The Swan Riders (3 page)

I could empathize. It is fairly easy to be calm when one's path is set and one has few choices. Having been both an heir to a crown and a blood hostage to the Preceptures, I should know.

Talis and his riders were (in their way) kind to me: we rode only a few hours.

A few hours was plenty.

I had frankly no idea horses were so big. They don't look so big from the ground. Getting onto a horse is like becoming a different kind of creature: a tall one, with an uncertain connection to the earth. A newborn giraffe, say. Or perhaps that implies too much delicacy. Once mounted (a process which took several iterations and cost me much dignity), I was acutely aware of how strong the animal was: its whole back was sheets and cords of muscle. There was no question who would win in any physical contest.

So, horses: big. Also, horses: wide. To straddle a horse for a few hours: well . . . A lifetime of farm labor has given me quite serviceable muscles—I am not a weakling. I am also not inexperienced with pain. But those muscles had never been called on to do anything remotely like riding a horse, and the pain (at least in its location) was novel too. By the end of three hours' riding I was sure I was going to die of overstretched thigh muscles and bruised sitting bones.

The Swan Riders swung down from their mounts while I sat on mine, unable to move my rigid legs and contemplating colorful ways in which I could murder Talis for doing this to me.

Though of course horses were the very least of what he had done to me.

The AI turned up as if my thoughts had conjured him. He took hold of my horse's bridle and offered me a fist as a brace for dismounting. I looked at it. Then I leaned on it, and on the saddle horn (while my datastore told me about William the Conqueror, who had bruised his abdomen on a pommel so badly that he had later died). I tried to swing my leg over.

But my stiff thighs seized up, and the next moment I was sliding. I slipped around the horse like a bead on a hoop, clutching at the saddle horn to slow myself while the horse snorted and sidled. Finally I just fell. Talis grabbed my waist and managed to swing me clear of the horse before I crashed on top of him and we both went down. He twisted as we fell and landed on top of me, laughing.

My horse swung his nose round and looked at us. It is good that horses have no eyebrows to raise. I felt that I might maim the next person who raised their eyebrows at me, and the horse was a (relative) innocent.

Talis rolled off me, and we both lay in the autumn grass of a little prairie hollow, with the sky just beginning to turn the color of jewels: chalcedony and lapis.

“That lacked dignity,” I said.

“Dignity is overrated,” he said.

Talis said this: Talis, the master of the Preceptures, with their codes of honor, order, and restraint. His dark hair was sweaty and sticking out everywhere. I was glad that mine—newly shorn for the grey room—was too short to muss. To give up dignity?

As he often did, Talis answered my unspoken thought. “It's a human yardstick,” he said. “You don't need to hold yourself to it.”

“Then what shall I hold myself to?”

Talis popped the air out of his cheeks, as if the question of ideals mattered not a whit. “You'll find something.” He swung his arms up, stretching like a cat. “What do you think, are you going to live?”

Given the situation, the history of the AIs, it hardly seemed likely. But before I had to decide, a shadow fell across us, dark against the soft glow of the sky. A human figure with wings: one of the Riders.

I jerked as the shadow touched me, and my throat tightened.

That's what the Riders meant to me. They were dread given human form.

Talis, though, sprang to his feet with a bounce that was nearly spaniel.

Both Swan Riders were there now, at the rim of the hollow, and they swept him a formal bow, touching their left palms to their right shoulders, then holding their upturned hands out, a gesture that looked Roman to my classically trained eyes.

This I had already seen them do. At the Precepture, they'd bowed so, saluted so, and said not a word. The Utterances—the book of Talis's quotations kept and studied as holy writ in north-central Asia, and a political text elsewhere—prescribed it so:
The Swan Riders
should mostly be silent,
it said.
They are way creepier that way.

It was true, and it had a point: ideally the Swan Riders are not viewed as people, but as messengers, angels, mere extensions of the will of Talis. In my time at the Precepture, I'd seen many Riders. I'd never heard them utter a word outside of their rituals, outside of the names of the Children they'd come to kill.

(Children of Peace. Come with me.)

These two were on that model: during the embarrassing fifteen minutes when my horse wandered away from the stool I was using for a mounting block every time I got halfway on him, they'd said nothing: they'd sat like figures from myth.

Now they stood together, a man and a woman, undoing for each other the buckles that held on their wing harnesses. He was big and she was narrow. He, African (or from Africa's diaspora), she Indian or Sri Lankan (at a guess). He was missing one arm somewhere above his wrist—he had the leads of both horses gathered in a prosthetic hand of scuffed-up but translucent silicon, metal bones and actuators visible within. I couldn't tell how far up it went, because it vanished into his sleeve.

