Background:  this was co-written, sort of, with our school librarian; we did a project with my Success group where the kids had to write a story without communicating with each other and switching partners every three minutes.  I’ve rewritten it because the two of us don’t write in quite the same voice– mostly to clean up tonal inconsistencies– so all of the words are mine in this version, but at least half of the ideas are his.  See if you can figure out where each of our three minutes ended and we threw in plot twists to screw with each other; I think I probably like this story far more than it deserves.

Also, neither of us know a goddamn thing about horses.

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It was already the wrong kind of night to be outside—driving snow, sleet, and just enough moonlight to light up the fog but not enough to see by.  To make things worse, the damn horse had just thrown a shoe, and it was showing no interest at all in doing any more carrying of people tonight.  It stood still, one leg held off the ground, steam pouring off its sides, chuffing and panting steadily.

Eleazar Gishovski hated horses.  He’d heard there were people working on inventing some sort of mechanical cart that cut the beast out of the picture altogether; he’d never seen one and half figured they were just a rumor the world had cobbled together to mock him.  But it was ride the horse or walk, and he had to be in Ramtucko by morning—hell, he had to be there by yesterday morning—and that meant riding, no choice.  He’d been summoned; there was plague in Ramtucko, and his skills were needed.  He’d borrowed the horse from a friend; Allan would kill him if he’d lamed the horse, if the plague didn’t get him first.

He slid off the horse’s back gingerly, hoping he’d be able to figure out how to get back on without someone to boost him.  He looked at the horse, then looked at its hoof.

“I’m just going to look and see if there’s a rock in there or something,” he said.  The shoe was definitely gone, but maybe there was something else wrong.  “Don’t hurt me.  I’m trying to be nice.”  Horses don’t eat people, do they?  he thought.

There was not a rock stuck in the horse’s hoof.

There was a diamond stuck in the horse’s hoof.  And a bloody great big one at that.

What the hell was that doing there?  Something nagged at the back of his head, an uneasy feeling quite out of sync with just having found a diamond, but he pushed it away.  How did he get it out?  Pry it?  With what?  He had a penknife and his bag with his surgical tools, but he wasn’t sure the horse was going to sit still while he sawed away at its foot.  Leaving it there wasn’t an option; it was obviously hurting the horse even above and beyond having lost the shoe, but he needed a way to get it out without getting kicked in the head.  The damn horse was named Kicker, for God’s sake; Allan had said it like it was a joke but Eleazar wasn’t interested in finding out the hard way that he was wrong.

The damn diamond was huge.

He felt around in his pockets until he found his penknife.  “Just gonna pry this out,” he said to Kicker.  “Might hurt for a second.  You’ll be fine.”  He tried to project feelings of soothing and gentle and please don’t kick me in my face to the horse, who glared at him as if contemplating abandoning its natural vegetarianism.

He gripped the horse’s hoof and carefully levered his knife under the edge of the diamond. He pried, carefully.

There was a very loud boom.  Eleazar had enough time to think the phrase horses don’t go boom and then the horse charged off, galloping awkwardly on three legs.  The diamond was nowhere to be seen.  Did I get it?  Was it out of the hoof? 

He had no idea.

What he did know was that the horse was apparently no longer concerned about its hoof, as it abruptly wheeled back around, regaining its usual four-footed gait and charging directly at him.  He had time to think DIVE! but no time to actually do it; the horse bowled him over, sending him flying, and charged off into the night, Eleazar’s bag and all his gear with it.

He lay on the ground in a stupor for a moment, trying to shake the clouds out of his head and hoping nothing was broken.  All he knew was that everything hurt; he’d never been run over by a horse before and had no interest in ever repeating the experience.  He shook his head and opened his eyes.

Something glittered in the snow, not two yards from his face.  It kept swimming in and out of focus, along with the rest of the world.  The diamond?  He reached for it, hoping against hope.

It was the missing horseshoe.

