# Chapter 1: The Wild Woman, the White Stallion, and the Girl Who Would Not Be Tamed
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 1 of "Mistress Of The Sun free digital audiobook". This opening chapter is called “Bone Magic,” and it carries us straight into 1650 France—a world of famine, plague, war, superstition, and one tiny girl whose heart is already galloping toward a destiny far larger than her small body.
The chapter begins with pure spectacle. A Romany woman in a crimson gown flashes past, standing on the back of a cantering horse. Her crown of turkey feathers quivers under the burning summer sun. The showman flourishes his black hat and announces “The Wild Woman!” The crowd cheers as the lathered horse speeds up, tossing its head, throwing off sweat and spittle. Its tail streams, its hooves pound the dust. The Wild Woman stretches out her hands, her diaphanous skirts billowing behind her, and slowly raises her arms to the cloudless sky. Then she shrieks a piercing war cry.
Watching, transfixed, is a pale girl—barely tall enough to see over the rails. She imagines her own thin arms outstretched, her own feet planted on a horse’s broad back. She presses her hands to her cheeks in wonder. Oh, the wind!
It is 1650, year eight in the reign of young Louis XIV—a time when people beyond the hamlets, caves, and forests were starving and violence ruled. The girl has just turned six. She is small for her age, often taken for a four-year-old—until she speaks, that is, with a matter-of-fact maturity far beyond her years. She wears a close-fitting cap tied under her chin with ribbons, her golden curls falling to her waist. Her gray serge gown is adorned with a necklace she made herself from hedgehog teeth. A pixie child, people call her, because of her diminutive size, her fair coloring, and her unsettling gaze.
She follows the Wild Woman with her eyes as the performer jumps from the horse, bows out, waves her feathered crown, and disappears. The girl pushes through the crowd. She ignores two jugglers, a clown walking on sticks, and a tumbling dwarf. She circles around to the sprawl of covered wagons on the far side of the hill. There she finds the Wild Woman pouring a leather bucket of water over her tangled hair, tin spangles catching the light.
“Thunder, it’s hot,” the woman curses. Her piebald horse with pink eyelids is tethered to an oxcart nearby. “What do you want, angel?”
“I want to ride a horse like you do,” the girl says. “Standing.”
“Do you?” the woman says, wiping her face.
“I’m horse-possessed,” the girl says soberly. “My father says.”
The woman laughs. “And where be your father now?”
The horse paws at the dirt. The Romany woman yanks its frayed lead and speaks in a foreign tongue. The horse whinnies, and a chorus answers. Horses. The woman tells the child they are in the back field and shoos her on.
The girl creeps between wagons and tents, making her way toward a clearing where four cart horses, a donkey, and a spotted pony are grazing. The tethered bell mare looks up, then returns to chewing moldy bran bread. The summer has been dry, and grass is sparse.
Then the girl sees him—a young stallion standing apart in the woods. He is fenced off from the others, one foreleg bound with a leather strap. He is a White, high in stature. His neck is long, slender at the head, and his up-pricked ears are small and sharp. Words from the Bible come to her: *I saw Heaven open, and behold: a White horse.* His eyes look right into her. *Sing ye!*
She thinks of stories her father told her—stories of Neptune sacrificing his Whites to the sun, stories of winged Pegasus. *Worship him that rides on clouds.* She thinks of the King, a boy not much older than she is, stopping the riots in Paris by riding into the fray on a White. *He who rides him is faithful and true.* She knows this horse: he is the horse in her dreams.
She picks her way across the clearing. “Ho, boy,” she says, her hand outstretched. The stallion pins back his ears, threatening to strike.
Meanwhile, Laurent de la Vallière turns his squeaky wagon into the rock-strewn field. He eases himself down from the driver’s bench and straightens, one hand on the small of his back. His military hat is plumed but stained, and he wears a cracked leather jerkin with patched woolen sleeves. His quilted knee breeches and sagging trunk hose, out of fashion for over half a century, are well patched and darned. Booted, spurred, and with a sword at his side, he has the air of a cavalry officer who has seen better days.
