Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  I remembered. Just to get him home from Lochloosa had required heavy sedation. Not to say that he’d react just as badly, or that he couldn’t be brought back to earth, but if he did, and we couldn’t — and we had to get him home in a hurry — no, an overnight show was out of the question, at least for the first trial.

  “What if there’s nothing here all winter?” I ventured. “Pete, the owners will never go for his missing the entire winter season. They’ll lose confidence and move him. And you have to be in the same boat with some of yours. We’re both too new at this to get away with skipping a season. They’ll expect us to pick up and go to Aiken.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “They’ve been more than patient but that can’t last forever. You’re right — they won’t stand for a winter off.”

  “So what will we do?”

  “We hope, I guess. We wait and see. Someone will have something.”

  And then, after waiting a few restless weeks, sending in reluctant checks, postdated with the closing date, to an event in Aiken, Lacey retrieved the mail and came into the kitchen at lunchtime bearing the first cheerful postcard of the season. She handed it to me and smirked. “Read it aloud!”

  I held it like it was the One Ring for a moment, staring at the cover image. It was me, galloping at Sunshine State on Dynamo, in the picture that had made the Chronicle of the Horse, my hand patting his neck in a good-boy gesture.

  Pete came over and looked over my shoulder. He nodded. “Now flip it over and read it, super-star.”

  Nervous, I flipped the card and stared at the curving script.

  “Read it aloud!” Lacey was laughing with delight and impatience.

  “We’re excited to announce,” I read in a trembling voice, “That Sunshine State Horse Park will be running its FULL CALENDAR this winter, thanks to our devoted volunteers…” I trailed off and looked around the room. “You guys,” I said wonderingly. “We’re going to make it.”

  Pete took the card and looked at the event dates listed. “One month,” he said after a moment. “Let’s get our entries in. This is going to fill up fast.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The low-hanging November sun made the morning feel like late afternoon, casting deep shadows across the tree-lined stables as we unloaded the horses at the horse park. Dynamo stepped out of the trailer like a lamb, looked around, and sighed gently in the quiet horse manner, before consenting to be led to his stall by Lacey. Somehow the turmoil of the summer had done wonders for his nerves, as if teaching him that he would always have a safe landing somewhere, and he had become the picture of the old campaigner. I watched him walk away sedately, heart swelling with the mixture of love and pride and fear that accompanied me every time I brought Dynamo to an event.

  Mickey came out of the trailer in a rush, his hooves slithering across the matted floor, and his first steps onto firm ground quickly dissolved into a rear, standing up on his hind legs in trembling excitement. I stepped back to escape the reach of his pawing forelegs, shaking my head as the leather shank slid through my fingers. “Come on, man,” I snapped. “Not this shit again.”

  Pete looked on from inside the rig, waiting to bring down Regina, who was being her usual regal princess self inside. “You need a hand?”

  I waited for Mickey to come down to the ground before answering. “I have him,” I said grimly, but when I tried to move the horse forward again, he went up on his hind legs once more. I ground my teeth together and brought all my weight down in one hard snap against the lead, driving the chain shank down against his nasal bone. Mickey flung his head from side to side, furious, but brought his forelegs to the earth again. I gave him another shank for good measure, and he snorted and actually swatted the air with his left foreleg. I jumped back, startled.

  “That was nasty,” Pete observed.

  I glanced around. Two horsemen walking their own horses past were watching us, eyebrows raised. Judgmental snots, I thought. Like their horses had never pitched a fit before.

  “I’ve never seen him do that before,” I said, but already I was remembering the way he had lifted his left foreleg and held it out when he first arrived in Florida. I had thought he was planning on pawing. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might have been a striker at some point in his previous life.

  That was really frightening. Colts often decided to “slap,” as Laurie used to call it, and it was of prime importance to break that dangerous little habit the second it cropped up. Nothing could ruin your day quite like a striking horse. And by “ruin your day” I meant “split your skull.”

  “You okay?” Pete asked again, and I realized I was staring at Mickey instead of getting a move on. Inside the trailer, Regina stamped a hoof once, politely, to let everyone know that the princess was getting impatient.

  “I’m fine. Let’s go, Mickey,” I said firmly, and started walking. To my relief, the gray horse began walking too, falling into stride next to me. The chain was loose over his nose, the shank was loose in my hand. We were going to be okay, I thought. We had this.

  And then he started jogging beside me, jigging nearly straight up and down. His neck was arched and his profile was nearly vertical, as if he was trying to duck behind the chain over his nose, and his breath came hard and fast from his nostrils. He sounded like a horse at a full gallop. I glanced over his neck and saw the veins standing out under his taut skin, the sweat beginning to darken his coat. I was walking next to a pressure cooker that was about to blow.

  Luckily, the barn was just ahead, and I managed to get Mickey into the dark interior of the temporary stabling before he was so worked up that he couldn’t move forward any longer. In the claustrophobic confines of the tent, he seemed to shrink, and by the time I got him into his stall and turned around to face the door, he was practically slinking along, his head held low, his eyes wide and shifting like a frightened dog’s.

