FROST- Jotun Chronicles #1

Horsey Lessons

The next couple days the rebels settled into the pace of castle life. It was so different from the ice palace that it took some getting used to. There was no set schedule, aside from breakfast, lunch and dinner, and most of us spent the day wandering around the castle, learning the passageways and corridors, discovering new rooms. Loki and I spent a lot of time together. He showed me his bedroom, which was absolutely massive. There was a big, oak four poster bed and all the furniture was roughly hewn oak as well. It wasn’t nearly as refined as my bedroom at the ice palace, but I loved the massive stone fire place and the shag carpet that lay in front of it.

Loki had sweet talked the cook into giving us a platter of fruit and a couple mugs of hot apple cider, and I lay stretched out on the rug, feeling the soft fur underneath me, watching the orange flames dance and leap . Loki set his mug down on the hearth and sat down right next to me, he dipped his head down and brushed his lips over mine. I tasted spices, cinnamon, nut meg and apples.

He pulled away and smiled down at me, “my father thinks you should go down to the stables and learn to ride properly today.”

“What?” I squawked, sitting up abruptly. That wasn’t what I’d expected him to say at all! “But….I can ride just fine,” I protested.

Loki raised one brow at me, and I grumbled, “alright, maybe I’m not so good at it.”

“Well you’ll want to get better, since you’ll be riding into battle,” he climbed to his feet and offered me his hand, “come on. We’ll go riding together, it’ll be fun.”

The stables were to the right of the huge castle, and we had to walk by the garden to get to them. On the way past the red fence I went up on my tip toes, trying to see into the garden. Loki chuckled, “Tell you what, we can go walk in the gardens afterwards, as an apology for putting you through riding lessons.”

“Alright,” I agreed, reluctant to get on a horse again, but eager to see what the garden was like beyond the red fence.  Loki came to a halt in front of a wide, flat stone building. It had an open front, and I could see an aisle ran down the middle of it. Long, brown faces peeked over the tops of wooden doors. Multiple pairs of massive brown eyes stared curiously at us. I swallowed hard as we entered. It smelled like fresh hay and the musky scent of horses.

“They’re looking at me.”

Loki snickered, “they’re wondering who’s come to visit them. Just relax,” he glanced over at me and shook his head, “you’re already visibly tense. The horse will probably pick up on that.”

“Great,” I mumbled.

There were a few fire jotun in the stables, shoveling hay into the stalls or grooming the horses. Beyond the stable building I could see a couple of large, fenced in rings of packed dirt. There were several horses doing laps around the rings, their jotun riders crouched low over their backs. As Loki and I entered the stall area, I looked up at the horses suspiciously. They were even bigger than the horses the frost jotun rode, probably because the fire jotun were so much heavier. These things were the size of Clydesdales!  Loki stopped me in front of one of the end stalls and gestured to a black horse with light grey mane.

“You’ll be riding Sigurd.”

Sigurd and I regarded one another suspiciously. The horse had light brown eyes and a handsome, smooth face. Intelligence lay behind it, a sense of self knowing that made me vaguely uncomfortable. What if he decided he didn’t like me?

Loki patted my shoulder, “Don’t worry, you two will get along great. Ah, here comes Vidar, he’ll show you the ropes.”

A tall, lean jotun dressed all in brown had entered the stables. He looked me over once and then shrugged, apparently I’d passed inspection as “good enough”.