He ties the cart mare to a scrubby oak and heads toward the crowd. At the top of the path, a big Romany woman sits on a stump—the gatekeeper, he surmises. He pats his leather doublet, feeling for the rosary he keeps next to his heart, a string of plain wooden beads touched by Saint Teresa of Avila. *O God, chase from my heart all ominous thoughts and make me glad with the brightness of hope. Amen.*
“Monsieur de la Vallière,” he says, tipping his hat. He is well respected in these parts, revered for his doctoring and charity, but the Romas are a traveling people; they would not know him. “I am looking for a girl.”
A sudden breeze carries the scent of urine. “A girl, you say?” The woman grins, gap-toothed.
“My daughter.” Laurent holds out his hand, palm down, to indicate height.
“Fair, two front teeth missing?”
“She is here, then.” *Praised be my Lord.* He has been looking all afternoon. After searching the manor, he combed the barn, the dovecote, the granary, the dairy, and even the henhouse. He walked the woods and fields beyond, and fearfully paced the banks of the river before harnessing the cart mare and heading into town. It was at the dry goods store in Reugny that he heard talk of Romas with trick ponies. The girl is a fool for horses.
“She’s in the far field—with Diablo,” the woman adds with a throaty laugh.
The Devil? Laurent crosses himself and makes his way over the hill and through the tented carts to the field behind. There he spots his daughter crouched in the dust.
“Petite,” he calls out. She is surrounded by heavy horses.
“Father?” She stands up. “Look,” she says as he approaches, pointing to a white horse at the edge of the woods.
“Where have you been?” Fear overwhelms him now that he knows she is safe. “You could have been—” Vagrants are everywhere. Just last week, two pilgrims were murdered on the road to Tours. He stoops beside his daughter and takes her hand. *O Lord, I offer my ardent thanksgiving for the grace You bestow on me. Amen.* Her pale cheeks are flushed. “Little one, you must not run away like that.”
She is an impulsive, emotional child, full-hearted and independent, boyish in her ways. These are not qualities his wife appreciates. She is strict with the girl, making her sit for hours at an embroidery frame—but what can he say? Raising a daughter is a woman’s domain.
“I’m going to stand on a galloping horse,” Petite lisps through the gap in her teeth. She stretches her arms out, her wide-set blue eyes luminous.
Was it the Holy Spirit shining through her, Laurent wonders—or the Devil? It is easy to confuse the two.
“Like the Wild Woman,” she says.
The girl’s fantastical imagination is a concern. That spring, she constructed a primitive hovel out of stones behind the barn, her “convent” she called it. There she nursed broken animals back to health, most recently a spotted salamander and a goshawk.
“They said they would teach me how.”
“Let us go,” he says, taking his daughter’s hand. “I have bread rolls in the wagon.” If the Romas have not stolen them.
“But Diablo,” Petite says, looking back at the stallion.
“He belongs to these people here.”
“They said they’d sell him cheap.”
“We will go to the horse market in Tours next week. We will find you a pony, just as you have always wanted.” As it is, the girl will ride anything with four legs. A year earlier, she trained a calf to jump.
“You said the horses at the market can hardly walk. You said they are fleshless.”
“It is not a good year for horses, true.” Between the endless war with Spain and interminable uprisings, decent mounts are hard to find. Any four-legged beast left standing has been taken by one army or another. As well, the taboo against eating horseflesh does not apply in a time of famine. “But there is always hope. We will pray, and the good Lord will provide.”
“I prayed for this horse, Father,” Petite says. The stallion stands still as a statue, watching them. “I prayed for this White.”
Laurent stops to consider. The stallion’s legs are straight and his shoulders long. His head is narrow, like a ram’s: perfect. Although thin, the animal is broad in the chest. Horses of that rare milk-white color are said to be like water, spirited yet tender. He will be a beauty, no doubt, once curried and combed. His daughter has an uncanny eye for a horse, in truth.
“How much did they say they wanted for him?”
It takes four strong men—the muscle men of the show—to secure the stallion to the back of the wagon. The leg strap comes loose in the tussle. “Stand back,” one of the men yells as the beast lets loose, kicking out furiously.
