She walked briskly to stave off the chill, the gravel of the road crunching beneath her boots. The rising sun, with its bands of orange and gold, drew her east.
As she walked, the glistening grasses of farm fields transformed into thick stands of fir and spruce blotting out the newly risen sun and darkening the road.
This was the edge of the Green Cloak she entered, an immense wood that grew thick and wild in the heart of Sacoridia. Its more tame borders marched in snatches and thickets right down to the shores of Ullem Bay and the foothills of the Wingsong Mountains. The bulk of the wood was dense and unbroken, save for villages and towns that made islands of themselves in its interior, and the occasional woods road that, from an eagle’s view, she thought, must cut through it like a scar.
Such roads were often in conflict with their surroundings. It didn’t take much for saplings to start growing in the middle of woods roads and winter blowdowns to topple across them, eventually obscuring the least used. A carpet of rusty pine needles softened Karigan’s footfalls and gave this road an abandoned look, though it was the main thoroughfare leading into Selium from points east.
Karigan walked till her stomach growled. She sought out a warm patch of sun surrounded by solid, cold shade, and washed down chunks of bread and cheese with handfuls of water from a gurgling stream next to the road. It wasn’t the choicest water, but it would have to do.
Afterward, she splashed cold water on her face. She felt altogether bedraggled after just one night on the road, and she longed for the hot baths and full meals the school served up.
“Don’t tell me I miss it. . . .” She glanced over her shoulder as if the entire campus, with its templelike academic buildings looming over the city from atop its hill, might pop into view.
It was curious how a night on the road made yesterday’s events seem somehow less significant, less hurtful. Karigan half-turned, gazing back down the road which, within a day’s walk, ended at the school. Her hands tightened into balls and she clenched her jaw. She would show the dean.
Kick me out of school, will you? Let’s see how you like confronting my father. She grinned, imagining her father, his expression livid, towering over a shrinking Dean Geyer.
Then her shoulders sagged and her grin faltered. It was no good. She had no control over her father. What if he agreed with the dean that her punishment was just?
She kicked the ground and pebbles skittered across the road. Gods, what a mess. She hoped to reach Corsa before the dean’s letter did, so she could tell her father her side of the story first. Either way, she would be in deep trouble. Maybe she ought to hire herself out on a merchant barge and stay away for good. After all, that’s what her father had done when he was a boy.
She jammed her hands into her pockets, and with head bowed, ambled along the rutted road at a reluctant pace.
She startled a baby squirrel sitting on an old lightning-racked stump. It pipped and squealed, its tail abristle. It stamped in place, then darted from one edge of the stump to the other, as if too frightened to decide which way to go.
“Sorry I scared you, little one,” Karigan said.
Chittering, the squirrel dashed into some underbrush and scurried noisily through the leaf litter of the forest floor, sounding like some much larger beast.
Karigan walked on humming an off-key tune. However, when the sounds of the squirrel did not abate but, in fact, grew much louder, she froze.
The racket shattered the woods. Trees and shrubs shook as if some wild creature—many times larger than a squirrel—thrashed in the twined branches and undergrowth. Crazed catamounts and rabid wolves played through her mind. She hadn’t a weapon with which to fend off the beast, and she couldn’t run either; her feet seemed to have taken root in the ground.
She drew a ragged breath. Whatever the nameless beast was, it charged her way, and fast.
It burst from the woods in an explosion of branches. Karigan’s breath hissed in her throat like a broken whistle.
The creature loomed huge and dark in the tree shadows. It huffed with great wheezings through flared nostrils like some infernal demon. Karigan closed her eyes and stepped back. When she looked again, a horse and rider, not some evil dragon of legend, staggered onto the road. Twigs and leaves fell from them to the ground.
The horse, a long-legged chestnut, was lathered with sweat and huffed as if from a hard run. The rider slumped over the chestnut’s neck. He was clad in a green uniform. Branches had lashed trails of blood across his white face. His broad-shouldered frame twitched with fatigue.
He half dismounted, half fell from the horse. Karigan cried out when she saw two black-shafted arrows impaled in his back.
“Please. . . .” He beckoned her with a crimson glove.
She took one hesitant step forward.
The rider was only a few years older than she. Black hair was plastered across his pain-creased brow. Blue eyes blazed bright with fever. With the two arrows buried in his back, he looked as if he had fought off death longer than any mortal should have.
He was of Sacoridia, Karigan was certain, though the green uniforms were far rarer than the black and silver of the regular militia.
“Help . . .”
Each step she took was shaky as if her legs could no longer support her. She knelt beside him, not sure how she could aid a dying man.
“Are you Sacoridian?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you love your country and your king?”
Karigan paused. What a curious question. King Zachary was relatively new to the throne and she knew little of his policies or methods, but it wouldn’t do to sound disloyal to a dying servant of Sacoridia.
“Yes.”
“I’m a messenger . . . Green Rider.” The young man’s body spasmed with pain, and blood dribbled over his lip and down his chin. “The satchel on the saddle . . . important message for . . .king. Life or death. If you love Sacor . . .Sacoridia and its king, take it. Take it to him.”
