by Toby Bishop
Suzanne Star had offered to step down, to make Mistress Winter Headmistress. But Mistress Winter, with a young horse to train and an injured one to care for, refused. Lark suspected she wanted to retain a bit of freedom to visit the Uplands from time to time.
Lark smiled as she went into to Tup’s stall. Six years before, Philippa Winter had allowed an unsuitable farm girl to come to the Academy of the Air. And now, Philippa spent as much time as she could on the very farm where she had first met Lark. And though Lark knew Brye hated to see her leave Deeping Farm, he was all the more glad when Philippa returned.
Lark finished her chores, saddled Tup, and tied her saddlepack behind the cantle. She brushed bits of straw from her tabard, and put on her peaked cap and her flying gloves.
Hester and Anabel and the others were also ready, gathering as a flight for the last time in the courtyard. Lark leaped up into Tup’s saddle and fell in behind her classmates. Just as Hester turned Golden Morning toward the flight paddock, Amelia hurried out from the stables. She came close to Tup, and held something up to Lark.
“What’s this, Amelia?” Lark asked.
“It’s your icon,” Amelia said breathlessly. “I almost forgot!”
“But I gave it to you. ’Tis yours now.”
“And it protected me,” Amelia said. She pressed it into Lark’s hand. Lark turned it over in her fingers, the little carved figure of Kalla she had worn for a long time around her own neck. She hesitated, and Amelia said, “It will protect you again now, Lark. I mean—” Her lips curved, and her eyes twinkled. “I mean—Horsemistress Black.”
Horsemistress Black! It was true. Kalla’s miracle was complete, from Tup’s birth on an Uplands farm to this shining day. “Oh, Amelia. Thank you.”
Amelia stepped back and lifted her hand. “Good-bye. Good luck!”
Lark nodded farewell and lifted Tup’s reins. Hester began her canter down the flight paddock, and the rest of the flight followed, one by one. Lark and Tup were last to launch into the sky, lifted on Tup’s strong wings. When the whole flight was in the air, they hovered at Quarters, the girls gazing into each other’s eyes one last time.
Then the formation broke apart, splitting in every direction in a sunburst of sorrel and palomino and bay and black.
Lark looked back once at the gambrel roofs of the Academy stables, at the majestic lines of the Hall and the Dormitory and the Residence, at the younger girls gathered in the courtyard to watch them leave. As Tup carried her away, the figures below her shrank until she could no longer tell them apart.
She was certain, though, that one of them was Mistress Winter, standing in the very center of the courtyard with her sorrel mare at her shoulder. She lifted one arm to wave.
Lark, her heart as light as if it had its own wings, waved back before she turned her face forward to her new life.
To read more about the winged horses of Oc,
please visit www.tobybishop.net.
Toby Bishop can be contacted at [email protected].
Ace Books by Toby Bishop
AIRS BENEATH THE MOON
AIRS AND GRACES
AIRS OF NIGHT AND SEA
