Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar (42 page)

“I’ve seen some of her work,” Godric said, herding her effortlessly and tactfully away toward the barn that was nearest. “It’s very good, and some is rather radical. Have you seen her new girthing system? I’m not entirely convinced, but ...”

Egil looked from the two retreating backs to Larissa, whose smile made him smile in return. “Is he really only training the young horses?” Egil asked.

“Young riders, too, of course,” Larissa said. “He’s good. We’re lucky to have him.”

Cynara lowered her head and went back to grazing. Egil leaned against her shoulder, suddenly and completely comfortable.

It said a great deal for Larissa that she watched him without an excess of envy. Yearning, yes, and maybe a little sadness. “What is it like?” she asked. “Do you ride as you would a horse? Or is there something else—something more?”

Cynara’s tail swished at flies; her jaws worked rhythmically, cropping and chewing. She was amused, he could feel it, but there was compassion, too.

“It’s different when the creature you ride can understand the words you speak or think,” Egil said, “but not as different as you might imagine. Mostly, when I ride, it’s a dance: two bodies moving together through constantly shifting space. That’s the same with a Companion as with a horse. The harmony—I’ve seen you ride; it’s not so different.”

“But Companions don’t need training,” she said.

“Do horses, really?” Egil asked. “A horse knows how to be a horse. What he has to learn is how to do it while carrying a rider. Companions are much the same. Except of course, with them, there’s no illusion of submission.”

“That’s true of the great horses, too,” Larissa said. “Those that are born for the dance, they know. They will share their joy in it, but they never precisely submit.”

Egil nodded. She understood perfectly, as he had known she would.

 

“I don’t trust that woman,” Bronwen said.

She had dogged his heels to the room he had been given. It happened to be next to hers, but she showed no interest in either privacy or sleep. Everyone else in the school had gone to bed: morning came early, and there was a long day of work and study ahead of them all.

Egil would have been happy to shut and bar the door and get some peace and quiet himself, but she was his intern. He had an obligation to instruct her. “Madame Larissa is one of the greatest living masters of the equestrian art,” he said. “There is nothing suspicious or untrustworthy about her.”

“Are you sure?” Bronwen demanded, dropping down onto the bed and tucking up her feet.

That did not bode well for an early night.
Patience
, Egil willed himself. “What should I not be sure about?”

She hissed at his maddening insistence on answering a question with a question, but for once she consented to play the game. “Something is odd here. The weather we had to ride through, the way we got out of it—that’s not normal. And now we’re here, and it’s as normal as anything can possibly be. It doesn’t fit.”

“It does if this place has nothing to do with the strangeness,” Egil said. “It’s a genuine school, and these really are horsemen. Very good ones, from what I’ve seen so far.”

“Just because they’re good with horses doesn’t mean they’re good people,” she said.

“True,” he said, “but it’s hard to be this good at it and be wicked Mages, too. Evil taints a soul; we’d sense it, most likely, and our Companions certainly would. Cynara isn’t alarmed at all. What does Rohanan say?”

Bronwen tossed her head. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“So? I thought you were going to look for evil Mages in the town?”

“I’ll do that,” she said stoutly, “and look for them here, too. So should you, if you can spare time from drooling at that woman’s feet. What was she, your first love?”

“Yes,” he said, and that took her quite nicely aback. “She was the first person I ever saw ride who made me understand that riding is truly an art, and worth studying for itself. Thanks in large part to her, I’ll study it for as long as I’m alive and able to balance myself in a saddle.”

“Oh,” said Bronwen in a gratifyingly small voice. “That kind of love. Believe it or not, I can understand it. I had one of those, too, when I was too young to know better.”

“It’s a good thing,” he said, “to have an example to follow.”

“It depends on the example,” she said, springing to her feet. “For me, it was you.”

She left him with that. It was a nicely dramatic exit, he had to admit, though it did not embarrass him nearly as much as she might have hoped.

Egil woke in the dark. He knew at once where he was and why, and somewhat of the when. The air had the taste and the texture it always had just before dawn.

Struck by the desire to breathe it fresh from the source, he left the bed, went to the window, unlatched it, and swung it open. Cool, soft air bathed his face, sweet with the scents of grass and flowers. He drank it in blissful gulps.

The stars were bright overhead, with neither cloud nor moon to dim them. He found the pole star and marked the shapes of constellations rising in the east that, later in the summer, would stand high overhead.

The sky rippled suddenly, as if he had cast a stone into a pool. He staggered, clutching the window frame. When his eyes opened again, it was as if he stood underwater. Wave after wave ran outward from the center of the sky.

:Cynara!:
he cried inside his head.
:Cynara, for the love of gods! What is happening?:

:Strangeness.:
Her reply was as serene as ever. As if she had power to quell whatever had turned the sky to water, the eerie ripples slowed and eventually stopped. The stars were still again. The wind blew soft, bringing the first of the morning light.

 

No one mentioned what had happened, and Egil decided to keep it to himself. They all must have slept through it.

He entertained the brief thought—he almost called it hope—that he had imagined it. But the shock was still in him. Well after the sun came up, he caught himself looking upward, as if the sky would turn strange again and this time would swallow the world.

Nothing that he saw that morning was anything but sane and earthly. The horses were as fine as Godric had promised, and the riding and training were very good indeed. He was privileged to meet Madame Larissa’s new stallion, who showed great promise, and to see her ride him with even more skill and grace than Egil remembered.

