The Swan Riders (11 page)

“They didn't touch me,” she said again. Softer. Slower.

“They better not have.” Talis's voice was soft as Sri's, but his was terrifying. He strode forward across the crazy-quilt squares of sunlight and shade. Francis Xavier fell in behind him, his crossbow cranked and aimed. The trommeller who had been leaning over Sri took a hasty step back and raised his hands.

At the fire, an old man was tending a griddle of bannock and fish. He stood creakily, pushing his legs straight with his hands. “Got no quarrel with the Riders,” he said. “No quarrel a-tall.”

“Don't you,” said Talis, disdaining the use of question marks. “That's not what I hear.”

“She just went down, m'lady,” the old man answered. “She fell and Javen brought her in by the fire. Nothing more.”

The woman from the doorway stepped over to the man with the goggles who Sri had been talking to—Javen, by the way he'd reacted to his name. They stood side by side, the space between them both thoughtless and powerful. Husband and wife, I thought. King and queen.

“Now, Rachel,” Javen said to Talis. “You know how it is in the Sask. We look after each other.”

The speech was easy, but the man was terrified. I could see it in him, in the sudden surge of heat around his heart, in the way his hands curled up. Had they heard about Calgary? Or had we interrupted something incriminating?

“We're just looking after her.”

“Of course you are,” said Talis, his eyes like an arctic blast.
Never lie to an AI.
He would see their fear, their unease. It would be spotlight obvious. Even I could sense it—twelve people, each glowing like a radio beacon.

“Sri?” Talis spoke without releasing Javen from his gaze. “Can you get up?”

Sri tried, but the obvious answer was
no
. Francis Xavier was still holding a weapon, and Talis was busy being menacing, so I went to help her. I hooked her under an arm and tried to drag her up. The doorway woman swung in to help me, taking Sri's other arm. For a moment the woman's eyes met mine. Our faces were close. “Your Highness,” she whispered. “Greta, do you need help?”

Did I need—

She knew me. My transformed mind, my Swan Rider's gear, my shorn hair—but she knew me.

My eyes went wide. Her not-quite-offer rattled through me. It made my teeth snap closed.

She knew me. How did she know me?

“Greta,” said Talis. “Stay with us.”

I swallowed.

“I'm Mahrip,” the woman said, much louder, and as if it were the first thing she had said. “Up we get now, dear.”

Together, Mahrip and I lifted Sri to her feet.

Sri was a bundle of muscles and bones, angles and poke. She tottered stiffly. Then she let her body melt and lean into mine, and together we found her feet.

“Hannah is my daughter,” said Mahrip.

Hannah.
Hannah.
A trommeller girl—Elián had stolen her shoes. Elián had stolen her shoes and tried to escape the Precepture. The proctors had taken Hannah. She had screamed and begged.

“Hannah lived, but Alba . . .” Mahrip looked right into my eyes. “Your Highness . . .”

“Greta!” Talis strode forward and muscled Mahrip out of the way, taking Sri's other shoulder himself.

“Your Highness, please, we're your people—” began Mahrip.

“I will kill the three youngest people in this room if you don't
stop talking
,” Talis snarled.

Mahrip stopped talking.

My people. I had no people.

Because this was what Talis had taken from me, at the refuge. This was the numb spot. That I had once had a people. That things had been done to me, that I had done things, because I had a people. There were spots in front of my eyes, a clicking in my ears. There was overload building in my head, pain and shivering and looping memory—

I'd stepped off the lift at the Calgary zeppelin depot, and the young dockhand there had blushed and bowed low before me.

I could not survive such a memory. But I could not survive without it. If Talis had to take one more thing . . . If he had to take it
here . . .

A burst of pain cut through the rising fire of the overload. Sri's expert fingers had found the pressure points inside my elbow and pushed like well-placed chisels. I gasped.

“Greta,” came Sri's murmur in my ear. She was on her feet. Leaning on me, yes, but upright. She released the pressure on my elbow carefully.

Francis Xavier had his back to our backs, his crossbow up. There was not an ounce of question in his voice as he said: “We're going.”

“We,” wheezed Sri. “We came for oats.”

“Yes,” said Talis. “We absolutely want some oats.”

They gave us the oats.

Technically we paid for them: I saw Javen fold our gold-plast strips into one of his buttonholes as if they were bobby pins. In this postcurrency society, they might well be most useful
as
bobby pins. But anyway we got the oats. And then we left, and they let us leave, though they watched us go. Twelve of them, and more on the banks and hills, their possible weapons concealed in swirls of bright patchwork, their faces hiding behind gold-tinted goggles.

I could feel them watching. I could feel my suppressed memories rising within me. Hannah. She had screamed and begged. There had been a bolt from the sky, orbital weapons fire. Even now the orbital weapons were looking down. They had come down the zeppelin spire at Calgary . . . I was shaking.

Talis doubled Sri, sitting behind her on NORAD, his arms around her as she leaned forward, holding tight to the saddle horn. Still, we were all up, and we were all moving. One might almost call it a victory. In passing, Talis leaned far out, his fire striker hidden in his palm, and set the wings on the statue blazing. The smoke rose up behind us as we rode away.

“Welp,” said Talis. “Gotta say, this is not the road trip I was picturing. I was thinking Kerouac, you know: putting the top down, letting the wind in our hair . . .”

“. . . Making the most threatening oats purchase in the history of the world . . . ,” put in Sri.

Talis grunted—not in disagreement—and with a bare twitch of reins turned NORAD toward an iron trestle bridge that spanned the river. “We're getting out of crossbow range,” he said, “and then you, young lady, have some explaining to do.”

