Nine White Horses (30 page)

“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.

o0o

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? Not 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.

What could a horseman do to stop this?

There was one thing . . .

As soon as he thought of it, he knew it was insane. But what
else was there?

“Listen,” he said. “Fetch Larissa and Godric. Tell them to
choose five of the best riders in the school, and saddle the best horses they
have. Then run, and saddle Rohanan.”

He braced for rebellion. Bronwen’s brows drew together, but
she let him go, turned and ran.

He had to trust that she was doing as he told her. Cynara
had jumped the fence and was cantering toward the barn and the tack room.

She was ready. Egil was not, but there was no time for that.
He groomed her carefully, saddled and bridled her, and led her back out into
the deceptively cheerful sunlight.

Of course it was cheerful. It was safe. Everything here was
safe.

Egil felt it pulling at him even through the Companion’s
presence. If he just let go, relaxed, let the magic do its work, he would never
have to worry again. The spell would do it for him.

Tempting
, he
thought as he mounted. There were other riders coming toward him: Larissa on an
older stallion than she had ridden before, Godric on an elegant bay, and the
rest behind, mounted as well as those two, if not better.

Egil sagged briefly on Cynara’s neck, limp with relief. Even
through the spell, a Herald’s word could bind these loyal subjects of the
Queen. He only had to hope that it would keep binding them once he set his plan
in motion.

Where was Bronwen? He could do this with the riders he had,
maybe. But a second Companion would make all the difference.

He could not afford to wait. The day was passing quickly.
The brighter, clearer, more harmless it seemed, the more urgently it struck
him. He had to stop this now.

“Follow my lead,” he said to the riders.

“What are we doing?” one of the younger ones asked.

“Your new quadrille!” Bronwen sang out from behind. “Go on,
follow. This will be brilliant.”

Hardly that, reflected Egil, but her words did their work.
The spell’s complaisance quelled the one who still had the wit to question. The
rest followed without a word.

He could not remember the exact steps and turns of Larissa’s
pattern. What he did remember was how it had run: widdershins, against the sun,
twisting this part of the earth free of the rest and wrapping it in the spell’s
protections.

The patterns he rode were familiar exercises from his
morning schooling, stretching and suppling, then moving into the gaits and
figures of this art that he loved more than anything in the world except
Cynara. He was careful to ride the patterns sunwise, to unwind the spell turn
by turn.

It was not a living creature. No Mage alive had cast it. But
it had a sort of will, an awareness that was part of its substance. It was
designed to know when it was threatened.

The sun dimmed. Clouds gathered overhead—the first Egil had
seen since he came to Osgard. A cold wind lifted Cynara’s mane, lashing it
against his hands and arms.

The hoofbeats behind and around him were steady. The riders
were focused on him and on the white being he rode.

Bronwen and Rohanan anchored them. The young Herald and her
Companion were more focused than he had ever seen them. They had what Egil had:
the fire in the gut, the passion that turned sport into art.

They needed every bit of it. When the sky began to pulse and
the earth to heave, it took all of each rider’s skill to keep the horses on
their feet. Egil dared not look up. He could feel the vortex forming overhead.

If its charges must endanger themselves by resisting the
spell, the spell would keep them safe—by swallowing them. Egil had no thoughts
left, and no plan, except to keep riding. His valiant Cynara kept her balance
when level ground turned vertical, when the wind howled, when sand blasted her,
drawing blood from the thin skin around her nose and eyes.

His own eyes were narrowed to slits. He could no longer hear
the riders around him, if any remained. The wind had deafened him.

Step by step and pace by pace, forward, turn, collect, pirouette,
forward again. He was drowning in sand. The wind eroded his soul. All he was,
all he had, was the movement in his body and the horselike body on which he
rode, and the bond between them that would hold until they died.

He was going to die. That thought was very clear. He was not
afraid at all. He had a task to perform and a duty to fulfill. He was a Herald;
he was doing what a Herald was born to do.

Finally, after all these years.

He looked up into absolute nothingness. Most of Osgard had
spiraled down into it, bright green grass and bright yellow sunlight and
blandly smiling people and all. Somewhere on the other side of the void was the
world from which the spell had sundered them.

:Cynara,: he said, faint and clear in the silence of his
mind. :Can you find the rest of the Companions? Can you ask them to guide us
home?:

:I can do better,: she said, serene as always. :Remember the
Grove in spring: the green leaves, the sunlight dappling the ground beneath
them, the Companions dancing on the grass.:

He saw it as she spoke it. The Companions’ dance matched the
steps and turns of his own: sunwise and clockwise, righting the tilt of the
world and drawing the errant part of it back into its place. Where the vortex
had been was the temple in the heart of the Grove, and the sun contained within
its walls, dazzling his eyes with living gold.

o0o

The sun was setting over the arena. The wind blew soft,
with a touch of chill, but that was the spring evening and not the grip of
magic.

The spell was gone. Osgard was safe on its own merits. Egil
had reason to hope that the storms outside the valley had abated and the world
settled into its normal track, free of meddling magic.

Cynara snorted wetly and shook herself from head to tail.
Egil laughed, and as he looked up, saw Bronwen laughing with him. And that was
the third time they had shared an emotion other than mutual dislike.

It would not be the last. The thought did not dismay him
more than a little. They could work together. They were Heralds. Whatever their
personal differences, they were born to live and work and fight side by side,
like arrows in a quiver, or riders in a quadrille.

They saluted each other across the darkening arena, while
the stars came out one by one, and the moon shone down.

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Nine White Horses

Nine Tales of Horses and Magic

Judith Tarr

Book View Café 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61138-437-6
Copyright © 2014 Judith Tarr

Cover illustration © 2014 Emily Lyman

Production Team:

Project Coördinator: Judith Tarr

Cover Design: Doranna Durgin

Proofreader: Alma Alexander

Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Digital edition: 20140812vnm

www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624

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Nine White Horses, Copyright © 2013 Judith Tarr

Classical Horses, First published in
HorseFantastic
, ed. Greenberg and
Greenberg, DAW, 1991

Kehailan: First published in
Arabesques: More Arabian Nights
, ed. Shwartz, Avon, 1988

Al-Ghazalah: First published in
Arabesques II: Even More Arabian Nights,
ed.
Shwartz, Avon, 1989

Dealing in Futures: First published in
WitchFantastic
, ed. Resnick, DAW, 1994

Dame à la Licorne: First published in
Immortal Unicorn,
ed. Beagle and
Berliner, HarperPrism, 1995

The God of Chariots: First published in
The First Heroes
, ed. Doyle and
Turtledove, Tor, 2004

In the Name of the King: First published in
The Book of Kings,
ed. Gilliam and
Greenberg, Roc, 1995

Widdershins: First published in
Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar,
ed.
Lackey, DAW, 2008

Judith Tarr is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories, including the World Fantasy Award nominee,
Lord of the Two Lands.
She lives near Tucson, Arizona, where she raises and trains Lipizzan horses.

The Epona Sequence

White Mare’s Daughter

Lady of Horses

Daughter of Lir

Avaryan Rising Series

The Hall of the Mountain King

The Lady of Han-Gilen

A Fall of Princes

Avaryan Resplendent Series