Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  I nodded, and blinked hard, because there seemed to be more sweat in my eyes. Why else would they be prickling? This wasn’t a calamity, was it? So it was all going to come down to a twenty-minute warm-up in the dressage ring and a show-jumping course. Everyone else had ridden for nearly an hour, showing off their dressage prowess, their cross-country bravery, their show-jumping discipline, and I was going to have to show I was worth twenty thousand dollars and a new horse by doing just a third of all that.

  That was just fine.

  It was a disaster.

  They were handing this whole package to Peter Morrison. I just knew it.

  My face flushed red at the thought, and if I had thought about crying with disappointment, rage replaced that despondency quickly enough. Resentment had always carried me further than jealousy; despising my enemies had always been more sustaining than envying my competition. The things you learn in high school, when you spend it all mucking out after your classmates’ horses.

  I hardened my jaw and then loosened it again, working my tongue around the insides of my dry mouth, as I realized that my unhappy tension had carried all the way down to my mount. His back had gone flat and his head had come up, losing the obedient, arch-necked stance that we prized in dressage. The hollow feeling was a reminder of what we needed to do. I could fight for this with everything I had, but if I slipped in my own composure, Dynamo would go around the arena like a plow horse after a long day in the fields. I had to go into this battle shod with ballet slippers, easy and light on the ground, on my horse, on the eyes.

  And I’d show them that I was brave enough to take on the heat. A few extra degrees couldn’t hurt us. We were Florida-breds. So I spoke up. “I think we could manage the whole ride. We’re locals, you know. We were both brought up here in Florida.”

  Damon Knox’s face clouded, and the two women sitting beside him narrowed their eyes. I saw my mistake instantly; their faces said it all. It was too hot for anyone to ask a horse for anything remotely strenuous. What sort of person was I?

  Knox was a snowbird from Virginia. He’d be leaving for the summer in another week. No Florida summers or Virginia winters for his home-bred, never-been-raced Thoroughbreds; he shuttled them up and down the coast chasing the room temperature ideal. He raised his eyebrows at me, silently questioning my sanity, my humanity.

  But it was Ronnie Gibbs, the woman sitting next to him on top of the picnic table, who spoke up. She had been a top rider before she fell at Badminton and broke her pelvis in three places. Now she coached and taught clinics, and her voice held that carefully rehearsed encouraging tone that kept hopeless riders coming back again and again with their checkbooks open. “You have the right spirit,” she said. “I’m very impressed with your spunk. But we have to be careful of what’s best for our horses, don’t we? After all, they should always come first. Without them, we’re nothing.”

  My toes curled up in my boots at her empty platitudes. I hadn’t been seen as brave and ambitious at all. I’d been seen as cutthroat and cruel to my horse and only interested in the win. Now I wasn’t the next big rider on the scene, I was just a headstrong girl who couldn’t take advice and didn’t put her horse first. I couldn’t come back from this; it was the eighth deadly sin, and the most grievous one of all. But I had to try. Maybe, if I passed if off as girlish excitement…

  “I’m sorry,” I said meekly. “You’re right. I guess I’m so used to the heat that I didn’t really realize it was worse than usual. I just got excited about running through that water complex, that’s all.”

  Ronnie’s lips curved into a smile that looked as though she’d bit into a lemon, as every inch of her face puckered into a thousand wrinkles. Horsewomen polish and adore their saddles, butbbb let their faces languish in the sun. I always put on sunblock… when I remembered… out of a terror of ending up like Ronnie and an entire generation of riding instructors, trainers, and competitive riders like her, with skin like a cowboy’s saddle left in the desert. “It’s natural to be excited,” she said. “I like the water complex best, too.”

  I had the uncomfortable impression that she was speaking to me in the same voice she used for Pony Club seminars.

  D-level Pony Club seminars.

  The ones for eight-year-olds, who were literally riding ponies.

