The Fire Stallion

“Banished for life,” Niamh confirmed.

“So, because of this law, you couldn’t bring any of your own trained horses here, then?” Mum said.

“Nope.” Niamh sighed. “Which put us on the back foot. We’ve had to train all of these new horses since we arrived in winter. And the whole time we were sending photos back to the production team of the horses we’d bought for schooling and Katherine was so excited. She loved the way they appeared so rugged with their coats all long and sun-bleached and shaggy.” Niamh seemed like she was about to burst into tears. “And then, just before filming started, summer arrived, and now look!” She waved a dismissive hand at Ollie, standing sleek and black before her. “It’s a nightmare! They’re all like this!”

“So they’ve moulted to their summer coats and lost their shaggy winter fur?” Mum grasped the situation. “And what do you want me to do?”

“I want,” Niamh said, “I want you to make it winter again.”

Mum didn’t bat an eye at the craziness of Niamh’s request. She stared hard at Ollie for a moment and then she dialled her phone. “Nicky? It’s me. Where are you? The airport? You’ve finally arrived? Good. OK, I’m going to give you the number of a contact in Reykjavik. I need you to go pick up some goat hair.”

A few hours later, Nicky was at the hotel with a minivan filled with six commercial bales of coarse-strand goat hair.

This was how Mum made the horse suits. Handfuls of the goat hair were dyed just the right shade of brown and then the ends were bleached to look like they’d been out in the sun. The hair was hand-stitched onto sheer black mesh which had been sewn with a zip that went from jaw to tail beneath the belly of the horse, in much the same way that a human might wear a onesie. A Velcro attachment hooked up onto the bridle to hold the suit in place at one end and tail clips fixed it at the other so that once it was done up there was no way to tell it was there and the goat hair looked exactly like the horse’s own natural long, shaggy winter coat.

Fashioning the horse-onesie was tricky work. The costumes had to be fitted perfectly to each individual horse. And that was where I came in. It was a two-man job to take precise measurements, involving one person making notes and the other lying down on the ground with a tape measure to chart the dimensions of their belly and combine this with their length all the way from their head to beneath the dock of their tail.

Mum and Nicky’s domain was the sewing room, where they had their team cutting and stitching the suits, and I stayed at the stables helping Niamh.

We did forty horses together. I would spend hours lying on my back beneath the bellies of the stallions with Niamh bent down beside me writing down the measurements that I gave her. By the time we were done I knew everything about her. She was eighteen, so only five years older than me, and had left school as soon as she could to go to work for her brother Connor who ran Equus Films.

“Horses are in the blood,” Niamh had said. “Mum and Dad breed point-to-point racers. Connor and I were both in the Irish National team for Pony Club Mounted Games. We’re both daredevils – the stunts we do now started out as things we did at home, like teaching our ponies to bow and rear, or swinging onto their backs off ropes and galloping them bareback.”

Mark, the third member of the team, was Irish too, a friend of Connor’s from Pony Club days.

“He and Connor started the company together before I joined, so that makes them the bosses,” Niamh explained. “Connor does most of the ridden work. He’s been training the two lead stallions, Troy and Ollie. Ollie is going to be the horse that the prince rides. He needs to be able to do all the usual stunts – you know, drop to one knee and rear on cue, and he also has to jump through fire to do the rescue at the end of the film. Troy has to do stunts too, but he’s also got to act because there are lots of scenes with him and Brunhilda together, so we need a horse that has presence, you know? Like a movie star.”

Considering he was supposed to be a movie star, Troy was not at all what I’d been expecting. He was handsome enough – a deep russet chestnut with a flaxen mane – and he was beautiful, almost feminine for a stallion. I guess he was the right horse for a princess, but he wasn’t quite what I’d pictured when Gudrun had talked about Jotun, Brunhilda’s famous stallion. If Brunhilda really was this ferocious warrior, then Troy seemed a bit tame for her. Not that I said this to Niamh, of course, who was totally in love with Troy.

“Don’t you think Jam is going to look amazing on him?” she said as she groomed his thick, shaggy blond mane.

“Jam?”

Niamh looked at me as if I were from another planet. “Jamisen O’Brien. She’s playing Brunhilda. You must know her! She was in that Hollywood blockbuster last summer – the musical one set in Greece.”

“Oh,” I said, slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t clicked immediately when Niamh called her Jam. “Yeah, of course I know her. I used to love her TV show.”

