First Rider's Call (5 page)

Her father had looked at her in astonishment, as if some stranger stood before him. “I thought you wanted to learn more about the business. It isn’t all traveling from town to town, or overseeing wares on fair days.”

The portrait of Karigan’s mother loomed large on the wall behind her father. She knew he would never forgive himself for Kariny’s death, or for that of the unborn child she had been carrying at the time. It was he who had scheduled her to lead a wagon train to a fair that, unknown to him, was rife with fever.

No, no matter Stevic G’ladheon’s innocence, he would never forgive himself.

“You’re being overprotective,” Karigan said. She had not shouted, but she might as well have.

Her father had followed her gaze to the portrait, then slowly turned his eyes back upon her. “You are my only child,” he said, “and I love you.”

Karigan swallowed hard, remembering the hurt and grief in his eyes, but as if thrusting a sword into his heart had not been enough, she had twisted the blade by telling him he didn’t understand anything. Then she had stomped out of his office and slammed the door behind her for good measure. The memory of it still left an ache of guilt within her.

Did she regret the Rider life? Over the past year she had come to accept it to a degree, and she even liked it well enough in some ways, but she believed she would always resent how it had utterly wrenched her out of the life she knew. And she would never forgive the call for the gulf it had opened between her and her father.

“It’s not a call,” she murmured. “It’s a command.”

At her quiet words, a devilish smile played on Bard’s lips.

“Oh, please,” Karigan began, knowing exactly what he was thinking. “Please don’t bring up—”

“Halfway to Sacor City in your nightgown!”

“I was not! I only got as far as Darden!”

“Two towns over. Gave the marketplace something to jabber about for weeks.”

Karigan’s face heated, and it wasn’t because of the crackling fire before her. The night she had finally succumbed to the call, it had crashed over her like a storm wave that washed her away in a dreamlike undertow from which she was unable to awaken. She only snapped out of it the next morning when she reached Darden. In the middle of the market. In her nightgown. She groaned at the memory.

“I can only use my imagination.” Bard shook with laughter. “My, but it makes an amusing picture—and tale.”

“Don’t you dare!” She wouldn’t put it past Bard to make some outrageous ditty of it. His talent for fashioning absurd lyrics was going to drive the more conventional masters at Selium out of their minds.

“There once was a girl from Corsa,” he began, “who rode a big red horsa—”

“Ugh!” Karigan scooped up handfuls of pine needles from the ground and tossed them at him. Most fell into the fire, giving off a sweet balsam scent as they burned.

The whole incident was funny now, she had to admit, but at the time it had been humiliating. The market had grown unnaturally quiet as everyone pointed and stared at her sitting on Condor, in nothing more than her light linen nightgown. Fortunately the matron of a prominent merchant clan had recognized her and supplied her with clothing for her return ride to Corsa.

The story of Stevic G’ladheon’s daughter managed to spread outward as the merchants traveled on to other towns and villages. Karigan’s aunts had been terrible to behold upon learning she had embarrassed her clan so extravagantly.

The incident had finally broken Karigan’s resolve to fight the call, and upon her return to Corsa, she had informed her father of her intention to be a Green Rider. She just didn’t have it in her to fight it anymore.

Bard couldn’t contain his laughter. Karigan glowered at him which seemed to incapacitate him further.

At that moment, Ty and Ereal wandered over, burdened with their gear.

“What’s so funny?” Ereal asked.

Bard wiped tears from his eyes. “Darden.” It was all he had to say, for all the Riders had heard of Karigan’s unusual and long overdue response to the call, and regarded it as a curiosity. Apparently everyone else had acceded to the call without a fight. Ereal chuckled and Ty smiled. Both Riders sat and made themselves comfortable by the fire.

Bard took up his sewing again. “I think Karigan’s ride to Darden makes a good story. There is, after all, a dearth of Rider stories told by the minstrels.”

“You would think your grandmother’s chin hairs an interesting story,” Ereal said.

“Hah!” Bard rose to his knees—and the challenge—and made up a clever rendition of “Grandmother’s Whiskers” on the spot. It left the others clutching aching bellies, they were laughing so hard. Soldiers passing by eyed the Riders curiously.

“I do not think,” Ty said, after things quieted, “that Karigan in her nightgown is the image of Green Riders we wish to project.”

Not an appropriate image of a Green Rider, was she? Karigan held her tongue, but Bard, the big tease, winked at her. He was having too much fun.

“It’s certainly not on the same level,” Ty continued, “as the heroic tales of Lil Ambrioth, Gwyer Warhein, or any of the others.”

Ereal leaned back against her saddlebags. “I don’t know. Look at the stories we’re missing precisely because of that reason. No one has ever written a history of the Riders and as a consequence we know so very little of our own heritage. The stories we do know are so embellished that the First Rider in particular is larger than life—hardly human—and there is scant mention of other Riders and their deeds in any of the histories.”

“Exactly my point,” Bard said. He drew his needle through the cloth as Ty watched very closely. “There are many generations of forgotten Riders and I think it very sad.”

“Then I think,” Karigan said, “our first tale should be about Ereal and Crane.”

They all looked at her.

“Crane is the fastest horse in all the provinces.” She gazed at Ereal. “When was the last time you lost a Day of Aeryon race?”

Ereal raised her eyebrows, her mouth open in surprise. “Never. We’ve never lost a race.”

Bard was laughing again. “A good thought, Karigan. A story would put ever more pressure on our good lieutenant and her valiant steed—she’d never live it down if she lost!”

