Guardian of Honor (24 page)

Bastien! Bastien in love with a Marshall! The rebel and rogue and
troublemaker. A black-and-white, Bastien had always gone off like a rocket in
any direction his brilliant mind took him, followed his emotions as if they
were oracles from the Song.

Bastien! Oh, how he deserved this lady. She would shake
him
up,
perhaps help make him into the man all sensed he could be—a great man. In the
vision, she reached up and placed her hand on his in a touch that spoke of
equal love. Luthan softened. Yes, Bastien deserved love. He'd had little enough
of that from their parents.

The Exotique met Luthan's gaze with an amused one of her own and
said something. Bastien shifted behind her and winced, obviously the butt of
teasing.

"Arr you alll righ'?" The Exotique's accented words in
the here and now, the hesitant touch of her fingers on the back of Luthan's
hand, broke the vision.

A small line of concern showed between her brows. Luthan laughed.
She sat back quickly.

Now when he looked at her and saw a lady who would sort out his
brother, all his uncomfortable feelings about her vanished like mist. His
sight,
as always, left him a little giddy.

Luthan reached out and patted one of her hands. "I am very
well, Lady."

She eyed him with suspicion, then shrugged. "I am called
Alexa."

"Alyeka," he said, and frowned when he knew he hadn't
pronounced it correctly.

He leaned back in his chair and drank deeply of his beer. It
grounded him, but he couldn't keep from smiling around the rim of his glass.
The complications between Bastien and Alyeka would be entertaining to observe.

"I'm called Luthan."

"I know. I have heard of you. You are a Chevalier, the
Representative of the Song and the son of Reynardus." Her words were very
slow but distinct.

Luthan thought it a good sign that she put his title first. She
saw him as an individual, then, not merely as the son of a man her voice told
him she disliked. Many people disliked his father. Including his sons.

Reynardus would loathe this one. Small and female and too strange
to be understood and manipulated.

But Bastien—her Power and her uniqueness would snag Bastien's
lively curiosity, just as her status as a Marshall would repel him.

Now that he knew she'd be Bastien's, Luthan studied her. Her
short, fine hair was pure silver. Her face was attractive enough, coming to a
pointed chin and holding those big eyes.

"Yes," he said. "Reynardus is my father." He
shrugged. "You can't choose your forebears."

A fleeting grief shadowed her eyes. She sat up straighter
"No."

"I have a brother, Bastien." He watched closely, but saw
no flicker of recognition. Had the two met yet? Bastien was in the Field, due
north.

"Ah've heard of Bastien." She pronounced their names
correctly, even if she misspoke words.

Luthan smiled, trying to calculate what gossip she might have heard,
who might have spoken to her of his brother. "Don't believe everything you
hear of Bastien. He's a good man."
Even if he is misguided.
But
Luthan cheered to think that this woman would put Bastien on the right path.

Luthan stood and bowed to her, offered her his arm. As her
eyebrows rose, he noticed they were a light brown. Odd. But no instinctive
twinge of revulsion occurred, and he grinned. He was over that affliction.

A
few minutes later Luthan introduced her to his volaran. The
volaran was huge, as large as some of the great horses in Earth's past. It was
a beautiful black, and when it had studied her in the Landing Field with big
brown eyes, she saw intelligence in its gaze. Perhaps not intelligence that the
Lladranans recognized, or intelligence that was humanlike, but a cleverness all
the same. She got the idea that the Lladranans underestimated these creatures,
but it wasn't something she felt qualified to comment on.

Luthan set her on a long saddle and mounted behind her.

Alexa figured that Thealia was trying to matchmake, but knew it
was futile. Alexa would always be an Exotique first to Luthan. A pity, because
he was a strikingly attractive man, better looking than both his father
Reynardus and his brother Bastien, whom she'd rescued from the pool. She'd
hesitated to mention Bastien because she didn't want to get into family
dynamics. Still, she sensed Luthan was the most honorable man she'd met in
Lladrana. Yep, really too bad.

