Laren shrugged. “Good. If I’m not here, be sure to leave a message,” he said. And then he grinned.
“Now, the gate. You said you would show me the gate.”
Laren turned and gestured at the shortest tower, a sooty stone structure Sharra had never been inside. There was a wide wooden door in its base. Laren produced a key.
“Here?” she said, looking puzzled. “In the castle?”
“Here,” Laren said. They walked across the courtyard, to the door. Laren inserted the heavy metal key and began to fumble with the lock. While he worked, Sharra took one last look around, and felt the sadness heavy on her soul. The other towers looked bleak and dead, the courtyard was forlorn, and beyond the high icy mountains was only an empty horizon. There was no sound but Laren working at the lock, and no motion but the steady wind that kicked up the courtyard dust and flapped the seven gray pennants that hung along each wall. Sharra shivered with sudden loneliness.
Laren opened the door. No room inside; only a wall of moving fog, a fog without color or sound or light. “Your gate, my lady,” the singer said.
Sharra watched it, as she had watched it so many times before. What world was next? she wondered. She never knew. But maybe in the next one, she would find Kaydar.
She felt Laren’s hand on her shoulder. “You hesitate,” he said, his voice soft.
Sharra’s hand went to her knife. “The guardian,” she said suddenly. “There is always a guardian.” Her eyes darted quickly round the courtyard.
Laren sighed. “Yes. Always. There are some who try to claw you to pieces, and some who try to get you lost, and some who try to trick you into taking the wrong gate. There are some who hold you with weapons, some with chains, some with lies. And there is one, at least, who tried to stop you with love. Yet he was true for all that, and he never sang you false.”
And with a hopeless, loving shrug, Laren shoved her through the gate.
Did she find him, in the end, her lover with the eyes of fire? Or is she searching still? What guardian did she face next?
When she walks at night, a stranger in a lonely land, does the sky have stars?
I don’t know. He doesn’t. Maybe even the Seven do not know. They are powerful, yes, but all power is not theirs, and the number of worlds is greater than even they can count.
There is a girl who goes between the worlds, but her path is lost in legend by now. Maybe she is dead, and maybe not. Knowledge moves slowly from world to world, and not all of it is true.
But this we know: In an empty castle below a purple sun, a lonely minstrel waits, and sings of her.
OF SWORDS AND HORSES
CARRIE VAUGHN
Carrie Vaughn is the author of the bestselling series about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show. She’s also written for young adults (
Iraised my daughter on Disney princess movies because I’d loved them so much as a girl: the music, the happily ever afters, and those amazing dresses. They made me dream of other worlds, and I’d wondered what it would be like to dance at a ball, to marry a prince, to live in a world with magic.
Maybe I thought that Maggie would turn into me, or something like me. I’d have a friend I could sigh over the movies with, a little girl I could dress in satin princess gowns.
But Maggie’s questions startled me.
“How come the girls don’t get to ride horses and have swords and things?”
Then, I showed her
So I signed her up for fencing lessons.
I read an article in the paper about the local fencing school where one of the students—a girl—had just won a medal in the world championships and a scholarship to Harvard. Who knew Harvard offered fencing scholarships? The school advertised that their classes boosted confidence and increased poise and self-esteem, especially for girls.
Maggie loved it. Better, she worked at it, listened to everything her coach said, practiced at home with a dowel rod from Dave’s workshop, making little gliding steps across the kitchen floor, lining her feet up with the lines on the linoleum. I watched her during lessons, then sparring with her classmates, and, when my heart wasn’t in my throat imagining all the ways she could get hurt, felt a tingle of pride every time she outwitted her opponent, scooped her blade out of the way, swished it over and touched to score a point. When she took her mask off, her face glowed with smiling. The advertisements were right: she grew to be confident and poised, more than I ever was at her age, when I tended to creep along, slouching in oversized sweaters.
At twelve, the riding lessons started, because she begged and kept her grades up. Dave printed off an article about Modern Pentathlon, a strange sport where athletes competed in running, swimming, pistol shooting, fencing, and riding. Supposedly, the event was modeled on nineteenth-century military training, replicating the skills a spy would need to cross enemy lines and deliver a message to his commander. Maggie read the article, her eyes growing rounder and rounder. She took up jogging in the mornings before school.
My daughter showed no interest at all in conventional sports like volleyball or gymnastics. I’d been in marching band.
When she was fifteen, Dave asked her, jokingly, as he gave our credit card number to the fencing supply company’s website—yet again—for new epee blades and shoes because she’d grown out of the old ones, “Swords and horses. Why couldn’t you have been a track star like your old man?”
She didn’t look up from her horse magazine, didn’t smile, and answered seriously, “Because when Corlath whisks me away to Damar I have to be ready.”
Dave stared at her blankly.
“I think it’s from a book she read,” I explained. She kept a stack of paperbacks by her bed. Most of them had swords, or horses, or both on the covers.
Her riding coach told Dave and me, she has a gift. She’s a natural. Even I could see it, and all I knew about horses was what I learned from Disney movies. The animals carried her around jumping courses, their ears flicked back and listening to her, though she never seemed to move while she sat on their backs, never seemed to tell them what to do. She had an uncanny way with the horses, and I thought, maybe it’s all those books about horses that gave her that sixth sense.
Her coach wanted us to buy her a horse, a big thoroughbred who’d been competing in Europe and was experienced enough to teach Maggie about advanced riding and boost her confidence. She laid out a plan, including all the expenses, showing what it would take for Maggie to ride in the world championships, the Olympics. It cost too much, of course. The horse alone cost a third of what our house was worth, never mind what it cost to keep a horse. We didn’t want to break Maggie’s heart by telling her we couldn’t help her chase such a dream—you want to support your children. Strange, though, she seemed to understand. She never asked for more than we could give.
She said, smiling wisely, “My time will come.”
When she was seventeen, Maggie disappeared.
The police found her car—she’d driven herself to a riding lesson—on the road by the lake where my family had a cabin. I couldn’t tell them why she might have gone there. They didn’t find any sign of Maggie.
It made the news for weeks, because she was young and pretty, blond and smiling. We took out a second
