Outside a large house, in the Jorvik City area that the locals called Millionaires’ Row, a pink car was parked with its engine running. A young girl dressed in riding gear, with her blond hair pulled back into a hairnet-covered bun, dashed outside. She was tall and lanky, and walked slightly bent over as if she hadn’t quite grown accustomed to her height yet. The vast courtyard was
flooded with harsh lights. Looking down, she noticed a tiny smudge, probably a grass stain, on her riding pants. “Shoot,” she muttered under her breath. “Good thing Mom didn’t notice it
at breakfast.”
Her mom’s voice echoed from the hallway, “Have a good day
at the stable, Anne! I know you’re going to win this competition. You always do!”
“See you later,” Anne called back as she rushed to the car.
She opened the door to the car that was going to take her to Jorvik Stables outside Jarlaheim. But before she could climb into
the car, something caught her eye and she stopped abruptly. She
squinted up at the sky then took a step back, blinded by what
she saw.
A bright light was dancing across the sky. The last stars lingering in the early morning sky formed a constellation that looked like a giant sun.
“Weird,” she mumbled. “The sun isn’t even up yet.”
“Come on Tin-Can! Give it all you’ve got!”
The girl asking for a canter had messy, tawny hair and an open, lively face that brimmed with curiosity and mischief. Her bright brown eyes matched the color of the horse she was riding. Together they flew down the forest road. It was so early that even the birds were barely awake, but Alex had come to cherish these brutally early rides on Tin-Can, her best friend and constant companion. At this hour, they had nature all to themselves.
The trails were all theirs, as was the dark forest with all its secrets, and the clearing where she often saw rabbits hopping around. Even the road back to the stables was usually quiet and deserted.
Alex liked to go fast and was never in the habit of slowing down. She liked to say that it was both a gift and a curse, and her teachers all agreed. Still, just a moment ago she and Tin-Can were standing motionless. The sky was on fire, twinkling so brightly she had to stop and look.
She saw a bright constellation shaped like an angular lightning bolt. It was a spectacular sight. She suddenly thought of her neglected Instagram page, but before she had time to take out her phone to snap a photo, the stars faded into the pale light of dawn.
Alex Cloudmill had lived on Jorvik all of her life. It was the only place on Earth she could ever imagine herself being. She almost felt sorry for all the people who had never experienced the beautiful island she called home. Especially on mornings like this one.
She pushed herself forward in the saddle and steered Tin-Can toward a ditch. They could clear it effortlessly and continue swiftly through the trees, racing toward the road that would lead them back to the stables where mucking out stalls, feeding, and grooming awaited.
They didn’t see the van until it was almost too late.
Lisa and her dad were just reaching the top of a long incline when a horse and rider suddenly came bursting out of the trees at a raging gallop. Her dad slammed on the brakes and the van screeched to a halt.
The horse, a small, muscular golden chestnut with a long, wild mane reared up and nearly brought his front hooves down on the hood of their van. Lisa just about stopped breathing.
In all the commotion, a saddlebag flew free from the horse’s back and landed on the ground beside the van.
Both Lisa and her dad rushed out of the van.
“Oh my god, I’m sorry!” the rider exclaimed, softly petting her horse in an effort to calm him down. “I didn’t think there would be any cars out and about this early. I hope we didn’t scare you.”
Lisa thought the girl looked remarkably calm for someone who had just barely avoided being run over.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lisa’s dad replied. “But you should try to be more careful. Watch where you’re going from now on.”
He didn’t sound angry, just worried. And the girl nodded in agreement.
“I promise. Sometimes I go too fast. My name is Alex, by the way.” Her brown eyes were fixed on Lisa. “Alex Cloudmill. And this maniac,” she said tenderly while patting her horse, “goes by the name of Tin-Can.” Tin-Can responded by chomping away at his bit and looking like he couldn’t wait to get going again.
“Lisa Peterson,” Lisa said, raising her hand to pet Tin-Can.
She could feel the horse’s muscles rippling under her hand and flinched, taking a step back. Alex’s eyes sparkled.
“It’s nice to meet you, Lisa Peterson,” Alex said. “Maybe I’ll see you again soon.”
Lisa was about to ask which school Alex went to when Alex suddenly clicked her tongue and rode off. At that moment, Lisa noticed the saddlebag lying on the ground.
“Wait, Alex! You forgot your . . .”
She picked up the saddlebag and held it up, but Alex was already out of earshot.
“. . . bag,” she mumbled faintly as she watched the horse and rider, who were already halfway down the hill, disappear in the distance.
On the opposite side of the road, halfway hidden under a big tree, a rider, draped in a long, gray cloak, was sitting astride a gray horse and watched the van drive off. She urged her steed on and rode after them, but neither Lisa nor her father would see so much as a trace of her today. Not yet. She was biding her time, like all of Jorvik.
3
Later that day, the temperature in Jorvik soared. It was the warmest September day the island had experienced in a long time. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
The perfect day to explore the island, Lisa thought.
