Nine White Horses (28 page)

“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 in 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.

o0o

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 stonework,
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.

o0o

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, 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 such 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.

o0o

“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.”

“It does if this place has nothing to do with the
strangeness,” Egil said. “It’s a genuine school, and these really are horsemen.
Very good ones, from what I’ve seen so far.”

“Just because they’re good with horses doesn’t mean they’re
good people,” she said.

“True,” he said, “but it’s hard to be this good at it and be
wicked Mages, too. Evil taints a soul; we’d sense it, most likely, and our
Companions certainly would. Cynara isn’t alarmed at all. What does Rohanan
say?”