They took off in a steep ascent that clutched at Alexa's lungs and
gut.

When they steadied, Luthan yelled in her ear, "Sing with
me."

He sang a spellsong through, then Alexa joined in and they
repeated it twice. At the end, they were encased in a magical bubble she'd
formed. She admired the sheen of the outward curve of the spell.
She'd
helped
in the magic! Formed the bubble that kept them warm and the air quiet around
them.

"Are you going to Test to become a Marshall?" she asked.

Luthan hesitated. "Not now. I have responsibilities to the
Singer and her Friends. They convinced me that the best use of my talents would
be to represent them. I probably will Test for Marshall sometime in the
future."

When his father retired from the Marshalls?
Did
they
retire? Alexa wondered if he worked well with his father. He certainly was more
diplomatic than Bastien. She'd heard how he'd baited Reynardus, pushing him
into following the rest of the Marshalls into Town after her.

Luthan said, "Has anyone told you of the distance-magic of
the strongest volarans?"

She didn't think so, but could extrapolate. "Um, they can
shorten it?"

"Ayes. Instead of flying one volaran-length with their wings,
they can fly a furlong, a mile—" he patted his
mount"—more. It depends on their physical strength, the strength and
wildness of their Power. Or my Power. My brother Bastien, raised my volaran.
All of our relatives have volarans he trained. All of the Marshalls and the
best Chevaliers have horses with great distance-magic. We'll be using a little
distance-magic this flight."

"Intereshtin'," Alexa said.

Since the little attempt at conversation had included several
explanations and definitions of words from Luthan, and neither of them seemed
to care whether they spoke or not, Alexa leaned back to enjoy the flight.

They flew northwest to the coast. Under them, slightly distorted
by the bubble, were fields, rolling hills, forests—all a patchwork of different
greens that tugged at her heart. A beautiful land, a verdant land, a land too
lovely to be desecrated with nasty monsters, blood, war and rotting bodies.

Was that why they invaded? Because Lladrana was so pretty? Alexa
didn't know. Nobody had told her why the horrors invaded. Maybe no one knew.

She caught her breath as she saw the ocean. From the map she'd
known of the ocean, but hadn't emotionally understood the landscape of
Lladrana. The sea was a changeable panorama of blue and green and gray, stretching
to an endless horizon, dotted with islands. To someone used to the jagged peaks
of the Rockies defining the western horizon and man-made buildings blocking the
east, the ocean was mysterious and too vast for comfort. But it too, was
awesomely beautiful, and she had wanted to see it.

The coastline was rugged, like pictures she'd seen of Oregon.
Alexa looked inland, trying to see the magical fenceposts.

This was the northwest border of Lladrana, and though the fence
was failing here, the monsters didn't often creep over. They seemed to prefer
invading where no water existed.

Straining her eyes, Alexa discerned a faint blue-white line a few
miles inland. She followed it to a glowing yellow beacon, tall and straight. A
fencepost!

The line between the good beacon on a rough outcropping, the end
post, and the next fencepost inland, one lying on the ground, was a dull white.
She narrowed her eyes. The downed fencepost barely glowed, as if its energy
leached into the ground. Squinting, she peered into the distance. The third
post inland was down and black on the landscape, looking like a huge fallen
tree trunk. She wondered what it was made of. Everyone wondered. No one knew.

Luthan murmured a command and the volaran angled to a gentle
descent. Details of the land jumped out at Alexa as she tried to wrap her mind
around another aspect of her new reality.

Two fenceposts were down, cut off from the energy of their
neighbors and the whole line. At least it wasn't like a string of cheap
Christmas lights in which, when one went out, all of them failed. With a hint
of nausea rising in her throat, Alexa realized that if all the posts went out,
there would be no Lladrana.

