Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses) (36 page)

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Authors: Sharon Shinn

BOOK: Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses)
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“It’s the raelynx,” she said. “I think I might be able to trust it now to go off on a kill. And I can feel it getting restless—if I can let it run almost free for a few hours, I think it might grow calmer. But I’d like to have Donnal beside it when it runs just to—connect it back to me somehow. I don’t know that I can explain.”
He nodded. “Let’s see what we encounter on the road in the next few hours.”
“You think our angry villagers sent off to Nocklyn Towers for reinforcements?”
“I think we’ve created enough of a stir all along our journey that anyone interested in tracing our path will be able to do so.”
“And I had planned to be so unobtrusive,” she said in a light voice.
“Really?” he said. “And have you ever managed that?”
She laughed. “I can be most quiet when it suits my purposes,” she said. “As I imagine you can. And yet, in general, a person would say you would be a hard man to overlook.”
“I’m big,” he said, “but I don’t set things on fire. I think you’re even harder to ignore than I am.”
“Perhaps I won’t have cause to do anything like that again.”
They continued on a few moments in silence. Behind her, Senneth heard Kirra’s bright voice and Donnal’s rare laugh. Cammon had dropped back to ride beside Justin, who seemed to be his favorite person out of the entire party. Senneth could not imagine two people less likely to be friends, and yet Justin treated the boy with a warmth he showed to no one else, not even Tayse. Tayse he worshiped, Kirra he hated, Donnal he tolerated, and Senneth he feared. But he liked Cammon.
“What happened to your young man?” Tayse asked abruptly.
She glanced over at him, completely baffled. “What young man?”
“The one you must have known in order to have a baby.”
“Oh.” She thought his determination to know had outweighed any embarrassment he might feel at asking the question; there was no expression to be read on his face. As for herself, she couldn’t help a tiny smile. “Him. I’m ashamed to say I never really cared about him. He was just a means to an end.”
“You wanted a baby?” An edge of sarcasm there.
“I wanted—I wanted to thwart my father, who had planned to marry me off to one of his cronies’ sons. I thought if I turned out to be damaged goods, as the saying goes, the marriage was less likely to go through. I miscalculated, as it turned out,” she added, her voice hardening a bit. “He was still willing to marry me, though he wanted some adjustments made in the dowry to reflect my—impurity. They were still hammering out the details when my father threw me out of the house.”
“So you were successful. In a way,” he said.
She reflected. “In a way. But the cost was too high.”
“It very often is,” he replied.
“Yes,” she said. “So I have learned.”
“I am sorry, though,” he said, surprising her. “That you would have to lose something so precious. In such a way. It’s a grim tale, and I’m not surprised that you don’t often tell it.”
She turned her head sideways and regarded him a moment with a lurking smile. “But I am not the only one who chooses not to tell many tales of her young life,” she said. “We know nothing about you except that you sprang whole from the loins of a King’s Rider, sword already in hand.”
He smiled back. “It was not quite that way.”
“Come, then! Were you raised by a mother who made some faint, desperate effort to instill gentleness in your soul? Were your parents married?
Do
Riders marry? I can hardly credit it.”
“They do marry, from time to time,” Tayse said. “The women usually regret it. I know my mother did. She had three children with my father, and he was present for none of their births and very little of their lives. I remember how bitterly she would speak to my sisters about his absence and his lack of affection. When I was about ten, she and my sisters moved from the soldiers’ quarters near the palace to a real house in Ghosenhall. I think she thought that would get my father’s attention, but it didn’t.”
“I’m guessing it didn’t get yours, either.”
He shook his head. His smile had turned a little rueful. “I was already in training. I didn’t miss her lectures and silly worries. I think I went five years without seeing her except on the days she would come to the palace just to visit me.”
“Oh, I hope you were kind to her those days.”
“I would like to think I was, but I doubt it. I was always very anxious for her to go, so I could get back to sword fighting or horse riding or dagger play or whatever it was we were working on for the day. I did always hug her and give her a kiss on the cheek. She requested it, you understand, but I did comply.”
“And is that the typical life of a Rider’s wife?”
He nodded. “From what I’ve observed.”
“Then I can’t believe that women are lining up to marry them.”
He laughed. “You’d be surprised. The king holds us in high esteem, and on the streets of Ghosenhall we are practically lionized. No tavern will take our money—merchants are always pressing goods on us for free. Men like to say they have made friends with a Rider, and women—well, you might guess what women like to brag of. There are no shortage of candidates for wifehood. But I don’t know many Riders who are happy in their marriages. Or, rather, they might be happy, but their women are not.”
“And has this turned you against the thought of marriage? Or do you have a wife stashed away in Ghosenhall that you just have not found time to mention?”
A slight smile for that. “No time to seek one out and, so far, no inclination. I would make an even worse husband than my father.”
“You could choose to do better,” she said. “I have chosen to be kinder than my father and stronger than my mother. You could make the same decision.”
He looked at her for a long moment, and she had time to wonder what he could possibly be thinking. “It is hard to imagine ever loving someone else so much that I would want to give her a very big part of my heart,” he said at last. “If she did have so much of me, I assume my behavior would change in every respect. But I have not been particularly changeable so far in my life. It is difficult to envision what kind of force could have so much influence on my personality.”
“Well,” she said, “there’s always magic.”
He almost smiled. “These days,” he answered, “I am less impervious to that than I used to think.”
“Love
or
magic,” she said. “No one’s impervious. I would be on my guard, if I were you.”
He gave her a quick, ironic nod. “I always am.”
A scuffle of hoofbeats behind them and then Kirra’s voice called out. “Senneth! Come settle this!”
She could have continued this particular conversation forever, and at the same time she was almost relieved to have it end. She gave Tayse a quick smile and reined back to join the others. The dispute was over the colors used on an old flag hanging in one of the hallways of Danan Hall, and Senneth told them with a laugh that she couldn’t remember the flag, let alone the color scheme. But she continued to ride beside the two of them until Donnal dropped back to ask Cammon a question, and then she continued on alongside Kirra.
“Better today?” Kirra asked.
Senneth shrugged. “Tired. Worried. Wondering if Annie and Sosie are all right. Wondering what we’ll find in Nocklyn. Wondering what we’ll know by the time we end up back in Ghosenhall. A lot on my mind.”
“Sosie and Annie will be just fine,” Kirra said in a dulcet voice. “Since they have magical stones to protect them.”
Senneth grinned. “Yes, I could tell you were quite impressed by my ability to turn common things into objects of power.”
“But can you really? I mean, seriously? Because I’d like a stone like that, if you can find the time to cast another spell.”
Senneth thought about it. “I do believe I was able to imbue those rocks with—something. Strength, courage, a little of my own power. I do think if those girls need help and they clutch those stones, they’ll connect with an energy that will help them. But maybe just having something that they believe will protect them will give them courage enough to go on. I don’t know. I had to do something.”
Kirra lifted her eyebrows. “I mean it. I’d like a stone like that, too.”
“You have enough of your own power. You don’t need mine.”
Kirra turned her head sideways to examine Senneth out of her blue eyes. “I don’t have anything like the power that runs through you. I think you’ve gotten even stronger since the days you were in Danalustrous, teaching Donnal and me how to focus our minds and hone our talents.”
Senneth was silent for a few paces. Finally, she said, “I think I have, too.”
 
