First Rider's Call (52 page)

COBWEBS

Karigan lay face down on the scrubby ground, gasping and shivering. Remembering the last time she had been caught in the traveling and left in a faded-out state, she touched her brooch to ensure she was solid and real. She was.

But so
cold.
And there was the killer headache.

She pushed herself onto her knees, grimacing as each movement made her headache pound with new ferocity. Warmth. She needed to get warm.

She guessed the traveling had left her off in her own time, in the same location where she had separated from Lil. At least, she hoped it was her own time. Even so, it meant her tinder box was with Condor, many miles away at Watch Hill.

She needed a fire, even if it meant rubbing sticks together for the remainder of the night. She forced herself to her feet and staggered about, searching in the light of the moon for dead wood.

Was it her imagination, or did her breath fog the air? Her left arm was so numb as to be useless. By the time she had accumulated a pile, she was nearly senseless. She slumped next to the pile of wood, and closed her eyes.

No,
came a tiny cry from within. To sleep would be her death.

But she was already submerging into darkness.

 

Her body rocked back and forth with violence, and unwillingly she was thrust from the embrace of blissful sleep into the world. She cried out and flung her hand as if to catch herself from falling.

Warm breath blew in her face.

Her eyes fluttered open to horse nostrils just inches from her own nose, making her cross-eyed.

“Condor,” she murmured, and she closed her eyes to go back to sleep.

He clamped his teeth on the collar of her shortcoat and started shaking her.

Karigan finally came to enough to realize what was happening. “Stop, boy! Stop!”

He released her collar, and turned his head so he could watch her with one big brown eye. She reached with a quavering hand to stroke his nose.

Somehow he had found her. Somehow he had, of his own volition, left Watch Hill to come after her. And somehow he had the sense to arouse her out of a sleep from which she otherwise would not have awakened.

Later, she would take time to marvel over all that, and the traveling, too, but in the meantime, she was still freezing. She grasped the stirrup hanging down from Condor’s saddle and hauled herself to her feet, then searched through the saddlebags and found her tinder box.

Once she had a roaring fire going, she wrapped herself in her bedroll, and sat before the fire, shivering uncontrollably as though she were caught in a raging blizzard, rather than sitting beneath the moon on a pleasant summer evening.

She kept feeding the fire until inevitably her eyes drooped and she dozed off. This time it was not a sleep of death.

 

Condor’s soft whicker woke Karigan. Sibilant whispers hissed from the darkness beyond the dying embers of her campfire. She sat up with a start and the whispers hushed like a sharp intake of breath. Blinking blearily, trying to shake off sleep, she felt the ground around her for her sword, groping vainly at grass and twigs.

She peered into the darkness. Nothing. Nothing, but the grayish hulk that was Condor, the orange liquidy reflection of the fire shining in his eyes. His ears twitched attentively.

Crickets chorused, their song rising and falling like a quickened pulse, then silencing, only to begin again in a rush.

She gazed into the woods, discerning nothing, but before her groggy mind thought to stoke up the fire, she found herself ringed by tall figures of shadow, the spade-shaped tips of their arrows glancing in the moonlight.

Karigan’s heart thundered. Each arrow was aimed at her.

A voice threaded from the dark, soft and musical, in a language she did not understand, but one she thought she knew.

She licked dry lips. Trying to hold her voice steady, she asked, “Are you
tiendan?
”

The other stopped speaking. Silence.

Moments passed. Did the archers tauten their bow strings? They seemed not to move.

Then one silver arrowtip streaked downward like a falling star, and one of the figures advanced.

A tall, slender woman stood over her. Karigan couldn’t quite make out her features, but the moon gleamed on ghostly, flaxen hair pulled back into numerous tightly woven braids. Snowy feathers bound into the braids rustled with the subtle movement of air. She wore the unusual milky armor Karigan had seen on Telagioth.

She climbed to her feet, all too conscious of the surrounding arrowtips following her movement. The woman was stillness itself, but finally she spoke.

Her voice was songlike, though it did not speak in friendly greeting. It spoke in quiet command, but Karigan did not understand the words.

“I’m Karigan G’ladheon,” she said, interrupting the Eletian. “King’s messenger, Green Rider.”

Silence.

She wondered if they understood her.

The woman spoke to those who ringed them. Arrowtips lowered to a less threatening position.

Glittering eyes surveyed Karigan, and she was aware of her blanket fluttering against her leg, of the cold that still numbed her limbs.

“Your name is known in the Alluvium,” the woman said. Her voice was not quite cold, but neither was it welcoming.

Karigan and the woman regarded each other at length.

Another of the Eletians spoke and the woman responded quietly to him, her eyes never straying from Karigan. She released the tension of her bowstring, and to Karigan she said, “You will come with us.”

“I—”

The Eletian raised her palm to her lips. Moonlight pooled there, and she blew. A cloud of silvery sparkling motes of dust billowed into Karigan’s face, and after that, she was unsure of what happened next.

