Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

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.

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 stone-work, 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.