Clockwork Boys (Clocktaur War, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

Hours passed, like a kidney stone. Slate stopped thinking, stopped feeling anything. It was easier to do that. If she wasn’t there, she wasn’t feeling the horrible chafe against her thighs, the ache in her hip joints, the dryness of her eyes and nose and tongue. She went away inside her head for a while, in a kind of meditative misery. There was nothing but the horse. There had never been anything but the horse. Possibly she had been born on a horse. She was undoubtedly going to die on one.