Daisy (the lady)

A farmer’s daughter on the land outside Ridh. There is also a horse called Daisy, which the company came by later and which has cost her more confusion than it has cost the horse.

Koa met her at the tavern one night and woke in her father’s barn the next morning wearing very little, with the man grumbling at the latched door outside. He got his gear together, walked his horse out through the back doors while the father was knocking the bar loose from the front, and was around the corner and mounted when the shouting started behind him: Daisy, what are you doing in here. She had called off a wedding at the last second not long before, which was being talked over in that same tavern the night they met.

Two years later Mikhail came to Ridh alone and spent the whole night in that tavern. She watched him through the window and did not come in, because of her father. At first light she stepped out from behind his horse and said good morning. He said the horse was beautiful, and she said thank you before she understood him; when he gave the horse’s name she blushed and made him say it twice. She offered to feed her. Walking out to the barn she told him she was not going to live in Ridh forever and that one day she would go to Haudh-Gwenn, and when he asked what was there she said: what isn’t. Koa had never told anybody her name, so Mikhail had no idea whose barn he was walking into. She gave it herself, with a look, when he put out his hand.

She unrolled a bed for him in an empty stall, walked out and shut the barn door, and came back a couple of minutes later to say she had forgotten to ask whether he wanted company. At dawn she woke him to say his friends had come, and then her father’s voice came across the yard shouting for Daisy, and she looked at him wide-eyed and said she did not think he was looking for the horse. Mikhail went out through the stall’s horse window and threw two coppers back for the stabling.

She took the whole company in that same night, once the pitchfork mob Dan had raised over the business was done with: three horses in the barn if they did not mind being snug, and her own main room floor for the men.