There are advantages to riding an old horse.

  While farm boys are prone to hopping onto the backs of their plow horses, to dig their heels into tired flanks and imagine themselves knights, their speed and spirit is short lived. It never takes long before even a young work beast is indolent to the urgings of its rider, secure in the knowledge that without the eyes of his peers, the farm boy will quietly accede to a gentle pace and get there in just the same time. The relationship is unequal and a smart rider is always aware their horse might make a fuss. In an instant they might be in an acrobatic tussle with an animal seven times their weight or more.

  An old horse rarely rears up. If it doesn’t like its rider, it’s more likely to stand there and take even a whipping than be accomplice to the whims of a clod of a rider. So, an old horse well taken care of and allowed to take a healthy pace will plod along the mud and dirt, carrying sacks of goods and the rider too because only something truly startling is enough to jolt old muscles into action.

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  Something like a shift in the wind that sucked from the bushes the rotting iron scent of a red cap goblin. The creature still wet with bog mud and trailing blood-sucking flies in love with the viscera caked cloth atop its head.

  In an instant, hooves were flailing in the air like maces of ivory and everything atop the horse’s back went flying. The burlap saddle bags that had bulged with firewood that morning splattered into the road's ruts, spilling the hardtack and the pastries and the jar of honey for Nina shattered across the ground like the back of my skull shattered against the gnarled root of a weather-beaten oak.

  And by all rights I should have died then and there.

  I still wonder if maybe I did. Certainly, something in me broke.