“Useless,” he muttered, and hurled the shoe into the woods. There was no way he was shoeing an angry, fast-moving horse that wanted nothing to do with him even before he magically found the nails and hammer that he’d need.  If that was even what you needed to shoe horses.  It was worse than useless to him– and the horse was gone.  There was nothing to do but to either try and find the diamond (which, for all he knew, was still attached to the horse) or head for town on foot.

Oh, wait, he thought.  There had been a boom.  What in the world was the boom for?

There was another boom.

This one was much closer to him; he saw trees shake a few dozen yards away and heard at least a few fall to the ground.

Run, he thought, and did.  No time to look for the diamond.  If it was there at all, it would still be there later.

He stumbled to his feet and took off pell-mell down the path, tripping a few times and nearly losing his footing.  All around him, debris—rocks, dirt, branches—was hitting the ground and flying through the air.  Something caught him in the chest, tossing him flat on his back.  A wire, strung between trees.  No, not really a wire—more of a cable.  Strung like a tripwire.  At chest height, where no human being not bent on running for his life would ever have managed to trip it.  And that he’d just bounced off of, without causing an explosion.

A cable that was much too long and obvious to catch people.

Oh, no.

He heard the horse scream, off in the distance.  A horse screaming was a terrible sound, one he never wanted to hear again.

Then he saw the dragon.

There hadn’t been a dragon near the midlands in a hundred and fifty years.  More to the point, there hadn’t been an angry dragon—one with a couple of inconvenient holes blown into its hide from badly-aimed shrapnel—anywhere near him in, well, forever.

That’s where the diamond came from, he thought idiotically.  Old dragons had the things embedded in their hides from years of lying atop treasure hoards; the thing had probably just fallen out.

Run.  Run run run.

The dragon was no longer distracted by the horse, and had nothing to focus on but Eleazar.  Who fled, tripping over his own feet again and pulling himself up, trying to lose himself in the woods.  The thing had already shown an ability to knock down trees but at least they would slow it down.  He could hear it behind him, could hear the trees groan and crack as the huge beast’s body slammed into them.

The treeline broke, and he saw the militia in the field.  A solid front, musketeers and grenadiers at least; maybe some cavalry behind them somewhere.  They would have been a relief if their guns hadn’t been pointed his way.  They wore green and blue; dragon-hunter’s coats.

“FIRE!” came the command.  He hit the ground, skidding as a hundred musket balls flew over his head and slammed into the dragon.  This only made the thing angrier, but at least it distracted it from eating him.  The dragon leapt over him, tearing great furrows in the earth with its claws as it headed for the infantry line.

He heard another command over the roars.  “ARTILLERY!”  Cannons chimed; another dozen booms, and the dragon took a face and chest full of close-range grapeshot.  It hit the ground hard, skidding to a stop just in front of the infantry, who had dropped their muskets and switched to pikes.  The pikemen rushed to finish the dragon, but the cannons had done their work; the giant creature was dead.

Eleazar got to his feet, stumbling toward the soldiers, who gave him a once-over and pointed him toward their captain.

“Congratulations,” the captain said.  He wore a fancy hat along with his uniform, which hadn’t a spot of mud on it.  Eleazar was filthy, wet and cold from having hit the ground so many times in the last half-hour.  “You flushed the beast out of the woods; we thought we’d be taking all night getting it to come out after us.”

“Accident,” Eleazar said.  “My horse stepped on part of the hoard; got it caught in a shoe.  I think the thing was stalking us.  I’m so glad you’re here.”

“You’re entitled to part of the bounty, you know,” the captain said.  “Enough to keep you flush for a decade or more.”

“I’ll trade part of it for a new horse right now,” Eleazar said.  “And a medic’s kit, if you have one.”  He still had a job to do.  There was disease waiting for him, and now he had to buy Allan a new horse.

Ramtucko was still a couple of hours away.  Who knew what he’d run into between now and then.