Black linework horse head on upper back

The stallion, Ossory Vane, would stand for nobody but the stable girl Wenna, so I spent three mornings in the straw with a stick of charcoal, watching how his head lifted whenever the weather turned. He never held still. He tossed, he snorted, he tugged his forelock out of his eyes. Each time he moved the mane flew up behind him in long curls, and I learned that a horse's mane is not hair at all but a river running the wrong way.

On the fourth day I gave up on the stallion and drew the wind instead, letting one line run from the brow down the arched neck and off into the air, lifting only where the breath caught it. Wenna laughed and called it a fish. The Chamberlain called it a fraud. When the gates were hung at midsummer, the thin black strokes made the iron look like it was galloping through smoke, and nobody at court could say where the horse ended and the weather began. I was paid double, which told me it was good work and not merely strange.

Ossory died in the autumn, old and unbothered. The morning after the funeral I went to the gates and found that the lowest curl of his mane had been scratched through by a boy's knife. Beneath it someone had cut my initials in the same thin line, as though I had signed the wind.