Ereal blinked. “I thought I was already under
that
pressure.”

“An officer racing horses.” Ty shook his head in disapproval, his eyes still following Bard’s inexpertly guided needle.

“And
Captain
Mapstone hasn’t lost one silver betting on them,” Bard said with some acerbity. “In any case, certain stories take on lives of their own. Who knows what the citizens of Darden may be saying ten years from now about the girl who rode to town in her nightgown.”

“They’d say nothing if you’d drop it,” Karigan said. Then the terrible thought occurred to her that this accursed incident might be the one thing in her entire life that anyone remembered her for. Her life’s legacy. Wouldn’t her aunts be furious!

Ty, suddenly unable to contain himself, reached toward Bard. “Give me that.” He snatched the sewing right out of Bard’s hands. “Awful,” he muttered, examining the handiwork. He drew his knife and ripped out the stitches.

Ereal and Bard traded knowing looks. “Rider Perfect” had struck again, and Karigan watched as Ty deftly sewed tiny, neat stitches in the sleeve.

Bard leaned back on his elbows, content to let Ty wrestle with his sewing.

“I believe this calls for a song,” he said. “When I was last on an errand to Selhim, Karigan’s friend Estral dug up an old song for me about the First Rider. It’s not one most remember. The title is ‘Shadows of Kendroa Mor.’ ‘Mor’ in the old tongue meant ‘hill.’ ‘Kendroa’ did not survive as a place name, so the mor of the song could be almost anyplace in Sacoridia.”

Bard cleared his throat, and in his baritone, began the fast paced tune:

The song depicted a desperate nighttime ride—a charge or retreat?—led by Lil Ambrioth. Since the song relied mostly on its fast beat, the particulars of the story were vague at best. If the song depicted an actual event, then the particulars had been well known to the singers and audience at the time it had been written.

“It could have simply been inspired by the First Rider in general,” Bard said afterward. “Maybe a conglomeration of events in her life. The actual theme of outrunning and slaying the enemy isn’t too specific.”

“What is meant by ‘clans of dark’?” Karigan asked.

Bard shrugged. “Estral thinks it refers to Sacor Clans that took Mornhavon’s side during the Long War.”

The Riders fell silent. Ereal stirred the embers of the fire with a branch and threw on some more wood. Growing flames hissed and popped as they consumed the wood.

The idea of clans betraying their own people had quieted the Riders. Sacoridia had come a long way in its sense of unity since those days. But the thought of Sacoridians joining a monster like Mornhavon who committed atrocities against their own people was sickening.

“Hah!” Ty said, startling the others. He broke the thread with his teeth, and knotted it off. He then presented Bard with his expertly mended shortcoat. “This is the way it should be done.”

Bard took the coat, smiling. “My humble thanks, Rider Newland. Next time I need some mending done, I’ll know who to call on.”

This brought more laughter, but despite the lightened mood, when Karigan finally kicked off her boots and wrapped herself in her bedroll, she still heard Bard’s rhythmic song ghosting through her mind as she fell into sleep.

BLACKVEIL

Far beneath the canopy of dark, twisted trees and vaporous shroud; buried beneath layers of loam, moss, and decayed leaves—a thousand years’ accumulation of growth and decay—a sentience stirred in deepest Blackveil Forest.

Even as it struggled to shudder off the captivity of sleep, voices called it back, lulling it, willing it to sleep.
Sleep in peace, ancient one,
they sang.
Disturb not the world, for it is not for you. Sleep in peace . . .

The sentience tried to block the voices and their enchanting songs, but it was a terrible labor. The sentience moaned, which in the forest was a breeze that rattled tree limbs and sent drops of moisture plinking into still, black pools. Forest creatures paused their scavenging, yellow eyes aglow and alert.

The sentience wanted nothing more than to obey the voices, to slumber undisturbed. Yet it was too restless, and so it resisted, spreading tendrils of awareness, like vines, creeping outward through duff and leaf litter to try and feel itself out, to understand itself, to seek and comprehend its boundaries.

Though it was the barest ripple of resistance and awareness, the voices climbed an octave in alarm; increased the rhythm of their song; and pursued the sentience.

Panicked, the sentience surged through moss and scattered leaves. It flushed fowl from undergrowth and rushed through a hollow log shredding spider webs. It sent wavelets across a sludgy, slow moving stream and followed it to the sea.

The sea, it found, lapped a rocky shore. The sentience slid along the stems of rockweed, tasting brine and swaying with the undulation of the waves, but it could not travel beyond the shore, for a great submerged barrier sang it back.

It traveled inland, and was absorbed by tree roots and sucked upward through the very fibers of the tree’s blackened heart. When it emerged as a droplet of dew at the tip of a pine needle, it found only heavy clouds of vapor.

The sentience raced northward, but found again a barrier, a massive wall of stone and magic. Here the songs intensified; interwoven songs of resistance, barriers, and containment.

The sentience backed off.

It was hemmed in, surrounded on all sides,
trapped.
The voices lulled and cajoled, and as drowsiness bore down on the sentience, it perceived just the tiniest hint of weakness in the song, a fragility that was an off-key note that emanated from the wall.

Rebellion had bled most of the strength from the sentience. Unable to resist further, it began the inevitable slide into sleep.

But even as it was overcome, a name from ages long past came to the sentience, and childlike in its desperation, it called out for an old protector:
Varadgrim!

This the voices could not repress, and even after the sentience drifted into heavy slumber, its cry penetrated a weak section of the barrier wall, and flowed into the land of Sacoridia, taking on a life of its own.