I had never been so angry since I had been a boy in Ettook’s krarl. Anger that he should waste a fine beast for his wretched villainy, anger that I must risk my life to make theater for them, and a darker, sicker anger for the woman I knew had been behind his scheming.

I stood there on the flats while the lords and ladies of the leopard’s court drew off to safe harbors, and the mad horse screamed and lunged in his jail. Even the grooms ran, leaving just one poor cloth-rank boy with a bare face like gray suet, who slipped the bolt on the box door and pelted for safety.

This time I thought, If I survive this show, it shall be the last. By the sow-harlot-bitch-whore goddess who grunted me forth from her belly, this hound has offered his last trick.

Then he was out, and I stopped thinking neatly in words.

He was not like a horse. If I had been remembering the legends of the wind god of Tathra’s tribe, this was surely he, not black but red, not wind but whirlwind.

He shot from confinement like ball from cannon, smoking foam, and came right at me with his eyes on fire.

I had reckoned on that. My legs and entrails said, Fly him. But instead I ran to him as he to me, and leaped for his great blazing horse’s head.

I got his breast, hard as rock, in my side; the impact almost winded me, save I had been ready. I swung over his neck and landed on his back like a gasping fish slung down on some heaving ship’s deck, and grabbed the foam-sticky mane.

He squealed, from pain or panic or his madness, and reared up, kicking the sky. He was slick with sweat. I clung as I could, and slipped and clung again.

I had believed I could only hope to hang on him like a mountain cat, till he died of the poison or dislodged me and tore out my vitals with his teeth. Suddenly something else swarmed through me. It was like the bite of strong liquor, like lust even. It was the notion I could mend him.

There had been one earlier day, long past, when I had kneeled over two does by a winter pool, and I had known it was life I took, the possession of another. And now, hugging the plunging stallion, washed by his pain, snowed by his bloody foam, I felt his life and his right. Both to die for the whim of a pusillanimous fool, or both to live?

What happened after that was swift but very certain. It was like the wave that suffused me, the light that burst me when I slew Ettook. Yet it was different. It was like a dam holding back the sea, and the dam breaks and the sea pours through, but there is no substance to the sea, no heaving force, no tumult, only a faint shining on the back of the eyes, and a stillness after.