got to get you out. Now!”
The urgency in her mother’s voice cut right past a most annoying habit, calling her sixteen year-old daughter ‘baby girl’. Talk about embarrassing her in front of friends. But she had never heard her mother roar like this, not even when six year-old Zaranna had tried to calm a rearing horse, only to be kicked clean across the stall. She still wore that scar just beneath her fringe, top-right of her heart-shaped face. Spitting out a bitter scrap of leaf, she tried to glance about. To understand. Only, reality was obscured by smoke and pain and a coppery tang of blood in her mouth. She heard a sibilant whistling of escaping gases somewhere nearby.
Her mother’s hands tore at the seatbelt, at the dash, at her clothes. Thoughts and impressions faded into and out of her head as if they were the ends of trailing rainbows. Why couldn’t she feel her legs? Why could she see the stars overhead? Unclipped, the seatbelt snaked past her left ear. Her mother wrenched at her shoulders; Zaranna screamed the piercing note of a hunting hawk. Her knees!
She had never known such agony, a sightless, white-hot tidal wave that sank her into oblivion. When awareness returned, her mother had a tree branch wedged down past her trapped legs. She heaved at it with all her strength.
“Move! Open, curse you …”
Susan Inglewood never swore. Not even when she had sliced the tip off the ring finger on her left hand while chopping carrots last year. She had stared at the offending flap of skin as though it belonged to an imposter. Her mother heaved at the crumpled dashboard so hard that the metal groaned; weeping, kicking the car’s twisted door as she leaned in through the passenger window – where was the window? Nor was there a roof, just cool evening air all the way to the stars.
Zaranna’s head lolled helplessly, as though her neck muscles had been severed.
Her mind rambled, confused. August skies. Leaving her grandmother’s home near the tiny village of Lacey Green to begin the long drive north up the M40 to Yorkshire, the late afternoon sunshine painting the forested Chiltern hills in vibrant autumnal hues. Later, she must have drifted off to sleep.
She remembered waking to a honking sound before the flying – the horn blasted again, a deep, animalistic groan that rattled her teeth. Closer. Lights dazzled. A low rumbling communicated through her spine to her dull awareness.
They were on train tracks! She gasped, “Train! Get me out! Get me – aaaaahhh …”
The tearing! Her legs felt like wet strands of spaghetti, curled under the crumpled dash – a lunchbox-sized space that could never have contained her limbs, Zaranna realised. Something was wrong. Badly wrong. She was imprisoned in the wreckage.
She heard herself begging, somehow, above the escalating roar of the onrushing train and the hissing and squealing of brakes as the great juggernaut tried to slow in time, but it loomed inexorably … and her mother still yanked at her arm, her face a stark mask lit by the train’s headlights … the Ford Focus quaked … it was too close. Too late.
“Mom, go.”
“Baby –”
“Go!” She tried to shove her mother away.
Even the train’s frantic honking succumbed to the thunder of thousands of tonnes of steel bearing down on their family car. All was light. All was terror, and the visceral knowledge of certain death.
Zaranna did not know from where she summoned the strength to swat her mother, but the last she saw of her was a flutter of white blouse beyond the dazzling beams. She saw the world in flashes of stop-motion, the prisms of light cast by the train’s powerful headlights seeming to yearn toward her upturned face, knowing that her body had, incongruously, fallen from muscular spasm into limpness. Curiously, her eyes tracked a luminous carmine-and-yellow butterfly as it flitted across her vision. Surely a dream; a fragment of beauty spawned by the expiring despair of her mind.
Just once, she sighed for all that was lost of her life.
The train plowed into the driver’s side door with monstrous force, caving it in like an eggshell, flipping the small car into the air as it charged onward without a care.
Now she was flying, too.
* * * *
The sensation of flying resolved into a horse’s smooth canter. Zaranna rode her favourite horse, Misty Dawn, along a vast curve of pristine beach, miles and miles of bone-white sand broken only by a rusty shipwreck jutting out of the stark expanse i
n the distance. Fierce African sunshine baked her cascade of sun-bleached blonde tresses. Snow-white gulls cawed softly overhead in a cloudless blue ocean. Misty Dawn’s hooves thundered across the hard-packed sand in the first wash of surf, kicking up clouds of sea-foam which matched the colour of her coat.
