Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar (40 page)

Queen Selenay felt like a Companion. At a distance, she was naturally more Herald than courtier, but face to face across a desk piled high with books and papers, she was not so much a Herald as something ... stronger.

The realization put Egil more at ease than he had been since he received the invitation. Companions invited awe, but in a way that Egil understood.

Whatever important matters of state the Queen had been contending with before he came, she fixed her full attention on him while he was there. She studied him for some time in silence that he made no attempt to break.

Eventually she folded her hands and leaned forward. Egil managed not quite to feel as if he had been called into the schoolmaster’s office for a rebuke. She seemed interested, even intrigued, but neither angry nor disappointed.

“Your family breeds horses, I’m told,” she said.

That was not what Egil had expected. He could only think to bob his head like an idiot and answer, “Yes. Yes, madam.”

She smiled. It did not comfort Egil at all. “All’s well there, I understand, and your sisters report that this year’s foal crop is the best they’ve seen in years.”

Egil gave up trying to hide his confusion. “What is it, madam? Has Zara had her baby? Was one of the others Chosen? Though I would know about that. Wouldn’t I?”

“You would,” the Queen said. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to torment you. I need a Herald with knowledge of both horses and riding.”

“All Heralds can ride,” Egil said. “Some are extraordinarily good at it.”

“I am told,” said the Queen, “that none is as good as you.”

Egil flushed. “I would hardly say that. I have some talent and a fair amount of training, but there are others who—”

“Not your particular kind of training,” the Queen said.

“I don’t understand,” Egil said.

“It’s little more than a rumor,” she said, “some odd stories and the occasional magical anomaly off the South Trade Road toward the Goldgrass Valley. What’s strange is that they seem to revolve around a riding academy.”

Egil’s brows rose. “A school of riding? In the middle of nowhere?”

“Not exactly nowhere,” the Queen said with the hint of a smile. “It’s horse country all around there, and certain elements of the court have taken a fancy to it: they’ve been buying land and building summer houses and stocking them with the finest in fashionable horseflesh.”

“And of course,” said Egil, “they’ll need trainers for the horses and instructors for their offspring, and if those should gather in one convenient place, so much the better.”

“Exactly,” said the Queen. “Your family has done much the same, I’m told, and done extremely well, training horse trainers and sending them where they’re needed.”

“You don’t think they’re involved with—”

“Probably not,” she said, “but now I’m sure you understand why I would like you to ride along the South Trade Road and see what there is to see.”

Egil did understand, but as sharp as his curiosity had grown, his love of the quiet life was stronger. There was also one inescapable fact. “Madam, I haven’t been in the field since I was an intern. Whatever skills I had in that direction are long since rusted shut.”

The Queen smiled in a way that told him she had heard every word, but not one had changed her mind. “It’s an easy distance, with inns at every reasonable stop, and the weather at this time of year is usually lovely. If it does happen that you have to camp for a night, you’ll have company who can do whatever is needed to make you comfortable. I’m sending an intern with you. She has some knowledge of horses as well and some interest in the art of riding. It should be a pleasant journey.”

There was not much Egil could say to that. The Queen had thought of everything, as she should. She was the Queen.

Egil had successfully avoided official notice for much longer than he had any right to. He was a Herald, and Heralds, as everyone knew, were the Arrows of the Queen. They flew wherever she sent them.

Egil heaved a deep sigh. “As you wish,” he said.

 

When Egil came out into the yard at first light, packed and ready to ride, and saw the intern he would be expected to advise and serve as an example for, his sigh was even deeper. Herald Bronwen had been Chosen at ten years old—younger than anyone in memory—but that had come as no surprise: she was Ashkevron, as Vanyel had been, and her family had been producing Heralds in remarkable numbers since the first Companion came into the world. Now at sixteen she had received her Whites and her first assignment, and it was clear she was as dismayed to see Egil as he was to see her.

