“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 a
rrive, 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.
With that one enormous eruption of fear and rage and sorrow, the tension had gone out of Cynara. She pawed the sand, ears flat, snapping teeth in the startled face of Larissa’s stallion.
Larissa was incapable of being truly angry at a Companion, but she was visibly out of temper. “That had a purpose, I hope,” she said.
Egil scraped his wits together and put them in some sort of order. “Those figures,” he said. “Where did you learn them?”
“They’re my own,” she said without either anger or defensiveness.
He shook his head. He did not mean to be tactless, but Cynara’s scream still was echoing inside his skull. “Something inspired you. Didn’t it?”
“Well,” she said, “yes. There’s an old book in the library, full of patterns like these.”
“Show me,” said Egil.
“These are spells.”
Egil had known as soon as he saw the quadrille. The book from the high shelf in the library, with its ancient and battered cover and its crumbling pages, had done nothing to change his mind. The drawing on the page confirmed it.
He did not recognize the language in which the book was written, except that it was old. How old, he was almost afraid to guess. On each page was a pattern, deceptively pretty, like something a lady would embroider on a coverlet.
Any coverlet embroidered with these would be weapon enough to start another Mage War. Egil forced his eyes to slide past them and not sink into them, trapped within their curves and corners. Each one was a maze to bind a spirit, along with any powers that spirit had.
“Why did you choose this one?” he asked, not quite pointing at the page Larissa had marked for him.
She shrugged. “It seemed the most ridable,” she said. “It has a flow to it that suits a horse’s gaits perfectly.”
Egil looked for signs of deception, but her eyes were clear. She might be an accomplished liar; that was always possible. He could not bring himself to think so. Horses were the most honest of creatures; anyone who trained them truly well could no more lie than a horse could.
There was a difference between lying and self-delusion. “Did you know these were spells?” he asked her.
“Not at first,” she said, “but after a while I began to wonder. There’s a pattern to them; they flow from one to the next. They’re protective spells, I think. Wards. They bring safety to whoever works them.”
“Did someone tell you that?”
“No,” she said. “It’s a feeling I get when I look at them. They make me feel safe.”
That was not the effect they had on Egil at all. This was far outside any sphere of competence he might lay claim to. It needed a Herald-Mage, and he was as mere and ordinary as a Herald could be.
“I have to send word to the Queen,” he said. “In the meantime, I’m afraid I have to ask that you choreograph another quadrille for your festival—and not one inspired by this book.”
Larissa frowned. She was not angry, or else she was trying hard not to be, but he could tell she was confused. “Why, sir? Is there a law against it?”
“You don’t know what you’ve done, do you?” As soon as Egil said that, he regretted it. She was his elder; she was by far his superior in the art of horsemanship.
He stiffened his spine. He was the Queen’s Herald, and Selenay had sent him on this mission. Now that he was here, he had begun to realize just how serious this problem was.
Larissa obviously did not. “I haven’t been working spells,” she said. “I’ve been riding patterns, that’s all. As training exercises, they’re quite ingenious.”
“They’re more than training exercises,” Egil said. “Have you by any chance been wondering what happened to the moon?”
She stared at him. “The moon? What does that have to do with—”
“I’ve been here for eight days,” he said. “I haven’t seen the moon once. That comes on top of other anomalies—the Queen gave me a fairly lengthy list. You’ve been riding these patterns since last autumn, am I right?”
“Yes,” she said, “but—”
“The weather has been exceptionally mild here, yes? Has it rained since autumn?”
“Rained and snowed both,” she said, “in appropriate amounts. We haven’t been suffering.”
“Have you not?” said Egil. Gingerly he picked up the book, not touching it with his skin, but wrapping it in a napkin borrowed from the kitchen. “The Queen will want to see this.”
“Of course,” she said.
She was not alarmed. That could be simple confidence, or it could be something else. Everyone here was just a little too much at ease.
Protected, he thought. Wrapped like the book in folds of soft and smothering magic.
Bronwen brought the next piece of the puzzle, one that he had begun to expect, but it was no easier to hear. She found him in Cynara’s paddock. It was the one place in Osgard where no one would dare to disturb him.
Bronwen had no such compunction. “I think we’re cut off,” she said. “Every road I try that looks as if it should lead out of the valley just circles around and brings me back in. The people I talk to don’t seem to understand when I ask what’s happening. ‘Why, nothing, ’ they say. ‘Why do you ask?’ Have they all lost their minds?”
“Not exactly,” Egil said. “They’re under a spell. You didn’t happen to find a Mage, did you?”
“Not a one,” said Bronwen. “I did talk to the village midwife, who has rather more of the Healer’s Gift than she’ll admit to, but all she could say was that everyone is very, very safe. ‘All but the moon,’ she said. ‘It must have said something indiscreet.’ I have no idea what she meant by that.”
“I’m afraid I do,” Egil said. He was not feeling it yet. He could not afford to, because then he would break and run screaming. :Cynara, is it true? Is the rest of the world gone?:
:It’s still there,: she answered. Her white calm washed over him. The gibbering fear had retreated; he could think clearly, or near enough. :We’re just not attached to it any more. I can sense the other Companions, but they’re distant. They’ve never seen anything like this.:
:What, none of them? N
ot even one of the Grove-Born?:
:None,: she said.
He looked into Bronwen’s face. She had been speaking to her Companion, too: her eyes were wide. “What do we do?” she asked.
The question fell on Egil’s shoulders with the weight of the lost world. She was not pretending superiority now or falling back on arrogance, either. He was the Herald whom the Queen had sent to instruct her. She needed that instruction.
The one sensible thought he had had, to pack up and take the book back to the Queen and let her deal with it, was no longer a possibility. There was no Mage to undo the magic. No one here had the power or the will to try. The spell protected them from their own defiance.
“But why not us?” Egil asked.
:Because of us,: Cynara answered.
Of course, Egil thought. Heralds were protected by a power greater than earthly magic. The spell recognized that and let them be.
It was a clever construct, but not quite clever enough. It could not seem to distinguish between protecting its charges and subtly but surely destroying them.
Osgard was a prosperous valley, rich in crops and livestock; it might survive for a long time. But in the end it would die of its own isolation.
The people were feeling it already, sinking into passive acceptance of the strangeness around them. From what Egil knew of magic, that meant that the spell was feeding on them, absorbing them into itself.
“We’re not Mages,” he said. “We’re barely full Heralds. We’re an intern and a fool who has been avoiding his duty since he came back from his first mission.”
“And two Companions,” Bronwen said with remarkably little temper. He pulled her around, glaring into her eyes, but the spell had not sunk its claws in her.
Yet.
She reversed his grip, caught hold and shook him. “Stop it! Stop thrashing. The Queen sent you here. She must have known what she was doing.”
Egil had serious doubts of that. Selenay had asked for a horseman, not a hero.
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