Magic Tree House #49: Stallion by Starlight (A Stepping Stone Book(TM))

famous horses of all time. Historians believe he was taken captivein Thessaly and was probably four years old when he was brought to Macedonia.
    Bucephalus was wild when Prince Alexander first laid eyes on him. The prince managed to tame and mount him before a crowd that included his father, King Philip II. Thereafter, the horse became the magnificent and beloved warhorse of Alexander the Great.
    For my story, I imagined that Bucephalus was a magnificent horse before he met Alexander, and that perhaps something had happened in his past to make him resist new riders.…
    To find out more about horses that did heroic deeds, read the Magic Tree House Fact Tracker:
Horse
Heroes
!

You’ll love finding out the facts behind the fiction in

    Turn the page to read an excerpt.
    Excerpt copyright © 2013 by Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce.
Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Sal Murdocca.
Cover photograph copyright © NaturePL/SuperStock.
Published by Random House Children’s Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

In the time of knights and castles, knights rode a type of warhorse called a
destrier
(DES-tree-er). Destriers weighed twice as much as other horses. They hadextra strength to carry knights wearing heavy armor into battle.
    Farmers wanted large horses for farmwork. Many of the biggest horses today come from hundreds of years of careful breeding. The largest, tallest, and strongest workhorse is the
Shire
horse. The English have been breeding Shires for 800 years. They can weigh more than 2,200 pounds and be over twenty hands high!
    Among the fastest horses today are Thoroughbreds. Thoroughbreds are relatives of Arabians. The English began breeding them for racing in the 1600s. They are still racing today. These tall, light horses usually reach speeds of about forty miles an hour. There are millions of Thoroughbreds all over the world.



The Tea Horse Road wasn’t actually a road. It was a series of paths covering almost 1,400 miles from China to Tibet. Beginning about a thousand years ago, men, women, and mules hauled millions of pounds of tea from China to trade for Tibetan horses. The trails were very dangerous. The workers faced raging rivers, steep valleys, rain, snow, and mountain passes 17,000 feet high. Some carried loads of over 300 pounds on their backs.
    When they got to Tibet, tea was traded for horses. The Tibetans bred strong, fine horses. The Chinese needed them to fight off hordes of nomad raiders. At certain times as many as 25,000 horses a year arrived in China from Tibet!
    The trade in horses continued until the end of the 1800s. After that, the Chinese traded tea for goods like gold, medicine, silver, and cloth. Traffic on the trails didn’t stop until 1949. Today much of the trail has disappeared and is covered with weeds or concrete highways.

Coming in July 2013!
    Jack and Annie find out about the greatest magician who ever lived: Harry Houdini!

    Learn how to do your own magic tricks with Jack and Annie!