  “Do you know the jumping course?” the other woman asked, rather more sharply. Kathy Britton, respected owner and amateur rider, was tall and thin, with a drawn, boney face, and she had propped her elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist, from which one perfectly manicured thumb nail emerged, tapping at her other fingers. I was mesmerized by the cherry-red lacquer on the nail for a moment, gazing at it while I tried to understand what sort of horsewoman had the time to maintain nail polish and cuticles in our world of oils, acids, and solvents. The rich sort, with people to do her dirty work, that was what sort. Like the girls back at Osprey Ridge, the girls whose parents paid boarding and grooming and training fees to Laurie, who passed all the messiest jobs down to me, the working student. The serf of the riding stable. I narrowed my eyes at those fingernails. You judging me, I thought viciously.

  “Ms Thornton?”

  I tore my eyes away from her manicure and plastered a smile on my face. “Yes! Yes, I know the course.”

  “Go right ahead,” Damon Knox said thinly. “Give us a circle and salute when you’re ready to start.”

  Kathy sniffed and adjusted the bra strap peeking from her tank top.

  I nodded and picked up the reins again, nudging Dynamo into wakefulness. He was sluggish as we moved off from the rail, and I gave the bit a jiggle in an attempt to bring his head up and get his attention back. But the air was thick and oppressive, weighing down on my shoulders, clogging up my tired lungs, and I could feel my body rebelling against my demands as much as my horse was. He was lop-eared and low-headed as we trotted into the jumping arena, and as I turned him towards the first warm-up fence, a low vertical fence of a single pole, his gait stuttered a little, as if he couldn’t quite believe what I was asking of him.

  I couldn’t quite believe it myself.

  But we’d been set up for failure, and all the rage and resentment and ambition boiled up in me, and I bit down on my lip and swung my right leg, the one that the committee couldn’t see, jabbing my horse hard in the ribcage with the point of one gleaming little spur.

  Dynamo lurched forward, breaking into a canter twenty feet before the fence, and sprang over the jump with the fluidity and power that had always marked his jumping. As a jumper, at least, the horse was a natural, and after he had learned to carry himself efficiently in the dressage, the extra spring in his step and thrust in his hindquarters had earned him at least another two feet of jumping ability.

  I let him canter in a big circle and then brought him back to the other fence, a big square oxer. He pricked his ears and rounded his back, looking at the fence with a hint of a spook in his step. “Are you kidding?” I hissed, and gave him another jab with my hidden leg, sending him forward in a crooked leap.

  Dynamo straightened a stride out and launched himself over the fence, and I closed my legs and huddled over his wet neck, my hands on the crest of his mane, my chin close over them. I always did have a dramatic jumping style, born of learning to jump on the dregs of the local stock auctions, whatever little beast Laurie brought home for two hundred dollars or less. Those horses either didn’t know how to jump yet and threw themselves at jumps with gusto, or they already knew they didn’t like jumping and threw themselves away from the jumps with equal gusto. Either way, I learned to get out of the saddle and clutch mane for dear life. I’d never have made it as a pretty girl poser in the hunter show arena, but in show-jumping, getting over the fence is all that matters. How it looks is of no consequence.

  Dynamo took a slight misstep upon landing, the rhythm of his stride in doubt for a split second — which can be a long time when you are perched atop an airborne horse — before he managed to catch himself, rebalance,
and carry on. I sat still, poised just above his withers, with my weight deep in my heels, lodged in irons hanging tautly from the stirrup leathers, all one hundred and thirty pounds of me dangling from the two steel bars in the center of the saddle, allowing him the freedom of his back so that he could help himself.

  I hoped the judges were getting all this. It wasn’t about the horse, after all, it was about how I got the horse around the course. This audition was all about me. And why I deserved more good horses. Better horses (sorry Dynamo!).

  We made one more sweeping turn around the top of the jumping arena before I turned him back for another warm-up fence, where I was hopeful that I wouldn’t have to jam him with a steel spur to convince him that he needed to jump. I needed him to regain some of his usual pizazz and enjoy his job. “I know it’s hot, baby,” I told him, and his ears flicked back languidly to listen to my voice. “But we really only have to be out here for another ten minutes or so. Help me out here.”