No one asked anything of the Heralds—they would not dream of it—but Godric and Larissa between them inveigled Egil into riding Cynara in one of the arenas. Cynara was glad to dance again; she had missed it on the journey.

So had Egil. Riding across country was a fine and useful thing, and pleasant enough apart from rain and mud and wind. But this was the thing he lived for, this art, this dance of horse and rider.

At first he was stiff and self-conscious, but Cynara’s rather too obvious air of indulging his frailty brought him to order. He forgot who was watching and let himself enter into the place where his heart truly was.

The world was different there. Words dropped away. Thoughts, hopes, fears were dim and distant things. The dance was all there was. Two bodies so very different and yet so clearly meant to dance together, joined in balance and harmony. The air was a living thing around them, enfolding each movement, shaping and transforming it.

For an instant, at the heart of it, he understood ... something. Some very important thing about what the sky had done and why, and who had caused it.

The instant slipped away. The dance unraveled. Cynara stood in the center of the arena, washed in applause and cheers.

Egil needed to go back. He had to try to see. The answer was there.

But Cynara had had enough. People were offering other mounts—horses trained with exquisite skill and artistry. Part of Egil wanted to grasp at them all, but the part that shared its soul with Cynara said,
Wait.

Egil did not want to wait. But he trusted no one else as he trusted Cynara, and for today, she was done. What riding he did after that was marvelous in itself, but he never went back to the place where the answers were. He never even came close.

The Queen’s sources had been right. Whatever was happening here, it had something to do with the school. Whether it was dangerous—he hoped not, but he was afraid that it might be worse than that. Very much worse.

 

Heralds’ training instructed him to share his thoughts with his intern, but he was not entirely sure what they were yet. She was already suspicious, and that was a good thing. No need to swell that suspicion until he had something solid to tell her.

That night he went to bed early and woke even earlier than before, but this time nothing happened. The stars stayed in their places, except for a handful that fell in a shower of silent silver rain. Meteors were a wonder in their own right, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The next few days were among the most pleasant he could remember. To be among horsemen all day, every day, sharing what he knew and learning so much more, was his personal dream of heaven.

Bronwen did not share his obsession with the art of riding. Once she had won the awe of all the students with her bright hair and her splendid mount, she grew quickly bored. By the second morning, she demanded leave to explore the valley.

Egil granted it. Cynara would make sure Rohanan stayed in contact, and there were always students willing, not to mention eager, to play escort. At the very least, she would keep herself occupied—and if she did find anything, Rohanan had orders to report it instantly.

Cynara would enforce those orders. Meanwhile, Egil was free to indulge himself. He was aware always, of course, that he had a mission, and that everything he did should aim toward that end.

After a handful of days, Egil began to wonder what had happened to the moon. It should have been new when they arrived in Osgard, but that was days ago. And yet every night was the dark of the moon. No thin sliver of new moon appeared to wax night by night toward the full.

No one else seemed to notice. He detected no signs of a spell; everyone was normal, and the horses were unperturbed. Yet the sky at night was crowded with stars, and the moon never rose at all.

The following morning, Egil was up hours earlier than usual. By full light he had Cynara saddled and ready to ride.

The arena in which he usually rode was already occupied. That was a minor inconvenience: there were other arenas, and most of those were empty. But he paused to watch, because there were eight riders—a quadrille—and one of them was Larissa on a fine black stallion.

Cynara was happy enough to have her reins looped up and be turned loose to graze for a few moments more before she went to work. As Egil watched, Godric paused beside him, halter in hand, on his way to fetch the first training candidate of the day.

“This is the new quadrille,” Godric said in Egil’s ear. “They’ll perform it in public at midsummer, when the local gentry come to see what we’re up to this year. That’s when the new students arrive, and the young horses, too. It’s a great event all around.”

Egil nodded. Others had mentioned that as well. It was still the better part of a month away, and while he was loving this interlude, he was practical enough to acknowledge that by then he should be back in the Collegium.

All the more reason to absorb what he could, while he could. The quadrille was a courtly dance of riders and horses, usually set to music, though there was no musician here to set the rhythm. Larissa and seven of her best young riders on matched blacks transcribed a series of intertwining figures, moving in a smooth skein that Egil knew from experience was anything but easy to achieve.

His admiration gave way to a peculiar uneasiness. It was rather like the sensation that had brought him to Osgard, and rather like a voice singing just perceptibly off key. It was a lovely, an ingenious quadrille, beautifully ridden, and there was something deeply wrong with it.

:Do you feel it, too?:
he asked Cynara.

She had already lifted her head to watch the dance. Her nostrils flared; she shuddered, a ripple of the skin over her whole body. The sight of it made Egil’s own skin crawl.

:Tell them to stop,:
she said.

He had never felt what he sensed in her just then. She was calm—she fought for that. Just how hard, he could see in the rigidity of her neck and the perfect stillness of her posture.

:They have to stop,:
she said.

Egil’s fingers were numb as he fumbled with her reins. When he touched her, sparks leaped. He flung himself into the saddle with nothing of his usual grace.

She barely waited for him to settle before she reared up on her hindlegs and screamed.

No horse, even dying in agony, had ever made such a sound. Even the wind stopped, appalled. The quadrille staggered to a halt; riders clapped hands over ears, and horses bucked and plunged.