What is wrong with that stallion? Laurent wonders. Even a horse born under a bad constellation would not have this degree of wildness. Had he been unsettled by battle? One sees that often of late, yet the White has no scars that Laurent can see, no telltale sword wounds.
“With respect, Monsieur—” Laurent turns with a start. The young man behind him has a face as black as a raven’s wing. His tunic is patched at the elbows and his head wrapped round with linen cloth. A Moor? A small fringed carpetbag is attached to a cord tied around his waist, but Laurent can see no sword or knife. He makes a quick supplication to Saint James the Moor-killer and reviews his state of arms: his rusty sword, the dull knife in his right boot. He breathes with relief to see a small cross around the Moor’s neck.
“I advise you to be cautious,” the young man says. “That stallion is uncommonly ill-tempered—evil, some say, although that is not a word I care to use, at least not with respect to animals.”
The stallion gives a high-pitched whinny.
“Father?” Petite says uncertainly, half-hiding behind her father’s legs. The beast lunges for one of the muscle men, teeth bared, and the man falls, his leather jerkin torn. “The Devil!” he curses, scrambling clear. Three urchins gather to watch and jeer, as if the scene were a bear-baiting, part of the show.
“He has been named Diablo for a reason,” the Moor says, gesturing to the lads to stand well back.
Laurent rubs his stubbled chin, in need of its weekly shave. He is puzzled by the Moor’s use of intelligible language. He had been given to believe that pagans were more beast than human. “I gather that you know this horse,” he says. Perhaps the Moor is the groom—a poor one, if that is the case. The creature has not been touched for some time, judging by his long splintered hooves and the mats in his mane.
“I am Azeem, a gentler. I train the horses.”
Petite speaks up. “Did you teach the donkey to sit like a dog?”
“You liked that trick?” The gentler smiles; his teeth are white and straight.
“I taught a goat to climb a ladder,” she says.
Laurent takes his daughter’s hand. Gentlers were born during the chime hours. Did they not have the second sight? “This horse looks none too gentled.”
“The Romas stitched his ears together when he was a colt, but it only made him vicious.”
Laurent makes a sound of disapproval. Stitching a horse’s ears together was believed to calm the animal—to keep it from kicking out while being shod, for example—but there was no magic in the practice, in his view. It served only to distract the horse, give it something to think about. Tying up one hoof did the job just as well. “Vicious, you say?” The rope is cutting into the White’s neck. The stallion is pulling so hard, Laurent fears the horse might break his neck.
“Aye. Bone magic is about the only thing that would turn him now,” the Moor says, signing himself.
Laurent frowns. He has heard talk of bone magic. One man he knew had used it to settle his horse, but then he himself had turned crackbrained. Gone to the river, been around water and streams, was how the neighbors put it, whispering among themselves. The man had only to tap on his barn door and it would fly open, as if the Devil were behind it. He claimed he saw the horse by his bed at night.
“Charlotte’s father used magic on his lame Barb mare,” Petite tells her father.
“Monsieur Bosse?” That horse had gone on to win three purses. Not that Laurent approved of gambling.
“Water magic, but maybe that’s different from bone magic,” the girl says.
“Forgive me, Monsieur,” the Moor says, addressing Laurent. “I should not have spoken of it in front of a child.” He stoops to face the girl. “Mademoiselle, whatever it is called—bone magic, water magic, toad magic—have nothing to do with it. Understand?”
“We do not hold with witchcraft.” Laurent pulls Petite closer, away from the Moor. The horse is tied securely now. It is time to move on.
“You are wise, Monsieur.” The gentler stands and makes a graceful bow from the waist, his hand pressing the cross to his chest. “It is the Devil’s power, and the Devil gives away nothing for free.”
Laurent’s stocky mare pulls the cart down the rutted laneway. His daughter sits beside him, looking anxiously back at the recalcitrant White. At first, the horse braces himself against the pull of the wagon, but the cart mare is strong and the ropes hold. After being dragged for a time, the stallion relents and follows along.