One thing was certain: it was not a good day to move. Especially when your father had convinced himself that they could get by just fine without a moving crew. “We’ll have everything done and dusted by ourselves in an hour or two,” he’d said. Yeah, right. Lisa rolled her eyes. It felt like they’d been carrying stuff back and forth from the van for ages.
“Almost done,” her dad said, giving Lisa an encouraging nod.
She turned around and looked out across the vast lawn that bordered an even larger meadow. When her dad triumphantly told her they would have their own house on Jorvik, she had pictured some kind of modern, wooden house. Maybe something like the terraced house that they had lived in outside of Oslo before making the move to Jorvik.
She had pictured tiny, well-kept gardens and identical houses that almost touched at the property lines. Instead, her dad drove right through the suburbs and continued down a narrow, winding, gravel road until they stopped in front of an old cottage.
The closest neighbor lived on the other side of the meadow. The house that was now theirs—Lisa couldn’t quite think of it as home just yet—was slightly crooked, with mullioned windows, twisted vines climbing up the walls, and overlapping, cinnamon-colored shingles on the slanted roof.
“This will be good for us, don’t you think?” her dad had asked as he put the key in the lock. He then stepped aside so Lisa could enter and take a look around.
Lisa took a quick look around the house without answering, and then set to work unloading the boxes and bags from the back of the van.
The mountain of boxes and carrier bags in the van had become considerably smaller a good few hours later. But carrying was becoming more difficult and the heat didn’t help.
Thankfully, they had been allowed to rent the house furnished from her dad’s new employer, so at least they didn’t have to move any heavy furniture. The sun was shining right in Lisa’s eyes, and she wished she could remember where she had packed her baseball cap. Sweat trickled down her back, gathering in little puddles inside her T-shirt.
She puffed and panted.
Her dad laughed. “Are you getting tired? It’s just a few more, okay? I can bring in the last ones if you’d prefer to start unpacking your room. Then I figured we’d head into town for pizza? That would be nice, right?”
Lisa just nodded. She couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened with the girl and her horse a few hours earlier. She shuddered when she thought about how close the horse’s flailing hooves had been. It had been years since she has been that close to a horse.
The thought made her stomach turn—and not only with fear for the horse. There was something else, too. Something that had lain dormant inside her since . . . since Mom. Maybe even since before that. This something was somewhere between curiosity and longing. Well, that and the mountain of fear. There should be a word for that feeling, Lisa mused.
She often found that words failed her; they were not enough. That’s when she turned to music. She always managed to find a movement, a melody, or a song that matched her mood. Colors have songs. Days of the week. Even people.
She thought about which song would best describe her encounter with Alex. A movie soundtrack, maybe? Woods. Darkness. A softly clinking piano and swelling strings. Dramatic percussion whipping up a faster beat. She could feel the melody inside her now. It slowly filled her until time and space floated away. The strings morphed into a different instrument. A harp, maybe? Weird.
“Ow!” Lisa squealed when a moving box fell onto her big toe.
“I’ll take that one,” her dad said, grabbing the box and walking toward the stairs.
Lisa straightened up. She slowly worked her way back to the present, the hallway, the boxes. Her tender, throbbing toe. What was it she had just been thinking about?
Yes. She remembered. She needed to return that girl’s saddlebag. Alex. Even though she’d promised never to set foot inside a stable again. But the saddlebag probably contained things that Alex surely needed. Keys, for instance. Lisa went to find the saddlebag and opened it. She felt like a pickpocket, rifling through the contents of the bag, but it couldn’t be helped. She hoped to find more clues about who the girl with the unruly horse might be, and she wasn’t disappointed.
In the bag, she found a set of keys with a keyring that had “Jorvik Stables” written on it in blue, slightly smudged ink. The keyring was in the shape of a happy-looking horse staring at a bunch of carrots. Lisa felt like the horse was almost smirking at her.
We had barely been on this island for five minutes before a horse appeared and there was almost another accident, she thought.
And yet, something was pulling her toward Jorvik Stables. Something irresistible and mysterious. She could clearly hear the melody.
It continued to rise within her along with the strong harp notes that wouldn’t subside. But she couldn’t quite sing along with the lyrics yet. Suddenly she didn’t care that she was sweaty, or that the bright September sun was hurting her eyes.
“Dad? How far is Jorvik Stables from here?”
“I think it’s pretty close. Why don’t you ride your bike over there tomorrow? I’ll show you the way on the map. And you have your phone, too, in case you get lost.”
“Bike?” Lisa asked, confused. She didn’t have a bike.
“Didn’t you see the blue bike in the driveway?” her dad replied. “It’s for you. A gift from my employer. Isn’t that nice?”
Lisa nodded, suddenly realizing how tired and hungry she was. How lovely it would be to sit down at the kitchen table with her father, eat pizza, and talk about what they were going to do with their new house. How they were going to make it a home and not just a place to live. And then they would talk about all the exploring they were going to do, and all the excursions they were going to go on when her dad was off work. He’d already promised that it was going to be different this time: You’re supposed to work to live, Lisa, not live to work. I need to get my bosses to remember that.