  His strides did not increase in strength, but the tempo remained even. I kept my legs tight against his sides and tried to help him as best I could.

  He was the best horse, a great horse — he always tried for me. Even when the air was too wet to breathe and his skin was too soaked to let him cool, even when his nostrils were extended to their red-rimmed utmost, even when his flesh was searing hot to the touch, he gathered his hindquarters beneath his body and shoved himself on, stride after stride, with the bounce and grace of a puma.

  I glanced to my right as we cantered along the rail, and found myself eye to eye with Peter Morrison, who was watching us from about fifty feet away, his wet mare grazing beneath an oak tree. He raised a hand and nodded, giving me a thumbs-up, and as I turned my eyes back to find the path to the next fence, I felt a resurgence of anger wash through me. Spoiled rich white American male, spying on me while his good mare dried out after their audition, their full audition, while I would get only a third of the judges’ time and attention. What was the point, what was the point of any of it? He was going to win, Damon Knox probably hadn’t seen anyone else’s name after he ran his finger down the list of finalists and saw word Peter.

  I shook my head, regardless of how odd it must have looked to the judges. I wouldn’t let him win. I put down my hands and waited for the fence ahead.

  Dynamo took the tall vertical in perfect balance, his breath shuddering from his lungs in a great fluttering snort as his hooves connected with the ground again, and I immediately reined him up in a dancing halt, dropped my right hand to my thigh, and nodded a salute to the judges on the picnic table. They nodded back, and I brought back my right calf, pricking Dynamo slightly with the tip of my steel spur, and he bounced forward into a bright, eager canter. The jumping had gotten him keyed up despite the heat.

  And me too. This was a second wind, this suddenly high, heady feeling, drunk with delight and passion and driving will all at once, to feel myself one with my horse, rocking back and forth with his swinging stride, my eyes tingling with the sharpness of salt dripping from my forehead. There was a sudden burst of wind from the recalcitrant rain cloud, the reluctant storm that had hovered so tantalizingly nearby all afternoon, a hot wind like the gust from a convection oven, like the desert of Dynamo’s forebears, and as we drove towards the first fence, a confection of saw-sculpted wooden flowers holding up a four-foot-high series of pink and yellow poles, the whole heavy structure seemed to be wobbling before my eyes.

  Not just mine; Dynamo’s ears pricked and suddenly seemed to be directly under my chin as he leaned backwards in alarm, raising his head higher to get a good look at the mysteriously moving fence. Despite course designers’ continued efforts to make fences look more and more outlandish and alarming, there is one unwritten rule: jumps don’t move. Horses have no tolerance for machination.

  Dynamo’s strides faltered; I sat down in the saddle and pushed, hard, with my pelvis, forcing him to match my own motion and keep moving forward. Horses’ bodies mirror our own; pelvis to pelvis, chin to chin, elbow to elbow, our weaknesses become theirs and our determination dictates their decisions.

  And that is what happened.

  Dynamo plowed forward despite his misgivings, right up to the very base of the fence, and then gathered himself up and launched upwards. His hind hooves had not yet left the ground when the second gust of wind came bursting out of the cloud, my very own little black rain cloud which had followed me since birth, waiting for this very moment, and mowed down the pretty wooden flowers and sent scattering the pink and yellow poles. One pole caught Dynamo in his perfectly even knees, aborting his flight, sending him downwards face-first. One standard of wooden flowers crashed into my left leg before sliding down my polished boot and across Dynamo’s ribs. A blossoming red rose appeared on the bleached white of the saddle pad, dark and oxygen-starved, as the wooden flowers splintered on his side.