Noordhoek beach, near Grandfather’s farm in Cape Town, was her favourite haunt in the world. Five miles of uninterrupted sand, as lonely as the skies were wide and the day long, a place where a free-spirited mare could fill her lungs with salty goodness and run until her heart pounded for the joy of the gallop. Misty Dawn jawed at the reins as though aware of her rider’s thoughts. Bareback, they seemed clothed of one flesh, the communication so instinctive that it transcended the need for speech. Without warning, the handsome mare flicked the creamy length of her mane – brushed out before sunrise that morning – and made a prancing series of dance-steps, before pinning back her ears and shooting the breeze with an abandon that filched Zaranna’s breath right out of her throat.
“Faster, Misty!” she laughed.
Misty Dawn kicked up her heels and showed the watching gulls why she had been a fine racehorse in her day, before a drunken groom had permanently injured the thoroughbred. The stable had decided to put her down. Zaranna’s father, Peter, brought her home one afternoon in a padded horse trailer. They spent the next three years rehabilitating the mare. Gradually, Misty’s terror of humans lessened and she learned to gallop again, but not as before. Her gait exhibited a noticeable hitch and she tired easily, but that fiery champion’s blood demanded daily exercise. Now, Zaranna and the horse she called her own had developed an understanding her father called extraordinary.
Only, what was Misty Dawn doing on Noordhoek beach?
The thrill of speed faded into puzzlement. Misty had never been to South Africa. She belonged on her parents’ farm in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, half a mile northeast of Malham hamlet.
Then, she realised that Misty’s hooves were no longer kicking up joyous sprays of seawater. Crazy. This was some dream.
“Misty? Are you flying?”
Tossing her mane, Misty Dawn fixed her with burning gaze, one eye literally aflame … and when she spoke, her voice was a growl issuing between fangs that lengthened before her rider’s incredulous eyes. “So, you’re finally awake? Time to die properly, Zaranna, daughter of –”
Back in the car, helplessly belted in as it plunged down a sharp embankment toward the train tracks, Zaranna’s scream blotted out the remainder of the creature’s words. Branches lashed her face. She flung out an arm to brace herself, but the impact cracked her head against the dashboard regardless.
She drowned in endless darkness.
* * * *
Zaranna awoke with a stifled moan. A sour, bloody crust gummed her tongue to the inside of her cheek. What a weird dream … colours swirled between her half-shuttered eyelids. Scents of sulphur and jasmine mingled in her nose, such an odd, redolent combination – where had she smelled it before? Her ears brought to her attention the low hum of a nearby machine. Something was making an annoying, incessant peep-peep, peep-peep sound – her heartbeat, of course. It sped up the moment she thought about it.
“Zu-Zu? Are you awake? Susan! Come quickly!”
She wanted to cry, ‘Dad,’ but there was an obstruction in her mouth. She bit down instinctively, but the plastic would not yield. Instead, her gag reflex kicked in. She tried to throw up. A hot knife of pain speared between her ribs. Gagging, gurgling, groaning, Zaranna tried to thrash her way free of the thing choking her.
Fingers stroked her forehead. A voice soothed, “Easy, Sprite. Relax. We’re here.”
She was alive. Tears leaked under the spider-thing clamped to her face. Zaranna tried to blink them away. The pink-and-brown blob wavering above her had to be her dad. Who else would wear such an unfashionable beard?
Another face swam hazily into view. “Zara? Baby girl, are you there?”
This time, the pet name rang with sweetness. Zaranna squeezed the slim fingers that slipped into her palm. So weak. She did not even have the strength to hold that grip. But she knew those fingers, and their familiar touch conveyed that by some miracle, life flowed in her veins. Oh mercy, why did she feel so faint? What had happened? She had to remember …
Zaranna heard someone shouting for the doctor. Shoes tapped on a hard, echoing floor.
Shortly, her thoughts floated into a realm of pink clouds and minty sweetness. How odd. And relaxing. Somewhere, in an impossibly distant body, she imagined she must be in pain. There was a raw shrieking of nerve endings and the comprehension that all was not well, yet she could not bring herself to care. Perhaps after a nice sleep …
Her eyes shuttered of their own accord.
* * * *
The car smashed through the brush with the grace of a stampeding elephant, kicking up clods of mud as it plunged into a pitch-black defile. Zaranna worked frantically at her seatbelt. She had to escape before the brunt of the final impact crushed her knees, twisting her feet at an impossible angle beneath the seat.
A deep hurgh-hurgh-hurgh of laughter mocked her efforts. Alien laughter. It ignited flame behind her eyes. “You’ll never escape.”
Zaranna looked up. She had never heard such malice contained in three words. The shapeless figure menacing her was robed in sweeping velveteen, wearing a robe of a red so murky, she had to concentrate to imagine it was not black. A deep hood left his face shadowed, unseen.
