Toby Bishop - Horse Mistress 02 Read online

  Amanda Beeth opened the door and held it for her. “I know my husband won’t let the matter pass, and not only because it happened in our district. It is too much an admission of Oc’s weakness, or its negligence.”

  “I hope the Council agrees with his lordship. Oh!” Philippa touched her forehead with her gloved fingers.

  “Margareth, I almost forgot. We must get word to Eduard…the Council refused to investigate his case, and the Duke is furious. Eduard should be warned.”

  Margareth had followed her to the door. “I’ll go myself, Philippa.”

  As Philippa and Lady Beeth hurried down the steps to the courtyard and the waiting phaeton, Hester and Larkyn emerged from the stables, and dashed across to them.

  “Mamá,” Hester said urgently. “Make Papá do something for Rosellen and her family!”

  “We’ll try, Hester.”

  The driver clucked to the horses, and the phaeton rolled smartly out of the courtyard toward the road to Osham. Philippa looked back over her shoulder at the two girls in the courtyard, tall Hester, with her fair hair smoothed into the rider’s knot, Larkyn small and vivid, with violet eyes, her dark curls cut short.

  Their innocence made Philippa’s heart ache. It had been easy to believe, when Oc and Klee made their uneasy peace, that the times of war were past. She hated to face the knowledge that such times would come again and weigh on these young flyers. She knew all too well how heavy the memories of war could be.

  THREE

  LARKbrushed Tup’s coat until it shone like the blackstone of her native Uplands. She combed his tail, and clipped his mane. She used the hoof pick to remove tiny pebbles and bits of bracken wedged around the frog of each hoof, and then polished his hooves with pine tree oil until they glistened. Tup loved to be groomed, and would usually groan with pleasure under the currycomb, or nibble at her hair, giving his little whickering cry as she brushed his mane. Today, though, he was quiet, though his ears followed her every movement. Even Molly, the long-haired Uplands goat who kept Tup company, seemed to have

  caught Lark’s bitter mood. Molly pressed close to Lark as she worked, and Lark stopped from time to time to rub her poll.

  When Tup’s grooming was done, she rested her cheek against his shoulder, feeling his warmth and strength, not caring that she was covered in horsehair and probably smelled as much like horse as he did.

  Molly pushed between them, and Lark closed her eyes, drinking in the comfort of her bonded companion and the little brown goat. They made her feel as if she were home again on Deeping Farm, as if she could walk out of the stables and go into her own comfortable, ancient kitchen, with its slanting floor and scarred table, the rue-tree just now shedding its leaves beside the door.

  She was still there when Hester came along from Goldie’s stall. Lark sighed, and straightened as Hester leaned over the gate. “I hear the carriages on the road,” she said. “The others are coming back.”

  “I wonder who will tell them,” Lark said.

  Hester shook her head. “I don’t want to be the one. Do you?”

  “Nay. I can barely stand to think of it, much less speak of it.” Lark gave Tup one last pat and crossed to the gate. She and Hester went out into the sunshine, to stand in the cobbled courtyard and wait for the carriages to arrive.

  “Poor Lissie,” Lark said softly. “Poor little lass. She must be frightened half out of her mind. I hope they won’t hurt her.”

  “They’re Aesks,” Hester said grimly. “Barbarians. She may not survive either.”

  “DOESit mean war?” asked Isobel softly. She and the other second-level girls clustered around Hester and Lark on the sleeping porch, on the upper level of the Dormitory. Word of the tragedy had spread like running flames at dinner, and those girls who, like Isobel, flew Foundation horses, looked especially grave.

  Hester also flew a Foundation, and Lark knew she had always expected to be assigned to the Angles, or Eastreach, or the South Tower of Isamar. Foundation flyers were the first to be called upon in times of war; they were the strongest and the heaviest of the winged horses, used to patrol the coastlines, to escort armies, sometimes even to fight. Isamar and Klee, once a united kindgom, had fought a brief, bloody war more than dozen years before, but a truce had been reached between the Klee and Prince Nicolas. Though at times uneasy, the truce had held, and all of Oc clung to the hope of peace. They had believed the barbarians to the north vanquished long ago.

  “It depends,” Hester answered Isobel. “on how the Council decides to respond.”

