Fantasy series before 2000's. Main character is a girl. Can communicate telepathically with a horse. [s]

[Jacki]

Late 1990's early 2000's I read a fantasy series which I forget the title of. The main character was a girl. The story involved magic. I remember she had a "quest" of sorts where she and a group pretended to be gypsy. She had a horse she could communicate with telepathically. She couldn't ride a horse and the horse would continually buck her off if she wasn't gripping with her legs. Any ideas?

[Tab]

Jacki, do you remember anything about the covers?
Any other characters like villains, friends, family, etc?

Was it a series of more than 3 books?

[Jacki]

Not sure on the cover. I believe there was some kind of a school of magic involved. The scene of the book that I remember the most is when the group are trying to escape after being captured and they had to jump on raft horse included. Either the horse or the main character didn't make it because they got separated at this point. I think there was a boy in the group as well. I don't think it was a long series. Any help you can give me would be appreciated.

[Jacki]

They had trouble at the school categorising her type of magic.

[M. Lee]

I'm pretty sure this is The Farseekers, the second book in the Obernewtyn series. Gahltha, the horse, was abused and hates humans, but agreed to go on the quest because (if I remember correctly) they wanted a representative of each of the groups on the quest. The school is more of a refuge (and a work camp in the first book), but they're separated into guilds based on their power - some people have two Talents, with one usually being stronger than the other, but Elspeth (the main character) has three, and they're all powerful.

(The powers are more ESP-like than straight up magic. There's 'Farseeking', which is basically telepathy, Coercion, Empathy, Healing, Futuretelling, Beastspeaking, and 'Teknoguilding', which is basically technopathy.)

[Jacki]

Fantastic work M.Lee!! Thank you so much.