Party mounts & animals

Three riding horses, one horse that is not like them, and a mule. That is the whole of it, and it took the company until a stocktake in Loshev to be sure of the number, because they had lent one out, got her back, and been given another somewhere in between.

Before the mule there was a pack donkey. The constable of Loshev found it when no horse could be had, named it after Aldo in front of everyone, and the name stuck. It went lame coming out of the razorleaf, was put down, and bit Mikhail one last time on the way out.

Nightstorm

Koa found her at night in a storm. Every other horse ran; she did not. His own telling is that she was either hard of hearing or brave, and he chose to believe the second, and the name he gave her is the weather she was standing in. She was young then and wild, and he broke and trained her himself, which for her kind is four weeks of dedicated work if it takes at all.

She is a mixed-breed Idirian steed, which Phillipa read off her at a glance the first time she saw her. Those are the fast, tenacious, free-willed ones out of the plains, notoriously hard to break and worth very little unbroken. Broken, this one is worth looking at: Phil Nye saw her hitched outside a tavern, assumed she belonged to someone richer than the guard he was hiring, and called her a magnificent beast to his face. Put a two-gold horse beside her and the two-gold horse looks like a scandal.

What she is actually worth is in the work. She stood guard over a sleeping camp and took a watch of the night like a member of the company. Koa fought from her back and did no more than get the sword into position, on the understanding that she would put him where the sword needed to be. She carried a dead assassin alongside the wagon so that the family in it would not have to look at him. She carried a man across the razor country with an unseen hand clearing the vines ahead. She drew a gnoll pack off a ridge and lost it, to buy Mikhail and Aldo the time to get up the goat trail. She hauled on the rope that pulled Mikhail out from under the mud, and pulled so hard it was nearly the death of him instead. Later she took a kill of her own in a fight.

She hates crowded cities and is not shy about it, and Koa apologizes to her before taking her into one.

Simon

A mare, and named Simon by Aldo, who did not know and was never told; Koa thought about correcting him and bit his tongue instead. She was bought in Haudh-Gwenn at the back end of her life, with a working lifetime of old sprains in her legs, and what she cost is given two ways: a haggle that landed near two gold with the tack thrown in, or twelve silver and the tack besides. She is the pack horse, and carries the goods and the saddlebags. In the razorleaf she came out worse than any of them and was patched up on the spot.

Aldo maintains that she has personality.

Simone and Daisy

Basic riding horses, and identical on paper. Simone is Aldo’s. Daisy is Mikhail’s, though one account of the season she spent away calls her Koa’s.

Daisy was given to Jaden to ride east when it was clear she would not survive the walk, and she was gone long enough that the company took to counting themselves a horse short, one account going so far as to call her lost in the flight. She was not lost. She came back, and so did Jaden.

Simone was shot by her own rider. Aldo, mounted, put a bolt through a creature and into his own horse, who screamed and bolted into the trees; she was recovered, and Mikhail spent days on the long care of her.

There is also a Daisy in Ridh who is a woman, and the two are not the same. Both names were given in earnest and nobody has ever agreed to change either.

Jacobo

The mule, bought for the company by Elliot to carry what the horses could not. He was speared through from behind by a gnoll early and healed up. He grazed calmly through a fight going on around him, which is more than can be said for anyone else present, and hauled the supplies without complaint.

The razorleaf nearly finished him. He lagged behind on the way out, Dwayne rode back for him, and he was gashed down to almost nothing before Koa got a healing potion into him, forcing it past a mule who was biting everything within reach and then staying with him until he stopped and nuzzled. Going out through the same country a season and more later, he came very near to dying in it a second time.

Barding and Handling

The animals wear barding out of Hinta’s forge, which she reshapes whenever the roster changes, hammering it to fit one animal at a time with Koa ferrying them to her door. It has been struck and it has held. Phillipa has offered barding off her own cart as well.

Dwayne is the handler. He is frightened of nearly everything the company does and does it anyway, wrangling panicking horses through two fights, patching Simon up afterwards, and waiting outside the gate with the animals while the others go in, having said his piece first about being left alone.

Campaign Updates

The mule was Elliot’s gift, and when the company counted itself five animals it was Elliot’s gift that accounted for the fifth as well. Which of the five he actually gave them was never written down.

Nightstorm was last on the road under one of Aldo’s disguises, crossing the river into Haudh-Gwenn. Jacobo was last shut into a keep’s map room with everyone else. Simon, Simone and Daisy were last on the Haudh-Gwenn road or standing at base. No sale, no loss and no death was ever written down for any of the five.