  “But there can’t be any question! This have to send a force to Aeskland!” This was from Grace, a girl who flew an Ocmarin filly. “Those poor children!”

  “Don’t be such a weakling,” a voice sneered. It came from the far end of the sleeping porch, where most of the third-level girls had their cots. Lark knew this voice well, with its forced accent. “There’s nothing to be done for them now. They should have taken steps to protect themselves, my father says, instead of expecting the Duke to do it for them!”

  Hester’s gray eyes met Lark’s with a flash of warning, but Lark didn’t care. She snapped, “They’re citizens, Petra! They pay the tithe-man like everyone else. It’s Oc’s duty to protect them.”

  “Why don’t you go after them, then, Goat-girl? If you care so much?” Petra Sweet stalked between the cots and came to stand before Lark, hands on hips, her features looking knife-blade sharp in the flickering light of the oil lamps.

  “I do care,” Lark said, lifting her chin. “And I would go in a minute.”

  “No doubt,” Petra said. “You probably feel more at home with fisher-folk than with us!”

  “Have a care, Sweet,” Hester began, but Petra ignored her.

  “Learned to use a proper saddle yet, Black?” she said to Lark. “Or are we going to have to ship you back to the Uplands with your little crybaby and that filthy goat?”

  Isobel stamped her foot. “Petra Sweet, you just leave Black alone. She flew her Airs on Ribbon Day, just as we all did. No first-level class has ever done better.”

  “First-level!” Petra said. “What will you do about the second-level? Just wait for your Grand Reverses, to say nothing of Arrows!” She smiled, showing small, sharp teeth. “Without a flying saddle, your goat-girl will be tumbling through treetops, and likely bring you all down with her.”

  “Petra,” Hester began, but Lark put up a hand.

  “Never mind,” she said. “She doesn’t bother me. I’m an Uplander. I don’t need to argue with yon shoemaker.”

  Anabel sniffed loudly, then pinched her nose. “What is thatsmell ?” she said. “Is that bootblack?”

  Grace giggled. One or two others laughed, too. Petra glared at Lark, her eyes narrowed.

  Until Lark arrived at the Academy, Petra had been the only girl there who did not come from titled aristocracy. Her father was a wealthy businessman, a manufacturer of shoes, and Petra felt her status keenly among the daughters of Oc’s barons and earls. She had seized on Lark’s country origins with fierce joy. Lark had repaid her by blacking her eye shortly before Ribbon Day.

  Petra looked down her nose. “I only warn you, girls,” she said, “for your own good.”

  She turned and stalked away. Beatrice, who Lark had always thought the quietest and most demure of all their class, stuck out her tongue at Petra’s retreating back. Everyone laughed.

  Lark clamped her hands over her mouth. In her emotional state, she feared a burst of laughter would disintegrate into tears of grief. Rosellen had been her friend, her faithful support through her difficult first months at the Academy. She couldn’t rid herself of the image of thick-bodied Aesks in their leather jerkins, swarming through the lanes of Onmarin. The wardogs’ ghastly howling haunted her dreams. And poor Lissie, and small Peter, kidnapped, carried away by barbarians in those black and scarlet warboats…

  She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, and the laughter around her died. No one spoke, though Anabel Chance pu
t an arm across Lark’s shoulders and squeezed her gently.

  The other girls turned to their cots. One by one they blew out their lamps, and the sleeping porch quieted. Lark lay awake for a long time, worrying about what lay ahead for all who flew the winged horses, horsemistresses and students alike. She watched drifts of cloud blur the stars, and a pale sliver of moon rise behind them. She must write to her brothers in the morning and tell them the bad news. She would not want them to hear it from someone else.

  PHILIPPA,too, lay wakeful in her bed. She had spent extra time rubbing down Winter Sunset after her long flight from the Angles, then blanketing her against the night chill. As she crossed the courtyard to the Domicile, the pallid moon barely pierced the thin cover of cloud. Winter’s hand would soon be closing over the Duchy of Oc.

  By the time she had reached the ruined village of Onmarin, other folk from the Angles were there, gathering up the dead, beginning the burials, comforting the fishermen who had come home with their day’s catch to find their cottages afire, their families slaughtered. By the time the bodies had been counted and identified, everyone knew that two children were missing, abducted by the barbarians.

