Green Rider (39 page)

The chant kept time with the rhythm of pounding hooves, of her heartbeat, of the blood pumping through her ears.

They burn.

At first Karigan didn't know what F'ryan meant. Did the spirits burn?

The arrows burn.

Karigan glanced over her shoulder, disconcerted at looking through F'ryan's gauzy form. Indeed the arrows were aflame and falling behind. A shout of victory, like a rush of wind, arose from the spirit riders. They pulled their horses to a halt, The Horse slackening his gait without direction. Though all were stopped, the world still hastened by, as if they were being swept away on some spectral current.

"Why?" Karigan asked.

F'ryan Coblebay slipped off The Horse and backed away, melting into the others.
I cannot rest till you complete the mission
. His voice faded.
It was a good Ride
.

"Why?" Karigan demanded, the reins bunched in her fist. "Why did you intervene?"

A lone Rider broke away from the group, her long hair drifting in an unearthly breeze. Two arrows protruded from her chest. The Rider Karigan had seen dead in North. Joy.

If this did not go beyond earthly matters, we would not have intervened. There is much you might accomplish to thwart the plans of an old evil. May we Ride together again some day, Green Rider
.

Joy turned her horse back among the other ghosts. The mass merged into itself, then lifted and dissipated like a fog carried off on a breeze to the heavens. Still, the rhythm of the Wild Ride pulsed in Karigan's ears.

RIDE'S END

The world slowed down, though colors still smeared like water on paint. A massive stone structure of towers and parapets and crenelated walls loomed ahead with colorful pennants streaming from its loftiest heights. An arched entryway flanked by rounded turrets gaped before her.

Behind her stood the guardhouses, the portcullis suspended between them, ready to cut off an invasion should an army attempt to swarm across the narrow drawbridge spanning the moat and assault the castle. A wall encircled the castle and its grounds. Somehow, the ghosts had carried her miles in just moments to the courtyard where she now stood before the castle of King Zachary.

The Horse's hooves crunched on gravel. She dismounted and, hands shaking, unbuckled the message satchel from the saddle. She left The Horse standing there, no worse from his strange run.

Time lagged again, and Karigan swayed as if the ground moved beneath her feet. The pennants, each representing the provinces, snapped into definition. Though their lines were no longer blurred, their motion was jerky and slow.

When her footing grew solid again, she proceeded to walk the distance across the courtyard to the castle entrance. Guards in black and silver stepped forward with halting movements to intercept her. They had not managed two steps by the time she was far beyond their reach.

As she walked beneath the arched entryway, more soldiers attempted unsuccessfully to stop her in jerk-and-stagger movements. They were too slow, she was too fast. Their voices were muffled, the words drawn out in a moronic drone.

She strode through a great corridor past guards and courtiers stalled in time. Most did not note her passage. Lamps lit along the walls flickered absurdly slow, casting a wash of strange tones of bronze and gold along the corridor. The corridor, she hoped, led to King Zachary's throne.

Coats of arms and weavings adorned the walls, and these remained static and clearly defined. She focused on these things rather than the unnatural, disorienting motions of the people around her.

Two doors appeared ahead of her, open. Some huge oak tree had been felled to create them. The firebrand was carved into one, and the crescent moon in the other. Two guards clad entirely in black were posted beside the doors. They were Weapons, but even they weren't immune to the time anomaly.

She swept past them and through the doors into a vast chamber. Sunlight lanced through tall and narrow windows at cross slants. Voices echoed off the vaulted ceiling in a weird and long drawn out babble. Black-clad guards stood like pillars in shadowy recesses.

A tapestry of Zachary's family crest, a white Hillander terrier against a field of heather, occupied the space behind the throne. It was said that the brave little dogs had rooted groundmites out of their earthen burrows during the Long War.

Below the tapestry stood two men and a woman attending a man who sat in an ornate chair. A white terrier sat up from where it had been lying at the seated man's feet. Before it was on its feet, Karigan had crossed the cavernous room. The three people and the king were just beginning to look up at her.

Slam!

Like walking into a wall, like the ground being pulled out from beneath her feet, the force rocked through her body and she fell away piece by piece, like feathers from a burst pillow cascading in a soft flurry.

She lay in a field immersed in sunlight. Sunlight leaked through her closed eyes. Asters and goldenrod droned with bees lighting from one blossom to another. A swallow chirped somewhere above her. She felt warm and drowsy. The light, the light… Something cool and wet ran along her cheek…

Time and motion snicked into place, like the latching of a door. Karigan shook her head, willing the stinging drone of bees and shock of light to leave her. She sighed, closed her eyes, and settled down to continue her nap, but the cool, wet something now licked her hand. She cracked open an eye. A pair of brown eyes gazed back at her from beneath a clump of white fur. The terrier panted and looked at her with a grin.

