WHO: @rodolphuslcstrange WHERE: Wickermann Racing Stables & Stud, outside of Newmarket, Suffolk. WHEN: 17th April, 2003.
Rarely, lately, did Bash stray far from his bed before noon — he was a creature of the night, these days, a ghostly sprite prone to prowling the halls of the estate after dark and riling up the family portraits when the moon was too bright and his mind too restless to surrender so easily, lest it be one of the nights the terrors came. Even rarer still was the sobriety that currently sat upon his shoulders like an ill-fitting coat, and without the comfort that the stifling of his senses provided Bash found himself at the mercy of the morning’s elements — of the Spring sun, sweating through his riding coat and assaulting his eyes, of the loudness and the smell of the beasts their family had always been so fond of, snorting and stamping and rustling and flapping in the stables.
His fingers massaged dully at his eyelids like it might diffuse the tension throbbing behind them, but without the warmth of something to dull the whispers in his brain he felt like an exposed nerve, being prodded at. It was a familiar feeling he had largely come to associate with being in Rodolphus’s company. “Rolf,” even his name was wielded as a complaint, born of all the practice a bratty younger sibling could muster over forty-two years of life, “Would you just pick a damned horse already. You know that I’m going to—” two lengths ahead, the impatient stallion at the end with the mean kick “—win, no matter who you pick.”
Bash had always had the knack for picking horses.
It was certain in the same way that Bash had already found his riding jacket, hanging on the back of his wardrobe door this morning. A curious and unacknowledged truth that Bash would cheerfully not notice beyond a stroke of luck after being improbably ousted from a fitful two hours of sleep to be beckoned to the family’s favoured (and most lucrative) pastime.
He liked to think he also had a knack for picking his brother’s intentions — and an early morning jaunt to the stables may have not been on Rabastan’s social calendar but things were rarely spontaneous in Rodolphus’s orderly, neat little world. He’d planned this. This was probably about his little sidetrip to Hogsmeade.