Egil had no objection to Trainees who wanted to make something of themselves. He had helped more than a few to excel in the classes he taught. Some were arrogant; some had too much faith in their own talents and not enough consideration for anyone else’s. But he had always seen through the façade to the nervous child beneath.

Bronwen seemed to have no façade. The arrogance, as far as he had ever been able to see, went straight through to the core. She was born to greatness, she was destined for it, and she would achieve it. She had no doubts of that whatsoever. Any instructor in the Collegium who did not give her the highest marks for as little effort as she could be bothered to spare was clearly both benighted and deluded.

Egil had ranked her as she deserved. She had not thought so. Clearly, from her expression, she never had changed her mind.

He thought she might turn on her heel and stalk back into the Collegium. If she had, he would have done nothing to stop her. That made him a coward and a disgrace to his Whites, but if he acknowledged the truth, he was both already.

The one thing a Herald could not do was hide what he was. That was the reason for the Whites. No one and nothing could miss a Herald in the performance of his duty.

Egil had done his best to try. Now he had no choice but to ride out, for the first time in fourteen years. And he had to do it with the one student in fourteen years for whom he felt something close to animosity.

:For your sins,:
his Companion said.

Cynara’s eyes were a very deep blue, the color of some horse foals’ before they turned honest equine brown. In most lights, in fact, they did look brown, so that people had been known to mistake her for an unusually pretty gray horse. Cynara, like Egil, liked to escape notice.

“You’re not blaming me for this,” he said.

:Not at all,:
she said. He could detect no irony in the words, but he eyed her warily even so, before he gathered the reins and set his foot in the stirrup and swung lightly onto her back.

Bronwen was already mounted. Her Companion could not have been more visibly what he was: he was taller than any riding horse should rightly be, and his eyes were the color of the summer sky, a clear bright blue that no horse had ever had. He was as showy as his rider, with her long legs and her long braid of wheat-gold hair and her eyes as blue as her Companion’s.

They were every village child’s dream of the Herald and her Companion, and they knew it. Rohanan was as full of his own importance as Bronwen, until he ventured too close to Cynara. She put him in his place with a snap of teeth and a well-placed kick.

Egil was determined to be the mature and disciplined Herald that he had been trained to be. To that end, he resolved to remain neutral toward his intern unless or until she did something to incite judgment. So far she had not said a word. Her expression said a great deal, none of it in his favor, but he could choose to ignore that.

 

The weather was as beautiful as the Queen had promised. The gardens of the city were in full and fragrant bloom, but even sweeter was the scent of wild roses along the roadside as they rode southward. Traffic was light at this hour, and what there was gave way before the Heralds, bowing their heads and often smiling.

Egil would gladly have put a stop to that. Bronwen accepted it as her due.

Her Companion recovered quickly from Cynara’s strict discipline. While Cynara kept a steady and sensible pace, Rohanan crackled with restless energy, cantering ahead and then back, dancing in circles, sprinting off across the fields, leaping fences for the joy of it, snorting and blowing and tossing his mane.

Bronwen was an exceptionally good rider. Whatever her Companion did, she never moved. That took talent as well as skill.

That evening in the inn to which Cynara’s unhurried pace had brought them, while Rohanan snored in his stall and the locals dozed over their beer, Egil ordered dinner in the common room. Bronwen would have had a tray sent up to her room; she was in no way pleased when he instructed that her dinner be served with his.

“I thought you didn’t like to be noticed,” she said: the first words she had spoken to him since she stalked out of his class in formal logic three years ago.

“Some things are expected of us,” Egil said. He had his back to the wall, and the table he had chosen sat in the corner with the best view of both the outer and inner doors.

His training was coming back: how to carry himself, how to speak and act in front of strangers, where to sit and what to watch out for. It was a refuge of sorts, a set of ingrained habits that he could fall back on with no need to stop or think.

Bronwen sat across the table from him, frowning. Her back was to the room. Anyone or anything could creep up behind her and sink a knife in her back.

