She hesitated to read it. It wasn’t addressed to her, or intended for her, and she feared invading someone’s privacy. But the messenger was dead, and reading it wouldn’t do him any harm. If she could find out who Lady Estora was, she might be able to deliver it to her one day. With this rationale, she felt better about reading it—until she realized it was a love letter. Her cheeks burned as she read:
My Dearest Lady Estora,
How I miss you these last few months; your ready smile and merry eyes. My heart aches with the knowledge that it will yet be a long month to the day before we see one another again. My brother insists it’s not love, but what does he know of it? He has never loved a soul.
Karigan scanned the private, loving sentiments until she reached the final paragraph.
It is dreadfully lonely without you and to keep my spirits light, I think fair thoughts of you planning our summer wedding. Do not worry—dark arrows couldn’t possibly keep me from you.
With Loving Devotion,
F’ryan Coblebay
Karigan clutched the letter to her chest and sighed wistfully, imagining that Lady Estora was the most beautiful woman who lived and how distraught she would be over her beloved F’ryan Coblebay’s death.
F’ryan Coblebay. The messenger for whom she swore she would deliver a message to the king. The dead Green Rider. He was no longer nameless. How ironic his last line about dark arrows.
The horse jerked up his head, his ears pricked forward.
Karigan shook herself out of the reverie. “What’s wrong? What do you hear?”
He pawed at the road. His uneasiness was enough of an answer for Karigan. She thrust the love letter back into her pocket and cleared up her things. Hooves clipclopped distantly down the road.
She stepped into the stirrup to mount the horse, but the saddle slid beneath his belly. The contents of the saddlebags spilled onto the road. She cursed and pushed the saddle to its rightful place behind the horse’s withers, and stuffed the bags with their displaced goods.
A sudden gust took her blanket and it tumbled down the road with a life of its own. Karigan sprang after it, feeling like a clown as the wind took it just out of her grasp. Finally she pounced on it and ran back to the horse with the crumpled mass.
This time, before mounting, she tightened the girth, skinning her knuckles on the metal buckles. She sucked on them, tasting salty blood. Sweat trickled down her sides. The hoofbeats were drawing nearer.
There was no telling exactly how close the riders were, or even if they were the ones who had pursued F’ryan Coblebay. She was determined not to find out.
A fine mist fell and tendrils of fog reached out of the forest as Karigan and the horse galloped along the road. She didn’t know what else to do except follow the road. If they cut through the forest, its dense growth would hamper their speed. If the people following behind were hoping to waylay the message she carried, they might have a tracker among them who could find her just as easily off the road as on. If she remained on the road and an archer with black arrows was among the group, surely she was an open target. No easy answer came to her.
They ran hard. She began to wonder how long the horse could endure this pace without rest. The fog, at least, would provide some cover. And where were they? Where did the road lead besides north? The stream of doubts flowed through Karigan’s mind. She bent low over the saddle, queasy with uncertainty.
When they came upon an enormous fallen spruce blocking the road, Karigan was prepared to pull the tireless horse aside, but his stride did not flag. As he gathered himself beneath her, she grabbed handfuls of his mane and closed her eyes. He launched over the spruce. Branches slapped his legs and belly. Upon landing, his front hooves dug furrows into the soft road surface. A lesser horse would have refused.
Rain pelted down, the sky darkening as if it were evening rather than late morning. The road turned into a quagmire of mud, and the horse slipped and labored through it. When they reached a stream flowing across the road, instead of under it through a collapsed culvert, she pulled the gasping horse to a halt.
“Running through this mess will only break one of your legs,” she said.
She guided him upstream. A tracker wouldn’t be able to find hoofprints in rushing water. If they were lucky, the rain would wash away their prints on the road. The Horse, as she decided to call him for lack of any other name, seemed to approve, or at least he did not resist.
Karigan pushed away branches hanging over the stream, receiving an extra drenching from water accumulated on each limb. They picked their way over slick moss-covered rocks and through deep mud.
A granite ledge, mottled with green lichen, large enough to hide behind, loomed out of the mist. The road couldn’t be seen through the fog, but it was close enough that anyone passing by could be heard. Karigan concealed herself and the horse behind the ledge, and stood miserably in the downpour awaiting some sign.
Though only moments passed, the waiting was interminable. Karigan dismounted and, tired of the rain pounding on her head, drew up her hood. She leaned against the coarse, wet granite, berating herself for having left Selium at all.
When she left Selium, the possibility of encountering genuine danger had never occurred to her. Sure, she had wanted an adventurous life like her father’s. And here it was, nothing at all like she dreamed it would be.
If something happened to her, she would be unable to clear her name in Selium. More distressing still, the people who cared about her would have no clues to her disappearance. She closed her eyes and could see her father scouring the countryside for her, calling her name, grieving. . . . Her throat constricted, and she swallowed hard.