Epona

In the grandfathers' time, when few yet living had been born, the People worshipped the horse, and served him, and took the gifts that he gave them: his meat, his hide, the milk of his mares. But he had not yet granted to men the greatest gift of all: the gift of riding on his back, and racing the wind. Sparrow is a shaman's daughter in a tribe that forbids women to be kings, to be shamans, to be anything but silent and tractable servants to the all-powerful men. They may not ever ride the horses that are the life and soul of the tribe, or even approach them, for fear of angering the gods. But Sparrow knows another story, a story of the woman who first rode a horse, and her brother who took both the horse and the glory away from her. Sparrow sees visions and dreams dreams–and her brother the shaman takes them from her and presents them as his own. Then the most sacred of all horses, the embodiment of Horse Goddess herself, claims Sparrow for her servant, and sends her on a journey that will change Sparrow and her people forever.

Long years after the White Mare came to the people of the Mothers, bringing the wild horsemen from the sea of grass and changing the world forever, the world is changing again. The Mother of Lir is dead, her heir cast out amid dire omens. War is coming–such a war as the people have never seen, fought with a new and terrible weapon: the chariot. Rhian, potter's child and White Mare's chosen, ventures with Emry the prince of Lir into the sea of grass and undertakes to steal the enemy's weapon. But that enemy is not at all what they expected. In Minas, prince and maker of chariots, and his mother Aera, they find a remarkable and deadly kinship–and forge an alliance that will be both the destruction and the salvation of Lir.

In a time before history, in a land of legend, where wild horsemen wage endless war across a sea of grass, the last descendant of the White Mare's servants follows a sacred vision beyond the edge of the world. There she finds a land ruled by women, whose people have no word for war. But the horsemen are coming. The White Mare's daughter must try to stop them, and both save and change the world.

For a long, brutal century, the Kingdom of Lower Egypt has been occupied by the 'Vile Asiatics,' the conquerors called the Shepherd Kings. With their horses and chariots they overwhelmed the armies of Egypt and swept over the Delta and the sacred cities. Iry, daughter of an old noble house, the Sun Ascendant, has been enslaved by the bearded conquerors. But her new master is born of a different blood, son of the priestess of an ancient rite, the cult of the Horse Goddess and her avatar, the White Mare. The Mare's priestess-servant is dead-and the Mare chooses Iry, the child of a land without horses, to be her successor. Meanwhile, in the wider world, the Pharaoh of Upper Egypt is arming to take back the lost kingdom. He forms such an alliance as his ancient land has never seen before, with the seafarers of Crete and the White Mare's servant, and rides to war against the Shepherd Kings.