Lynne

“The horses were actually another set of problems. Slate was used to simply handing the reins to a stableboy or the farmer’s son and walking off. Apparently, there was a lot more to keeping horses around than that. You had to take their tack off and rub them down and check their hooves and their legs and feed them and water them and make sure they were tied to something where they’d be comfortable and not break their necks trying to run in the middle of the night. And then you had to rub the tack down, and fix bits and put oil on other bits, and by the time you were done, over an hour had elapsed when you weren’t eating and weren’t sleeping and weren’t getting any closer to your goal at all. Then in the morning you had to get up and do it all over again, pulling saddles on and bridles and shoving things in horses’ mouths and tightening straps and then the horses would puff their bellies out so that you didn’t tighten it very tight, except that if you fell for that, Brenner generally slid off the horse an hour later, and there’d be a lot of swearing and brandishing of knives. Mules were worse. Mules were like horses who could plan.”
― T. Kingfisher, Clockwork Boys