You will hear the horse before you hear anything else, and you will hear it from a long way off, because it does not hurry. It has never once had to hurry.
The rider carries his own head at the hip, turned outward, and it is grinning — not with malice, only with the fixed and dreadful cheer of a thing carved for the purpose. The eyes in it move. They go over the hedgerows and the shuttered windows and the byre door, and they are looking for a particular face, and it is not usually yours.
They say gold turns him. They say a bolt across the door is nothing to him at all.
When he stops, he speaks one name. Only ever the one.
Bar the door anyway. It costs you nothing to bar the door.