Petite asks if she can climb into the back of the wagon. “So that he won’t think God has forsaken him,” she says.
“Leave the horse be,” Laurent answers wearily. The stallion is a handsome creature, but his condition is pitiable. His wife will have a thing to say, that is for sure. “You will just unsettle him.”
Petite sits back down beside her father and bites into a bread roll, swinging her feet. “Was that gentler a Moor?”
“I believe so,” Laurent says as they approach Reugny. The spire of the little church can be seen over the treetops. He wonders if there will be news. The sun is at salute level—about five of the clock—and the mail rider from Tours might have arrived. Last he heard, Bordeaux, to the south, was in revolt against the Court, and the King’s forces had the city under siege. If Bordeaux proved victorious, anything could happen. The King might have to retreat behind the walls of Paris and abandon the countryside to the warring princes. What was left to fight over? France was like a shattered vase. The only thing people shared was poverty. Peasants were lucky to get fifteen sous for a day’s labor, the price of a basket of eggs.
How was it possible to go on living with such discord? Laurent feels for the copper coin sewn into the lining of his jerkin, the one engraved with the image of Henry the Great. That good king’s death had unleashed a century of mayhem. Every night Laurent prays that their young and most Christian King will put an end to the eternal bloodshed. The King is God’s representative; that is ordained. Surely he will triumph.
“I was going to the land of the Moors,” Petite says, interrupting Laurent’s thoughts.
“Oh?” he replies absently, pulling the wagon into a vacant lot across from the village green. Something is going on: a crowd has gathered to one side of the hanging tree. A great laugh goes up and then a hiss. A cockfight, perhaps?
“This morning.”
“You were going to the land of the Moors this morning?”
“To be beheaded,” Petite says. “Like Saint Teresa in the book. But that Moor was a gentler, and he didn’t have a sword. Or an ax.”
“Saint Teresa’s book?” Laurent asks, confused. Over time he has acquired a small library—some texts on husbandry and history, but largely religious and philosophical tracts. Among them is Saint Teresa’s account of her life, a slim leather-bound volume. How did his daughter know of it? “Did Monsieur Péniceau read it to you?” His son’s tutor had once been a Court scribe; he could read and write passably, but theology was certainly not his province.
“I’ve been reading it myself, but I’m only to page sixteen.”
Laurent turns to stare at her. “You can read?”
“Some words are hard.”
“Who taught you?” His daughter is precocious—that he well knows—but his son Jean, two years older, has yet to even learn his letters.
“I learned myself,” Petite says, standing and surveying the green. “Someone’s in the stocks.”
“Stay with the wagon,” Laurent instructs, making a mental note to inquire into this matter later. “I have to pick up some supplies at the apothecary.”
“Will Diablo be all right?” Petite asks, looking back at the White.
“He cannot go anywhere.” The rope is holding. “Do not let anyone near him.”
Laurent has walked only a few paces when he hears “Papa!”
A strapping lad runs across the crowded square, an angle rod in one hand and a bait bag in the other.
“Jean,” Petite calls out to her brother.
“They’ve got Agathe Balin in the stocks,” the boy tells his father breathlessly. He turns and points at the crowd.
“Why?” Petite asks.
“No mind,” Laurent says with a warning tone.
“For fornicating, Papa. With Monsieur Bosse, everyone’s saying. Go look, Papa. She’s covered in spit.” Jean’s freckled cheeks are flushed.
“Monsieur Bosse—Charlotte’s father?” Petite asks.
Laurent glares down at his son. “You are supposed to be at your lessons.”
Jean throws his sack and rod into the back of the wagon. “Where’d this horse come from?” He circles around to have a look. The horse snorts, white-eyed. “Is it wild?”
“Stay back, son,” Laurent warns.
“Mother!” the boy curses, jumping to avoid a smartly aimed kick. “That’s one mean beast.”
“He’s mine,” Petite says. “I prayed for him.”
“Little one, he is not a horse for a girl,” Laurent says, heading for the apothecary.
“What does ‘fornicating’ mean?” Petite asks, making room for her big brother beside her on the cart’s bench.
