Ever obedient, Si'Wren complied and waited to see what was up.
Ibi turned and waved an arm to signal someone unseen just beyond her range of vision in the next room, and an exceeding rough-looking character stepped in. The newcomer, with as many fighting scars on his skin as any other might have had tatoos, was dressed in a leather skirt supported by wide, criss-crossed leather straps across his hairy chest and over the tops of his bulging, heavily muscled shoulders.
He had a leather thong across his dark, thick, unkempt hair, and sandals fastened by calf-straps like a soldier or professional sojourner. He carried a sword in his right hand, and the presence of dirt and grime on him was self-evident by the smell.
The newcomer entered and greeted Ibi formally, and -at Ibi's bidding- turned and looked upon Si'Wren with bold, appraising eyes that were unusually bony across the brows, while his blunt, step-ladder nose looked as if it had been broken and rebroken many times, and his ears had been boxed so many times they scarce resembled ears anymore. The newcomer was clearly not a man to be fooled with.
He also stank like an animal. His odor filled the room, but she was used to being around animals from having spent her earliest years as a slave, so that she really didn't mind that nearly so much as she might have, had she been noble-born instead. It just made him that much more imposing and disquieting to be around.
His face was hard and unflinching, and his eyes were openly appraising of everything he saw as if he were already preparing for the battle. She felt his eyes on her, sizing her up. Not that there was all that much of her to be sized up, she being so small for her age.
"You want to give spurs to this chicken?" the newcomer ventured, with an skeptical look that Si'Wren found somehow insulting.
"Aye," Ibi sighed with a studious nod of his haggard, hoary old head and long, flowing white mane. "Do what you can, Mearch. It is our Emperor's desire that she should learn to do more with horses than to look at them. I'm getting too old to ride along with his Majesty on the odd excursion, so a competent replacement has been wanting for some time. I have any number of young male understudies, but his majesty has taken a fancy to the girl. Anyway, you're to set her up with her own mount, and see that she learns how to handle herself on four legs as well as two."
Si'Wren's eyebrows quickly raised in astonished hope, disbelief, and anticipation.
For her—a horse?