Nine White Horses (27 page)

o0o

When Egil came out into the yard at first light, packed
and ready to ride, and saw the intern he would be expected to advise and serve
as an example for, his sigh was even deeper. Herald Bronwen had been Chosen at
ten years old—younger than anyone in memory—but that had come as no surprise:
she was Ashkevron, as Vanyel had been, and her family had been producing
Heralds in remarkable numbers since the first Companion came into the world.
Now at sixteen she had received her Whites and her first assignment, and it was
clear she was as dismayed to see Egil as he was to see her.

Egil had no objection to Trainees who wanted to make
something of themselves. He had helped more than a few to excel in the classes
he taught. Some were arrogant; some had too much faith in their own talents and
not enough consideration for anyone else’s. But he had always seen through the
façade to the nervous child beneath.

Bronwen seemed to have no façade. The arrogance, as far as
he had ever been able to see, went straight through to the core. She was born
to greatness, she was destined for it, and she would achieve it. She had no
doubts of that whatsoever. Any instructor in the Collegium who did not give her
the highest marks for as little effort as she could be bothered to spare was
clearly both benighted and deluded.

Egil had ranked her as she deserved. She had not thought so.
Clearly, from her expression, she never had changed her mind.

He thought she might turn on her heel and stalk back into
the Collegium. If she had, he would have done nothing to stop her. That made
him a coward and a disgrace to his Whites, but if he acknowledged the truth, he
was both already.

The one thing a Herald could not do was hide what he was.
That was the reason for the Whites. No one and nothing could miss a Herald in
the performance of his duty.

Egil had done his best to try. Now he had no choice but to
ride out, for the first time in fourteen years. And he had to do it with the
one student in fourteen years for whom he felt something close to animosity.

:For your sins,: his Companion said.

Cynara’s eyes were a very deep blue, the color of some horse
foals’ before they turned honest equine brown. In most lights in fact they did
look brown, so that people had been known to mistake her for an unusually
pretty grey horse. Cynara, like Egil, liked to escape notice.

“You’re not blaming me for this,” he said.

:Not at all,: she said. He could detect no irony in the
words, but he eyed her warily even so, before he gathered the reins and set his
foot in the stirrup and swung lightly onto her back.

Bronwen was already mounted. Her Companion could not have
been more visibly what he was: he was taller than any riding horse should
rightly be, and his eyes were the color of the summer sky, a clear bright blue
that no horse had ever had. He was as showy as his rider, with her long legs
and her long braid of wheat-gold hair and her eyes as blue as her Companion’s.

They were every village child’s dream of the Herald and her
Companion, and they knew it. Rohanan was as full of his own importance as
Bronwen, until he ventured too close to Cynara. She put him in his place with a
snap of teeth and a well-placed kick.

Egil was determined to be the mature and disciplined Herald
that he had been trained to be. To that end, he resolved to remain neutral toward
his intern unless or until she did something to incite judgment. So far she had
not said a word. Her expression said a great deal, none of it in his favor, but
he could choose to ignore that.

o0o

The weather was as beautiful as the Queen had promised.
The gardens of the city were in full and fragrant bloom, but even sweeter was
the scent of wild roses along the roadside as they rode southward. Traffic was
light at this hour, and what there was gave way before the Heralds, bowing
their heads and often smiling.

Egil would gladly have put a stop to that. Bronwen accepted
it as her due.

Her Companion recovered quickly from Cynara’s strict
discipline. While Cynara kept a steady and sensible pace, Rohanan crackled with
restless energy, cantering ahead and then back, dancing in circles, sprinting
off across the fields, leaping fences for the joy of it, snorting and blowing
and tossing his mane.

Bronwen was an exceptionally good rider. Whatever her
Companion did, she never moved. That took talent as well as skill.

That evening in the inn to which Cynara’s unhurried pace had
brought them, while Rohanan snored in his stall and the locals dozed over their
beer, Egil ordered dinner in the common room. Bronwen would have had a tray
sent up to her room; she was in no way pleased when he instructed that her
dinner be served with his.