He wrapped one arm tight around Sri and squeezed his knees around NORAD. The little horse went loping. We followed. The cottonwoods, the slope, the bridge. Loud hoofbeats raining down into the river. The bridge was ancient (built in 1908, my datastore told me). The rivets (its most likely points of failure) were knuckly and swollen with rust. But the steel was painted against corrosion in a jumble of bright colors, and the patchwork decking (steel plates, fiberblast boards, newly split logs) was solid under our hooves.

Once across, I leaned forward over Gordon's neck. The horse bunched and plunked his way up the far bank, through the scrub trees, up onto the rolling prairie. I wrapped my hands in Gordon's mane, letting its wiry strands cut into my fingers, trying not to die. We rode across the empty grass until the dome of the trommellers fell away behind us and the plume of smoke from Talis's little parting fire was just a thread in the high blue October sky.

“Sri?” said Talis. “Can you ride on your own?”

And Sri began with some hesitation, “I—”

“Give it another moment,” he said softly, then raised his voice. “Seriously, though. Francis, you will let me know if
you
intend to collapse anytime soon, won't you?”

“I will,” said Francis Xavier solemnly.

“Mortal peril of any kind, really. Just a heads-up, is all I'm asking. What about you, Greta, you with us?”

“Don't take anything from me,” I said.

“Great,” said Talis. “So Greta's fine.”

Fine was overstating it. My head was pounding, phosphenes boiling at the edge of my vision. We're your people. Hannah's shoes. She'd screamed and begged. A bolt from the sky. A crater—

Calgary.

I squeezed the bruise inside my elbow, where Sri had saved me.

Even if she had to hurt me to do it.

Mahrip, the trommeller woman who had known my name. She'd said—she'd said something I had not understood.
Hannah lived, but Alba . . .
“The old woman you had executed,” I said. “What was her name?”

“You're gonna have to narrow that down a little,” said Talis, whose list of executions was fairly substantial.

“Here, in Saskatoon. The trommeller matriarch, from when Hannah—”

“Don't think about that,” said Talis quickly.

“It's important.”

“It's Rachel's memory,” said Talis. “I can't access it. Francis?”

The big man looked away. “I did not ask.”

“Didn't anybody write this down?” said Talis. “Honestly, people. The illusion of my omniscience depends on you doing your paperwork.” He blinked and went internal for a moment. “Ah, a visual confirm, thank you Francis, nice job. I can ID her but her face is a little . . . Alba Kajtar,” he said. “Her name was Alba.”

Of course.

And now that I knew there was a record, I too could see her face. I could see it before, and after.

“The old woman volunteered, before we needed to draw lots,” said Francis Xavier. “We made it very fast.”

I felt an urge to thank him. But I didn't.

“Those people are up to something,” said Talis. “I'm going to put some capital letters on that, even. Up. To. Something.”

“You think they're part of the Pan Polar rebellion,” said Francis Xavier.

“Maybe they just don't like us,” I said. I still had Alba's face in my head, and some disagreeably comprehensive information about the skull-penetrating power of a crossbow quarrel. I shivered.
Please, Your Highness.
“They have cause.”

“Well . . . maybe. I suppose blowing up their city because I had a bad vibe off them is a little over the top?”

“A little,” said Sri.

“Sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“And here I was thinking overwhelming firepower could solve all the world's problems,” said Talis. “Sri. Honey. What happened?”

But just then we learned exactly what had happened.

“Stop,” barked Talis. He reined NORAD up so suddenly that she pranced in a tight circle. “Get her down—Francis! We've got to—”

Francis Xavier leapt off his horse and ran to them. He pulled Sri into his arms. The next instant they were all on the ground, Francis Xavier kneeling astride Sri's body, Talis crouched in the dust and dead grass, holding Sri's head between his steady hands. And Sri—Sri was convulsing. Her lips were skinned back, and a long and dreadful
something
was shuddering through her. Her teeth were clenched so tightly I was surprised they did not break. She was making a noise. The only possible question did not seem remotely adequate, but I found myself asking it anyway: “What is it? What's happening?”

Talis glanced up. His face was: what? Angry? Stricken? Not worried, though. Not surprised. I had often enough seen him worried over me, and once or twice I had surprised him: this was neither of those.

Francis Xavier didn't look at me at all.

I was loath to repeat the question: Excuse me, but why does my companion appear to be dying in horrible pain? But what else could I say? “Please— What is it?”

Francis Xavier answered me at last. “It's Rider's Palsy.”

“What's that?”

“Oh, for God's sake, Greta,” snapped Talis. “Look it up.”

I looked it up. Rider's Palsy: when the lesions acquired by hosting an AI caused—not seizures in the exact sense of the word, but the anomalous firing of the nerves: pain without bodily cause, pain so white-light intense that it brought the body to the ground. They happened nearly without warning. They were progressive. They were, eventually, fatal. I knelt near Talis, watching Sri's hands clutch and scuttle at the little stones, the dry grass. Francis Xavier was holding her arms down to keep her from hurting herself.

Or hurting herself any more.

“They're clustered,” said Talis. “This isn't a first episode. She's supposed to tell me—why didn't she tell me?” His fingers were tangled in Sri's hair. “FX: why didn't you tell me?”

“My life is yours,” answered Francis Xavier in his soft, solemn voice. “But Sri's is her own business.”

Talis dipped his head as if rebuked.

He'd been swimming with dolphins, and now Sri was—

There was no name for what was happening to Sri. It went on and on.
Seizing in the grass until her heart gives out.
My breath felt strange in my throat; my mouth tasted bitter.

Sri had signed up for this. Volunteered. Had she known?

The paradox of the Swan Riders, the idealists who were executioners.