So, the stable tomorrow. Lisa knew she was too exhausted to go anywhere today. And the shower she was about to have would be the most longed-for shower of her life.
“If it’s all right, I wouldn’t mind staying here when you go into town,” she said. “I want to shower and unpack a bit.”
“Of course,” her dad replied. “I’ll pick up some other supplies for the house while I’m at it.”
She heard the creaking of the old hardwood floor as he walked away and then the sound of the front door closing behind him.
Lisa walked upstairs to her new room. She fiddled around randomly without doing any real unpacking. She paused, holding a framed photograph of her and her mom. Through the window she could see her father in the driveway, talking on the phone.
The bedroom was spacious, but not much bigger than her old one. The bed looked new, as though someone had just removed the plastic. It was made up with a checkered bedspread and purple and green pillows. Lisa smelled the air to see if there was a trace of perfume from whoever put so much effort into making Lisa and her father feel welcome. But she got nothing other than a hint of wood from the large desk at the far end of the room.
She wondered if that was brand new, too.
So far, only one thing revealed that the room belonged to Lisa: the nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, which she had made sure to carry in before anything else and immediately hung up over her bed. It felt important to get the guitar in place right away. She reached out and gently strummed the strings.
The room had a sterile feel to it that took her back to the hospital room three years before.
The single chair sitting next to the bed.
The white sheet that had been pulled up to her mom’s chin.
These memories brought on the tears again, and this time Lisa couldn’t stop them. She sat down on the bed and sobbed.
After a little while, she dried her tears and stood up. She decided she was going to have that shower now. Her legs trembled but didn’t buckle. She wasn’t going to be weak; that wasn’t an option now.
The bathroom was sparklingly clean—almost sterile.
That won’t last, she thought to herself, and smiled a little. Neither she nor her dad were particularly tidy.
Sitting on the sink was a small hand soap that looked expensive and luxurious. When she peeked behind the shower curtain, she discovered shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel. Big, fluffy towels were stacked up on the towel rack, folded just like in a hotel.
Who was her dad working for again? Did they look after all their employees this well?
She lingered in front of the bathroom mirror. The girl looking back at her looked tired. Otherwise, she was the same as always. Her disheveled red hair, the strangely shaped birthmark made up of freckles on her cheek. Since she first started to wear makeup a few years back, she’d been trying to hide it with foundation and powder. It kind of worked, but maybe she shouldn’t bother. Sometimes she wondered if she should just accept that the birthmark was a part of her, just like her taste in music and love of cheap chocolate.
It had been a long time since she had allowed herself to break down like she had just then. She did feel lighter now as a result and broke her eye contact with the mirror. Lisa began to think again about all the boxes in her room. She decided the best thing would be to try to get settled in as quickly as possible. Get rid of that cold, hotel-room feeling.
Maybe Jorvik could be the place where she and her dad finally settled down, forgetting the past few horrible years and really starting over. This thought hit her at the same time the shower of water touched her skin. Through the open window, she heard her dad whistling in the driveway as he arrived with the pizza. She smiled and thought that she’d try, at least.
And yes, she would go over to the stables tomorrow and return the saddlebag to Alex. That’s the kind of thing the new Lisa was going to do. S
he turned off the water and stepped out of the shower.
“Welcome to Jorvik, Lisa Peterson,” she whispered.
4
During their first night in the new house, Lisa dreamt of riding a horse. She’d had the same dream before, more times than she could count. The details weren’t always the same—there were little shifts in time and space—but Lisa always thought of it as “the dream.” Sometimes the mood in the dream was dark. Sometimes it was light, like that night, and she wasn’t afraid of riding. Fear belonged to the darkness.
Together with her horse, which was a beautiful light gray color with a long, bluish mane, she flew across green meadows and over a babbling brook. She and the horse were the perfect team. The canter was smooth and flowing. Lisa’s commands were almost unnoticeable.
Lisa knew this horse well. It had been appearing in her dreams since she was a little girl.
In elementary school, she drew a blue mane and tail on all her horses. Her teachers tried to persuade her to try other colors. One even began to wonder whether Lisa might be color-blind. Surely Lisa knew that’s not what real horses looked like? But Lisa stubbornly insisted. This particular horse did have a blue mane and tail. She knew it did, because that’s how it had looked in her dreams.
It had been a long time since Lisa had dreamt about this horse. And yet, it still felt familiar. It felt like coming home. There was a time when she had welcomed this nightly dream. But then it turned into a nightmare after her mother’s accident.
Had she come home now? Finally? Ever since she was little, Lisa had felt an inexplicable urge to be somewhere else. She didn’t know much about what this other place might be. Where to find it, or if it even existed. But she knew, without understanding why, that that horse lived there. Could Jorvik possibly be that place?
In the dream, it was sunny. Birds were singing. The whole setting was almost too perfect.
But even so, Lisa could feel anxiety surrounding her, like a cloud suddenly invading a clear blue sky. The birds stopped singing. Darkness fell quickly, and the day was relentlessly chased away by a thick, sticky gloom.
Soul Riders (Book 1) Page 2