Karigan nodded.
“Here in the stables your disguise is safe. But you are not to speak of this to anyone in the house. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good then. I found a saddle that looks like it’ll fit Raven. I suspect he’s been used hard on the mouth so we’ll try some different bits and see what suits.”
Raven whickered in greeting at her approach. There was no disguising herself from him. She laughed and stroked his neck. He seemed none the worse from his encounter with Arhys earlier in the morning and stood calmly while she brushed him down, burnishing the gold and mahogany dapples on his rump. However, when she took the bridle Luke handed her, she could almost feel Raven’s suspicious regard, how he tensed up, but he tolerated her sliding the bit into his mouth and buckling on the bridle. He chewed on the bit and shook his head, but did not rebel further.
“He wouldn’t have let me or the boys do that,” Luke mused. “He trusts you, maybe because you’re not male, and it would’ve been males who mishandled him.”
The professor must not have told Luke that Raven was truly a Green Rider horse nor Karigan a Green Rider, which would have explained why Raven was so receptive to her.
“Let’s see how he likes the saddle,” Luke said.
It was an ordinary saddle, larger and heavier than those used by Green Riders, who tried to minimize the weight their horses must carry while on message errands. She set pad and saddle on Raven’s back as gently as she could, praising him softly the whole time. His flesh quivered, and his ears darted back and forth as he listened. He stamped his hoof quite profoundly when she pulled the girth around his belly. He shifted and snorted when she tightened it, and curved his neck around to get a good look at what she was doing.
Luke pressed some pieces of carrot in her hand. “Give him these. He’s being good.”
She did, and Raven daintily lipped them off her palm. The carrots took his mind off the tack.
“Let’s take him out and see how the pair of you do,” Luke said. He led them out of the stables into the paddock. The paddock was necessarily small because of the way the buildings in Mill City were packed together. It was a sign of the professor’s status that he had space for one at all.
“Now the professor tells me you’re an experienced rider,” Luke said. “That true?”
She nodded.
“Good. Thought so. You seem competent around horses anyway. Not common in girls.”
Karigan frowned but put the comment aside to focus on preparing to mount. She felt no small trepidation. She hadn’t much direct experience with stallions—mostly geldings and mares—and there was no telling how Raven would react to a rider on his back no matter their bond. She and Luke had no way of knowing his exact origins or how long or deeply he’d been abused. It may be that he was entirely unrideable or that it would take a very long period of gentle retraining to make him accept a rider. Even the intelligent Green Rider horses were animals of instinct first. It might come down to how he’d been treated and trained by owners prior to Dr. Silk.
The last thing Karigan wanted to do was convey her nervousness to the stallion, but she knew mounting up could prove very painful in the end for her, and it was difficult to quell her anxiety.
“Leg up?” Luke asked.
She took a deep breath and nodded, and up she went, landing lightly in the saddle. Raven flicked his ears, then looked back at her as if to see her for himself. He didn’t even flinch, and her nervousness faded, replaced by joy to be on horseback once again.
“Walk him around a bit,” Luke said. “See how he does.”
Karigan adjusted the stirrup leathers then squeezed him into a walk. There was a good deal of head tossing and prancing, a buck or two, which only increased when she attempted to correct him with the reins.
Luke scratched his head. “Let’s change out the bit to something milder.” As it turned out, they tried three different bits before Raven settled sufficiently. In the meantime, he got used to Karigan mounting and dismounting, and riding on his back.
With the new bit, he had quite a bounce to his gait, and he tossed his head though this time not in discomfort. Karigan had some trouble holding him in, and when she finally allowed him to trot, he arched his neck as if to show just how handsome he was.
Luke laughed in pleasure from his place at the fence. “He’s a proud one, that one. Give us a canter, will you?”
From the way Raven responded to her commands, Karigan could tell he’d once been a well-trained saddle horse. He’d not always been abused.
“Responds better to a light touch than the whip,” Luke observed. “Something those louts of Dr. Silk’s never understood. There are all kinds in my work, and more than half of them ought not to go anywhere near the beasts.”
Raven’s canter was smooth, as comfortable as her Condor’s had ever been. Thinking of her horse almost two centuries in the past brought on a wave of guilt. Was she betraying Condor by bonding with Raven? Eventually those concerns dissolved, replaced by the sheer joy of riding once again.
When she returned Raven to a walk, Luke said, “He’s doing much better than I thought he would. In fact, I’m thinking he’s doing good enough to take him out for a bit of a hack. What say we get out of the city so we can really take him through his paces?”
“Yes,” Karigan said eagerly.
“All right, you stay out here and keep getting used to him while I tack up Gallant.”