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tail, too, was variegated gray, like carven onyx, and flowed like the waves of an ocean.
    My father, prepared to be skeptical, gaped. “The speed of that horse!” he breathed. “The lines of her!”
    “Thy daughter will be safe on her,” the blue lad assured him. “What the Hinny cannot defeat she can outrun, except for the unicorns, who leave her alone. Once she accepts the commission, she will guard her rider with her life.”
    But my father was already lost. He stared at the Hinny, the most beautifully structured mare ever to be seen in our village. I knew he would have given his left hand to own such a mount. “And she hearkens to thy summons,” he said, awed.
    “Nay,” the lad demurred quickly. “Only to my stallion.” Then he approached the Hinny and extended his hand, slowly, as one must do for a strange horse, allowing her to sniff it. Her ears were angled halfway back, silken gray.   When they tilted forward, reassured, he addressed her directly. “Hinny, I require a service of thee, for the price thou knowest.”
    The mare switched her nacreous tail and lifted her head.   She was by no means large, standing about fifteen hands tall, but she had a slender elegance that made her classic.   She glanced sidelong at the blue stallion, and it was as if magic electricity lifted her mane. She was interested.   “A service for a service,” my father murmured, intrigued. He contemplated the lines of the blue stallion, recognizing in this creature the very finest of the breed. The foal of such a union would be special.
    “Thou must bear this Lady,” the blue lad said, indicating me. “Thou must carry her on her search for her lost foal, and bring her back safely to her father. I will travel with thee, assisting. An we find the foal not, but the Lady is safe, payment will be honored. Agreed?”
    “How can a horse comprehend all that?” my father muttered skeptically. But the Hinny surveyed him with such uncanny certainty that he could not protest further.   The Hinny now oriented on me. I held out my hand and she smelled it, then sniffed along the length of my arm, across my shoulder and up to my face. Her muzzle was gray velvet, her breath warm mist with the sweetness of cured hay. I loved her that moment.
    The Hinny turned back to the blue lad, one ear moving forward with agreement. My father found himself unable to protest; he too was enthralled by the mare. And it seemed but a moment until arrangements were complete and we were riding out, the Hinny’s canter so gentle I could close my eyes and hardly know we were moving, yet so swift that the wind was like that of a storm. I had never before ridden a steed like her! It seemed but another moment, but when I opened mine eyes we were miles from my village, proceeding west toward the interior of the continent where the greatest magic lay. The groves and dales were passing like the wind.   No horse could maintain such a pace, so smoothly—yet the Hinny ranged beside the blue stallion, now and then covertly turning a sleek ear on him; she desired the service only he could serve. I wondered fleetingly whether it could be like that for me as well, with only one man destined to be my husband. Little did I know how close to the truth that was, and that he was as close to me then as the stallion to the Hinny.
    “Whither do we go?” I asked the lad.
    “The wild horses should know where thy foal has strayed,” he replied. “They range widely, but my steed is searching them out.”
    “Aye,” I said. “But will they not flee at the approach of our kind?”
    He only smiled. Soon we spied a herd, and its stallion lifted his head toward us, and stomped the ground in warning. But the blue lad put his two hands to his mouth, forming a conch, and blew a whistle-note, and at that signal all the horses relaxed, and remained for our approach.
    “They respond to thy whistle?” I asked, perplexed.
    “They know my stallion,” he said easily.   So it seemed.