Excerpt:
Nobody knew much about Syeira except that she had been born in the river stable, among old horses and the ghosts of horses. Her mother had died when she was little, and her father might have been the wind for all that the people could remember of him. She was small for her age—what her age was—and skinny, too; but otherwise she was no different from the dozen other children who worked in the stables of King Hulvere. She slept in a loft and dreamed often of her mother, whom she remembered as a warm blond voice, with skin that smelled slightly of hay.

To spend every day in the king's stables might seem like paradise to some, and so it was—for members of the royal family. They didn't have to do any of the chores. But for a stable orphan like Syeira it meant working all day and much of the night. She mucked out stalls, hauled water, fetched straw, repaired bridles, groomed and fed the horse, stoked fires, and swept the stone floors around the torch pits. Some nights she slept no more than the horses, which was about four hours. Still, the stables were the only home she'd ever had, and they were at least warm and safe. The main stable was very old, with great okay beams and a huge fireplace at one end. Here the king kept his stud stallions and broodmares and chargers-in-training. Rich people came from the far corners of the land to buy these horses, for King Hulvere—ruler of a small country called Haysele, land of horses and horse-sensitives—was a famous horse breeder. There was also a stable beside the jousting fields, about a mile from the castle. It was called the Stable of the Lists and housed the king's own cavalry. Finally there was the rundown stable near the river, where Syeira had been born.

People of importance rarely visited this river stable, for it was a fair walk from the castle and held no animals of value. It was actually a home for horses that had come to the end of their careers. Here you could find old draft horses has imperturbable as oak trees, bow-backed hares who had foaled many times, and war horses who had grown tired of war. On the walls was a wonderful array of old tack—huge leather collars for the draft horses, armored hoods for the chargers (chamfrains, they were called), and blinders and spurs and the heavy, high-backed war saddles. You had the feeling, while walking through this stable, that great horses had lived out their days here and still lingered in spirit.

If you are unlucky enough to be an orphan, it helps to grow up among horses. Horses take life as it comes. Like holy hermits or milk-fed babies, they are without ambition or regret. It is true that they sometimes breathe on people, but this is nearly always pleasant for the people. The breath of horses is as mild as weak mead. If you took a sun-baked melon—large but slightly underripe—and cut it open with a single stroke, you might get something like the breath of horses. Of course, Hulvere kept some bad-tempered chargers, horses whose breath carried a hot not of menace; but the river stable had none of these. The horses Syeira had grown up with were unfailingly calm. When she was very small she used to run between their legs and clamber roughly onto their backs. This was the early morning of her life: the smell of hay and the light of her mother's hair and the quiet sentinel presence of horses.

But her strongest memory was not of horses at all. It was of a tiny yellow bird, a bird quick as a spark from the blacksmith's anvil. Even now she could hear its vivid song—a king of filigree on the air that shone in her mind like a horse brass. No one else in the stables remembered it, but she was sure she hadn't made it up. She liked to lie in a loft of the river stable and imagine it darting through the hay-scented shadows. Probably the old horses would remember it, is she could only ask them. But horses only spoke in her dreams, or in the tales the blacksmith told; and this hard truth always brought her wearily out of her loft and back to the main stables, where the ordinary horses where waiting for a brush and a feed.