Lady Honoria Vane had wanted to ride the late Queen's horse for three years. He was the finest animal in the royal stables, a tall, proud gelding named Warden, and since Queen Matilda's death he had let no one on his back and almost no one near him. The King had refused Honoria twice. That morning she had the horse brought out anyway, and Warden had nearly broken a groom's arm.
Humiliated in front of the court, Honoria looked around for someone else to laugh at. She found a plump maid named Agnes Dale standing at the edge of the crowd.
"Go on," Honoria said sweetly. "Calm him. He'll crush you."
The ladies laughed. Agnes looked at the horse for a long moment. Then she set down what she was carrying and walked out alone.
She did not walk straight at him. She turned her shoulder toward him, kept her eyes on the ground, held one hand open and low at her side, and began to hum, very quietly. Warden reared once, then stood trembling. His ears swung toward the sound. Slowly he lowered his great head, and Agnes laid her palm flat against his neck.
From the steps, King Aldous stood up. "He only ever let the late Queen touch him," he said, and his voice broke on the words.
What the court did not know was that Agnes had been there the night Warden was born.
Her mother, Bess, had been Queen Matilda's milk-sister. They had been nursed by the same woman and raised almost as sisters, and when Matilda married the King, Bess came with her to keep her wardrobe. Little Agnes grew up in the Queen's rooms. When the Queen's mare foaled, Matilda carried the eight-year-old girl down to the stables in her nightgown to see the colt, and every morning after that the two of them went together.
The Queen taught her everything she knew about horses. Never look a frightened horse in the eye. Turn your shoulder, so you are not a threat. Keep your hand open and low. And hum, always the same old tune, so he knows it is you. By the time Warden was grown, there were only two people in the world he trusted: the Queen and the little girl who followed her everywhere.
Then the Queen fell ill. In her last days she wrote the King a letter asking him to look after Bess and "my Aggie," as she always called her.
But grief makes men blind. While the King shut himself away, a new steward cleared the Queen's household. Bess was dismissed with a month's wages. She died two winters later, and Agnes, entered in the parish book under her father's name, went into service like any other orphan girl. When the King finally remembered the letter and sent for "the Queen's Aggie," no one could tell him where she had gone. He believed he had failed his wife's last request.
Now he stood in front of her. "Aggie?" he said.
Agnes curtsied, her hand still on Warden's neck. "Yes, Your Majesty. She always hummed the shepherd's song to him. I never forgot it."
The court went silent for the second time that morning.
The King did not shout at Lady Honoria. He did not need to. He only asked her, in front of everyone, whether she had known the maid could be killed. Honoria could not answer. By the end of the day she was barred from the royal stables and the royal hunts, and her family was told she would not be needed at court for the rest of the season. For a woman who lived to be seen, it was the worst sentence of all. Wherever she went that winter, someone whispered the story of the lady who sent the Queen's girl out to be trampled.
Agnes never went back to the laundry. The King named her keeper of the Queen's horse, with a room above the stables, the room where she had slept as a child, and a place in his household as his late wife's ward. Every morning she walked Warden out into the sunlight, humming the shepherd's song.
On the anniversary of the Queen's death, the court gathered for the memorial ride. At its head, on the horse that let no one else near him, rode a plump young woman with a fair braid down her back.
The King watched her from the steps, and for the first time in three years, he smiled.