 

When Karigan came back to herself, she was sitting cross-legged in a clearing of emerald grasses, the dawn raising a golden mist from stark white birches that ringed the clearing, their branches knit together like a net. Glimmerings of crystalline light winked among the birches, some close, some far off, deep in the woods. They were like a galaxy of stars, silvery amid gleaming leaves.

Karigan shook her head for her mind was layered with a complex interweaving of cobwebs she could not seem to break through.

The Eletians had brought her to the clearing. It was an assumption, not a memory.

Were they just going to leave her here? Was she a captive, and if so, why? The one who had spoken to her—last night?—had said her name was known. What did that mean?

Eletians emerged from the woods as though the slender birches had come to life, arrows once again nocked. They did not step into the clearing, but rather stood in the fringes of the woods. She tried to discern them, but the color of their attire shifted with their stance, blending them in with their surroundings.

One did step into the clearing—the woman. Her armor, too, changed color subtly in the light with the iridescence of a hummingbird. Her flaxen braids gleamed brightly in the daylight, the snowy feathers drifting behind her as she walked. Her eyes were as emerald as grass newly grown in the spring. She was beautiful, but exotically so. And she possessed an edge, cold and dangerous.

She carried her longbow with a full quiver of arrows strapped over her shoulder. Girded at her side was a long, narrow blade.

The Eletian simply looked down at Karigan, her expression hard to read. Was it haughty? Searching? Disinterested?

“Yes, we are
tiendan,
” the Eletian said, as if no time had elapsed since Karigan’s query.

Angry at having been dragged from her campsite, horse, and her own concerns without explanation, Karigan tried to stand, but the cobwebs that clouded her mind confused her, and she could not rise.

“Why have you brought me here?” she asked.

The Eletian did not answer. She circled Karigan looking her over, evaluating her, making her feel like a beast in a zoo.

The wrath built so within her that her face flushed with heat. “I am a king’s messenger, and your interference will find only ill will with my king. Laws protect Green Riders—”

“Your laws hold no power over us, and the regard of your king no meaning.”

A rush of angry retorts surged into Karigan’s mind, but before she could open her mouth to speak them, the Eletian drew her blade and knelt before Karigan.

Karigan’s angry words scattered like ashes before a wind. The blade was of the same gleaming steel as the arrowheads, perfect and radiating cold light in the dawn’s golden glow. Would the Eletian slit her throat or stab her in the heart before she could take another breath?

The Eletian slashed, ripping through her left sleeve, but not her flesh.

Karigan looked at her unhurt, exposed shoulder in disbelief. The slash revealed a tiny scar, like a cold white puncture wound.

The Eletian, hesitantly, touched it with her fingertip. Warmth, brief and fleeting, flowed inward from her touch. Something twitched within Karigan, and she shifted uncomfortably.

A vertical line appeared between the Eletian’s eyebrows. She glanced sideways at Karigan. Concern? Fear? Surprise?

“Please,” Karigan said. “I—”

The Eletian drew her palm to her lips and blew. Karigan faded into a haze of sparkling dust motes gone golden with the sun.

MIRROR OF THE MOON

Karigan sat cross-legged in the night. As far as she could tell, she hadn’t moved since—since her last awareness. But now a cloak draped her shoulders and kept her warm. It was of a soft weave, almost more a membrane of skin than cloth, with veins of green like a leaf.

Moonstones still shone among the trees, casting light into the clearing. No Eletians stood within sight, but they had left her food, laid out on platters like a feast amid the stars. She sniffed the contents of a flask and sipped. A warming fluid, like a fine liquor, spread throughout her body, chasing away the last chill of the traveling. It invigorated her and lifted her spirits.

She unfolded her legs, surprised they were not cramped from sitting this way for—for however long it had been. Minutes? Hours? Days? She ate of the wild roots, berries, and honey cakes. She had not realized how famished she was. She drank deeply of the flask, which never seemed to empty.

Her stomach content, she strode to the edge of the clearing. Her prison? She shook and rattled the interwoven limbs of birch trees, but they would not part.

She tried to crawl beneath tree limbs, but the tangle of brush stopped her, and so it was with the entire circumference of the clearing. She doubted an ax would be of much use, after all.

She placed her hands on her hips, wanting to know what the Eletians intended, but she supposed there was nothing she could do about it but wait and see how it would all play out, at their whim. There was no telling why they deemed it necessary to confine her.

If they wanted to talk to her, they needn’t have imprisoned her in this clearing, a pretty prison though it was.

Too much had happened already. The traveling rushed back to her and she pressed her hand across her midsection, but felt no remnant of an arrow wound, only the memory of it, which remained powerful.

She paced around the clearing, going over the events of Watch Hill in her mind. By some strange fate, she had witnessed Lil Ambrioth’s rescue of Hadriax el Fex. She had ridden with the First Rider.