A horse like this was a once in a lifetime ride.

Feeling the stallion beneath him bunch, the jockey leaned back a fraction in the stirrups. The starting gate loomed ahead of them and the scent of the other stallions was sending all the wrong signals. Raising the volume on his murmured stream-of-thought commentary, he used the blur of words to lure the stallion back under control. He'd never liked match races, half of racing was the chess-like skill of maneuvering the horses around each other, compensating for a bad track, bad draw, or any of a thousand other things.

This time it would just be the two horses.

Three, three horses, he reminded himself. As if he could forget that disaster of a horse they had added at the last moment. The pair was like an untrained swordsman, deadly in their unpredictability. He shifted slightly as the stallion tensed and Cyclone snorted in frustration, wanting nothing more than to batter down the midnight upstart. But this was their race, not the Black's, their chance to prove once and for all that Sun Raider would always come in second.

Nothing could stop them now...