  Rosellen, the Academy’s stable-girl, had not survived the attack. Her body had been found in her cottage, where she had run back for her little sister. It was that sister, young Lissie, who was nowhere to be found. A small boy, Peter, was also unaccounted for. As in the old stories, the Aesks had taken children, and if the tales were true, poor Lissie and little Peter were doomed to lives of slavery—if they survived.

  The news from the Council was tragic. Duke William was disinclined to war, and so, it seemed, were most of the Council Lords. Philippa tossed in her bed, fretting over this failure. Duke Frederick would never have tolerated the abandonment of any of his people, however poor or insignificant. When the South Tower of Isamar had been attacked, he had ordered his soldiers to war, and his horsemistresses into the air, without hesitation.

  How many years ago had that been? Philippa counted back, startled to find that thirteen years had passed since that awful day. The memory, the awful sight of Alana Rose falling, was as fresh as if it had happened the week before.

  And now, with Frederick in his grave less than a year, William spent his energies spying on his own people, fawning on Prince Nicolas, manipulating anyone who stood in his way.

  Philippa, who had studied statecraft with the old Duke himself, agreed with Lord and Lady Beeth. If Oc did not move to protect its own, there could be more incursions, more offenses against the people. It boded ill for the Duchy that the Council felt otherwise.

  At last Philippa gave up trying to sleep. As she often did, she gathered her bed quilt around her and sat in the comfortable armchair beside her window. She gazed out across the courtyard at the clean lines of the stables, the well-groomed paddocks. Tomorrow the new term would begin, with the arrival of a new class of first-level girls and their colts. Like the cycle of the year, the cycle of the Academy would go on, war or no war. So it had been for centuries.

  She found the thought comforting. History had not recorded the name of the first brave woman to bond with a winged horse, to mount it, to launch into the sky in defiance of every natural law. And what man was the first to understand that no winged horse would abide him near?

  Philippa’s eyelids drooped, and sleep began to steal over her, there in her soft armchair. No one would ever know those names. Philippa was too pragmatic to believe the old fables about winged horses descending from the Old Ones, but for years she had turned to pondering the mystery as an escape from hard times, as on the day Alana Rose fell to her death, or when Irina Strong also fell, through her own fault, but with just as final a result.

  Philippa yawned. Her muscles released, and her eyelids drooped. Who had been the progenitress of the horsemistresses? How far back, layered under recorded and unrecorded history…

  Odd, that an unanswerable question should be her meditation, her repose. But it was. Philippa yawned again and forced herself to get up. She would be stiff in the morning if she fell asleep in the armchair.

  She wrapped the quilt around her shoulders and was on the point of turning to her bed when she caught sight of a dark figure trudging up the lane from the road, just now coming into the courtyard. Sleepiness vanished.

  Everyone else was abed. Every light had been extinguished in the stables, in the Dormitory, in the Residence. Philippa leaned toward the window, squinting through the darkness. The person was not tall, wrapped in a shapeless cloak and wearing a hat with a drooping brim. Whoever it was stood staring up at the darkened windows, looking at each building in turn.

  Philippa reached for a coat to pull over her nightdress. She could hardly leave someone out in the cold and dark.

  She slipped as quietly as she could down the staircase and across the foyer. She opened the front door and stepped outside. At the clicking of the latch, the stranger whirled to face her.

  “Hello?” Philippa said.

  “Oh!” It was a woman’s voice, and a woman’s plump face Philippa saw as the visitor jerked off her hat and bobbed a clumsy curtsy. “Oh, thank ye for coming down, Mistress. I know the hour is late, but I’ve walked so far…and I have nowhere else to go.”

  “The hour is indeed late,” Philippa said. “But you had best come in. Quietly, please.” Everyone is sleeping.”

  “Oh, aye,” the woman said softly. She held her hat before her in her two hands and climbed the steps, walking as if her feet hurt her. Philippa stood back to let her pass and saw that it was not a cloak the woman wore, but a long, rather ragged shawl, wrapped several times around her stooped shoulders. She carried a satchel in one hand.

