Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

That did not bode well for an early night. Patience, Egil willed himself. “What should I not be sure about?”

She hissed at his maddening insistence on answering a question with a question, but for once she consented to play the game. “Something is odd here. The weather we had to ride through, the way we got out of it—that’s not normal. And now we’re here, and it’s as normal as anything can possibly be. It doesn’t fit.”

“It does if this place has nothing to do with the strangeness,” Egil said. “It’s a genuine school, and these really are horsemen. Very good ones, from what I’ve seen so far.”

“Just because they’re good with horses doesn’t mean they’re good people,” she said.

“True,” he said, “but it’s hard to be this good at it and be wicked Mages, too. Evil taints a soul; we’d sense it, most likely, and our Companions certainly would. Cynara isn’t alarmed at all. What does Rohanan say?”

Bronwen tossed her head. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“So? I thought you were going to look for evil Mages in the town?”

“I’ll do that,” she said stoutly, “and look for them here, too. So should you, if you can spare time from drooling at that woman’s feet. What was she, your first love?”

“Yes,” he said, and that took her quite nicely aback. “She was the first person I ever saw ride who made me understand that riding is truly an art, and worth studying for itself. Thanks in large part to her, I’ll study it for as long as I’m alive and able to balance myself in a saddle.”

“Oh,” said Bronwen in a gratifyingly small voice. “That kind of love. Believe it or not, I can understand it. I had one of those, too, when I was too young to know better.”

“It’s a good thing,” he said, “to have an example to follow.”

“It depends on the example,” she said, springing to her feet. “For me, it was you.”

She left him with that. It was a nicely dramatic exit, he had to admit, though it did not embarrass him nearly as much as she might have hoped.

Egil woke in the dark. He knew at once where he was and why, and somewhat of the when. The air had the taste and the texture it always had just before dawn.

Struck by the desire to breathe it fresh from the source, he left the bed, went to the window, unlatched it, and swung it open. Cool, soft air bathed his face, sweet with the scents of grass and flowers. He drank it in blissful gulps.

The stars were bright overhead, with neither cloud nor moon to dim them. He found the pole star and marked the shapes of constellations rising in the east that, later in the summer, would stand high overhead.

The sky rippled suddenly, as if he had cast a stone into a pool. He staggered, clutching the window frame. When his eyes opened again, it was as if he stood underwater. Wave after wave ran outward from the center of the sky.

:Cynara!: he cried inside his head. :Cynara, for the love of gods! What is happening?:

:Strangeness.: Her reply was as serene as ever. As if she had power to quell whatever had turned the sky to water, the eerie ripples slowed and eventually stopped. The stars were still again. The wind blew soft, bringing the first of the morning light.

No one mentioned what had happened, and Egil decided to keep it to himself. They all must have slept through it.

He entertained the brief thought—he almost called it hope—that he had imagined it. But the shock was still in him. Well after the sun came up, he caught himself looking upward, as if the sky would turn strange again and this time would swallow the world.

Nothing that he saw that morning was anything but sane and earthly. The horses were as fine as Godric had promised, and the riding and training were very good indeed. He was privileged to meet Madame Larissa’s new stallion, who showed great promise, and to see her ride him with even more skill and grace than Egil remembered.

No one asked anything of the Heralds—they would not dream of it—but Godric and Larissa between them inveigled Egil into riding Cynara in one of the arenas. Cynara was glad to dance again; she had missed it on the journey.

So had Egil. Riding across country was a fine and useful thing, and pleasant enough apart from rain and mud and wind. But this was the thing he lived for, this art, this dance of horse and rider.

At first he was stiff and self-conscious, but Cynara’s rather too obvious air of indulging his frailty brought him to order. He forgot who was watching and let himself enter into the place where his heart truly was.

The world was different there. Words dropped away. Thoughts, hopes, fears were dim and distant things. The dance was all there was. Two bodies so very different and yet so clearly meant to dance together, joined in balance and harmony. The air was a living thing around them, enfolding each movement, shaping and transforming it.

For an instant, at the heart of it, he understood ... something. Some very important thing about what the sky had done and why, and who had caused it.