 
BY the time they broke for lunch, it seemed clear they weren’t being followed from behind or hunted from ahead, so Tayse permitted Senneth to send Donnal and the raelynx on an expedition. She did so with some trepidation.
“If there’s trouble, don’t try to control him yourself,” she instructed Donnal. “Come back and get me.”
“There won’t be trouble,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
She followed them with her mind as Donnal flowed from man to raelynx and the two of them took off running. She could not read thoughts—certainly not a wild creature’s—but she could feel their emotions, distinguish the patterns of their moods. Donnal’s were orderly and observant, a man’s impressions taken through a beast’s eyes.
From the raelynx she drew only the most primitive images of speed, power, rage, and hunger. She could sense his desire to outrun her, to flee this strange, troubling influence that had shackled his motions and curbed his appetite for so many days. She could feel how he reveled in the very act of racing through the scrubby brush of the countryside. For a moment she almost wished she was a shiftling like Kirra so she could run beside him, feel the earth and the stones and the fallen leaves in an elemental mosaic beneath her feet—sort through the feast of scents laden on the table of the heavy air—and hear sounds so distant and so distinct they seemed like ancient music. For a moment she felt heavy and earthbound and dull, and she wanted to release him from her own hold because she was unworthy of his beauty.
But she could set the whole countryside on fire and feel less guilty about the resulting catastrophe.
She was concentrating so closely on Donnal and the raelynx that she was not paying much attention to the road before her. She trusted that the Riders would keep her safe and that her horse would bunch with the others; thus, she left her hands loose on the reins and let her eyes lose focus. She was conscious only slightly of motion, of voices around her, the soft fall of shod hooves on a dirt road, the touch of weak sunlight on her cheek.
A shadow beside her. A voice so soft it might come from her memory. “Senneth. I don’t want to disturb you.”
Cammon. “Hmm?” she answered, not much interested.
“I can follow Donnal for you. You don’t have to concentrate on anything but the raelynx. I can let you know if Donnal senses trouble.”
Why hadn’t she thought of that? “Yes—good,” she said dreamily, and let Donnal’s consciousness slip away from her.
Cammon might have ridden beside her for another few paces, but she had stopped noticing. All her attention now was swallowed by the raelynx. He had dropped to an absolutely motionless crouch, his belly so low to the ground the pine needles tickled his fur. Before him was a deer, thin and shaggy in the dead of winter, her sloe eyes watchful, her footsteps hesitant. But he was silent, he was still, he did not even shiver as he waited for her to come a step closer, and then another. All the world held its breath; even the wind stopped teasing.
Then a blur of motion—a burst of energy so strong that it shocked even Senneth—the pounce, the bite, the gush of blood pouring into her mouth. The sense of victory so intense, the rush of hunger so strong, the taste on her tongue so real. She jerked back, suddenly wanting to be a woman on a horse again and not a feral cat devouring a freshly killed meal. But she kept her mind hovering over the rae-lynx’s, not letting him get too far from her, not letting him revel too fiercely in his freedom.
He feasted, eating very fast, and only bothering with his favorite parts of the carcass. Suddenly he looked up, alert, and licked his tongue across his face. Noises a short distance away. He dropped low again, almost to his stomach, and began crawling toward the sound of potential prey.
He was deeper into undergrowth now, almost into woods; the light came through in intermittent slants. Senneth had pulled back far enough from his mind that she could not smell what he smelled or hear what he heard; she could only catch his own narrow excitement. Some of what he saw filtered back to her in snatches—a stand of naked trees conferring in the cold, a skate of ice in a shallow ditch, a flash of red bird wing so high overhead it scarcely merited a single glance.
He crept up over a low ridge, pressed his belly to the ground, and peered down. Every muscle was strung taut, every sense strained to its fullest. Below him, half covered with leaves, lay a brown trail, winding its way around deadfalls and ruts. Deer path, Senneth assumed; there must be water somewhere nearby. By the raelynx’s absolute dedication to silence, she also assumed a deer or some small animal was making its meandering way down the route toward water.

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