The Hollowfield Ash-Mare

Among the older unresolved entries in the rolls of the Lantern-Wardens is the beast the marcher folk call the Ash-Mare: a horse-shape seen on the field of Hollowfield about the anniversary of the battle fought there in 236 AS, riderless, unsaddled, and by every account faster than any mounted pursuit. The wardens have never classed her. No rising of the Unquiet, man or beast, has ever been confirmed on that field in the seventy-six years since the battle, and the mare has therefore been logged as a sighting only, a thing almost without precedent in the order's rolls. The archive sets down here what the wardens have logged, what the Khaddan say, and where the two accounts refuse to meet.

Appearance

Witnesses agree on little and agree on it firmly. The thing has the shape of a tall mare, gaunt as a steppe horse in a hard spring, grey going to black at mane and tail, her coat dusted pale as if with lime or chalk. She is most often seen at dusk on the long shallow valley between the chalk ridges, near the Tor Stone, in the three nights about the battle's anniversary in late summer. She leaves no print in frost, mud or chalk-dust, though the grass where she has stood is found flattened in the morning, as if lain upon by a real weight.

Her eyes are dull, the shepherds of Nether Stow say, until a horn is sounded, a name shouted, or a song sung on the field; then she turns her head all at once, in the manner recorded of the walking dead, and comes. Whether she comes to answer or to trample is the point on which no two accounts agree.

What the Khaddan say

The Khaddan name the field itself the Field of the Empty Woman, and their riders will not camp on it. Of the mare they speak without hesitation: she is one of theirs. The horse-clans hold that when the host of Khagan Temmet broke in 236 AS, the horses of the dead were left where they fell, ungathered, a thing the clans reckon a debt still owed. The Ash-Mare, by their telling, is a steppe mare come back to look for her rider, and she will run the field every year until someone names him to her.

Certain clan singers go further and say the mare is not searching but waiting: that she stands at the head of the valley through the anniversary night and only runs when she is chased, and that she has never once been seen to flee unpursued. This detail, repeated in camps a week's ride apart, is the sharpest difference between the Khaddan telling and the wardens' log. It was put most plainly by a horse-master of clan Uzek, whose words a Saverran factor took down at Thornwick fair.

You chased her and you lost her, and you call that a haunting. We have watched her stand in one place from dusk to dawn, facing the stone. A horse that waits is not a ghost. A horse that waits has orders.

What the wardens have logged

The first warden record is a marginal line in a sighting tally of 241 AS: a grey horse upon the field that would not be counted. Fuller entries follow in 267, 288 and 309 AS, all filed under sightings rather than risings, for the order will not write Unquiet of a thing it has not burned, bound or buried, and the mare has never suffered any of the three. The wardens' version runs thus: the mare appears at dusk, runs the length of the valley once from ridge to ridge, and vanishes at the northern pits where the battle dead lie unburned. Two wardens of the Thornwick contract rode after her in 288 and were outrun within half a mile, their horses blown and one lamed; the entry notes, in a careful hand, that the mare's hoofbeats were heard long after she passed from sight, though the ground where she ran bore no mark.

It will be seen that the two accounts cannot both be right. The Khaddan say she waits and is chased; the wardens say she runs and is pursued. One warden's annotation of 309 AS attempts the reconciliation that she does both — that she stands facing the Tor Stone until approached, and runs only from wardens — but the same hand adds, below, that no living thing can know her intent, and the archive repeats the caution.

Encounters and dealings

No killing by the mare is proved. The worst recorded harm is the lamed horse of 288 and a shepherd boy found insensible on the northern ridge in 296 AS, who woke speaking of the battle in a tongue he did not know and forgot it by morning. The wardens call her grave by caution rather than evidence. The posting itself — two wardens on the ridge for the three nights, lanterns written and lit — has acquired its own name in the rolls, the Anniversary Watch, and is among the few contracts the Thornwick lamphouse will not let lapse, even in years when no lord will pay for it.

• Wardens posted to the field on the anniversary carry their written lanterns and do not give chase; pursuit is held to be the one sure way to make her run.
• Horns, drums and songs are forbidden on the field for the three nights, by long custom of Nether Stow rather than any ordinance.
• The Khaddan leave a halter of plaited horsetail at the valley's edge in some years. It is always gone by morning. The wardens do not record who takes it.

One thing the archive cannot set down to anyone's satisfaction. The dead of Hollowfield were buried unburned in long pits, and yet no rising has ever been recorded on the field in seventy-six years — a quiet that the wardens call fortunate and do not explain. Whether the mare is bound up with that quiet, or is something left over from Maera Tor's working, or is only a mare, is a question the rolls leave open. The Khaddan, asked the same, say only that a horse is easier to bury than a debt.