At home, the mood turns sharp. “What good is a horse you can’t ride or work?” Madame Françoise de la Vallière demands, her hands bloody from killing a rabbit for Lord’s Day dinner. She cuts off the head and snaps the legs to remove the feet. She is a pretty woman with round cheeks and a dimpled chin. Deep frown lines separate her thin plucked brows.
“I have yet to meet a stallion I cannot ride,” Laurent says with false optimism. He had needed the help of the ploughman and three field hands just to get the beast into the barn—with pitchforks and the whalebone whip.
“He tried to kick me,” Jean says.
“No news yet out of Bordeaux.” Laurent lets his running hound in by the back door. The dog hurries to her pups in the basket by the fire.
“They’ve got Mademoiselle Balin in stocks in town,” Jean says.
Blanche, the pock-scarred kitchen maid, turns her one good eye to stare. “Agathe Balin?”
Françoise raises her brows. “You don’t say.”
“For fornicating with Monsieur Bosse, everyone’s saying.”
“A married man.” Françoise cuts through the rabbit’s groin. “That girl has had the Devil in her from the day she was born.” She takes out the waste tube and cuts off the tail, then pulls the skin down over the body in one easy go.
“Everyone spat on her, and a dog was licking her face,” Jean says as he empties two eels out of his sack into a copper basin. “You should have heard her scream when I tickled her feet.”
“Good catch,” Françoise notes, gesturing to Blanche to take the eels outside to clean.
“And you should have been praying for the salvation of her soul, son, not tormenting the girl,” Laurent says with a sigh.
“Everyone was doing it,” Jean says, following the maid out the back door.
“He’s just a lad, Laurent,” Françoise says, cutting the rabbit’s stomach lining and removing the innards.
“He was supposed to be studying.”
“And she was supposed to be at her needlework.” Françoise glances over at Petite, who is stroking the hound by the fire. “She runs off, and the two of you come back with a horse. What kind of discipline is that?”
“A true White is rare,” Laurent says. The stallion even has blue eyes, something he’d heard of but never seen. “A noble breed,” he adds, thinking of the ancient inscription etched over the bedroom mantel: *Ad principem ut ad ignem amor indissolubilis.* For the King, love like an altar fire, eternal. These are the first words he sees on waking, the last words he sees before falling asleep. It has been his family’s motto for generations. His father’s great-great-great-grandfather rode beside Jeanne d’Arc. The King could count on a Vallière in troubled times, but Françoise is not a Vallière. She is a Provost, a family that tends to profit in troubled times. She will never understand the value of a horse such as this: a true Blanchard, a beautiful cheval blanc, the mount of kings. Not everything can be measured and weighed, not everything has a price.
“And he has conformation,” Petite says, nuzzling one of the pups.
“He has good conformation,” Laurent corrects. His old cavalry mount Hongre can hardly manage a trot anymore. He fancies himself on the White.
“Father’s going to breed him.”
“It’s not seemly to discuss such things with a girl,” Françoise tells Laurent under her breath. “As it is, she spends too much time with the horses. It’s time she started acting like a lady.” She plunges her knife into the breast of the rabbit, splitting it in two with one stroke.
The next morning, at the third cock’s crow, Petite moves quietly out the back door, a dry crust of bread in her hand. It has rained in the night. The moon is still visible, illuminating the outbuildings, the misty kitchen gardens, and the great trees beyond—a silent world of half-light. The cock crows again, answered by a chirping starling. Petite puts on her wooden sabots and picks her way across the puddled poultry yard.
She pries open the barn door, taking care to lift it as best she can so the rusty hinge will not squeak. She does not want to wake the ploughman asleep in the loft. Three swallows swoop by her. She stands in the dark, inhaling the warm scent of the horses, feeling their alert presence. Old Hongre nickers softly. The ploughman stirs, then returns to snoring.
Dim light shines through the window at the far side of the barn. A moment passes before Petite can make out the shapes of the horses and the two milk cows. On the wall above the harnesses is a silver-birch switch that keeps demons from riding the horses at night.