  Did Dynamo flip over because his head hit the ground and broke his momentum? Or did he stumble as his hind hooves tried to gain purchase on the rolling poles beneath them, like scrabbling on steel rollers, sending his hindquarters up into the air? Whatever caused it, he was up before I was, tripping and falling and lurching, dripping blood from a dozen abrasions caused by shattered poles and fragments of flowers. I lay where I’d fallen, face in the dirt, clay in my mouth, mane between my fingers, tears in my eyes, until Peter Morrison was on his knees at my side.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “You didn’t really fall off,” my mother said. “The fence fell on you. That’s completely different.”

  “There’s no do-over, Mom,” I said impatiently. I had a crick in my neck from trying to talk on my cell and muck stalls, my head turned completely to the left to pin down the little phone while my hands were busy with the pitchfork. “I don’t complete the audition, I fail. I lose. They’re going to give it to Peter fucking Morrison, just watch.”

  “Stop cussing like that. You sound like a stablehand. You’re running your own barn, act professional.”

  “I am a stablehand right now. What do you think I’m doing? I’m mucking out.” I was impatient for the conversation to be over. Phone calls from my mother were just opportunities for us to realize how much we didn’t understand each other. She thought I should be building up a big riding lesson business to make money for one nice competition horse of my own. I was concentrating on training horses and selling them on, reasoning that since I hated children, there was no point inviting them to my farm and letting them make me miserable all day. I was in the horse business to ride, not to baby-sit.

  “Laurie would have had a kid in there mucking out,” my mother pointed out. “She always had you doing it. She wasn’t doing all that work. She was teaching, making money.”

  “Laurie liked kids. I don’t. I like being by myself.”

  “Well, she’s out riding her horses while you’re in the barn mucking your own stalls. Doesn’t seem like you’ve improved much for yourself since she was out riding her horses while you were in her barn mucking her stalls. Except now you have to pay the bills, too.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, as much as I’d love to. I flicked manure into the wheelbarrow with a practiced twist of my wrist. The expert at work. “I’ll ride in the afternoon.”

  “When it’s ninety degrees? That seems smart.” Her voice took on its nasal, sarcastic quality, which I associated with pretty much every foolish decision I’d ever made, from the time I’d bought a plastic horse model from a girl at school for my entire life savings (she fleeced me thirty bucks for a model that cost twenty dollars at the toy store; I was in second grade and saving for a real horse, but the temptation of seeing that gleaming model right in front of me was too much to bear) to entering one of Laurie’s sales horses in an event with a non-refundable entry fee (I lost one hundred and fifty dollars when the horse sold for two thousand dollars a week later; the event went on, five weeks later, with me dancing in attendance on Laurie and her students, as usual). I had a history of foolish equine-rel
ated decisions, and every one of them could be chronicled in my mother’s special tone which she reserved for my stupidity and my stupidity alone.

  I can’t even describe the knife-edge it took on when I announced my plan to buy a farm with my college fund.

  She responded to heartbreak with sarcasm, I see that now.

  I did, too. We were always alike. I see that now.

  At that moment, I couldn’t see how anyone related to me by the sacred bonds of blood could be more different. Teach children to ride? Had we never met?

  “Listen to me, Jules — Peggy Barlow is selling a nice lesson pony. I can give you her number. You really need to think about it.”

  “How do you know about that?” My mother wasn’t involved in the horse business. How was she still in on the feed store gossip, after I left home and took the horses out of her life?

  “One of the girls at work told me. Her daughter rides with Peggy. That lady, she’s another one making a fortune teaching kids. I’m really disappointed that you won’t consider it.”

  From sarcasm to disappointment. We were almost to the angry hang-up. Which was such a relief, because my neck, shoulder, back and somehow, inexplicably, my left hip, were all in a state of extreme agony from the effort of holding the phone in place against my shoulder. Also the phone was getting hot and wet against my cheek; the temperature at eight a.m. was about eighty-five degrees, and stall mucking is physical work.

  “Mom, I just can’t deal with kids right now, okay? I’m not a riding instructor. I’m a trainer. They’re not the same thing all the time!”

  She clicked her tongue in exasperation and I knew the conversation was over. “Jules, you think you know everything. I don’t know why I even offer to help. Have fun mucking your stalls.”