  I removed the chain and carefully backed out of the stall, latching the door and giving it a little jiggle to test its security. Temporary stalls were made to collapse flat for storage and transportation, though. I would have given anything to have put my time bomb of a horse into a solid wooden box stall.

  Peter came in with Regina, who was surveying her surroundings with a sort of detached interest. Her lead was loose in his fingers, and I watched them pass to the next stall with a sense of jealousy. In Regina, Pete had the perfect partner — she was endlessly talented and completely in love with him. I had Dynamo’s affection, but he was scoping out over these Intermediate-height jumps. Even Pete had noticed it in our schooling sessions. Dynamo just didn’t have the jump in him for much more. I was less and less certain Dynamo could take me Advanced, even for one or two events.

  And I was less and less certain I was going to get Mickey through Novice, let alone to the top of the game.

  Pete closed Regina’s door and watched her for a moment. The mare did a walking tour of her ten-by-ten space, put her head over the door and looked up and down the narrow little aisle, and then sighed and went to her hay. Next to her, Mickey was walking in a circle, the thick curls of wood shavings rustling around his hooves, looking as if he wanted nothing more than to escape and run all the way home.

  “He wasn’t like this when I got him,” I said despondently, and Pete came over and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “He’s still thinking about pain.”

  I considered this. “How can we make him forget?”

  “You have to prove to him that it won’t hurt to work hard, and that other things might be worse.” Pete paused. “Someplace away from prying eyes.”

  Mickey leaped away from me the moment that I mounted, and I hit the ground hard on my back. The wind knocked out of me in more than one sense, I just stayed there, lying in the dirt. I wasn’t thinking about any potential injury or the gravity involved with the thousand pounds of horse and hoof waving above me — I was thinking that I was a failure. And when Mickey’s hooves finally did hit the ground a few inches from my hea
d, and Pete was grabbing his reins and shouting, and Lacey was kneeling next to me and gabbling about nothing at all, I was thinking I can’t ride this horse. And when I snapped out of it and Lacey suggested that I had a concussion and Pete was all for shining a flashlight in my eyes, I was thinking, I have to ride this horse now.

  You have to get back on the horse after you fall, that’s what they all tell you, and that’s not just a saying, it’s God’s honest truth. You have to get back on, or the fear eats you up from the inside out. So that’s what I did.

  I waited until the buzzing in my ears was (mostly) gone and the black spots in front of my eyes were (mostly) vanished and I marched right up to that damn horse, snatched the reins from Pete’s reluctant hands, and I swung up in the saddle before Mickey could do boo about it. The entire time I was thinking I loved you so much, from the moment I saw you, I knew we were going to have something special, and just because I didn’t know your feet hurt once, doesn’t mean I have to be punished forever. We have to work this out, Mickey.

  “We have to work this out, Mickey,” I told him aloud, just before I nudged him forward and Pete jumped aside and Mickey took one of his flying leaps, me clinging to his mane like a little kid on a pony ride, my heels jutting down from the stirrups somewhere near his heaving shoulders.

  He hit the ground and I smacked him with my jumping whip and he did it again, of course, and it was harder to stick this time because I only had one hand on the reins. The other was somewhere behind me, held out for balance as if I was going down a steep drop on the cross-country course. The third time he actually groaned, as if he couldn’t believe I was making him do this again and again, and the fourth time he crumpled to his knees and remained there, half on the ground and half standing, until I climbed out of the saddle and gave his head a good yank with the bridle.

  Mickey responded by lying flat out in the dirt, his polished gray coat spoiled by the sooty-black Florida scrubland sand, and I wondered if maybe I had more than a concussion after all, and I was imagining all this.

  Mickey groaned again and closed his eyes.

  “Jules, are you okay?” It was Pete, closely followed by Lacey and Becky. Lacey’s face was white and horrified, while Becky’s was bright and interested, as if she was watching a very good television show and couldn’t wait for the next twist.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m okay, but I think my horse is broken.”

  Pete looked down at Mickey. “Son of a bitch.”

  “What do we do?”

  Pete came over and took the reins from my unprotesting hands. “We break the habit once and for all,” he announced. “That’s why I wanted someplace remote.”

  All of us looked around; we had trekked to a distant corner of the horse park, a clearing in pine woods that were criss-crossed with riding trails for recreational riding. There was no one in sight.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked cautiously, feeling a sudden sense of foreboding. I thought we had sought out a secluded space to spare embarrassment when Mickey behaved like a criminal. I hadn’t considered that Pete might have some sort of training method up his sleeve that he wasn’t proud of. How could I? Pete was the most caring, gentle horseman I’d ever known. I looked at him, the tension in his shoulders, the fist on Mickey’s reins, the tightness of his jaw, the sheer ruthless determination in his eyes, and I saw a Peter Morrison I’d never seen before — and that I found a little frightening. “Pete?” I asked again, voice tremulous. Beside me, Lacey plucked at my sleeve. “What are you going to do?”

  Pete turned his head slowly and looked me in the eye. “Something I learned from my grandfather,” he said huskily. “But you aren’t going to like it.”