“Jamisen’s an amazing horsewoman,” Niamh continued. “She’ll be riding all her own stunts. The costume department have this enormous long blonde wig that she wears under her Viking helmet and it will look incredible blowing in the wind next to Troy’s flaxen mane.”

“It must be weird,” I said, “to be not that much older than me and be the star of an entire movie.”

“She’s used to it, I guess,” Niamh said. “What is she now? Sixteen? She’s been famous almost her whole life.”

The arrival of Jamisen O’Brien and Anders Mortenson had everyone talking at dinner. The two stars of the film had finally turned up on a private jet with their entourages in tow, ready to start work the next day.

“Jam’s brought six assistants with her,” Niamh told me as we piled up our plates at the buffet.

My mum had worked on a lot of films and she’d told me some stories but I swear I’d never heard of any celebrity who had that many assistants before.

“What do they all do?” I asked.

“One of them is her personal trainer, one of them is her hairdresser, one of them is her personal assistant …” Niamh rattled them off, counting on her fingers. “Don’t know what the others do.”

Anders Mortenson, on the other hand, had just his personal assistant with him. He’d been famous since he was ten years old when he played a spoilt rich kid in the TV comedy Cody and Toby and now, at the age of fifteen, this was the first time he’d play the hero. He was Prince Sigard, who would fight by Brunhilda’s side as her power grew and eventually marry his queen.

“They get here today and then it’s a week of training with us and the stunt co-ordinators,” Niamh explained, “and then filming will finally begin …”

The sudden hush that fell over the dining room at that moment made me think that maybe Jam and Anders had just walked in. But it was only Gudrun. She stood out from the rest of us in our North Face puffer jackets at the best of times, but today she was particularly wildly dressed in red trousers and a violet cape.

She made a beeline for our table and flung herself down beside me.

“Hilly, we need to talk.”

I saw Niamh tense up in her presence. She couldn’t stand Gudrun; she’d admitted that to me when we’d been working on the goat-hair suits together.

“Don’t you think it’s weird how she always talks to you?” Niamh had said to me once when she was going on about Gudrun’s odd behaviour.

It was true and, yes, I did think it was a bit strange. I was the least important person here and yet Gudrun treated me like someone who really mattered. It made me uneasy but I kind of liked talking to her too.

Niamh stood up to leave. “I have to go. Hilly, let’s meet up at the stables in half an hour, OK?”

“Sure,” I said.

Gudrun waited in silence until Niamh was out of earshot. Her green eyes were even wilder and brighter than usual.

“Do you know what night it is, Hilly?”

“Sunday?” I offered.

“Yes,” Gudrun conceded. “Sunday, the 24th of June. The Jonsmessa is here at last. It’s time.”

Then she leaned closer so that she could whisper to me: “I’ll come for you just before midnight. We must finish what we’ve started. It’s time to meet Brunhilda.”

That night I sat up on my bed, fully dressed, waiting for Gudrun. She said the ritual needed to take place at midnight but by 11.30 p.m. she still wasn’t here. Finally at around 11.45 p.m. I gave up on her and closed the blackout curtains in my room. I had only just started to get ready for bed when I heard this scratching on the glass of the sliding door. Then another sound, a thin, melancholic whimper. I sat bolt upright and listened. More whimpering, louder this time. I got up, and moved cautiously over to the window and flung the curtains apart.

In front of me, right on the other side of the glass door, stood two enormous grey wolves. They were standing there, side by side, like two statues, eyes blazing intently, tongues lolling from their massive open jaws. We were separated by the glass, so they couldn’t get to me, but that didn’t make them any less terrifying.

I put my hand up to the pane and one of the wolves edged closer. His breath steamed the glass and I could see saliva dripping from his white fangs. The other one cocked his head and moved forward too. They were massive, powerful creatures, and I was sure at that moment that if they’d wanted to they could have broken down the glass to get to me. But they didn’t try. They didn’t even growl. They both stared intently at me. Then, as if they’d heard someone calling them, they turned on their heels and bounded away, into the forest. A moment later, another shape emerged from the shadows of the trees. It was Gudrun! I slid the door open for her.

“Quick!” I hissed. “Get inside! There are wolves out there.”

Gudrun was perfectly calm. “There are no wolves in Iceland,” she said.

“I know what I saw,” I insisted. I wanted her to come in so I could shut the door, but she beckoned me outside instead.

“Seriously, Hilly,” she said. “There’s nothing there. Come on. It’s time. We need to go.”

I didn’t want to stay there arguing and risk waking Mum and so I stepped outside and slid the door shut behind me.