BRIDGES

Karigan stumbled back across the bridge, spitting sand and brushing it off her sleeves. “That definitely was not the mountains.”

“It’s an easy mistake,” Duncan said. “A lot of these bridges look similar.”

She rubbed more sand out of her eye and saw they were once more in the white world, and all the Riders were watching them curiously. Loon made a plaintive whicker.

“What’s on the other side?” Tegan asked.

Karigan glanced back at the bridge. It was not a large span, but more like a picturesque stone bridge one would find crossing a stream on a country estate. This one crossed nothing, or at least nothing perceptible. Only when one walked over the arch and suddenly arrived elsewhere did one learn that what the bridges transversed were layers of the world.

“A desert,” Karigan said, “with two suns and a dust storm.”

“Two suns?” Tegan said. “How is that possible?”

“The bridges do not always align with our own world,” Duncan replied.

Which begged the question: what other world or worlds were there? One that was obviously hot and dusty. She went to Loon’s side and sipped from her waterskin, only to spit out the water to expel more sand. It was going to take a while to get rid of all the grit crunching in her teeth.

“We’d best move on,” Connly said. “Time is running out for the colonel.”

“Remember,” Duncan said, “it may feel like hours have passed here, but time moves more slowly in our world. Perhaps only minutes have passed.”

They were, Karigan thought as she dragged herself back into the saddle, very long minutes, and stepping into that dust storm had made being under the influence of the whisper wraiths an almost enticing alternative.

Do not dare to even think that way, Nyssa told her.

“I was being sarcastic,” Karigan muttered.

Tegan gave her a strange look.

“Talking to myself again,” Karigan said.

You were not being sarcastic enough.

Perhaps not. Nyssa wasn’t the one with sand in her hair and clothes, and in her eyes and mouth. Which Karigan would probably have for days. She was so damn weary, and the only rest she had gotten recently was with the wraiths.

“Perhaps,” Duncan said, once more popping behind her on Loon’s back, “the next bridge will be the one we are looking for.”

They rode on, everyone sunk into his or her own thoughts. The white world seemed to extract animation from a person with its ponderous white expanse the way the desert would deplete a person of moisture.

For her own part, she thought back to the alternate life she had experienced under the influence of the wraiths, one in which she had not been called to the Green Riders. Had the visions shown her what her life might have been like had her mother lived? It had been so perfectly normal—no sword fights, no magic, no political intrigue, just joining her family in the clan business and marrying a merchant’s son. She wondered if Telamir was someone who actually existed, or if it were all a fiction. He lingered in her mind with memories that felt as though she had lived them: birthdays, holidays, family picnics, working together at trading fairs, birthing her first child . . .

Grief caught in her throat, the loss of Telamir and her children all too real. She grieved quietly as she rode beside Connly at the head of the Riders. To think all her suffering and hardship as a Green Rider might not have occurred had her mother lived.

This, however, was her reality, this green uniform, the white plains before her, the horse she rode, the torture, and the loss of friends. She did not regret her life as it was, for she knew she had real purpose, especially when it came to defending the realm. If she hadn’t become a Rider, she would have missed out on making friends with Tegan and Mara and Yates, and all the others, and she would never have met Colonel Mapstone, Alton, or Cade. She would never have gotten so close to her king. Maybe it would be better if the last had not come to pass, but in that alternate reality given her by the wraiths, he had died at his brother’s hands. She could not bear the thought of that.

Mercifully, she could not linger in such speculation as they soon came upon another bridge. This one had a long sweeping curve to it. They paused while Duncan considered whether or not it was the one they wanted.

“I thought you were an expert about these bridges,” Connly said. They were all, by now, feeling a little irritable.

“It has been a long time since I last traveled through the Blanding,” Duncan replied. “You try remembering what you once knew a thousand years ago.”

After some hemming and hawing, he decided, ultimately, it was not the one they wanted, and they moved on. Karigan was just as glad he hadn’t asked her to carry his pouch across so they could have a look.

The next bridge appeared more promising to him. “We will cross it,” he said.

The bridge was made of rough stone like the others, but it had three arches. Karigan dismounted with a sigh. She and Connly had decided to risk only one Rider to accompany Duncan across the bridges, and since she was the custodian of his pouch as per their agreement back in Oxbridge, she was the one Rider. Duncan, of course, approved, adding that, indeed, depending on what might lie at the end of some of the bridges, just one Rider would be less of a target. This did little to improve her disposition toward the whole endeavor.

“Do you want someone else to go this time?” Connly asked her.

“A deal is a deal,” Duncan said.

“Surely you can give her a break.”

“It’s all right,” Karigan said, handing Connly Loon’s reins. She was pretty sure a certain amount of annoyance colored her words. She adjusted the strap of the pouch on her shoulder.

Duncan stood by the end of the bridge and gestured to it. “After you, dear lady.”

Karigan grumbled to herself. He could be as charming as a prince and fashion his image to look as stunningly handsome as he wanted, but at this point his efforts left her unmoved. She scratched at her wrist where the wraiths had punctured it. As feeling returned to her arm, it grew more itchy and painful like a bad sting.

“Don’t scratch it,” Duncan chastised her. “You’ll just make it worse.”

She grumbled again and stepped onto the bridge. There was no telling what they might encounter on the other end so she kept her hand to the hilt of her sword as she approached the center arch. They came to a thin wall of mist that marked that they were about to leave the white world and cross into another place. She held her breath against the possibility of another sandstorm and pushed through.

And found herself in a pleasant wood-paneled room with towering shelves of books and an open bay window that looked out over the ocean far below. Seashells were lined up on the sill and a pleasant breeze flowed in that smelled of briny air. She breathed deep of it for it was a balm after so much time spent in the deadening environs of the white world.