Egil pointed that out, gently. She made no move to change her position.

“There’s no threat here,” she said. “Everyone’s either in awe of us or so happy to see us he can hardly speak.”

“Not every threat will announce itself with a scream before it leaps,” Egil said.

She sniffed audibly. “This place is safe,” she said.

“You’re sure of that? Are you a Mage, then?”

Her eyes blazed on him. “No,” she said through clenched teeth. “I have eyes in my head. It’s as simple as that.”

Her vehemence told him a great deal about this girl who seemed so sure of her own destiny. Of course an Ashkevron of her character and talents would expect to be a Mage as well as a Herald. It must be a great disappointment not only to her but to her family that she had not inherited that particular combination of Gifts. “Come around and sit where you know you should sit,” he said mildly.

Their dinner came while he waited, and he began to eat, relieving her of the burden of his stare. After a moment in which he managed to take a bite of roast lamb, chew and swallow it, she dropped into the chair beside him, with her back against the corner’s other wall. He said nothing, only slid her dinner toward her and held up the cider jug in mute inquiry.

“No,” she snapped. Then, even more crossly, “Yes. Damn it, yes.”

He gave her time to cool her resentment and start thinking again, and also to eat as much of her soup and bread as it seemed she was going to, before he said, “We’ll be riding for another three days if the weather holds, but I think it’s time now to explain where we’re going and why.”

“I know that,” she said. “There’s odd magic coming out of a town called Shepherd’s Ford. It’s in the middle of Osgard Valley, where a good number of equestrian-minded nobles have their summer estates. We’re to go, investigate, and pretend we’re interested in the riding school in Shepherd’s Ford, while we find and eradicate the Mage or Mages who have been disturbing the balance of powers in the region.”

Egil finished savoring the last bite of his roast lamb—it had been excellent; he would be sure to compliment the cook—and sat back, as relaxed as Bronwen patently was not. She sat stiffly upright, like a student who had finished a recitation but not yet received the teacher’s response.

“Well,” Egil said. “It seems you’re much more fully informed than I am. I only know that we’re to investigate the riding school. There are Mages, too, you say?”

Her skin was very fair, and a blush showed on it like a flag. “There must be,” she said. “What else can it be?”

“Now that is a very good question,” said Egil. “Can it be something other than Mages?”

“Do you know what I hated about your classes?” she said. “You never would give a straight answer. Everything was questions in answer to questions and ‘Do you think ... ?’ and ‘What else can it be?’ Did you even know what the answers were?”

“Not everything has an easy answer,” Egil said. “This may be one that does, but we can’t know that until we’ve seen it for ourselves.”

She pushed her half-eaten bowl of soup away so hard it splashed on the table, barely missing her sleeve. “See? That’s what I hate. I need answers. Not more stupid questions.”

“The only stupid question is—”

“—the one that isn’t asked.” She glared at the puddle of soup in front of her. “Do you hate me as much as I hate you?”

She really was young, Egil thought. That kept him from letting her hear the first answer that came to mind. The second might not please her, either, but it was honest enough. “I don’t hate you. There’s a reason why we’ve been sent on this mission. We’re expected to work together and learn from each other. There’s nothing that says we also have to like one another.”

To his surprise, she did not fling herself away from the table and run off to her room in a temper as she would have done when she was his student. Apparently she had grown up a little, though she was still very much a child.

It was the child who muttered, “Good, because I can’t stand you.” But the older Bronwen, the one who had earned her Whites, added grudgingly, “We can work together. Rohanan says we have to—he’s in complete terror of Cynara.”

:True,:
Cynara said from her vantage point in Egil’s mind. The smile had curved his lips before he thought to stop it. Again to his surprise, he saw a similar one on Bronwen’s. Her Companion must have said much the same.

They did not have to like each other. But they could share a moment of mutual amusement, Herald to Herald.