She tried to move, but found herself strapped to a table. Wrists. Elbows. Neck. Taut leather straps furrowed multiple locations along her torso and down each leg. Even her forehead was secured, leaving Zaranna able to roll her eyes, wriggle her fingers and toes, and flex her legs a quarter-inch or so. Overhead, a ceiling of blocky stone suggested a dungeon or underground room; lamplight flickered in the corners of her vision. Water dripped nearby. All was damp. She struggled to breathe the foetid, lung-clogging underground air.
Where was she? What crazy dream was this?
Deliberately, the man raised a large, metal wood-saw into her line of sight. “Since you refuse to talk, Daughter of the Winter Wizard, I’ll make this simple for you. Tell me where you hid the Imjuniel.”
Zaranna jerked against the bindings. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Tsk tsk. How very … disappointing.”
He fingered the blade thoughtfully. Zaranna could not peel her eyes off the saw. The blade was rusty, the teeth as damaged as the gap-toothed grin of a beggar she had once seen on Adderley Street in central Cape Town. Her father had bought him a KFC meal; the man tossed it into the nearest bin, shouting that he needed money, not food.
The voice that issued from that hooded darkness was as bleak as the Little Karoo. “Talk, or I will employ this very blunt saw on your very pretty knees. It’ll take a while and you will experience excruciating pain. But we have plenty of time. Now, speak! Where is the jewel?”
“I’ve no idea – no!”
He tapped her left knee twice more with the blade, evidently amused by her shrieks. “Second thoughts, little girl?”
“Please … please, no …. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please!”
Pleading. She despised the piteous note in her voice, but her courage seemed to have fled hand-in-hand with dignity and reason. In a flash, she knew she would do anything to avoid this torture. Anything at all.
“He hasn’t told you?” Zaranna had the impression that somewhere in the blackness, pitiless eyes bored into hers like twin skewers slowly being forced into quailing flesh. A headache bloomed instantly behind her eyes. “Preposterous.”
While terror kidnapped her tongue, the hooded beast lined up the saw. Checking the angles. Deliberating whether to make his first cut above or below the knee. Zaranna could not believe he would actually do it. Surely this nightmare would end? Yet it was so vivid, she smelled the peculiar odour of sulphurous smoke mingled with jasmine rising from his robes, an
d the pungent stench of the leather straps securing her body to the table suggested the blood and sweat of many victims.
‘Wake me, wake me, please,’ she begged silently. All she needed to do was wake herself. Yet she could not find a way.
The only identifying feature on the man, beyond the robe, was an outlandish ring he wore, an irregular, ruby-red stone affixed to his left forefinger by what appeared to be a set of claws. The artist in her took in the details with awe. Her mother made jewellery, but nothing like this. The oblong ring appeared strangely alive. The stone sported a mouth with tiny yet distinct fangs, apparently shards of diamond fixed somehow into the red stone. The claws had a texture like scales and tiny, perfect nails. She had time to appreciate all this as the man dawdled over her legs, prolonging the anticipation. Had she any clue what he sought, Zaranna would have refused, for whatever their nature, his plans had to spell evil. She fought the straps grimly.
The hood shook sorrowfully. “He has left you weak. Less pleasure for me. Last chance, Wizard-Daughter.”
Zaranna tried to spit at him, but succeeded only in splattering her own arm.
The saw gouged the flesh just above her right patella, a soft, testing stroke. Zaranna froze. For a long second, there was no sensation. Of course, it was a dream. Then the hurt bit like the rending jaws of a Great White shark. She writhed against the straps for long seconds before a raw, lingering scream finally forced its way past pain’s chokehold on her throat.
She collapsed, sweating and whimpering. “Monster …”
“Monster?” said the man, pausing to regard her narrowly. She thought she saw a glint of light touch his eyes, perhaps a hint of pale, icy blue? “I suppose I am. Last chance, girl. The Imjuniel – where is it?”
“I … don’t … aaaaaaahhhhhh!”
He sawed again, a long, bone-grating stroke.
“Aaaaaiiii –” She rode a tsunami of pain. And sank.
* * * *
Zaranna arched off the pillow before crumpling onto damp sheets. Her skin was clammy; the pain, as deadly as in her dream – what had she dreamed? Something weird, lurid – a saw? She remembered only the vaguest details. A dungeon. An unaccustomed smell. She glanced down her body and saw large mounds beneath the blankets where her knees should be. Good. They had fixed her legs.