David Weber - War Maid's choice

The King laughed. There might have been just an edge of sourness in that laugh, but it was genuine. And probably owed something to the fact that the move of Tellian’s bishop allowed him to exchange one of his knights for the baron’s remaining castle.

“I would like to see his reaction,” the King admitted, setting the captured castle to one side. “Unfortunately, not even a king can have everything.”

The sheer, wild exhilaration filled her mind and heart with a fiery intoxication.

The fiercest gallop upon the back of the fleetest warhorse ever bred paled to insignificance. Perhaps- perhaps — a warhorse might have touched, ever so briefly, that headlong, booming, drumroll speed, but it could never have sustained it, never maintained it for more than the barest handful of minutes. Yet the mighty muscles continued to stretch and play, the matchless heart thundered not simply with exertion but with the untamed, unquenchable power of a courser’s dauntless will, and Gayrfressa’s link to the energy which formed and sustained the entire universe burned like a coil of lightning. It poured that energy into her, and her hooves spurned the earth not for mere minutes, but for hours.

Leeana Hanathafressa was part of those booming hooves, shared those straining muscles, tasted that energy and felt it pour through her. She was submerged within the wild rush of speed, feeling it as Gayrfressa felt it even as she felt the wind of their passage whipping at her braided hair, bringing tears to her eyes. It was the first time since their bonding that Gayrfressa had truly loosed the incomparable speed and endurance of her kind. They’d touched moments of such swiftness, yet until this moment, not even Leeana-a wind rider herself, wife and daughter of wind riders-had truly grasped what it would be like. Now she knew…and as she rode the tornado named Gayrfressa, she and her hoofed sister merged on an even deeper, even more complete level.

Dimly, in the back of her mind where her own thoughts resided separately from this driving charge across the Wind Plain, she understood that part of the magic was her own love of running. Her delight in the speed of her merely human feet, of the deep breaths pulsing in and out of her lungs, of the steady, elevated beat of her heart. She knew that love for herself, and so she truly shared Gayrfressa’s passion to outrace the wind and give herself to the thunder of her hooves-to gallop until even she could gallop no more. And as that thought wended its way through her own mind, she felt Gayrfressa touch it with her and sensed the mare’s agreement, exalted and joyous despite the gravity of their mission.

She raised her head, green eyes slitted against the wind, gazing ahead. Few creatures on earth could match a courser’s sense of direction. Gayrfressa knew exactly where they were headed, and she burned her way across open fields, vaulted dry stream beds and small creeks, slowed just enough to maintain her footing as she forged across a broader watercourse, carrying both of them arrow-straight toward their goal. Leeana knew the land around Chergor well, if not so intimately as the terrain around Kalatha, yet she could never have picked out the shortest path to her father’s hunting lodge as Gayrfressa had. She wondered how the courser had done it, yet that was something not even Gayrfressa could have explained to her. The huge chestnut mare simply knew where her destination lay, and no power on earth could have deflected her from her course.

Now Leeana blinked on tears, and her heart rose as she recognized known landmarks. They were no more than a quarter-hour from their goal, the way a courser galloped, and she lowered her head once more, lying forward along Gayrfressa’s neck, cheeks whipped by the courser’s mane, and laid her palms against her sister’s shoulders and the bunchy, explosive power of her deltoideus muscles. She flattened herself, molded herself to the courser, and they and the wind were one.

Tellian stroked his beard, looking down upon a chessboard which had done nothing but grow progressively (and inevitably) worse from his perspective.

“Mate in three, I believe,” the King said genially, and the baron snorted.

“I believe you’re correct, Your Majesty. And in the interests of moving on to allow you to do something more worthwhile with your time-”

He reached out and tipped his king over, conceding the game.

“I won’t pretend I’m not savoring this moment,” Markhos told him with a smile, beginning to reset the pieces. “Of course, I’m sure you would never be so undutiful as to point out that I’d need to do this no more than…oh, another couple of hundred times to pull even with you.”

“I don’t think it’s quite that bad, Your Majesty,” Tellian corrected with a smile of his own. “It couldn’t be more than a few score games-certainly not hundreds.”

“You’re making it ever so much better, Milord.” Markhos’ blue eyes glinted with amusement.

“It’s not that I don’t-”

Tellian cut off abruptly, jerking upright in his chair. The King looked up quickly, his eyebrows rising in surprise, but the baron didn’t even see him. His eyes were unfocused, his expression that of a man listening to a voice only he could hear. And as King Markhos watched, that expression transformed itself from one of sheer astonishment to something far, far darker.

The ornamental wall barely topped the fruit trees Baroness Hanatha had had planted along the wall’s foot as Gayrfressa slowed her hurtling pace at last. The trees of Chergor Forest rose beyond the lodge, climbing the gently rolling hills between its eastern wall (such as it was) and the northernmost reaches of the Spear River. Leeana had always loved the vast, leafy hunting preserve, and the graceful, airy architecture of the timbered lodge itself, with its leaded windows, breezy verandas, and steeply pitched roof had offered a far younger Leeana a wonderful contrast from the grim, indomitable battlements and turrets of Hill Guard Castle. But as she watched that low, purely decorative wall show itself above the apple trees, she found herself wishing fervently that it was twice as tall and three times as thick.

‹ At least Dathgar and Gayrhalan heard me,› Gayrfressa pointed out, and Leeana nodded.

“I know, dearheart,” she agreed, catching the glint of a lookout’s polished steel helmet from the top of that damnably low wall. “I know. But I wish-”

She cut herself off with a grimace. She knew how she wanted the King’s Guard to react, but there was no sign they were doing anything of the sort.

I don’t suppose I should be all that surprised they aren’t, either, when all they have to go on is the word of a war maid, even if she is a wind rider, she thought.

‹ From what Dathgar’s had to say, I don’t think that’s the only reason they’re not already headed for Balthar,› Gayrfressa said grimly in the back of her brain. ‹ I wish you two-foots were just a little more like us, sometimes!›

“Unfortunately, we’re not,” Leeana replied even more grimly. “We don’t always think of the rest of the herd first, and you can always count on someone to argue, no matter how sensible your suggestion might be. And,” she conceded unwillingly, “this has all come at them completely unexpected. It’s not too surprising that there might be a certain amount of…disagreement on the best way to respond, I suppose.”

Gayrfressa snorted, slowing still further, to the fast, smooth walk of a courser, as the two of them approached the open gate in the outer wall. It wasn’t much more of a gate than the wall was of a wall, Leeana reflected. It had seemed much more substantial when she’d been younger, and she wished fervently that her childhood memories could have changed the reality.