Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

by Mercedes Lackey

  To his surprise, she did not fling herself away from the table and run off to her room in a temper as she would have done when she was his student. Apparently she had grown up a little, though she was still very much a child.

  It was the child who muttered, “Good, because I can’t stand you.” But the older Bronwen, the one who had earned her Whites, added grudgingly, “We can work together. Rohanan says we have to—he’s in complete terror of Cynara.”

  :True,: Cynara said from her vantage point in Egil’s mind. The smile had curved his lips before he thought to stop it. Again to his surprise, he saw a similar one on Bronwen’s. Her Companion must have said much the same.

  They did not have to like each other. But they could share a moment of mutual amusement, Herald to Herald.

  That was the last such moment they shared between the inn and the valley. Three days of riding in beautiful weather stretched to five as they turned off the South Trade Road and ran headlong into a siege of summer storms. Wind and lightning and torrential rains turned the roads and tracks to mire and made riding a misery, but Egil was oddly reluctant to find an inn or a farmhouse and wait it out. The worse the weather was, the more restless he became.

  That, Bronwen declared early and often, was ridiculous. This was perfectly ordinary, early summer weather, a bit ill-timed but in no way unusual.

  Egil could hardly disagree. Every Herald knew by now what hostile Magecraft looked like, and this had none of the signs. And yet there was that itch in the region of his tailbone, which nothing but riding onward could scratch.

  Cynara had no objections to offer. She said nothing at all of praise or complaint. When the rain soaked her white coat until the black skin showed through, or the little stream she had begun to cross swelled suddenly into a chest-deep torrent, or the smooth road ahead turned out to be a sucking quagmire, she lowered her head and set her ears and slogged silently on.

  So did Rohanan. Bronwen was by no means silent, but she did not turn back, either. She had the stubbornness that a Herald needed, the devotion to duty that could take her to the borders of death if need be.

  Egil had not thought he was that devoted. For years it had been his secret shame. But in the wind and the rain and the occasional and increasingly rare moments of sun, he found he had no desire to turn back. The Queen needed him. Therefore, he would do as he was ordered.

  By the sixth day, Egil had begun to wonder how many weeks it would take them to reach Shepherd’s Ford. The town must be flooded, if the weather there was anything like what it was here. Every stream they met was brimming over the banks, and while no bridges were out as yet, water was lapping over the highest of them.

  They had had to camp in the rain the night before, and it seemed they would have to do it again tonight. The only inn along this stretch of road stood on the banks of a river, and its lower floors were flooded out. The best the innkeeper could do was direct them toward the nearest high ground and wish them luck.

  The days were long at this time of year, and Egil could see clear sky ahead. Cynara was not averse to going on, though he was less sure of Bronwen. When they sloshed past the hill, on which a fair-sized village of tents had sprung up, she seemed hardly to notice.

  He frowned. Was the girl ill?

  :Rohanan says no,: Cynara replied, though he had not meant the question for her.

  Egil trusted Cynara implicitly. Even so, he had the same strange feeling just then as he had about the weather. Something was odd and growing odder the farther he rode.

  The promise of brightness floated ahead, always at the same distance. The rain slackened, but the clouds above the Heralds were as thick as ever. Thunder grumbled inside them.

  Egil’s thought brought Cynara to a halt. Rohanan went on a few strides but then stopped as well, turning his weary head and drooping, dripping ears to stare at them.

  “We’re riding in circles,” Egil said.

  “We’re not.” Bronwen’s retort was pure reflex. But then she twisted in the saddle, staring as her Companion did, in a kind of baffled anger. “What do you mean? The road is as straight as it’s supposed to be. We haven’t repeated any turns.”

  “We haven’t,” he agreed, which only baffled her the more. “Oddities, the Queen said. Strange things surrounding a certain valley to the south. We push on through storms that refuse to stop, moving slower and slower, and now we’re at a standstill. We seem to be moving, the land seems to be changing, but the horizon never shifts.”

  “That’s what it does,” she said. “It’s the horizon. It’s always in front of us. We can’t ever reach it.”

  “We can’t,” he said, “but what’s under the horizon ought to change. And it’s not.”

  Comprehension dawned in her face. “It’s like one of your classes. Question after question, and the answer’s never any nearer.”