“Hey, Talis,” said the woman, shrugging out of the wing straps. Her voice was like scorched sugar—sweet and rich and bitter, all at once. “Heard it was you.”

“How nice!” he piped. “My reputation precedes me.”

(It did, too. In the way aerial bombardment precedes an army.)

The man said nothing but looked down his elegant nose at me.

“And who's this?” said the woman.

“Oh, sorry,” said Talis. “Greta, this is Francis Xavier. And that's Sri.”

It was awkward being presented to standing people while lying flat on my back, but I drew on my royal training and endured it. I couldn't have risen without help in any case. “Hello,” I said. Dried grasses poked at my shaved scalp.

“New Rider?” said the woman, Sri, as if the notion amused her vastly.

Talis's smile went sharp-edged. “New AI.”

For just a flash, Sri looked nakedly horrified.

Talis put up an eyebrow—dangerous—and Sri whipped a blank expression across her face as if snapping a sheet into the wind. She touched her shoulder again, this time to me. “My apologies.” She reached down for me. “Need a hand?”

“Please.” Actually, lying flat sounded good, but the smarter thing was to walk off the stiffness. Even with help, getting up was difficult. My legs cramped and wobbled, my torso (staying upright on a horse is harder than you think) felt like old rubber.

“It gets easier,” said Sri.

“It gets harder first,” put in Talis cheerfully. He and the male Swan Rider, Francis Xavier, were pulling the saddles off the horses. “Tomorrow you're going to feel
really
rotten.”

“Oh, that's wonderful news,” I said—and suddenly sounded, in my own ears, like Elián Palnik. He was the only person I'd ever heard smart off to Talis. Elián. Talis had exiled him with little more than a horse and a stern warning. He was out here on the prairie somewhere. Lost. I had lost him. I had left so much behind.

I tried to be more myself: “Thank you, Talis.”

Thank you, Talis, for telling me I'm going to hurt. For taking away my childhood. For making me a prisoner.

For wrenching me from the people I loved.

For turning me into a machine.

The Swan Riders set to work.

It is not in my nature, nor in my training, to watch others work and do nothing. But horses, as has been established, are foreign to me, and camping not much less so. (The king my father would sail out sometimes, and we would lay up on an island and—but no good to think human thoughts.) So for the better part of an hour, I sat on a rock and watched while Talis and Francis Xavier and Sri took the tack off the horses and cared for them, and built a fire and unpacked their gear.

Past that first bow, and past everyone's care for Talis's glittery temper, they did not defer to each other. If you did not know better you would assume the three of them were equals. If you did not know better, and if you hadn't seen that strange gesture: palm to shoulder, palm out in offering.

The pair of Swan Riders could have been picked for contrast. Francis Xavier was big, broad across the shoulders and narrow at the waist, with a face as round as the moon. Sri was as narrow as if she'd shut herself in a door, her face almost comically tapered: all intense eyes and needle-sharp nose. He was thoughtfully slow; she was wildly quick.

They were both murderers, of course.

Of Francis Xavier, I knew this for a fact: he'd killed my classmate B
hn. He stood out from the various other people who had murdered my various other schoolfellows, because of the hand, and also simply because he was so big. He—I would say he was beautiful, but that did not quite catch it. His dark skin was glossy smooth and his features were perfectly symmetrical, as if someone had buffed out all his details. His face was so carefully blank that you could believe he'd taken a recent blow to the head. The Swan Riders are not meant to have a will of their own, and I had never seen one of whom that was easier to believe.

Sri, on the other hand, seemed self-willed as an alley cat. She had a scrawniness that looked tough. But balancing that she had a quick voice, rough and lovely, that made me wonder if she could sing. I had no idea how many people she'd been called on to kill.

Soon the horses were grazing (their teeth were big, close up, and their jaws were built for leverage) and a fire was burning and Sri had flipped up a crossbow and shot a rabbit that just happened to be passing.

Well. That was what we were going to eat, I guess, and solved the puzzle of how four people could travel in abandoned country yet carry so little food. The puzzle of water I had yet to come to grips with.

And the puzzle of me. What was I now? How was I to live?

When I finally sat down at the fire, Francis Xavier nodded to me solemnly and said: “Greta.”

A Swan Rider, speaking my name.

So tall his wings brushed the lintel as he ducked into the room. Nghiêm Th
B
hn, he'd said. Come with me.