The Diamond Horse

As the blizzard closed in, Anna Orlov struggled to make out the lights of the palace on the horizon. Their starry shimmer had been the beacon guiding her home, but as their glow became obscured by the snowstorm Anna felt as if she was fading too. Submerged deep beneath the snowdrifts, her feet had long ago turned numb, and her heavy skirts, soaked through and stiff with ice, threatened to drag her down with every step.

Yet it was not her own failing strength that worried her most. It was Drakon. The race across the taiga had left her horse ragged with exhaustion, and the wound on his shoulder had opened into a raw slash of crimson that seeped into his silver dapples. As he stumbled alongside her in the deep snow, Anna’s heart was breaking. With every step she could hear the dark rasp of his mighty lungs, his wide fluted nostrils misting hot plumes into the frozen air.

Dragon’s breath. That was how it looked. And hadn’t Drakon always reminded her of a dragon? Something about the shape of his head, that great, solid slab of his mighty jawbone, the way it narrowed to the slender taper of his fine muzzle.With enormous Asiatic eyes, dark and intense, trimmed with long lashes, his features would have been better suited to a dragon. That was how he had been given his name.

The rest of Drakon was no less peculiar. His body was out of all proportion for he had been born with an extra rib, which elongated his physique, making him as lean and sleek as a racing hound. He was all muscle and sinew, with a dapple-grey coat strung over a bony frame. His legs, buried deep in the snowdrifts, were so long they looked like they belonged to another creature entirely. They gave him his power, made him swift and sure-footed across the treacherous black ice of the frozen rivers.

Drakon’s strides had pounded out a relentless drumbeat across the Russian taiga, but their cadence had weakened until now it had become a desperate struggle to place one hoof in front of the other.

“Come on! It is not much further,” Anna promised her horse. But in reality, she had no idea how far away the palace was, or even if it was ahead of them at all. There was nothing to guide her any more. Just the snow and the darkness, her numb feet and ice-bitten cheeks, singing with the pain of air so cold it pierced her brain.

“We must keep moving, Drakon …”

With his head hanging low, the horse managed to take another step, then suddenly he lurched sideways, his legs buckling beneath him.

“Drakon!”

Anna flung herself at him, clinging to his neck. Her fur-gloved fingers twisted into the rope of the stallion’s silvery mane. “Drakon, please! Please …”

Drakon was a dead weight plummeting, his magnificent swan neck twisting and jerking as he went down. Anna gasped as she felt the sting of the snow flung up in his wake like an ocean wave striking a ship’s bow.

Shocked by the fall, the horse instinctively tried to get back to his feet, forelegs twitching as he struggled, swinging his neck to raise his head. Then, with a pitiful groan, he gave in to exhaustion and collapsed back into the icy drifts.