Blaze and the Dark Rider

Chapter 2 (#u53ab2c50-8760-5b8a-bbc6-3acdb2232297)

The first rally of the new pony-club season had finally arrived and Stella was fizzing with excitement. “It’s so great to be back!” she grinned as she tied Coco up next to Blaze underneath the big plane tree at the far end of the Chevalier Point grounds.

“Coco is totally psyched to be here, aren’t you, girl?” Stella giggled and gave her chocolate mare a slappy pat on the neck.

Coco, who never got excited about anything ever, looked at Stella with a sleepy expression and immediately shut her eyes and began to doze away in the shade, her tail lazily flicking away the odd fly that happened to buzz by.

“Yeah, Stella, she’s thrilled,” Issie laughed.

Even if Coco wasn’t excited by the prospect of the new pony-club season, the girls certainly were. This summer the club schedule was jam-packed and the most important event on the competition calendar was the Interclub Gold Shield.

The Interclub was a huge event involving all the clubs in the Chevalier district, from Chevalier Point in the north to Garnet Ridge in the south. Teams trained for the competition throughout the season and then the six district clubs competed in the grand event to see who would take away the trophy.

“St Johns, Mornington, Marsh Fields, Westhaven and Garnet Ridge!” Stella rattled the names of their rivals off by heart.

“Have you seen the Gold Shield? I’ve seen it. Whoever wins gets all their names engraved on it!” Stella was raving to Issie. “It’s not actually a big gold shield at all—well, it is big, but it’s made of wood and then it has all these little gold shields all over it and each shield has the names of that year’s winners engraved on it. It’s like, centuries old. OK, maybe not centuries, but really, really old. Even Avery has his name on it! He was in the team way back in, like, the seventies or something—”

“It was 1985 actually, Stella, thanks for making me feel even older than I usually do,” Tom Avery said stiffly.

“Oh no,” Stella groaned. She hadn’t noticed their riding instructor standing right behind her.

“Hi, Tom!” Issie grinned. Most of the riders at Chevalier Point were scared of Avery. He had a brisk, authoritative manner. But Issie knew that a lot of his strict attitude was just an act he put on for show.

Avery loved horses with a real passion. He worked part-time for the ILPH—the International League for the Protection of Horses. It was Tom who had brought Blaze to Issie so that she could be her guardian. She still remembered that day when he turned up at the River Paddock with the sickly, half-starved chestnut mare that he had rescued. Even though Issie was still hurting after losing Mystic she knew immediately that it was her job to nurse this mare back to health. And she had done just that. Blaze was now a beautiful, incredible horse.

Today, as usual, Avery carried a tan leather riding crop, which he now struck vigorously against his right boot with a loud thwack to get the girls’ attention. “Right. Got yourselves sorted for the first event this morning, I hope? We’ll be fielding a team of six riders at the Interclub, which I will be choosing today…”

Avery paused for a moment as he noticed Coco dozing next to him. He shook his head, tut-tutted and made an adjustment on the throat lash on the mare’s bridle, tightening it by three holes. “Two fingers,” he told Stella, placing his own two fingers in the gap between the throat lash and the horse’s windpipe to illustrate his point. “Leave no more than a two finger gap on the throat lash…” he trailed off again.

“Anyway, yes, as I was saying—at the last two Interclubs we have been pipped at the post each time by our archrivals at Marsh Fields. But not this time. This time I mean to choose a team that will win us back that shield and do us proud.”

He looked Stella in the eyes. “Selection day is serious. I am not in the mood for hijinks today. Are you in the mood for hijinks, Stella?”

For once the bubbly, freckly redhead seemed to have nothing to say for herself. “Ummm, no?” Stella offered eventually.

“Excellent, excellent!” Avery smiled at her. “Off we go then. Mount up and round up the rest of your mob. Your groups are all listed up on the walls of the clubhouse so head over there to see who you’re teamed up with. Right? Excellent.” Avery gave the side of his boot one more thwack with the whip for emphasis and then spun about and set off.

He was only just out of earshot when Stella whacked her leg with her crop just as Avery had done, imitating his gruff voice and barking at Issie, “Are you in the mood for hijinks, Isadora?”

Issie fell about laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Kate asked as she trotted Toby over, pulling up to a halt next to Blaze and Coco.

“Avery,” said Issie. “He’s not in the mood for ‘hijinks’. He’s determined to win the Interclub Shield back again.”

“Well, I can’t say I blame him,” Kate said. “Marsh Fields have really rubbed it in ever since they won it for the second time in a row.”

“So Avery is choosing six of us out of the whole pony club?” Issie asked. She felt a sudden tingle of excitement as she realised how much this mattered to her.

“Eight, actually,” Kate told her. “Six riders plus two team reserves.”

“Dan and Ben are both bound to get in,” Stella groaned, “so that’s two places gone already!”