“I thought you didn’t like to be noticed,” she said: the
first words she had spoken to him since she stalked out of his class in formal
logic, three years ago.

“Some things are expected of us,” Egil said. He had his back
to the wall, and the table he had chosen sat in the corner with the best view
of both the outer and inner doors.

His training was coming back: how to carry himself, how to
speak and act in front of strangers, where to sit and what to watch out for. It
was a refuge of sorts, a set of ingrained habits that he could fall back on
with no need to stop or think.

Bronwen sat across the table from him, frowning. Her back
was to the room. Anyone or anything could creep up behind her and sink a knife
in her back.

Egil pointed that out, gently. She made no move to change
her position.

“There’s no threat here,” she said. “Everyone’s either in
awe of us or so happy to see us he can hardly speak.”

“Not every threat will announce itself with a scream before
it leaps,” Egil said.

She sniffed audibly. “This place is safe,” she said.

“You’re sure of that? Are you a Mage, then?”

Her eyes blazed on him. “No,” she said through clenched
teeth. “I have eyes in my head. It’s as simple as that.”

Her vehemence told him a great deal about this girl who
seemed so sure of her own destiny. Of course an Ashkevron of her character and
talents would expect to be a Mage as well a Herald. It must be a great
disappointment not only to her but to her family, that she had not inherited
that particular combination of Gifts. “Come around and sit where you know you
should sit,” he said mildly.

Their dinner came while he waited, and he began to eat,
relieving her of the burden of his stare. After a moment in which he managed to
take a bite of roast lamb, chew and swallow it, she dropped into the chair
beside him, with her back against the corner’s other wall. He said nothing,
only slid her dinner toward her and held up the cider jug in mute inquiry.

“No,” she snapped. Then, even more crossly, “Yes. Damn it,
yes.”

He gave her time to cool her resentment and start thinking
again, and also to eat as much of her soup and bread as it seemed she was going
to, before he said, “We’ll be riding for another three days if the weather
holds, but I think it’s time now to explain where we’re going and why.”

“I know that,” she said. “There’s odd magic coming out of a
town called Shepherd’s Ford. It’s in the middle of Osgard Valley, where a good
number of equestrian-minded nobles have their summer estates. We’re to go,
investigate, and pretend we’re interested in the riding school in Shepherd’s
Ford, while we find and eradicate the Mage or Mages who have been disturbing
the balance of powers in the region.”

Egil finished savoring the last bite of his roast lamb—it
had been excellent; he would be sure to compliment the cook—and sat back, as
relaxed as Bronwen patently was not. She sat stiffly upright, like a student
who had finished a recitation but not yet received the teacher’s response.

“Well,” Egil said. “It seems you’re much more fully informed
than I am. I only know that we’re to investigate the riding school. There are
Mages, too, you say?”

Her skin was very fair, and a blush showed on it like a
flag. “There must be,” she said. “What else can it be?”

“Now that is a very good question,” said Egil. “Can it be
something other than Mages?”

“Do you know what I hated about your classes?” she said.
“You never would give a straight answer. Everything was questions in answer to
questions and ‘Do you think . . . ?’ and ‘What else can it
be?’ Did you even know what the answers were?”

“Not everything has an easy answer,” Egil said. “This may be
one that does, but we can’t know that until we’ve seen it for ourselves.”

She pushed her half-eaten bowl of soup away so hard it
splashed on the table, barely missing her sleeve. “See? That’s what I hate. I
need answers. Not more stupid questions.”

“The only stupid question is—”

“—the one that isn’t asked.” She glared at the puddle of
soup in front of her. “Do you hate me as much as I hate you?”

She really was young, Egil thought. That kept him from
letting her hear the first answer that came to mind. The second might not
please her, either, but it was honest enough. “I don’t hate you. There’s a
reason why we’ve been sent on this mission; we’re expected to work together and
learn from each other. There’s nothing that says we also have to like one
another.”

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 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.

o0o

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, earthly 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.”