As for himself, he’d found excuses to often be in her company, whether she was playing music or not.
By the time he and Dale reached the tower, Estral was strumming a warm-up piece and he remembered how effortlessly her fingers swept across the strings, her eyes so distant when she played, her face placid and unguarded.
Dale faced him. “You’ve been blushing a lot lately. And smiling, too.”
“Have not.” Alton immediately frowned to remove the smile from his face, but he couldn’t do anything about the blush.
“Have too,” Dale said with a grin, and pressed her hand against the tower wall.
Alton cleared his throat. It galled him he’d been so transparent. Best to let it go, however. Yes. Let it go and concentrate on the task before him. He hadn’t the slightest confidence that the two of them together would get inside the tower anymore than just one of them had, but it was worth a try. He placed his hand against the wall, passing his other over his Rider brooch.
Nothing.
Just the harmony of the wall guardians humming against his palm and up his arm.
Actually, now that he thought about it, they felt stronger, brighter. Almost ... cheerful.
“Do you feel that?” he asked Dale.
“Feel what?”
Estral started singing, her voice so quiet Alton could not make out the words.
The vibration of the guardians’ own song intensified.
“I felt that,” Dale said.
“I wonder . . .” Abruptly Alton left the wall and strode back to Estral. She stopped playing and gazed up at him. “Do you think you could try something? Can you do something with this tune?” He hummed the melody of the wall guardians.
Estral started humming with him and picked out single notes on her lute.
“Yes,” Alton said.
“It’s a strange tune,” Estral said. “Very rhythmic.”
“Do you think you could keep playing it? Humming it?”
Estral cocked an eyebrow, but proceeded to pick out the tune, then filled in with full chords and hummed the melody. It was eerie. Alton had heard it often enough from the wall guardians singing in his mind, but to hear it externally with Estral’s beautiful voice was very strange.
He turned to rejoin Dale at the tower, but she was gone.
TOWER OF THE EARTH
“Dale!” Alton ran at the tower, slapped palms against stone, but he could not enter. He tensed, clenched his fists, ready to throw himself at the wall, but stopped himself and stood there trembling, remembering his madness of last fall. After a moment, he realized Estral had stopped playing. He touched the wall. It did not resonate as much as before.
“Play!” he shouted at her. “Play and don’t stop, no matter what!”
Surprise flitted across Estral’s face, but she did not hesitate. Her music drifted to Alton and he concentrated on rhythm and harmony—hummed it in his mind, and it vibrated through him. The wall swallowed him.
When he emerged into the tower, Dale grabbed him before he could take another step. She was backed up against the wall.
“Don’t move.” Her voice was harsh and her face pale in the sickly green light that illuminated the tower. Her shoulder was smoking, a patch of uniform singed.
“Dale?”
“I’m all right,” she replied. “Just—just don’t move.”
Alton glanced around the chamber seeking whatever danger had attacked her. In a glance he took in the blackened, scorched walls, the cobwebs that draped from the shadowed heights waving in the air currents like restless specters. Whatever furnishings had once existed in the tower were now jumbles of wood. In the center of the chamber, the columns that surrounded the tempes stone on its pedestal were scorched and cracked, entire chunks missing from their fluted facades. One had toppled and was nothing more than rubble. The tempes stone itself looked like a lump of coal.
And there, in the circle of columns was a skeleton in a pile of rags, a bony arm stretched out as if reaching, reaching for the tempes stone.
“Gods,” Alton murmured. “It looks like there’s been a war in here.”
“There’s something else,” Dale said, her eyes darting toward the shadowed recesses above. “Something bad. In here with us.”
“What?” He’d shifted his body just the slightest bit and lightning streaked through the tower from top to bottom so bright it left a white-green afterhaze in his vision.
“Duck!” Dale cried, and she hauled him to the floor just in time as the lightning forked and struck where Alton had just stood.
“Gods,” he murmured.
“Told you not to move.”
“I see why.”
Something then caught the edge of Alton’s vision, a flicker of shadow. Something in the tower’s upper regions. The hair on the back of his neck stood.
More lightning exploded, this time high up, spreading like fiery lace, and he saw it, the shadow thing flitting through the air to the opposite wall. It was spindly, vaguely human in form. A tendril of lightning stabbed at one of its limbs and its cry was unearthly, terrible.
Dale covered her ears. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Alton stared up into the dark, but nothing moved. The shaft of the tower seemed to suck all the air upward. The silence was dense, oppressive, filled his ears. He broke out in a clammy sweat.
Moments crawled like hours. He detected a whisper of movement, like a shadow caressing his mind, subtle, close. Too close.
Lightning ripped through the chamber again just above their heads, so near Alton felt its heat. The creature hissed and scuttled away. Silence.
“We need to get out of here,” Dale whispered.
Alton agreed. He hoped Estral had listened to him and continued to play her music. He called upon his special ability and wrapped an invisible shield of protection around them both. “Now!” he yelled. He grabbed Dale and heaved her through the wall, following right behind her, just as lightning blasted his footprints.
