The horse was a gray mare.
The mare had been waiting at the eastern grain-shed for six hours by the time Valeria reached it, saddled and provisioned by a stable-hand whose name Valeria did not know and whose face she would not see — the boy had been working under instructions from the wider Embercrown service network that Mara had operated for the previous seven years, and the boy had left the grain-shed at the fourth bell of the previous evening on the small precise schedule of a domestic worker whose absence would not be noted before the morning rounds.
Mara had built the network.
