Following The Night of the Red Horse, the supernatural element follows through in the rest of the series. In The Magic Pony, Jinny helps to get an elderly dying tinker (traveller) woman, Keziah discharged from hospital so she can die on the moors with her family in the fresh air as she chooses – and also a couple of other tasks need to be completed before her death….

Shantih at this time is lame after a fall when Jinny was recklessly galloping her over a wall on the moors. Jinny fears that she has broken a bone in her foot and the vet has arranged for Shantih to be boxed down to Glasgow with another horse for an x-ray.

With Keziah successfully discharged from hospital and Jinny at home on her own, she sees the party of tinkers including Keziah approaching Finmory. When they arrive, they proceed up to Jinny’s attic room and Jinny follows them as if in a trance. There is a bowl with special plants burning, and Jinny is handed a paintbrush. With a background of chanting and using special paints, Jinny, still as if in a trance repaints the Red Horse mural on her wall.

Afterward Keziah is exhausted but asks to look at Shantih’s foot, she diagnoses that there is poison in the foot and she knows how to make up a poultice that will draw it out.

A week later, Jinny removes Shantih’s poultice to find that it was a shard of stone that had been driven into the sole of her foot that made her lame (Would the vet not been able to figure that one out? 🤔) and Shantih is now totally sound again. Jinny gallops Shantih up to the bothy where Keziah is staying, just in time to witness her death.

Additional notes:

The other story in this book is that Jinny also rescues an elderly pony, Easter from a run down riding school. The pony ends up being euthanised in the next book (Ride Like the Wind) and her blindness to Easter’s suffering is another Jinny moment that annoys me.

Also in Ride Like the Wind, it is implied that the power of the Red Horse helped Jinny, Shantih and Kat Dalton escape from the rip tide they were being swept away by.

The paints that Jinny used to repaint the Red Horse mural were then given to Jinny after Keziah passed away with the words that she wasn’t to use them but to keep them until ‘an old one came along’. Well….. That’s another story….