Dan and Ben were the girls’ closest friends at the club—and they were both really good riders. Dan had blond curly hair, startling blue eyes and rode a leggy, flea-bitten grey called Kismit. Ben was dark-haired, always teasing the girls, and had a sullen bay Welsh pony called Max.

Stella turned to her little chocolate mare. “You’d better wake up, Coco! We’re going to have to do our best to make the team.”

Coco reluctantly raised her head to see what all the fuss was about, and looked up at the girls now with her big brown eyes, then shut them again and dozed some more.

Kate and Issie were laughing, but Stella frowned as she reached for her hard hat and began to tighten her girth. “Sometimes, Coco, I think you aren’t taking this seriously enough.”

“How many events do we have to do for the selection?” Issie leaned over Kate’s shoulder to look at the schedule that she had written down.

“Five,” said Kate. “Rider on the flat, rider over hurdles and a showjumping course against the clock, and then there’s the team events—the flag-race relay and the bending relay.

“I hope Toby and I do well in the jumping,” Kate sighed. “We’ll never get picked for the team when it comes to the games. Toby is useless at bending. He’s far too big and his stride is too long to wind through the poles.”

Kate was only thirteen and in the same year at Chevalier Point High School as Issie and Stella. But she was tall for her age with lean, long legs, and her parents, who didn’t want to buy a pony only to have Kate outgrow it, had thought it sensible to progress her straight on to a horse. Kate’s horse Toby was a rangy bay Thoroughbred, standing a massive sixteen-two hands, which came in useful for Kate in the showjumping ring. But he was not so good at games like bending and flag racing where the poles were set up at the right distance for the short strides of little ponies, not the huge, ground-swallowing strides of an ex-racehorse.

The bending poles had already been set up for the games. The poles were about two metres high, stuck upright in the ground and evenly spaced with about three horse lengths between each pole. To win the race, riders needed to serpentine their way as fast as they could down through the poles, turning tightly around the last pole at the end, and slaloming back through again as fast as they could to cross the finish line.

For flag races, the same poles were used, but this time a flag was secured with a rubber band near the top of each pole. The riders had to race their horses to each pole in turn, pluck off the flag, then race back and drop the flag precisely into a small wooden box on top of an oil drum. If they missed the box, they had to dismount, pick up the flag, put it in the box and mount up again before they could continue the race.

“At least Toby is a star when it comes to jumping against the clock. You’re bound to win selection points in the jumping,” Issie consoled Kate. “Come on. Let’s finish tacking up and go.”

Issie ran her stirrups down the leathers, gave Blaze’s girth a final check and popped her foot in the stirrup iron, bouncing herself up lightly on to Blaze’s back.

“Here we go again, eh, girl?” Issie said, leaning in low by Blaze’s neck to whisper in her ear. The mare danced and fidgeted anxiously beneath her as they waited for Kate and Stella to get ready Then the three girls set off at a trot towards the bending poles and their first event of the day.

At the clubroom, five other riders were already waiting on their mounts. All of them were wearing the navy jersey and red tie which were the Chevalier Point Pony Club colours.

One of the girls, a blonde with two perfectly straight plaits, starchy white jodhpurs and a sour expression, sat astride a glossy, golden palomino. She saw Issie, Stella and Kate heading towards her and gave them a haughty smirk.

“Oh no, not Stuck-up Tucker!” Stella muttered under her breath. “Why does she have to be in our group? I wish I was doing jumping first like Dan and Ben.”

“Be nice,” Issie warned Stella. Issie knew that being nice to Natasha Tucker wasn’t easy, in fact she was gritting her teeth too in anticipation. The last time Issie had crossed paths with her had been in the jump-off at the one-day event, when Natasha had been eliminated for hitting Goldrush with her whip and Issie had gone on to win.

Needless to say, Natasha wasn’t pleased to see Issie again. “We’ve been waiting for you lot for absolutely ages! I hope you’re not planning to make us late all day,” Natasha said as the girls trotted up to join them. This clearly wasn’t true as the clock on the wall of the clubroom said nine exactly, which was when the rally was due to start.

“Hi, Natasha,” Issie said, deciding it was best to simply ignore her sniffy comment.

“Hi, Issie. Don’t worry about it, we only just got here too,” said a cheerful girl on a dinky twelve-two grey pony. The girl was Pip Miller and her horse was called Mitzy Next to Pip was her little sister Catherine who rode an even smaller twelve-hand grey called Nemo. The girl beside them was Annabel Willets, who was in the year above Issie at school. Annabel’s horse, Eddie, was a pretty palomino gelding with a wall eye.

The fifth rider, who was hanging back on the edge of the group, was a girl that Issie had never seen before. She had long dark hair just like Issie, but her skin was pale to the point of being ghostly. Her club jersey and tie were clearly brand new. She had a navy gilet over the top of her jersey and a shiny white helmet. Her pony who was jet black, was pretty and dainty and about the same height as Blaze.

“Who is she?” Kate wondered out loud.

“Hmmphh?” Natasha Tucker overheard her. “Oh her? That’s Morgan. She’s just started going to my school.”