The White’s head appears in the corner stall and then disappears. Petite gropes her way along the feed bins and woodpile to where Diablo stands facing her, a ghostly apparition. “Ho, boy,” she whispers. He tosses his head. Handsome he surely is, the most beautiful creature she has ever seen. *Behold, thou art fair*, she thinks, recalling a line from the Song of Solomon. She longs to comb his matted mane, wash and oil his long white tail so snarled with burrs. The scabs on his haunches would clear with care, if only he would let her near him.
“Beloved,” she murmurs, the word dangerous and thrilling.
The horse pins back his ears.
She tucks the crust under her armpit to give it her scent, then holds it out on her palm, both offering and bribe. He turns his back to her, tail swishing.
Petite pops a bit of the crust into her mouth and crunches it noisily, watching with satisfaction as Diablo’s right ear swivels back. Patience is the companion of wisdom, her father has often told her, quoting Saint Augustine. She holds out her hand yet again.
The horse twirls and lunges, teeth bared.
The fall that year is stormy. On wet days, if she has to be indoors, Petite prefers dusting the books in her father’s small study, and she likes best to do it while her brother Jean is at his lessons in the sitting room. That way, she can listen as she works, learning Latin and even a little history. On this particular rainy November morning, a fire crackles in the hearth, and Monsieur Péniceau reads aloud from *Consolation of Philosophy*, a translation of Boethius.
“‘Happy is that death which does not thrust itself upon men in their pleasant years,’” the tutor recites, his voice high and strangled.
Through the open door Petite can see Jean resting his head on the table, one cheek on the back of his hands, his eyes closed. With his turned-up nose, dimpled chin, and dark curls, he looks like a cherub, the very image of their pretty mother.
Petite opens the window shutters to let in light and pulls up a step stool so she can scan the spines of the books nearest the window. One appears to be a book of Latin verses on hunting. Another—*Histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes*—is a pigskin text with a gilt-stamped spine. As far as she can tell, the books on this shelf are the more practical texts: on animal husbandry, herbs, and trees.
She takes down the dog-eared text of medical recipes her father consults when tending the ill and impoverished. Petite knows this book well, for she often goes with him on his rounds. The day before, they visited a woman and three children who lived in a cave in the rock escarpment. The youngest had cut his leg setting a trap, and Petite’s father bandaged it with clean linen. At the head of the boy’s bed of dried leaves was a cross made from twigs. The woman bowed low before her father as they left, pressing his hand to her forehead as if seeking benediction.
The book, so often used, is not dusty, but Petite wipes the cover with her rag anyway and slides it back into place. In that small gesture, we see her hunger to learn, her tenderness for the wounded, and her quiet rebellion against the narrow life being carved out for her.
Reader’s Impressions & Star Rating: This opening chapter is a masterclass in atmosphere and character. It gives us a France that is both grand and broken—war, famine, superstition, and glittering royal dreams all pressed together. Petite is instantly unforgettable: tiny, fearless, strange, and achingly human. The White stallion, Diablo, is more than an animal; he is a symbol of wild nobility, divine mystery, and the dangerous pull of destiny. The tension between Laurent’s faith and Françoise’s practicality feels painfully real, and the appearance of Azeem and the talk of bone magic adds a delicious shiver of the supernatural. The chapter ends with Diablo lunging at Petite, and the effect is electric. I was left breathless, worried, and utterly hooked. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.8 / 5 Stars
Next Chapter Prediction: I predict the next chapter will show the aftermath of Diablo’s attack—or near-attack—on Petite. She will not give up on him. If anything, his violence will deepen her resolve, because she sees something sacred and misunderstood in him, just as she sees herself as out of place in her family’s ordinary world. I also suspect we will learn more about Azeem and the “bone magic” warning, perhaps through a rumor, a dream, or another encounter. Meanwhile, the political backdrop of Bordeaux, the young King Louis XIV, and the Vallière family motto will begin to pull Petite’s story toward the French court. The White horse may be her first step toward a future no one around her can yet imagine—one that will place her close to the Sun King himself, with all the passion, danger, and heartbreak that implies.
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