  When they were in the foyer of the Residence, the woman set down the satchel and stood awkwardly in the center of the tiled floor. Philippa struck a match and turned up two oil lamps on a breakfront. When they were burning steadily, she faced the woman, her brows raised.

  The woman was past middle age, red-cheeked, with gray hair scraped into a braid that hung down her back. Her eyes were red and swollen, her face haggard and full of misery. She said, in a choking voice,

  “I’m Evalee Brown. Rosellen was my daughter.”

  Philippa put a hand to her throat. “Kalla’s heels,” she breathed. “Mistress Brown—I’m so sorry—” She

  crossed the floor swiftly and put out her hands to take the other woman’s. The hat fell to the floor unheeded. “Don’t tell me you walked all this way!” she said.

  From the apartment beneath the stairs, she heard a door open and close. She was sorry to have wakened Matron, but it couldn’t be helped. She put an arm around the grieving mother’s shoulders.

  “Come to the kitchen, Mistress Brown,” she said. “You must have something to eat.”

  “Perhaps—I could do with a cup of tea, if ’tis not too much trouble.” Her voice broke on the last word, coming out as a little, exhausted sob. Philippa urged her toward the back of the Residence, where Matron kept a small kitchen supplied with tea and coffee, bread, a few simple things for making off-hour meals. When she pushed the door open, she found Matron already had the kettle on the boil and cups set out.

  “Matron, you’re a wonder,” Philippa said. She introduced the two women, then urged Evalee Brown into a chair. Rosellen’s mother accepted a cup of tea, circling it with her work-worn hands, and looked up into Philippa’s eyes.

  “He won’t do nothing,” she blurted.

  Philippa was on the point of asking what Mistress Brown meant, but then, with an impatient gesture at her own slowness, she said, “Ah. You mean the Duke.”

  “Aye, Mistress. My man heard the Duke said there wasn’t nothing to be done.”

  “Many of the Council Lords disagreed, Mistress Brown.”

  “That don’t help,” the woman answered. Her eyes were as bleak as the windswept coast that was her home. “That don’t bring my poor Lissie back, or pay them demons for what they did to Rosellen.”

  “I�
��m so very sorry about Rosellen,” Philippa said in a low tone. “We all are. She was a fine, hardworking girl, and we miss her.” Matron set a plate of buttered bread on the table and withdrew from the little kitchen. Philippa pushed the plate nearer her guest.

  “You know what they did to her?” Evalee Brown said in a tone of dull horror.

  Philippa didn’t want to know. She had been told Rosellen was dead, and had asked for no details. She could hardly say that to the girl’s mother, though. Mutely, she shook her head.

  “They savaged her, that’s what they did,” Mistress Brown said. “Rape is hardly the word for it. Rape, then…” She hung her head, and was silent for a long time. At last, she whispered, “My poor girl. All she ever wanted was to be near the winged horses.” Her head began to move, side to side, trembling on her neck. “It’s my fault. I wanted to see her once more, just wanted her to come for a visit. If I’d let her be, she would still be safe, out there in yon stables, mucking stalls and mending tack.”

  Philippa stretched her arm across the table and covered the woman’s rough hand with her own smooth one. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “You couldn’t have foreseen—”

  Evalee Brown suddenly sucked in a noisy breath. Her head came up, and her hand turned to seize Philippa’s with an iron grip. “They have my Lissie! Those animals, those beasts—my little Lissie, what’s afraid of her own shadow! And he says—he says—”

  “I know,” Philippa said grimly. “I know what he says.”

  “You have to help me.” It was not a plea, but a statement.

  “I don’t know what I can do,” Philippa began, but Evalee Brown interrupted her.

  “You know what them barbarians are like, Mistress. They make slaves of the children they take, they use them however they please, as if they was animals. It’s been a long time, but we all know the stories, and we can’t leave my Lissie and poor little Peter to them! We can’t!”

  And Philippa, with grim resignation growing in her breast, knew she was right.

  WHENthe new girls and their foals began to arrive, Lark and the other second-levels were in a classroom that fronted the courtyard. Mistress Star, their instructor, gave up trying to keep order and allowed the girls to crowd into the windows to watch. Anabel and Hester were on either side of Lark, with the others kneeling or standing on tiptoe to see.