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 put 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.
It was the first time Lark had seen a new class arrive. The girls of her own class, Beryl and Beatrice and Lillian and the others, had all come to the Academy in the usual way, their spring foals in tow, just as the warm days of autumn folded into the chill days of early winter. Tup had been a winter foal, a surprise to everyone. It was true, as Petra Sweet never tired of reminding everyone, that Lark was never intended to bond with a winged horse. But Lark believed firmly that Kalla, the horse goddess, had made her own choice in bringing Tup’s dam to Deeping Farm for her foaling. Lark and Tup had not arrived at the Academy until the following summer, and everything about them was different.
Below, in the courtyard, she now saw how it was supposed to be. Colts filed wide-eyed and light-footed into the stables, their bonded companions at their sides. The oc-hounds who had fostered the colts paced alongside, feathery tails waving. The girls were no less wide-eyed than their colts, gazing around them at the emerald paddocks, at the long, whitewashed stables, at the majestic Hall flanked by the Dormitory on one side, the Domicile on the other. Some came in carriages, their winged colts trotting alongside. Others came in phaetons, or even, in one case, a girl rode a wingless horse with her foal on a lead beside her.
None arrived, as Lark had, in an oxcart, her colt accompanied by a little brown Uplands goat.
Hester nodded to Lark as if she could hear her thoughts. Anabel exclaimed over the colts as they paraded across the courtyard in a palette of equine colors.
“Noble,” Anabel proclaimed, as a roan filly trotted into the stables with her bondmate.
“There’s a Foundation,” Isobel said, pointing. The colt was a dapple gray, almost white. “And there’s an Ocmarin.”
Lark leaned closer to the glass to get a look at the little dun creature following a girl and the first-level instructor. “Get a blink at him,” she said. “Those little pins—he looks a bit like Tup, doesn’t he?”
“If by that bit of Uplands dialect you mean his legs,” Hester said dryly, “I can’t agree. That colt’s legs are thinner than Tup’s. Look how his croup slopes, too, where Tup’s is so flat. And by the way, Black, I thought you were going to start calling your horse by his proper name!”
“I keep meaning to, but I’m so used to Tup. And he’s used to it, too.”
“No saddle and no name,” Anabel said mildly. “You might have to try a little harder.”
Lark sighed. “Aye,” she said. “I suppose I could try calling him Black Seraph—or Seraph—though it’s a mouthful. But the saddle still troubles me.”
“You have to give it a chance.” This came from Beatrice, surprising Lark once again. In fact, all her classmates surprised her, except for Hester and Anabel. All during her first long months at the Academy, she had felt as friendless as a bummer lamb. Only Hester and Anabel had treated her as one of their own.
But since their triumphant Ribbon Day, her classmates had behaved differently, teasing her as friends might, going on about her country accent and her Uplands dialect. The last step of her true belonging would be to learn to use the flying saddle.
“Aye,” Lark said again. “We have work to do, right enough.”
Beatrice gave her a shy smile. “You’re so good, Black. You have a beautiful seat. I know you can do it.”
Lark blushed. “Thank you, Beatrice—Dark, I mean.” She turned back to the window, warmed by the camaraderie. It was a quirk of Academy life that girls were called by the names of their horses. The
moment Tup had received his proper name, she had become Larkyn Black instead of Larkyn Hamley.
Sometimes, she still forgot to answer.
As they watched the last of the newcomers being sorted out, Horsemistress Winter came out of the Hall and crossed the courtyard with her long-legged stride. She stood, pulling on her gloves, her bony face pale in the sunlight, waiting for Winter Sunset. The stable-girl who had taken Rosellen’s job appeared with the sorrel mare, and the girls all leaned forward to watch Mistress Winter’s standing mount, a lithe, swift leap into the saddle, and her brisk trot toward the flight paddock.
“Do you suppose she’s off to the Palace?” Anabel asked.
“I don’t think so,” Isobel said. “She and the new Duke hate each other.”
Hester and Lark exchanged glances. They knew the true depth of the conflict between Philippa Winter and Duke William, but they had sworn not to speak of it.
Lillian said, “They say she wanted to marry him when she was young.”
“Oh, surely not!” Beryl put in. “She would never have wanted to marry!”
“Why not?” asked Anabel.
“She’s—why, she’s a horsemistress !” Beryl exclaimed.
“She wasn’t a horsemistress when she was sixteen,” Lillian said pertly. “She was a girl, the daughter of an earl. And her family was very close to the Duke’s.”
Hester interrupted. “There they go,” she said. All eyes turned back to the window to watch Philippa Winter and her glorious Noble
, Winter Sunset, launch into the mists of the autumn morning. Sunny’s coat was a splash of red against the grayness, Mistress Winter’s slender, erect figure a slash of black, barely moving as Winter Sunset drove them up and away.
“She’s perfect!” Beatrice breathed.
“None better,” Isobel agreed. “Too bad she’s so sharp-tongued.”
Lark restrained a protest. It was true enough, Mistress Winter was abrupt in her ways. But surely, she was the best flyer in all the Duchy. Lark watched her wing away to the south, the opposite direction from the Ducal Palace. She leaned into the window, gazing after the slender rider and the sorrel mare until they disappeared into the distant sky, and she wondered.
The antagonism between Mistress Winter and the Duke was no worse than that Duke William felt for Lark herself. He had wanted Tup for breeding, that secret breeding only she and Hester and Mistress Winter knew of. They kept his secret in hopes that knowledge would give them some power over him.
But the Duke had never forgiven Lark for keeping Tup from him.
Even now, safe in the Hall, the memory of Duke William’s icy dark gaze gave her a shiver. She hoped Mistress Winter, her protector, would return soon.
FOUR
“FRANCIS, you have the best eye for horses in Isamar.”
Lord Francis Fleckham, second son of Duke Frederick of Oc, bowed slightly to his prince. “Your Highness,” he said mildly. “I think you exaggerate. But no one who grew up with my late father could help learning about horses, winged or not.”
Isamar’s prince, Nicolas, gave the younger man a lazy smile. “My own father had little interest in them, except for the prestige they brought him.” Like all the Gelmonds, Nicolas had brown eyes and brown hair. Isamar’s royals looked more like the Klee than they did like Isamarians, harking back to the days when Klee and Isamar were one single, albeit troubled, land.
“Well, in this case, Prince Nicolas,” Francis said, nodding toward the tall stallion in the paddock, “given the color, the long backbone, and the depth of his chest, I would judge your stud has Foundation blood.”
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