“I—I . . .” One part of her wanted to run screaming from him, and another part felt drawn to his need. Running away to Corsa, instead of waiting for her father to collect her at Selium, had held an irresistible air of adventure that she had anticipated. But real adventure now looked at her with a terrifying visage.
“Please,” he whispered. “You are—”
The last words died inaudibly as blood gurgled in his throat and sprayed his lips, but she thought she caught a breathy the one. The one what? The only one on the road? The only one to take the message?
“I—”
“Dangerous.” He shuddered.
Everything around fell silent in an expectant hush, as if the world held its breath for her decision.
Before Karigan could stop herself, she said, “I’ll do it.” She heard the words as if someone else had drawn them from her.
“You s-swear?”
She nodded.
“Sword. Bring it to me.”
The horse shied from Karigan, but she caught his reins and drew the saber from the saddle sheath. Its curved blade flickered in a patch of sun as she held it out before her. She knelt beside the messenger again.
“Wrap your hands around the hilt,” he said. When she did, he placed his hands over hers. It was then she saw his gloves were not dyed crimson, not originally. He coughed, and more blood flecked the corners of his mouth. “Swear . . . swear you’ll deliver . . . the message to King Zachary . . . for love of country.”
Karigan could only stare at him wide-eyed.
“Swear!”
It was as if she already looked upon a ghost rather than a living man. He would not allow himself to die until she swore the oath. “I swear . . . I’ll deliver the message for the love of my country.”
Although she had sworn, the Green Rider was not ready to die yet. “Take the brooch . . . from my chest. It will ident . . .” He squeezed his eyes shut in pain till the spell passed. “Identify you as messenger . . . to other Riders.” The words were
gasped as if he were forcing air in and out of his lungs by sheer will to extend his life. “Fly . . . Rider, with great speed. Don’t read m-message. Then they can’t tor-torture . . . it from you. If captured, shred it and toss it to the winds.” Then, because his voice had grown so faint, she had to lean very close to hear his final words. “Beware the shadow man.”
A cold tremor ran through Karigan’s body. “I’ll do my best,” she told him.
There was no response from the messenger this time though his eyes still stared at her, bright and otherworldly. She gently pried his fingers from her hand and closed his eyes. She hadn’t noticed the winged horse brooch before, but now, pinned over his heart, it glowed golden in the sun. Absently she wiped bloody finger marks off her hands onto her trousers and then unclasped the brooch.
A curious sensation, not at all unpleasant, as if all her nerves sang in unison, tingled throughout her body. The gold warmth of the sun embraced her, and drove the shadowy chill away. There was a fluttering like great white wings beating the air, and the sound of silver-shod hooves galloping. . . .
Moments later, the sensation receded, and she realized the sound was her own excited heartbeat, and the sun had risen sufficiently to widen the patch of light she stood in. Nothing more. She pinned the brooch to her shirt.
She then sensed, like a breeze whispering through a hundred aspen trees, invisible lips that seemed to murmur, Welcome, Rider.
Karigan shook her head to clear it of such fancies, and turned to practical matters. What to do with the messenger’s body? She couldn’t just leave it lying there in the middle of the road exposed to carrion birds and passersby, could she? She wouldn’t want to stumble across a body in the middle of the road during her travels. It just wasn’t right to leave it there.
She grimaced. The body was too heavy for her to drag into the woods by herself, and how would she bury it? She most certainly hadn’t packed a shovel. It seemed wrong to leave the body out in the open, but . . . she had to try. Then, as if a voice said to her, Don’t waste the time, she backed away from the body and took up the reins of the horse.
And still she hesitated. The least she could do was leave the saber with the messenger to show how bravely he had died. But what if she met up with the people who had struck him with the arrows? She would need some kind of defense, even if a saber wasn’t any good against arrows. Practicality won out, and she slid the blade back into its sheath.
The messenger had told her to fly, but running the horse to his death would serve no purpose. She would walk him and mount up only when he seemed at least partially recovered.
The horse was a sorry-looking beast. His legs were long but thick; obviously he had been bred to run fast for distances with no thought to aesthetics. His neck reminded Karigan of her father’s descriptions of some long-necked wild beasts he had seen on one of his voyages. The horse’s coarse chestnut hide was crisscrossed with old scars.
“I wish I knew your name,” Karigan told him as they plodded along.
The horse curved his neck to look, not at her, but behind her. She glanced back, too. The messenger’s body had already fallen behind a bend in the road, and there was nothing to see besides the pointy shadows of spruce trees shrinking as the morning progressed.
She shuddered. The messenger’s twisted, tortured form would stay in her memory for some time to come. She had helped lay out the corpses of old aunts and uncles for funerals, but they had died peacefully in their sleep, not with arrows driven into their backs.
This message business was a huge change of plans. Home was out of the question. Karigan bit her lip. Her father would be aggrieved enough by her suspension from school, and now she was running off on some reckless errand without having considered the consequences.
She could almost hear her aunts enumerating her deficiencies: Feckless, Aunt Gretta would say; Willful, Aunt Brini would add; Impulsive, Aunt Tory would declare. Aunt Stace would sum it all up with, G’ladheon, and all the aunts would nod knowingly in mutual agreement.
