Not quite a resolution, but I've made the decision to not let really neat ideas just escape. When something springs to mind that has potential, I'll write the story flash-fashion, if nothing else, and come back to it later, perhaps years later. I've lost hundreds of ideas which were filled with potential, so let's stop that! Here we go...
North Wind
(Thinking through my fingertips)
Bragutai was wild born, in the years when Eldric, Prince of the Feyn, still tried in vain to grow a man’s beard — when his sister, Zamarah, grew taller, shot straighter, swung an axe truer than their father’s favourite. It was Zamarah, not Eldric, who found Bragutai, no more than a bundle of bony legs, shivering beside his mother’s body when snows returned, far too late in the season … Zamarah who carried him home, fed him with her own hands, nurtured him, until he grew taller, stronger than the sires of the king’s best racers.
Save for custom, she would have ridden him to war, but the traditions of a hundred generations of the Feyn forbade girls to bear arms in battle. Many years of war had taught them that young women are the key to the future of any people, and must be shielded, not squandered, at least until their duty to the people is done, and the next generation half-grown to replace them.
So, it fell to Eldric to bear King Andregar’s colours into battle against the seething hoards of the Veru, savage tribes from the west who poured across the hills like tidal waves and offered no quarter. By now a young man, Eldric carried his father’s sword: time had caught up Andregar, leaving the old king trembling in his limbs, wandering in his thoughts, so frail that Princess Zamarah sat in his place upon the Kestrel Throne of the Feyn, and the chieftains took her counsel.
Two things only could Zamarah do for her brother, as he girded on his swords and laced his armour. She gave to him Olnar, the storm witch whose family — for their poverty and debt — were indentured to the Feyn royal house a decade before the boy’s birth. Olnar grew up with the gift of Sight. Wasted in the olive groves and kitchens, he spent his youth at the feet of Feynafell’s greatest mages, mastering every skerrick of magic they could teach while he learned how to command his gift, lest it destroy him as wildfire races through the forest.
And on the eve before battle, Zamarah sent for Eldric, and into his hand placed Bragutai’s halter. She trusted no horse before him. Twice, he saved her life when she was still only a girl — fought and defeated a mountain krall with fangs like scythes, and carried the young princess through a brawling river, when the bridge on the Tane collapsed. No magic or prayer could keep Eldric off the battlefield, for the Veru were starving at winter's end, as always. The instinct for survival spurred them east into gentler, more fecund lands than their own. But if any force could bring Eldric home, Zamarah placed her faith not in her father’s careless gods, who seemed deaf even to the entreaties of their own priests, but in Bragutai.
She watched from the revetment above Feynafell until her people’s battle colours faded from sight. Everything she held most dear marched beneath those banners, and she would receive no word until couriers raced home with news. Only Olnar could send messages, and then merely through the wyrd dreams which haunted Zamarah through the late spring and into the summer…
The winds swung southeast and warmed; spring rain fell as the new year’s crops were seeded; new foals romped and kicked in the paddocks where Andregar’s best stock were bred. She watched Bragutai’s progeny born in those months, while she fretted through the nights, her dreams filled with images of battle, hardship, danger and the longing for home. She might have wondered which dreams were Olnar’s and which were pure fancy, but instinct always told her the truth.
She knew when the Feynafell regiments were routed and sent scrambling for cover among the passes; she saw when fire overtook their supply column, and men went hungry while they cut the dogs loose to hunt for themselves and the horses made do with the high hills’ sparse graze. Zamarah knew when a spearpoint found Olnar’s leg, and he thrashed for days in delirium, wondering if it would be gone when he woke — and she also glimpsed the battle when the Feynaell regiment overrode the Veru, drove them northwest. They fell back, broken for the season just as the caribou returned to their hills and the hunting paths opened.
But Olnar had warned many times, victory would not be won without great cost; the butcher’s bill must be paid. The last battle soon shattered into a desperate scramble for the high ground, and though Eldric’s lieutenants — the chieftains Gareth and Weyland — wrought victory out of chaos, Eldric found himself cut off from the regiment. Wounded, he beat a path through crags and high timber where the Veru and the sickle-fanged krall could smell blood on the air.
Messages of victory sped to Feynafell with regimental couriers, ahead of the wagons bearing the wounded, but the force remained in the north, searching the passes for Eldric. In a week, even Gareth and Weyland gave him up for dead. Only Olnar continued to swear that Eldric lived and was at liberty, though even he could not find the prince in the tangle of rock and heather, where the high hills became the low slopes of the Alcaus Mountains.
In a month, only a token force remained at Trolldance Rocks, and that because Olnar refused to leave. The young witch wrote to Zamarah, swearing on his gods that he could feel Eldric in the wild. Placing her faith in her childhood friend, and with the Veru danger spent now, Zamarah took a party of scouts and lancers and hurried north from Feynafell.
At sunset, when the krall began to wail over the high valleys, they came upon the camp in the wind-shadow of the high granite outcrop known as Trolldance Rocks. Olnar’s wound had healed well enough for him to ride, and at dawn they went out, following his fey instincts … but it was Bragutai who brought Eldric back — both of them wounded, at the end of their strength.
Eldric would recover, with the finest surgeons the old king could provide, but Bragutai’s race was run, and the horse knew it. He had become a legend already, and would never be forgotten — the people of Feynafell tell his story still. Zamarah sang his elegy as he was honoured the way all great horses are: his head, his heart and his hooves were buried deep, where the krall would not find them, among purple heather on a wild hillside not a mile from where he was born.
***
This feels to me as if it would make an excellent YA high fantasy novel, aimed at all people but 65% at girls. I might come back to this, when time permits, and write it.
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