Question about horses

[alnaperera]

I am writing a sort of fantasy adventure thing and it involves horses. I have no experience with them whatsoever, so I have a few questions.
1) would a horse be okay with a trip that's ~15km, roughly 100m drop but with minor ups and downs and a pretty low grade throughout (say a maximum of ten degrees for very short stretches, sustained is more like one degree)? How long will this take? What about the return trip?
2) how would they react to this being at 2 in the morning? One horse is the rider's best friend pretty much, the other horse has never met the rider before but assume it's a nice horse. The second rider is also very experienced, just not with this horse.
3) how will the react to a bicycle being a part of the party?

Editing to add a bit more context.
The party consists of the following:
1. Horse A and character A, both used to each other (in town, around town, exploring hills, committing crime together).
2. Horse B and character B. Horse B is my biggest variable because they will appear for just this trip, that's it. Generally used for riding around farms and getting to nearby cities and stuff, I don't imagine this horse being one of those big farm horses. Character B is from a culture that is very horse based and has been riding since she feasibly could, mostly training with war horses.
3. Character C and bicycle. Character C has no riding experience whatsoever and needs to arrive at the destination in reasonable shape, hence the bicycle.
The trip happens early in the morning what would be the rough equivalent of northern hemisphere early March, temperatures would be in low single digits C and warming up slowly to low double digits.
The roads are reasonably well lit for established cultural reasons.
Character A and Character B can both see in the dark much better than the average person.
They also need to start the return trip almost immediately afterwards, though they can reasonably get some rest about 2 kilometers in.

Comments

[spark]

I am not very horsey although I have some riding experience, but I am a farmer in a very rural area. If the scenario is that three people need to make an urgent journey and the transport available is horses plus a bike, and one of the people has no riding experience, then I would think it more likely that they would take three horses and just have the horse for the inexperienced person on a leading rein. Especially if the journey is likely to be at horse walking pace, not requiring gaits that are harder for an inexperienced person. A combined horse/bicycle group is going to be much more inherently awkward for reasons others have discussed.

Of course if you want it to be the bicycle for plot reasons there's no reason you shouldn't, but personally I find three horses more likely.

Also, I would be surprised that the roads are lit in a rural area without many cars, they are not lit where I live aside from the bits where they pass through villages. But again perhaps your worldbuilding accounts for that :)

[winterbird]

Seconding this! Like literally to the point where if a bicycle was needed for plot reasons, it's almost better to have a collapsible one that's on a calm/steady/seen-everything horse's back like a second rider, wrapped in fabric/textiles to cushion it.

Bike + horse is awkward as hell, bike 'carried by horse' is actually way more understandable, especially if they're draft horses or cold-blooded / warm-blooded horses that are used to other forms of work as well!

(Also seconding that farm roads aren't generally lit at all in rural areas here either, that's extremely unusual. Even in times where horse was the *only* method of travel outside of like...walking, roads were even less likely to be lit in rural areas).

[sunshine304]

Agree with the awkwardness of a mixed group of horses and bicycle. A horse isn't that fast when just walking, at least not for someone on a bike comfortably driving next to it. When my family had horses, I used to take my horse out into the fields on a lead while I drove my bicycle. When she walked, I also walked and pushed the bike along. I only sat on the bike when she trotted or cantered, otherwise it just didn't work.

But as mentioned, you could take a bike along if one character really isn't able to stay on a horse at all. If the horses are used to carry things, it wouldn't be too difficult to strap a foldable bike to a horse's back.