The air was redolent with the smell of sun-baked earth and sweating horse, beer and roasting meat and thick with the voices of man and beast and the distant breath of the sea. The summer sun shown on sleek hides: dapple grey, piebald, black, and bay, shaggy little mountain ponies and high stepping palfreys and everything in between.
Bliss.
His horses-local dray mares and foals out of his own powerful, long legged stud-had sold well and early, leaving Ravi with a full purse and time on his hands. A recipe for disaster, typically, but with horses on his mind, the young man seemed to have less capacity for his usual drunken shenanigans. In point of fact, if he wanted to continue to have a heavy purse, he would need to find more mares-the desert born ladies just didn't fair well on the long journey north, and those that did sold long before reaching the fair.
It was a bit of a game, really, finding them, the little gems hidden away in the midden pile; they came from the sportsmen's string, worked too young and too hard or just didn't make enough money, or the farmer's teams, massive beasts fully capable of eating their way through their earnings and beyond, or they were rejected from a rich man's stable, born the wrong color, wrong size, or wrong temperament. Food and time and compassion seemed to be a miracle cure for a good many horses that wouldn't otherwise fetch a wooden penny.
Ravi paused outside a simple rope pen holding a handful of sorry looking creatures with dull coats and muddy, overgrown hooves. One mare in particular had caught his eyes-a dark, moth eaten grey with all the beauty of road dust, too lean and too listless, but balanced and compact, with long clean legs and feminine head. At her side stood a droop-eared bay with matted white feathers, and a massive black with angry white harness scars, each as unexpectedly well built as the dirty grey, as different from their weak backed, sheep necked, and cow legged companions as a rose from a rock thistle. All fine additions to his string, assuming he could part the drover from his dull eyed creatures.
