Princess Autumn of Veld was well known for being a very stubborn woman, and in the person of her knight, it seemed that she had finally met someone with a pigheadedness to match. After they had finished touring the gardens and the courtyard, on the second day, they found themselves having a disagreement regarding what, exactly, counted as the castle grounds. She argued that it must go all the way to the outer wall and include the stables. He, for his part, preferred that she remain inside the inner ramparts.

“There is more than enough to see,” he maintained, standing firm between her and the gate leading out towards the forest. “Perhaps we might visit the sunroom?”

“I am not interested in the sunroom,” she said, even though she was deeply interested in the sunroom. She wondered which area of the keep it was attached to, as they had walked all around it already and had seen nothing of the sort. Evil Castle was bordered by a cliff on its north side, several terrasses of dead grass and stairs snaking down a slope on the east, the gardens on the west, and a grand dirt courtyard facing south. It was built in height and composed of spiky towers and angry-looking buttresses. Perhaps the sunroom was hiding at the top of one of these towers, but if that were the case, then she would get to it when she explored the castle’s interior. For now, she wanted to be outdoors for as long as the good weather would last.

“I want to see the horses,” she insisted.

“I really must insist that you do not go past the moat.”

A moat! She hadn’t known that there was a moat! Even Veld didn’t have one of those. Well, that settled it. Autumn was now more determined than ever to have her way. She squared her shoulders and said in her most regal tone of voice: “King Eltanin told me to stay inside the walls, not inside the moat. And while he did not mention which walls, clearly the outer ones count.”

Her knight breathed in and out slowly and seemed to realize that he would not win this argument. Reluctantly, he led her through the gate.

The vegetation on the other side of the inner wall appeared darker and more ominous, somehow, than what that had been on the inside. Autumn glanced uneasily at how the canopy hid the sky and suppressed a shiver, unwilling to let Knight see her be so immediately cowed after she had brute forced her way through their argument. If she had been given to flights of fancy, she might have described the trees here as being wild, whereas those in the garden had been tamed. But she knew that plants could be no such thing, and that she only felt this way due to being from the prairies, where trees were few and far between and generally cut into geometric shapes; domesticated shrubbery, one might say.

They quickly reached the moat, which Autumn was disappointed to realize was in fact that same little stream that she had noticed on the day of her arrival, the one at mid-point between both walls with the old wooden bridge curving over it. It was two metres across and half a mile away from the castle; hardly her definition of a moat.

“It is deeper than it looks,” said Knight, glancing at her expression. “And deadly.”

She arched an unimpressed eyebrow. “How deadly can it be?”

There were rocks peeking out here and there over the water; it looked to her eyes as if someone might easily be able to jump from one to the other until they’d reached the opposite side, should the bridge be blocked. These rocks did appear a bit slippery, certainly, but she would not go so far as to call them deadly.

“Are there constructs in there?” She asked, dubiously. “Fish constructs?”

It was the only thing that she could think of that might make this tiny little river dangerous, aside from some sort of spell.

The question seemed to trouble him. “No,” he said. “Even He would not be so cruel as to put one of us in there.”

Autumn blinked and took a step back from the water’s edge. Definitely magic, then. She decided not to linger.

They crossed the bridge and made their way to the low buildings that she had glimpsed on arrival. These indeed turned out to be the stables. Several structures were arranged around a square training yard within which horses were ambling, looking bored. There were more of them than she had expected for a kingdom of no one, and once more, she wondered what the Wizard King’s original intention for this land had been. Knight guided her through the main doors, and Autumn felt it a relief to finally see something that she understood in this strange and disturbing kingdom. The stables were warm and smelled of hay and manure, the familiarity of which filled her with an emotion that brought tears to her eyes and simultaneously made her want to duck back outside.

A voice greeted them from within a stall, and for one heart-stopping moment, Autumn was terrified of finding herself face to face with a construct made from a horse. In some obscure way, this felt as if it would be too much for her; a stable hand made of horses, forced to take care of the very creatures of which they had been made from. It seemed… cruel, like rubbing salt into a wound. But as the boy — with such a round face, he could not possibly be called a man — emerged from the stall, she saw that he had a pair of short horns on the top of his head, similar to a goat. Which made a certain sort of sense to her, far more than the raccoon in the gardens had. Goats did belong in stables, at least. There was not an entire industry based on chasing them out of them, the way that many people in Veld had made their living as raccoon and skunk catchers.

“Hello, hello!” said the boy exuberantly, and darted forward to grab her hand, shaking it vigorously up and down. “My lady! What a surprise to see you here, truly! What brings you to my stables on so fine a day? Oh, and hello to you as well, deer knight. May I offer you a lick of salt?”

Knight flicked a glance at her that almost seemed embarrassed and shook his head. “Thank you, but not right now.”

“Later, then! Of course, of course. Have you come to see any horse in particular? Oh, do excuse me!”

Behind him, a beautiful black palfrey was attempting to sneak out of the stall, whose door the construct had left open. The goat boy wrangled him back inside with fluttering hands and a few clicks of the tongue.

“Sorry, so sorry!” he said once the door was properly closed and locked. “This one, I swear. He is in the running to be your steed, your high— I mean, my lady—, given as he has such a beautiful gait, but he will have to learn some manners beforehand, now won’t you, you big brute!”

This last part was said to the horse while wiggling a finger in the air, then immediately undercut by the boy pulling a sugar cube out of his pocket and feeding it to the animal.

“I am supposed to get a horse?”

The stable hand gave her a look of such horror that Autumn regretted having spoken.

“But of course, my lady! What sort of King would not arrange for his lady wife to have a decent steed for her riding?!”

One who does not intend for her to live, she thought, at first quietly, before deciding with a spike of rage and spite not to keep the thought to herself. First the gardener, and now this. Had all the constructs been instructed to act as if there had not been a hundred other women here before her, and another hundred that might come after? Future Queen indeed.

“One who doesn’t expect her to live to see their wedding day,” she spat.

The goat boy’s eyes widened then narrowed. “If you are not going to take this seriously, then you might as well leave now,” he hissed, no longer cordial. Beside her, Knight shifted uneasily. “You think that I wouldn’t prefer not to be the hundredth stable hand to raise horses for a princess that doesn’t make it through?”

“I— Of course not,” she stuttered.

“Indeed! But what am I supposed to do? My options are rather limited here, in case you haven’t noticed. So I will tell you what I am going to do; I am going to train these horses, and pick the best damned one that’s ever come out of this stable to be your steed. And you—” the boy raised a finger and pointed it directly at her. Knight made a low noise in his throat, and the hand shot back down. His eyes shifting back and forth between the two of them, the goat construct continued, his voice strained: “You do what you have to do to make sure that you get to ride this horse one day, do you hear? Respectfully.”

“Right,” she said. “You are right.” She nodded, squared her shoulders, and raised her chin. “We are not pretending to the universe that a marriage is going to happen, we are telling it so.”

“Yes, that’s the spirit!” he cheered, a large grin spilling across his face once again. “Now would you like to meet the rest of your potential steeds, my lady?”