Rajko_ilic_gara_sa_golije_rajkova_gara -

He didn't use a saddle; his hands were too stiff to buckle the straps. He threw a heavy wool blanket over her back and pulled himself up with a groan of pain. They stepped out into the white abyss.

Gara pushed on. Her powerful chest acted like a snowplow, her muscles steaming in the sub-zero air. She didn't stop when a branch snapped under the weight of snow, sounding like a gunshot. She didn't stop when the scent of a wolf pack drifted across their path. She walked with the relentless, stubborn cadence of the mountain itself.

The wind on the ridges was a physical wall, screaming down from the summit of Jankov Kamen. The snow was powdery and deep. Any other horse would have panicked, sinking into the drifts, but Gara knew the mountain. She felt for the solid ground beneath the snow with a surveyor's precision. When the path vanished entirely under a ten-foot drift, she skirted the edge of the abyss, her hooves finding purchase on ice-covered rock where a single slip meant death for both.

"Keep going, Gara," he wheezed into her ear. "Just a little further, my girl."