“Huh,” Duncan said. “I have been here before, but long, long ago.”

“Where are we?” The room was circular and appeared to be part of a tower. A desk sat in the middle of it, set with paper and some sort of writing implement, as if waiting for someone to sit down and write. She gazed at the books on the shelves but was not able to read the titles on the spines for they were all in a language she did not know.

“It is not of our world,” Duncan replied.

“It isn’t?” Aside from the different language on the spines of the books, she could be standing in a tower room looking upon the shoreline of almost anywhere along the Sacoridian coast.

“Some layers of the world are just slightly offset from our own,” he replied.

She picked up a book from the desk and found in its pages beautiful lifelike renderings of birds—all very familiar. Exacting type on shiny paper like she’d never seen before must describe each bird.

Just then, a terrier with folded ears and a red coat scampered into the room. Actually, he was . . . transparent, and when he started barking at them, he sounded muted, far away.

“Is he—?” she began.

“A ghost?” Duncan nodded emphatically. “He is, and we best leave lest he rouse someone.”

Another ghost? she wondered.

“Fergus!” a woman shouted from below, followed by the sound of footsteps ascending a creaking spiral staircase.

Karigan went to set the bird book back on the desk, but spied another ancient-looking tome there with a cracked leather binding and very faint lettering, which was, to her surprise, in the common tongue. She picked it up but could not quite make out the words they were so blurred with age. The dog growled as he tried to gnaw on her ankle, but being a ghost, he could not grab on and she felt only his cold presence, not a jaw full of teeth.

“Come on!” Duncan said.

“Fergus?” the woman called again, her footsteps nearing the top. “Who’s up there?”

Karigan went to replace the book on the desk but missed. Pages fluttered as it fell, and she glimpsed wording on the title page:—and the Green Riders: A History, by Lady Estral—

It hit the floor with a boom, which was followed by an exclamation by the woman climbing the stairs. Karigan dashed after Duncan toward the bridge even as the ghost dog barked at them. The bridge faintly glowed and seemed to superimpose itself on a wall of books. Karigan and Duncan hastened onto it and into the mist. She assumed it would disappear from the tower room and whoever lived there would not be able to open the way to the white world and cross it unless she possessed the right magic.

As she reentered the white world, she idly wondered if the woman who yelled for the ghost dog could communicate with ghosts like she could.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she said as she stepped off the bridge. The ocean breeze had been a refreshing change from the white world. She would have liked to have lingered and looked at the book. She’d known Estral had been working on a history of the Green Riders, and apparently would manage to finish it at some point, but it also made her wonder how it had migrated into that other world. Others, perhaps, had found their way across the bridge? She would probably never know.

The Riders who awaited her and Duncan were not even looking her way to hear about what the two of them had seen. Instead, they faced in the opposite direction, silently staring. She stepped up onto the bridge’s parapet wall to see what they saw, and immediately wished she had not.

A cadaverous army of dull blacks and grays marched mutely across the plain, bearing tattered banners. At the head, beneath the shredded silver and black banner of Sacoridia, rode a skeletal king in helm and armor on the rotting corpse of a warhorse. He was not close enough to discern fine details, features, but it was him, his armor, the way he carried himself even as one dead. A scream built inside her. He was followed by cavalry and foot soldiers. The other banners featured the provinces, and pennants for regiments and units—the River Unit, the Mountain Unit, and so on. Then came the Green Riders, all rotting, some with arrows stuck in them, or missing limbs, even heads, all riding silently on.

Karigan thought the white world was sparing them the stench of dead, but it was not to be so. A wafting breeze carried an overwhelming odor of decay, and Karigan was not the only one who turned and gagged.

“It’s not real,” Duncan reminded them. He wasn’t gagging. Apparently “projections” lacked a sense of smell. When she looked again, the dead army vanished behind a tumbling cloud.

“What does it mean?” Constance asked, voice trembling.

“Sometimes,” Duncan replied, “it’s a warning, and sometimes the Blanding just taunts you. But on the whole, the why and what-for of it all is beyond even me.”

Karigan gazed at her fellow Riders and saw some in tears. Others had a pallid cast to their faces.

“We should get them moving,” Karigan told Connly. “This wasn’t the bridge we were looking for.”

Connly shook himself. “Right.”

She took the reins to Loon and mounted. “Everyone form up,” she told the Riders.

As she clucked Loon to the head of the line, she observed one of the Riders wiping tears off his face. He was a green Greenie, quite young, and not exactly fit for the life of a messenger. She was surprised he’d been brought along on the journey to the front, much less chosen by Connly for the rescue mission. It must have something to do with his special ability, whatever it was.

“Hoff, isn’t it?” she asked. They’d been briefly introduced.

The boy nodded, but gazed straight ahead, not willing to look her in the eye.

“Don’t let the white world—the Blanding—get to you too much. It likes to show the worst visions.”

“All right,” he said, still not meeting her gaze.

“We’ll be out of here soon.” When he did not reply, she continued on to the head of the line.

“His specialty is illusion,” Duncan said, making her jump. She’d forgotten about him and his tendency to just appear behind her.

“You can tell that’s his ability?”

“I can, just as I can tell what yours is. His is not an easy form of the art to master.”

“I’m sure it will be useful.” And now she understood why the colonel had chosen to bring him to the front, and why Connly had chosen him as well for this mission. Still, it was a harsh introduction to the reality of his calling.

When Connly joined her at the head of the line, she asked, “About Hoff—did the colonel have some plan in mind for him?”

Connly smiled. “She did.”

When he told her what it was, she said, “Very crafty.” She expected no less of their colonel and only hoped they found her in time.