Michael Williams - Galen Beknighted

"Now they are all together," he announced. "Each fixed in a holy permanence, bound to each other always in memory."

As she slept in the saddle, Dannelle di Caela dreamed she was riding with Sir Galen.

The two of them, astride the enormous Carnifex, galloped into a clearing of towering pine and aeterna; the light was blue and white about them.

She was proud to ride with him, behind him on the back of this formidable horse they had broken together. Carnifex snorted and steamed, but he was bested and knew it, his wild strength bridled in obedience to the combined will of man and woman.

In the dream, the horse reared up, its forelegs pawing the misted air. Galen twisted in the saddle and reached for Dannelle…

But she was falling… falling…

As she jerked awake, riding with Birgis atop the racing Carnifex, it seemed to Dannelle that the trees she passed were blurring, transforming themselves into huge swaths of blue and green. It seemed that the landscape around her was dissolving, that only she and the dog-who sniffed and rumbled amiably at her shoulder-remained from the world she remembered.

She was relieved to see the Cat Tower pierce the horizon. As the walls of the castle and the fluttering pennants atop it became clear in front of her, she lowered her head and pressed the strong flanks of the horse with her knees. Birgis stirred a bit in the harness on her back.

"Sit back, damn it!" she started to exclaim, but the wind rushed into her face, choking her and drowning the words. Her thoughts moved quickly over the ground ahead of her, outrunning Carnifex and the wind and even the reddening sunlight breaking across the pennantry.

Now the walls loomed before her, the crenellation and windows sharply defined. Now she made out the arms of di Caela, of Brightblade and Pathwarden and Rus on the fluttering pennants.

Good, she thought. They all are here. And fifty miles of riding has come down to the next half hour.

For Dannelle di Caela intended an arrival that was showy and brilliant, nothing short of completely spectacular.

Riding Carnifex over the drawbridge she came, full speed across the courtyards, amid a flurry of hoofbeat and color and the shouting of heralds, straight to Sir Robert di Caela, who in her dreams of this moment stood agape before the double oaken doors of the Great Tower, scarcely believing his eyes.

For this red-haired slip of a girl he so often disparaged had not only arrived in time to save her companions beneath the Vingaards, but also arrived on the back of Carnifex, the horse Sir Robert had claimed she could not ride.

There were two problems with this just and wonderful vision: First of all, the Lady Dannelle di Caela was uncertain as to how she would dismount from her horse.

And secondly, the drawbridge in question was boarded up by makeshift carpentry. Behind it stood engineers with little better to do than weathering hangovers and speculating as to how to repair the mechanism kicked asunder by a big stallion not two days before.

For several years, everyone in Castle di Caela had marveled at the lack of foresight or intelligence shown by the fabled nomad chief who had given Carnifex to Sir Robert.

"Such a fine piece of horseflesh," they marveled. "As a gift outright."

And they shook their heads at nomadic stupidity.

All but the grooms in the stable, who had known for several years that Sir Robert had the worst of the deal-that the real stupidity lay in part with the old lord of the castle, but chiefly with the big horse itself.

Carnifex did not shorten his stride. Ignoring the cries of the woman atop him, her frantic tugging at his long silver mane, the animal lowered its head and whickered, its speed increasing until a panic-stricken Dannelle scarcely noticed they were airborne.

The horse and his two passengers leapt from the far bank of the brimming moat and splashed into the mud on the other side. Birgis, by far the most practical of the three, untangled himself and plunged into the water, as with a short, powerful surge, Carnifex strode up the incline and charged toward the half-repaired entrance, Dannelle hanging on desperately atop him.

It is hard to imagine the surprise of those engineers who, still aching from their bout with Thorbardin Eagle and settled in for a safe, undemanding afternoon of examining gears and pulleys, were confronted suddenly by a wild horse surging through the woodwork, a long-vanished noblewoman astride it.

In a moment, everyone scattered. Engineers and carpenters dove from their path, and whether by reflex or foresight or simply damned good luck, Dannelle di Caela grabbed the dangling chain of the drawbridge mechanism and swung acrobatically from the back of the horse, landing ankle-deep in the sucking mud and precariously, dramatically gaining her balance.

She looked cautiously around for an audience. She seemed disappointed, but decided that the engineers would do.

Dannelle was telling her story before Carnifex was out of sight, before Birgis had shaken the water from his coat and trotted merrily through the shattered drawbridge. She told them the lengthy story as, filled with alarm, the engineers carried her between them toward the infirmary, terrified that they would be blamed for any of her bruises or breaks or discomfiture.

Birgis tipped along behind them, yawning and wagging his tail.

"Which brings us to this juncture," Dannelle concluded, "where I guided the stallion over the moat outside and in through the drawbridge…"

"A daring exploit that must have been, m'lady," the head engineer commented absently, shifting the girl's weight in his bony arms.

"Not so daring, that," she objected, well schooled in false modesty. "The moat was full, after all, and would have cushioned my fall from the saddle, and then there was the mud…"

"I beg your pardon?" the man said, his beard trembling, his eyes suddenly intent.

'There was the mud in the courtyard that-"

'The moat was full, you say?"

Dannelle nodded. "I suppose the lot of you have been busy in my absence. Where are the others?"

Without waiting for her answer-indeed, dropping the young woman perfunctorily at the steps of the infirmary- the engineer turned and raced toward the cellars of Castle di Caela, where the brimming moat had told him that the underground was filling with water.

Birgis trotted up to the indignant young woman and

again most reverently licked her nose. He murmured in her ear, something that sounded like words again to the jostled Dannelle.

"You are muddy," he seemed to say, "and you smell like salt."

Birgis charged off jubilantly around the corner of a guardhouse, and something squawked and fluttered from the direction he had taken.

Down in the tunnels below the castle, something stirred in the rubble. Gileandos, tutor to the Pathwardens, scrambled out from a rockpile, trailing gravel and dust.

He did not know he had been unconscious for a day.

"Oh, dear!" he exclaimed. "Oh, dear! I fear that my companions have been… submerged past all recovery."

His hands fluttered like bats in the darkness. He could not see them.

After scrambling and worrying and exclaiming and fluttering, the tutor groped in the darkness, found a large rock-one, in fact, which missed his head by inches in — the cave-in-and seated himself upon it.

"Now, think clearly, Gileandos," he told himself. "There is… there is a lantern in these whereabouts, and if the gods are kind, it is still in working order."

Like a mole, he turned and dug in his subterranean blindness, his soft, thin fingers scrabbling through rock and dust.

Above Gileandos, the engineers stopped at a fork in the passage and caught their breath. The dozen or so castle servants they had brought along-grooms, sappers, a cook or two-ran into one another in the gloomy, lamplit corridor. Following behind the stumbling wall of men, Dannelle stepped through the crowd and laid a muddy hand on the shoulder of the younger and more promising engineer.