  “It’s never any farther, either. The answer is always right in front of you. You just have to understand how to see it.”

  “Well, how do we see this?” she demanded.

  “We stop asking the same question over and over,” he said.

  She did not understand, but her Companion did. His head came up; he snorted. His tail lashed like an angry cat’s. Even Bronwen’s unshakable seat rocked visibly as he launched himself upward toward the line of light that had tantalized them for so long.

  Cynara gave her Herald more warning. It was the highest jump she had ever tried. The mud sucked at her; the rain and wind tried to beat her back. She shook them off with as much impatience as he had ever seen in her.

  The storm rose like a wall, crested, and sank away. Egil braced for the landing—even a Companion might come down hard after such a leap.

  She landed like a feather in a wash of clear golden light. Egil stared at the green field around them, the clear sky overhead, and the sun riding low over a line of deep blue hills. There was no sign of the storm.

  None at all. Heralds and Companions were dry, warm, and unvexed by muddy feet.

  “Now that was odd,” Bronwen said. “It must have been magic.”

  “Or something like it,” he half-agreed. “This must be the Osgard Valley, which means that Shepherd’s Ford must be—”

  :There.: Cynara’s head was up and her ears were pricked. The field rolled down from where she stood toward the setting sun, and a cluster of walls and roofs lay not too far ahead, with the glimmer of a river running through it.

  The river was running high and quick, as it should in the spring, but it was well shy of flood stage. Wherever the rains had been, they had not caused trouble here.

  The town was a clean and pleasant place. It was full of gardens, all in bloom, and there were two inns, both of which looked well and tidily run. Egil might yet find himself lodging at one or the other, but the tickle in the tailbone that had brought him here was urging him to look at the riding school before he went anywhere else.

  It had been market day in the town, and a few booths were still up, selling spring lettuces and bright ribbons and an array of saddles so fine that even in his current state Egil would have stopped to admire them, if Bronwen had not pushed on past.

  The last thing he needed was to lose his intern just before they reached their destination. She was drawing all the attention, as usual; people saluted or called greetings, and a few edged a little too close, trying to touch her Companion.

  Cynara could have tolerated that, but Rohanan was young and a stallion and it was spring, and within a furlong he was ready to jump out of his skin. Bronwen did not look too comfortable, either.

  Cynara established herself beside and a little behind the younger Companion, presenting her broad and well-muscled hindquarters to the next hand that tried to take liberties. Egil smiled down at the white-faced man who had felt a hoof pass within a hand’s breadth of his skull, nodded amiably, and rode on.

  The word spread as quickly as he had hoped. Look, but don’t touch.

  In some towns, that would not have been enough. This was a
town of horsemen. People got the message. They even seemed not to resent it.

  The riding school stood on the western edge of the town, surrounded by a patchwork of fields. Egil glimpsed horses grazing on the new spring grass as he rode past neatly kept fences toward the tall wooden gate. It was handsomely carved with scenes of horses at work and play, and riders winding in skeins through a chain of oval arenas.

  He had little time to study the carvings. The gate swung open before he had a chance to pound or shout, showing a sandy yard within and a short and wiry man in well-worn riding leathers, whose face broke out in a broad and astonished grin. “Egil! Cousin! What in the world are you doing here?”

  “I might ask the same of you,” Egil said.

  His cousin Godric’s grin grew even wider. “I just came here a month ago. I’m in charge of training the young horses—they have so many, and such quality, you can hardly imagine.”

  “I’ll be eager to see,” Egil said.

  “Oh, you’ve heard of us?” Godric seemed delighted. He extended his welcome to the younger Herald and both Companions, calling stablehands out to look after the latter and herding the Heralds into what must, in its time, have been a baronial manor.

  It still kept the grandeur of its carvings and stone-work, and the floor had been paved with mosaics. But the furniture had been made more for comfort than for looks, there were warmly woven rugs over the cold paving, and the once enormous rooms were broken up into clusters of apartments. The smell of leather and horses permeated the place in a way that Egil found quite pleasant.

  The grand hall was now half library and half dining commons. Godric led the Heralds into a hubbub of voices, the clatter of crockery and cutlery and a mouth-watering promise of dinner.

  The sight of two strangers in Whites stopped the conversation cold. There must have been fifty people in the commons, men and women of various ages and sizes and shapes, but they all had a familiar look, one that Egil had learned to recognize when he was small. They were all horsemen.