He lay on the ground panting, not able to reconcile the scent of damp earth with the darkness of the tower. Beside him Dale groaned. He rolled over and found her sitting up, gingerly reaching for her singed shoulder.
“Water!” he screamed at Estral.
The minstrel, who had listened to him and kept playing and singing no matter what, now set her lute aside, grabbed a waterskin and ran it over to him. She asked no questions, just thrust the waterskin at him. He liked that.
He crawled over to Dale. Her shoulder was an angry red.
“I’m all right,” Dale said. The dazed look in her eyes suggested otherwise.
Alton poured water on the burn. Dale screamed and fell back, but did not resist. Alton kept pouring.
Dale gasped. “Don’t get all of me wet.”
“Well, hold still then!” To Estral he said, “We need to get her back.”
“It stings like all five hells,” Dale said, “but I’ll live.”
“Good,” Alton replied, “but we’re still going back so Leese can have a look.”
Dale groaned.
“Plus,” he added, “Merdigen will want to hear about the tower.”
“There was something in there,” Dale whispered.
“Yes. Yes, there was.”
To Estral’s credit, as soon as Alton said they needed to go back, she’d set about collecting their things and packing them, no small effort considering they’d brought camping supplies so they could spend the night at the wall if necessary. She then started bridling the horses and tightening girths. Dale’s Plover almost dragged Estral away in an effort to reach her injured Rider. And still Estral did not question them about what happened.
By the time Alton had finished pouring out the contents of the waterskin over Dale’s burn, she was shivering in the cold air. He removed his own greatcoat and gently placed it over her good shoulder and wrapped it around her in a way that would keep most of her warm but not aggravate her burn. He then helped her to mount.
�
�I’m all right, really,” she said, but there was an edge to her voice that wasn’t entirely convincing.
He lifted her waterskin from the saddle horn and thrust it into her hands, then knotted Plover’s reins over the mare’s neck so they would not drag. Before Dale could protest, he said, “Drink as we go. Plover knows the way.”
Dale rolled her eyes, but she did not argue. Alton was glad. He wanted to get her going before shock set in. Even if it did not, the burn was obviously painful, and the sooner it was treated, the better. They had a long ride ahead of them, but he’d use all his Green Rider training to get them home faster than they’d arrived at Tower of the Earth.
It was not until they were well under way, taking a break at a walk from the ground-eating trot he’d paced them at, when Estral started asking questions.
“What happened back there?” Her eyes were large, her forehead crinkled.
“Hard to say,” Alton replied.
There was an amused snort from Dale up ahead. Alton made her ride lead so he could keep an eye on her. Not that Plover would allow her Rider to fall, but he wanted to make sure. The way was easy to follow anyway, with the immensity of the wall to their immediate right.
“You just drink,” he ordered her. He remembered hearing from Leese that it was important for injured people to drink water. He wasn’t sure why, or even if she meant all injured people, but at the very least it gave Dale something to think about other than the pain of her burn.
“I’m getting waterlogged,” she complained.
“Good. Keep it up.”
Dale grumbled something he couldn’t quite make out, and probably didn’t want to hear, but at least she complied and took a swig from her waterskin.
“The beginning,” Estral reminded him. “Begin with the music.”
When he explained where the melody he’d requested her to play had come from, she gazed at him in amazement.
“The guardians resonated with your music and allowed us to enter the tower. That begets a lot of new questions, one being how and why they are responding like that to your playing, and another being why they were stubborn about letting us through in the first place.”
“I don’t know about the latter,” Estral mused, “but as to the former, music is powerful. It can make you laugh and sing along, or move you to tears. It has started wars, and brought peace. If the wall’s strength is really the harmony of the guardians’ song, then it makes perfect sense to me they should respond to my music. I am, after all, descended from Gerlrand Fiori, and one certainly gets the impression from the stories that there was magic in his music.”
Alton just didn’t know, but her explanation made as much sense, if not more, than anything else he could think of. He was also impressed by how casually she discussed such ideas. He was so used to the antagonism expressed toward magic by those other than Riders that her acceptance of it surprised him.
“So you got into the tower,” Estral said. “Then what?”
Alton removed his feet from his stirrups and rotated his ankles to stretch his legs. He kept Night Hawk on a very long rein, but the messenger horses appeared to understand the need to make time, so kept to a fast walk.
“There was ... there was lightning,” Alton said. “It struck at anything that moved. Not regular lightning, but magic.”
“That’s what got Dale?”
“I did not get got!” Dale protested. “I was grazed. If I’d been gotten, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”
Alton suppressed a chuckle, thinking she was probably right.
“The tower was in shambles,” he told Estral. “And there was someone’s skeleton on the floor. The walls were all blackened with scorch marks. Even worse, there was something else there. A creature ... or something.” He shuddered.
“Is that what caused the lightning?”
“I don’t think so because it got struck as well. It’s almost as if the tower generated the lightning.”
“I wonder what the creature was,” Estral said, “and how it got in there.”
“So do I. If some evil creature from Blackveil penetrated Tower of the Earth, what’s to say the other towers aren’t vulnerable as well?”
Dale suddenly halted Plover.
