“He did it, Korgan,” she said quietly. “He started at the beginning in Iran and then traced those horses up to those nomadic tribes I told you about. He’d decided the only chance he had was to find one of those wandering tribes whose people and horses had the least opportunity of being touched by civilization. He searched, desert, mountains, wilderness…Then bingo, he came upon this tribe of traders who also bred horses who seemed to fill the bill. Rossi even found out they’d sold some horses through the years, but that they weren’t of particularly good quality. It discouraged him, and he decided he wasn’t going to pursue it. But then he heard that same tribe also kept another smaller herd in a nearby canyon in the desert that they’d refused to sell. They wouldn’t even let a prospective purchaser go to look at them. They said that the horses were part of their heritage and tradition and must stay with the tribe.”

“And naturally that would intrigue Rossi,” Korgan murmured. “Yet he managed to get a few horses?”

“Just the mare and a stallion. But the stallion was only on loan and had to be returned to the tribe as soon as the mare was bred, and the foal reached full term. But they were as wonderful as Rossi hoped. Fantastically beautiful and the fastest horses he’d ever run across. He spent two years with the tribe before he managed to persuade the chief to let him buy the mare. He mortgaged everything he owned and sold off most of his own horses. He devoted that entire two-year time to studying the horses, verifying their pedigrees, and trying to learn the history and secrets of how they’d been raised and what would work with them.”

“Work with them?”

“They might be wonderful but that didn’t mean they weren’t major problems. In that nomad camp, those horses were treated like the heavenly bodies the Chinese called them. They were totally wild, and over the decades it became ingrained. They couldn’t be broken even if those nomads had wanted to bother. When Rossi got them home, he found that out, but he wasn’t about to risk damaging them.” She paused. “And then he remembered that little girl in the circus who had been able to do magic with those four horses he’d sold to Zeppo. Why not find a way to use her?”

Korgan smiled. “It was just as well that was pre-Alisa in Sasha’s life, or he would have found a reason why not. You would have killed the son of a bitch.”