This is a reblog of a post; the original post is linked after my comments.
I didn’t use horses in Wings of Twilight for one simple reason: I forgot until I was two-thirds of the way through the first draft. Then, I decided that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation why Strom & company weren’t using them: horses and their upkeep are expensive. Strom was leading his band on a misguided, self-righteous crusade, not exactly the kind of thing that would leave them rolling in dough.
Much to the chagrin of one of my editors, I had the characters acquire mounts in Scars of the Sundering, though. It was like introducing a whole new slew of characters, and since the traveling groups in that series were rather large, that meant a lot of tracking whose steed belonged to whom.
Pancras acquired Stormheart, a blue roan stallion
Gisella rode Moonsilver, a white mare
Delilah acquired Fang, a nailtooth (kind of like a rideable velociraptor)
Kale acquired Blackclaw, a nailtooth
Kali acquired Taavi, a nailtooth
Edric rode Yaffa, a pony
Qaliah acquired Comet, a piebald gelding, named after the Comet the Wonderhorse from the Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.
Lord Fenwick rode Shadowmane, a black stallion
Valora rode Quincy, a dwarven battleboar (so named because I thought it was funny)
In my next World of Calliome novel, horses will once again feature as mounts for the characters. I’m not quite ready to reveal the characters, but we’ll have Pepper (a dapple grey gelding), Socks (a chestnut stallion with white legs), and Silvermane (a silver dapple gelding). For you lovers of all things equestrian out there, I don’t go into as much detail as George R.R. Martin; I’m not really telling a story of a knight and his horse, plus, I write stories that are a little more fast-paced than A Song of Ice & Fire.