“What’s wrong?” Alton demanded.
“My bladder is sloshing.” She flung her leg over Plover’s neck and slid to the ground. “I’ll be right back,” she said and dashed into the woods.
Estral watched thoughtfully after Dale. “She’s hiding how much that burn hurts, and the riding is taking a toll.”
He almost retorted that Riders often rode while injured and bore it, but her expression was one of genuine concern and he did not want to sound like an oaf, reinforcing anything Karigan had told her about him being “mean.” Her approval of him had somehow grown significantly in importance, so he kept his peace and was content to sit in her company while they awaited Dale’s return.
WATER MUSIC
Alton wished he could come up with something clever or witty to say while they waited, but it was as if he no longer knew how. He was out of practice. All his attention had been centered on the wall, which did not require making small talk with others. In fact, for the longest time he hadn’t cared much about conversing with anyone at all, except maybe Dale and Merdigen. But now he found himself wanting to talk to Estral just to hear her voice, her ringing laugh. Her responding to him.
Karigan. He would have liked to talk to Karigan if only she’d been assigned to the wall as he’d requested, but she was not here. If only she would write him! He was so unsure of her, of how she felt toward him, or if she even thought of him at all. He had wanted to ask Estral about Karigan, but did not know how. An appropriate moment never seemed to materialize and, he realized with no small amount of surprise, he hadn’t been dwelling much on her of late. He’d been . . . distracted.
As if picking up on the subject of his rumination, or maybe also feeling the need to fill in the silence with conversation, Estral said, “After the excitement at the tower, I think I now have a sense of what Karigan’s adventures are like.”
An opening. Alton leaped on it. “Do you hear from her much?”
Estral chuckled. “Oh, you know Karigan—not the best of correspondents. Occasionally I receive a letter, but usually she’s woefully terse on details. More often I get the bigger news, like the rescue of Lady Estora, secondhand.”
“Secondhand?”
“Other minstrels. Sometimes Mel has a tidbit or two from your captain.”
Alton had forgotten the captain’s daughter, Mel, was studying at Selium.
“Yep,” Estral continued, “Karigan hasn’t written me a single word about her part in the rescue of Lady Estora. We did have a big old talk, though, when she came through in the fall searching for the Silverwood book.”
“Did she ... did she say anything about me? Besides that I was, um, mean to her?” He grimaced when he heard himself, and felt a blush warm his cheeks.
Estral glanced away, perhaps considering how to respond. He did not think it boded well.
“That did come up,” Estral said. “Your anger toward her really hurt her.”
“I know.”
“She understood you’d been under immense strain here at the wall, but she didn’t understand why it made you angry at her. Despite that, she never stopped caring for you.”
Alton felt a rush of guilt. Yes, he’d been forgiven, but he wasn’t sure he could forgive himself. “How . . . how much does she care? For me?”
Estral did not answer, but darted her gaze into the woods where Dale staggered out of the underbrush. In the waning late afternoon light, Dale’s face looked drawn and pale. When she reached Plover, she couldn’t seem to get her toe in the stirrup to mount. Alton immediately shoved all personal concerns to the back of his mind.
“Dale?” he asked. “How are you doing?”
She ignored him and tried to mount again, but Plover swerved away out of reach. Alton knew messenger horses tende
d to be more sensible than their Riders at times, so he slipped off Night Hawk and took Dale’s arm. She was shivering and he could see the pain in her eyes. He checked the burn. It was an angry, swollen red and blistering.
“We’re stopping for the night,” he declared. “We’ve still got a long ride ahead and I think it would be better if you got some rest before we continue on.”
It was a measure of the pain Dale felt that she did not protest. Alton made her sit on a rock, wrapped in his greatcoat, while he and Estral tended the horses and set up camp.
He watched Estral from the corner of his eye as she collected firewood and dumped it in a pile before setting off to find more. She worked efficiently, silently, and without complaint, not at all like the citified noblewoman he had expected, but as competent as any Green Rider. His lips curled into a smile. Then he cleared his throat and straightened his features, remembering what Dale had said earlier about him smiling a lot more lately.
In no time they had raised two small tents and sparked a campfire. They installed Dale in one of the tents and now Estral was brewing tea.
“I’ve some excellent willowbark tea that should help Dale,” she said. “There’s an apothecary in Selium who has only the best quality stuff, and I’ve been getting the willowbark from him for years. Headaches. I get them.”
“Ah.”
When the tea had steeped to her satisfaction, she took a mug into the tent where Dale rested. Meanwhile, Alton prepared a simple meal of bread, cold beef, and cheese for each of them. They ate in silence as the sky deepened into midnight blue above and the stars punched through with brilliant light. The horses munched on their ration of grain nearby and there were scurrying sounds of small animals in the underbrush. An owl hooted in the distance.
“I want music!” Dale yelled from her tent, shattering the tranquility.
Alton almost sputtered his tea.
“Well, then,” Estral said, “I guess I have my orders.” She set aside the remains of her meal and opened her lute case, and once again tuned up the strings.
Blackveil: Book Four of Green Rider Page 30
