Eve was amazed all over again at the space and the silence. There had never been real silence in the city, she realised – always the sound of traffic, of people, or even, below conscious hearing, the hum of their domestic machinery. So many things she had never experienced before. No, not things, she corrected herself: rather the absence of things: the absence of sound that gave true silence, the absence of light that gave true darkness and stars, the absence of buildings that gave this vast and glittering emptiness. The plain that stretched out around and ahead of her seemed endless, sparkling with a myriad points of view, shifting in colour as stray cats’-paws of breeze ruffled the surface of the gorse and heather.

The horses, too, seemed to be in high spirits. Mist tossed her head and danced sideways as Sky urged her forwards.

“She wants to run,” he called to Rahim.

Rahim laughed. “The sooner we cross, the safer we’ll be. Let her go.”

My first break

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Background

• The Hinba Ghosts by Kate Green

• A1 Joe and the Roman Dog by Judith Low

• The Song of Sky and Evening by Charlie Scott

• Gemoc by Elizabeth Lawson

• The Beaten Road by Roberta Nichols

Background

• Reavers by Emily Diamand

• Jack Flynn and the Assassins by John M. O’Brien

• Tutankhamun: Diary of a Boy King by Laurence Rowley

• They Do Things Differently There by Ruth Furness

• The Secret Life of Jemma Jones by A. M. Conway

Mist didn’t need asking twice. Sky hardly had to touch his heels to her flanks before she took off in her familiar smooth, swaying gallop that was now as natural to him as his own running. He gripped her flanks with his knees and leant low over her neck, revelling in the buffeting of the wind in his face. Glancing back beneath his arm, he saw Faras had also broken into a gallop, with Whip clutching his mane between Rahim’s arms and laughing, and Orrin was bringing up the rear in a sedate canter with Eve clinging gamely to the pommel of the saddle.

Faras was closing, but he carrying two, and Mist was light and strong. “Go my beauty,” Sky whispered. The mare’s ears flicked, although surely she couldn’t have heard him, and she stretched out her neck and picked up speed. The soft purple heather flowed back like water beneath the blur of her hooves, and Sky felt the powerful bunch and release of her muscles between his knees. “You are the finest horse of all horses that were ever foaled,” he yelled, the words snatched away from him in the wind-rush of their headlong progress. She was as fast as a falling star, he thought fondly. “Going like her tail was on fire.” That was what Jay always used to say. Remembering Jay he felt a sudden cold stab of sadness – would he ever see his friend again? And hard on the heels of that thought came the realisation that while he had left one friend behind, the strange woman-child they had brought with them had left everybody and everything she knew. What must she be feeling in this hostile new world? He twitched the reins briefly. “Whoa, beauty,” he whispered, and felt Mist begin to slow. Moments later Faras drew level and dropped back to match their pace, and finally Orrin cantered up.

“I didn’t fall!” shouted Eve, face flushed and eyes sparkling. “You said I would fall, and I told you I wouldn’t, and I didn’t! Orrin wouldn’t let me!”

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