  I opened my mouth and found that I didn’t have the words to reply. I was trying to imagine a world in which Pete did something cruel to a horse, and I was failing. I started to step forward, to take the reins back from his fierce angry grip, to tell him to cool down first, but Pete took his whip out of his boot and laid it into Mickey’s chest with a crack that made the horse stumble to his feet in a seconds.

  I gasped, and so did Lacey, and so did Becky. “Peter,” I began, “This isn’t the way —” I took another step, hands outstretched to take the reins.

  Pete ignored me and took a step towards the shaking Mickey, yanking the reins backwards to tell the horse to back up. When Mickey didn’t move, he slapped him across the chest with the whip again. Mickey darted backwards, and Pete went with him, clucking his tongue and yelling “Get on! Back up! Get back!” right across the clearing. If the horse hesitated, Pete gave him another slap across the chest with the riding crop. Reeling with confusion, I looked at the girls on either side of me for some sort of anchor to the real world — because what I was seeing just made no sense at all.

  “What the hell he doing?” Lacey breathed, staring at the scene with her mouth wide open and her cheeks flushed. “Is he crazy?”

  Becky just pursed her lips and looked thoughtful, as if she was trying to parse the reasoning behind Pete’s behavior.

  But there couldn’t be any sort of reason here, could there? What on earth did he mean to accomplish by backing my horse around and around a clearing no larger than a small dressage arena? Already, foam was dripping from Mickey’s open mouth, sweat was building across his dappled coat and working into a lather between his hind legs and behind the saddle’s girth. And still Pete backed him up, until the horse’s hocks were trembling.

  I balled up my fists. Enough was enough.

  “You should stop him,” Lacey cried. “You have to stop him!”

  “No,” Becky said softly. “He wouldn’t do this to be cruel.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Becky,” I told her stonily. “He had no right to take my horse and behave like this. This is my horse. He can do whatever he likes with his horses. But he shouldn’t have touched mine.”

  Becky looked at me loftily, that old familiar measuring gaze that always found me wanting. “You couldn’t fix him,” she observed. “Why can’t you accept help from someone who can?”

  Across the clearing, Pete had let Mickey stand still and they were like two statues facing each other, sides heaving with exertion.

  “You’ve never been able to admit that you need help,” Becky went on, her nasal voice faintly mocking. “You’ve always thought that you know everything. Why would a girl your age know everything, Jules? What kind of inflated ego do you have, anyway? Even Pete takes riding lessons and goes to clinics when he has some spare cash. Every one else in this business understands that they can never stop learning. Every one but you. And that’s why you will never succeed. And that’s why I gave up on you.” She paused. “And if you march over there and take those reins, Pete will give up on you, too.”

  But just then Pete turned away from Mickey and started walking towards us, with the gray horse following him wearily. I stepped away from the girls and waited for him, hands behind my back so that he couldn’t see they were balled into fists.

  His eyes searched my face as he approached, and I thought he might apologize when he realized how angry I was. But he just said: “Get on the horse now.”

  Getting on the horse was the last thing I wanted to do. “I’m not getting on him like this.”

  “Just get on the horse, Jules, for God’s sake. Get on and walk him around.” Pete threw the reins back over Mickey’s neck. “Here, I’ll hold him for you while you mount.”

  “After this, you want me to get on him? He’ll probably flip over and kill me. You get on him, if you want to test your handiwork.”

  Pete shook his head. “I’m not getting on him.”

  My temper went past the flashpoint. “So now you’re afraid and you want the girl to do it? You broke it, you bought it, buddy. Get on him your damn self. I’ll even hold the reins for you.” I stepped up next to him and clutched the reins in a fist, just below his hand.

  Pete looked down at me. There was sweat running down his face, cutting dirty paths through the dus
t layering his skin, and his eyes were fierce and angry. I probably looked much the same, right down to the rage glinting in my eyes, but somehow it didn’t stop a quiver of excitement from running up my spine. Damn him.

  “Damn you,” Pete growled. “You think I’d put you on a horse I’m scared of? I can’t get on him, not without eliminating you from competition, remember?”

  He was right. My heart sank to my boots as I remembered one of the most simple rules of eventing: at recognized events, only the registered rider could get on the horse at the show grounds. I nodded slowly, and turned away.

  Time to see what he’d left me to ride.

  I took one more look at Pete before I stuck my boot in the stirrup, to make sure he had a firm grip on the reins, and then I swallowed my nerves and swung into the saddle.

  Mickey stood still.

  I gathered up the reins in my hands, holding them gently between forgiving fingers, and waited for Pete to step back, out of the way. Just in case it happened again. And really, I had no reason to believe that it wouldn’t. Even so, I whispered, “Please don’t be broken, Mickey,” one last time, before I nudged him gently forward.

  And Mickey walked forward.

  Hesitantly, and with ears uneasily cocked towards me, but he walked. He didn’t jump, he didn’t leap, he didn’t bolt.

  He walked, four hooves flat on the ground.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I rode Mickey back to the stabling area without much incident. Indeed, by the time we got there, he felt more normal than ever. He was doing the things you’d expect of a young horse at a show, looking around with interest at other horses, spooking at plastic bags, walking at a good gait, head bobbing and ears pricked.