Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

too. It’s a great event all around.”

Egil nodded. Others had mentioned that as well. It was still the better part of a month away, and while he was loving this interlude, he was practical enough to acknowledge that by then he should be back in the Collegium.

All the more reason to absorb what he could, while he could. The quadrille was a courtly dance of riders and horses, usually set to music, though there was no musician here to set the rhythm. Larissa and seven of her best young riders on matched blacks transcribed a series of intertwining figures, moving in a smooth skein that Egil knew from experience was anything but easy to achieve.

His admiration gave way to a peculiar uneasiness. It was rather like the sensation that had brought him to Osgard, and rather like a voice singing just perceptibly off key. It was a lovely, an ingenious quadrille, beautifully ridden, and there was something deeply wrong with it.

:Do you feel it, too?: he asked Cynara.

She had already lifted her head to watch the dance. Her nostrils flared; she shuddered, a ripple of the skin over her whole body. The sight of it made Egil’s own skin crawl.

:Tell them to stop,: she said.

He had never felt what he sensed in her just then. She was calm—she fought for that. Just how hard, he could see in the rigidity of her neck and the perfect stillness of her posture.

: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.

Bronwen brought the next piece of the puzzle, one that he had begun to expect, but it was no easier to hear. She found him in Cynara’s paddock. It was the one place in Osgard where no one would dare to disturb him.

Bronwen had no such compunction. “I think we’re cut off,” she said. “Every road I try that looks as if it should lead out of the valley just circles around and brings me back in. The people I talk to don’t seem to understand when I ask what’s happening. ‘Why, nothing, ’ they say. ‘Why do you ask?’ Have they all lost their minds?”

“Not exactly,” Egil said. “They’re under a spell. You didn’t happen to find a Mage, did you?”

“Not a one,” said Bronwen. “I did talk to the village midwife, who has rather more of the Healer’s Gift than she’ll admit to, but all she could say was that everyone is very, very safe. ‘All but the moon,’ she said. ‘It must have said something indiscreet.’ I have no idea what she meant by that.”

“I’m afraid I do,” Egil said. He was not feeling it yet. He could not afford to, because then he would break and run screaming. :Cynara, is it true? Is the rest of the world gone?:

:It’s still there,: she answered. Her white calm washed over him. The gibbering fear had retreated; he could think clearly, or near enough. :We’re just not attached to it any more. I can sense the other Companions, but they’re distant. They’ve never seen anything like this.:

:What, none of them? Not even one of the Grove-Born?:

:None,: she said.