Karigan thrust a strand of hair behind her ear. She could not help but concur with her aunts’ assessment. It seemed she always made the wrong choices—the kind that got her into trouble.
It was too late to turn back now, though. She had made a promise. She had sworn to the Green Rider she would take the message to King Zachary himself.
She had visited Sacor City once as a young child, and at the time, elderly Queen Isen, Zachary’s grandmother, reigned over Sacoridia. Zachary’s father had ascended the throne only to fall ill and die a short time later. Zachary’s ascension to the throne had been challenged by his brother, Prince Amilton, but why, she did not know. She assumed all royals engaged in squabbles whenever power and prestige were at stake.
Now her ignorance annoyed her. What could be happening in the land that meant a life-or-death message for the king? What did the message contain that was so vital someone was willing to kill for it? She longed to look at the contents of the message, but the Green Rider had ordered her not to.
Belatedly, she wondered how much danger she had put herself in. She was all alone amidst the wild forest lands of Sacoridia. She carried a message for which a man had been pursued and killed. She let out a trembling sigh, suddenly yearning for home; to be held in the safety of her father’s arms and to hear her aunts gossiping in the kitchen. She missed the big old house in Corsa and the predictable and unimportant concerns of everyday life that pulsed and flowed through it.
The recklessness of her decision to carry the message truly set in. With a sinking feeling, she knew it would be a long time before she saw home again.
Three wooden arms branched from a cedar signpost planted in a grassy island in the middle of the intersection. From the south arm hung a shingle indicating the River Road. More shingles, carved with the names of towns along the way, hung beneath it. If Karigan were going home, she would take this road.
The middle arm pointed to the well-maintained Kingway which bore east, the most direct route to Sacor City and King Zachary. Her father had said the Kingway would one day be paved all the way from Sacor City to Selium, increasing commerce and prosperity for all the villages situated along it.
The third arm pointed toward an ill-kept, overgrown track. The one shingle hanging from it bore one ominous word: North.
Estral, Karigan’s good friend at school—her only friend at school—had hinted there was more activity up north in recent months and that King Zachary had reinforced the borders with armed patrols. But Estral, who pursued the craft of the minstrels and seemed to come by incalculable amounts of information from unguessable sources, never said exactly where the trouble was emanating from. Mysterious Elt Wood lay due north, but somehow she couldn’t fathom anything from that strange place deigning to bother Sacoridia.
The horse had finally cooled down enough for Karigan to mount up. The saddle was a tiny thing compared to what she was used to. A light saddle made sense if you wanted to travel speedily, which she supposed most messengers did, but it would take some getting used to. It felt like there was nothing between her rump and the horse’s bony spine.
The message satchel was strapped to the front of the saddle, and a bedroll, two small packs, and the saddle sheath to the cantle. She would investigate the contents of the saddlebags later when she was well down the Kingway. Maybe there would even be food inside one of them.
She adjusted the stirrup irons to a comfortable length, settled into her seat, and squeezed the horse’s sides. He didn’t budge. She kicked more insistently, but he stood his ground.
“You’re a stubborn, ill-trained horse,” she said.
The horse snorted and walked toward the North Road of his own volition.
“Hey!” Karigan pulled back on the reins. “Whoa. Who do you think is in charge here?”
The horse stomped his hoof and shook the reins. Karigan tried guiding him toward the Kingway again, but he refused. When she let up, he gained a few more steps toward the North Road. She d
ismounted in disgust. She would lead him onto the Kingway by foot if she had to. The horse tossed his head back and jerked the reins out of her hands. He took off down the North Road at a trot.
“Hey, you rotten horse!”
More horrified than angry that the horse was running away with the important message, she chased after him. He looked back at her as if to laugh and kept jogging for nearly a mile. Then he waited patiently, cropping the grass that grew in the road, for an infuriated Karigan to catch up. When she was just within an arm’s reach of the reins, he swished his tail and trotted off again, leaving her to shout a number of curses in his wake.
The third time, Karigan made no attempt to grab the reins. She stood huffing and puffing before him with her hands on her hips.
“All right, horse. Maybe you know something I don’t. Maybe the Kingway is more dangerous because it’s the most direct route to King Zachary. We’ll try this road for a while.”
At this compromise, the horse allowed her to gather up the reins and mount. He responded to her commands as a well-trained horse should, and Karigan frowned at his duplicity.
“That’s right, you rotten horse,” she said. “Pretend nothing happened.”
He then adopted an uncomfortable gait that jarred every bone in her body.
“I do believe you’re doing this on purpose.”
The horse made no indication he had heard her, and continued on in his ambling, bouncing, potato-sack gait. Karigan clucked him into a canter which was equally jarring, but would make better headway. If foes were on their trail, she wanted to keep as far ahead as possible.
Red squirrels raced across the road before them. “Road” was laughable. It served more as a streambed when the ditches were too overgrown or filled with debris to drain properly. When Karigan reached King Zachary, she resolved to inform him what a sorry state the road was in, and demand that taxes be put to good use in repairing it. Well, maybe not demand. One did not demand anything of a king, but she would make a strong recommendation nevertheless.