Karigan widened her eyes.
Dog! Castle! Zachary
! She sat up too fast, and spiraled back down to the woolen runner in front of the king's dais. The buzz filled her head again, but it might have been the voices of people around her. This time when she looked up, four blades wielded by black-clad Weapons were pointed at her chest.

"This is no Green Rider I've ever seen before." A man's voice with a hard edge to it.

"Could it be another assassin?" the woman asked.

"Her coming here smells of magic," said a second man with a sniff.

Karigan had fallen on the message satchel. She rolled to her side to unwedge it, and the Weapons pressed the tips of their blades against her chest.

"Message." Karigan's mouth felt too full of tongue. "Message for the king."

"Let us see it," said the first man.

Karigan took the paper from the satchel and handed it to a Weapon who in turn passed it to someone she could not see. Indistinct murmurings echoed off the walls of the cavernous room, which seemed, rather, like whispers issuing from the fresco-painted figures on the ceiling. The age-cracked figures of kings, queens, knights, and the god, Aeryc, riding the sickle moon, and the goddess, Aeryon, haloed by the sun and peering from behind a cloud, all looked down on her. Among them, and at the center, was a great black horse whose arched neck and flanks rippled with motion.

"—spy," a queen seemed to say from above.

"This message is from F'ryan Coblebay, but this is—“ said a king.

"—unimportant and irrelevant. It's the magic I'm—“

"Too young to be—"

"Should be confined and interrogated—"

"—unimportant."

Karigan drifted away again in search of the sunlit field, but she was not able to find it. The Weapons seized her roughly under her arms and hauled her to her feet. Someone took away the saber. She protested weakly, but no one heard.

"Lock her up until we decide."

"Not in a prison cell," said a gentler voice Karigan hadn't heard before. The Weapons blocked her view with their broad shoulders and she could not see who spoke. "Choose a guest room and guard it."

"But, Majesty," said the harsh voice, "you may be endangering yourself. This one uses magic like we've never seen before."

"And all the prison cells in the world would not hold her if she did anyway. A guest room. Does she look threatening to you in her present condition, Crowe?"

"Majesty, begging your pardon, but she may just want it to look that way."

"Of all the idiotic ideas I've ever heard, that is the worst," said a new voice from the direction of the entryway. It belonged to a woman accustomed to authority. The Weapons still blocked Karigan's view, but she heard the purposeful click of boots on the flagstone floor as the woman approached. She passed by, and the clicking ceased. "Your Majesty."

"Captain, your intrusion speaks of—"

"Disrespect, Castellan Crowe? Is that what you wish to say?"

"I will not have this bickering," said the king. "Captain Mapstone, do you have anything you wish to say? Do you know this girl? She dresses as a Green Rider."

"I've never laid eyes on her before, but I think I can tell you who she is."

The woman stood on tiptoes and peered over the shoulders of the Weapons. Karigan received a fleeting impression of hazel eyes and reddish hair.

"I can also tell you that she is a Green Rider."

"No," Karigan whispered, but no one was listening.

"I can't say I understand, Captain," Crowe said.

"Your Majesty, have her taken to Rider barracks. She will do you no harm, and if I'm not mistaken, the message you hold in your hands is of great import."

"We have our doubts about that," the king said.

"Then what of this?"

The captain held aloft two black arrows. Karigan groaned and lurched to her side, and would have fallen if not for the support of the Weapons.

The two Weapons led her away from the throne, each stony-faced and silent. They passed through alternating shafts of dazzling sunlight and shadow as they walked to the far end of the throne room. Had Torne and Jendara once been this way? Stern and silent? Courtiers, servants, and soldiers who walked the corridors spared her a glance not at all.

They left the castle by a different entrance than she had come in, and passed through a courtyard, skirting the castle. The Weapons gripped her elbows, practically lifting her from the ground, as they escorted her past curious onlookers. They brought her to a whitewashed wooden building, the unmistakable odor of horse manure permeating from a not-too-distant source. The people here were all dressed in green and they were very curious. They stared at her.

"Where am I?" she asked.

"Rider barracks," the Weapon to her left said, and that was all.

They entered the building, floorboards creaking beneath their feet, and a hint of leather in the air. It was far more appealing than the stone castle. Abruptly they stopped and the Weapon to her right threw open a door. They shuffled her into a room sparsely furnished with a bed, table, washstand, stove, and chair. Sunlight poured through a window, warming the place.

"You will empty your pockets," said the Weapon who had been at her right. The other stepped out of the room and posted himself by the door.

"I will
what
?"

"Empty your pockets." The man lacked any hint of emotion.

Karigan tossed the message satchel on the table— somehow she had managed to hold onto it—and dug into her pockets. She produced the moonstone, some coppers and one silver, the bunchberry flower with its missing petal, the sprig of bayberry, and Joy's winged horse brooch. The Weapon gathered her things up into one large hand.