  They saw it in the Heralds, too; their eyes warmed, and their faces relaxed. There was no head table; people seemed to sit in groups by age and apparent experience, but Egil judged that was more a natural human impulse than a school rule.

  The table to which Godric urged him was one of those in the middle. Most of the people at it were young, around the age of senior Trainees, but several were older. One, a woman of middle years, as weathered and wiry as Godric, stood and held out her hand.

  “Welcome to Osgard Manor,” she said. “It’s a great honor to see you here.”

  “I believe the honor is mine,” Egil said.

  He was not merely being polite. She was older than he remembered, but then he was not a wide-eyed boy any longer, either. She still had the perfectly erect carriage and the exquisite balance even on foot that had made her one of the great masters of the horseman’s art.

  “Madame Larissa,” he said, bowing over her hand. “Now I understand why the world has gathered here to learn the art of riding.”

  She accepted his homage graciously, as a queen should, but then she said, “Honor for honor, sir. It’s a small world we inhabit here, and you’re the first of the Queen’s own to grace us with your presence. Dine with us, please, and afterwards, if it’s not terribly presumptuous, might I be introduced to your Companions?”

  The hunger in her eyes startled Egil. It was not that he had never seen such a thing before. Even as difficult and dangerous as the Herald’s life could be, few in Valdemar failed to dream that they, too, might be Chosen.

  Another gift had chosen Larissa, one that Egil felt was at least as great: to dance with horses in ways that even Heralds might hardly dream of. Yet like any village girl, she yearned after the white beings that had, in their wisdom, taken the shape of horses for the defense of Valdemar.

  It was a peculiar sensation to find himself envied by someone whom he had been in awe of since before he was Chosen. She served him with her own hands, picked out the best cuts of the roast and the last of the fresh bread, and sent a boy to the garden for a bowlful of spring greens and tiny carrots. She would have stuffed both Heralds as full as festival geese if she had not been so manifestly eager to meet the Companions.

  Rohanan and Cynara were royally housed by true horsemen’s standards, in adjacent paddocks with three-sided shelters. There was fresh water in a stream that ran through the paddocks, and fresh green grass to eat, and a manger of oats and barley if they were inclined to indulge themselves.

  No horseman would be so crass as to hang over the fence, but a remarkable number of people had found chores to do in the near vicinity. Egil doubted that any of the paddocks or the nearby barns had been as clean as they were that evening, or that the horses in them had been groomed so thoroughly since the last public exhibition.

  Rohanan was taking advantage of his celebrity to dance and snort and arch his beautiful white neck. Cynara, never one to shout for attention, grazed peacefully in the waning light.

  Larissa spared the stallion an appreciative glance, but it was the mare on whom she focused. “Now there is beauty by any measure,” she said. “No nonsense about her at all, is there?”

  “None,” said Egil, not caring if Larissa heard the fondness in his voice. “Cynara, come and meet someone remarkable.”

  His Companion cocked an ear, finished the mouthful of grass she had been in the midst of eating, and raised her head. After a moment she deigned to approach the gate.

  Egil opened it and bowed Larissa through. She moved with such quiet and deep calm that Egil felt it in himself, and in Cynara, too.

  :Interesting,: Cynara said.

  “May I?” Larissa asked her.

  She bent her head. Larissa laid a light hand on her neck, stroking it in a kind of dizzy wonder.

  “Haven’t you ever met a Companion before?” Bronwen asked from behind them. Her voice seemed to Egil to be both loud and abrupt.

  “Oh, yes,” Larissa said with no sign of offense, “but never in my own stable, as my honored guest.”

  “Really?” said Bronwen.

  Damn the girl, what had got into her? Before she could finish throwing down the gauntlet, Egil said in his smoothest tone, “One tends to forget how few of us there are, or how many places see us seldom if at all.”

  “Now that is true,” Godric said. “Come, young Herald, tell me: I noticed your saddle is unusually well made. It’s a Stefan, isn’t it?”

  Godric always had had a gift for defusing the tempers of the young. Bronwen nodded, still scowling, but effectively distracted. “Yes, it was one of the last that he made before he retired. They say his daughter is an even better saddler than he was, but I haven’t seen enough yet to be sure.”

  “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.”