Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

:They have to stop,: she said.

Egil’s fingers were numb as he fumbled with her reins. When he touched her, sparks leaped. He flung himself into the saddle with nothing of his usual grace.

She barely waited for him to settle before she reared up on her hindlegs and screamed.

No horse, even dying in agony, had ever made such a sound. Even the wind stopped, appalled. The quadrille staggered to a halt; riders clapped hands over ears, and horses bucked and plunged.

With that one enormous eruption of fear and rage and sorrow, the tension had gone out of Cynara. She pawed the sand, ears flat, snapping teeth in the startled face of Larissa’s stallion.

Larissa was incapable of being truly angry at a Companion, but she was visibly out of temper. “That had a purpose, I hope,” she said.

Egil scraped his wits together and put them in some sort of order. “Those figures,” he said. “Where did you learn them?”

“They’re my own,” she said without either anger or defensiveness.

He shook his head. He did not mean to be tactless, but Cynara’s scream still was echoing inside his skull. “Something inspired you. Didn’t it?”

“Well,” she said, “yes. There’s an old book in the library, full of patterns like these.”

“Show me,” said Egil.

“These are spells.”

Egil had known as soon as he saw the quadrille. The book from the high shelf in the library, with its ancient and battered cover and its crumbling pages, had done nothing to change his mind. The drawing on the page confirmed it.

He did not recognize the language in which the book was written, except that it was old. How old, he was almost afraid to guess. On each page was a pattern, deceptively pretty, like something a lady would embroider on a coverlet.

Any coverlet embroidered with these would be weapon enough to start another Mage War. Egil forced his eyes to slide past them and not sink into them, trapped within their curves and corners. Each one was a maze to bind a spirit, along with any powers that spirit had.

“Why did you choose this one?” he asked, not quite pointing at the page Larissa had marked for him.

She shrugged. “It seemed the most ridable,” she said. “It has a flow to it that suits a horse’s gaits perfectly.”

Egil looked for signs of deception, but her eyes were clear. She might be an accomplished liar; that was always possible. He could not bring himself to think so. Horses were the most honest of creatures; anyone who trained them truly well could no more lie than a horse could.

There was a difference between lying and self-delusion. “Did you know these were spells?” he asked her.

“Not at first,” she said, “but after a while I began to wonder. There’s a pattern to them; they flow from one to the next. They’re protective spells, I think. Wards. They bring safety to whoever works them.”

“Did someone tell you that?”

“No,” she said. “It’s a feeling I get when I look at them. They make me feel safe.”

That was not the effect they had on Egil at all. This was far outside any sphere of competence he might lay claim to. It needed a Herald-Mage, and he was as mere and ordinary as a Herald could be.

“I have to send word to the Queen,” he said. “In the meantime, I’m afraid I have to ask that you choreograph another quadrille for your festival—and not one inspired by this book.”

Larissa frowned. She was not angry, or else she was trying hard not to be, but he could tell she was confused. “Why, sir? Is there a law against it?”

“You don’t know what you’ve done, do you?” As soon as Egil said that, he regretted it. She was his elder; she was by far his superior in the art of horsemanship.

He stiffened his spine. He was the Queen’s Herald, and Selenay had sent him on this mission. Now that he was here, he had begun to realize just how serious this problem was.

Larissa obviously did not. “I haven’t been working spells,” she said. “I’ve been riding patterns, that’s all. As training exercises, they’re quite ingenious.”

“They’re more than training exercises,” Egil said. “Have you by any chance been wondering what happened to the moon?”

She stared at him. “The moon? What does that have to do with—”

“I’ve been here for eight days,” he said. “I haven’t seen the moon once. That comes on top of other anomalies—the Queen gave me a fairly lengthy list. You’ve been riding these patterns since last autumn, am I right?”

“Yes,” she said, “but—”

“The weather has been exceptionally mild here, yes? Has it rained since autumn?”

“Rained and snowed both,” she said, “in appropriate amounts. We haven’t been suffering.”

“Have you not?” said Egil. Gingerly he picked up the book, not touching it with his skin, but wrapping it in a napkin borrowed from the kitchen. “The Queen will want to see this.”

“Of course,” she said.

She was not alarmed. That could be simple confidence, or it could be something else. Everyone here was just a little too much at ease.

Protected, he thought. Wrapped like the book in folds of soft and smothering magic.