A group of Marshalls and Chevaliers were already surveying the
site. The ground where the volaran settled showed trampled, short spring grass
and mud. Dark patches of blood stained the ground, and the dark outlines of the
fallen Chevaliers. According to Lladranan custom, a spell was cast on the dead
and they sank into the ground to fertilize it. Memorial tablets were erected in
their home chapel. Everyone accepted that the death would lead to new life on
the land.

Since the battle had happened just after dawn that morning, three
shields of independent Chevaliers stood point-down where they'd fallen. The banner
of a lesser noble waved over her grave.

Alexa felt Reynardus's gaze on her. Everyone would be watching
her, seeing if she could fix the boundaries, if she was a true,
powerful Exotique. She hadn't ever thought of herself that
way. Hadn't ever wanted to be a warrior except in the courtroom. But she would
fight and defend, and, if necessary, die to make this land safe again. She
thought of the gurgling baby Nyja she had played with the night before.

Yes, this was a bad time for Lladrana, and if she could save it
for the future, what a triumph that would be! What a difference that would make
in so many lives. To save a whole culture. She'd have made her mark.

She hadn't wanted fame, but she did want to make a difference.
Even if the memory of her deeds was never recorded and lost in the mists of
time,
she'd
know that she'd made a difference. Her life, her struggle to
be the woman she was, would be validated. The result was more important than
any acknowledgment or fame.

Sliding off the volaran, her knees gave way, and she would have
fallen if the flying horse hadn't shifted to support her. Oh boy. This
was
reality.
And did she have any incredible deeds within her? What happened if she didn't?
Would they throw her out of the Marshalls, just as she'd begun to think of them
as her peer group?

The other Marshalls approached. Reynardus smiled that nasty smile
of his. "Now, let's see what you are made of." He jerked his chin at
the boundary line, then waved an expansive hand at both the downed fenceposts.

Alexa wanted to frown, but sucked in her breath and nodded. She
was circled by sober-faced Chevaliers and people planting fields who'd stopped
to watch. The two fallen posts were relatively close together, no more than a
few hundred feet apart. This too was something that had no explanation—how far
apart the magical posts were. Thealia was of the opinion that it was determined
by their creation, and that circled back into the complete lack of knowledge of
how to make the fenceposts, how to revive them, how to regenerate the
boundaries.

Deciding to start at a logical place, Alexa walked to the first
dead inland post. Wind whipped her tabard over her surprisingly comfortable
chain mail. She clinked as she walked.

With one last glance at the gathered onlookers, she pulled her
Jade Baton from the loop at her hip and curled her hands around it. As always
it warmed to her touch and began to glow. A sigh escaped her. She could only do
her best, and hope that it would prove her to be a true Marshall.

Placing one foot on the boundary, she walked it like a tightrope.
Her cares fell away and she was conscious as never before of the world around
her. Whatever expectations others had of her, she was free to enjoy this moment
of lambent sun behind pearly clouds and a brisk sea wind that left the taste of
salt on her mouth. Her nose twitched and the light scent of brithenwood came
with its tune. She glanced around and found a copse of trees nearby. Clouds
blew away and left a dazzling sky. Sunlight caressed her face and warmed her
tunic. The earth beneath her feet felt soft and welcoming. Lladrana accepted
her.

A simple melody rose from her heart, a melody she'd never heard
before, and didn't really hear now. She
experienced
it. Notes comprised
the sun and blue sky and the greenly budding brithenwood and the whiff of rich
earth and salty ocean and the susurration of waves and wind. It bubbled through
her, giving her peace and joy. She began to dance.

You have found your Song!
The pink-and-silver
butterfly danced with her.

"Salutations, Sinafin," Alexa said.

Sinafin's eyes gleamed and she curled her antennae.

Alexa flung out her arms and twirled. The bronze flames at the end
of her wand fired into reality, burning strongly in the wind. Her tabard
whirled out with her, like petals on a blooming flower, and she almost liked
purple again. She laughed, caught her breath
and gathered
her dizzied senses and continued along the border, weaving dance-steps along
the boundary.