The Anchoring of Karigan
K arigan arose from hazy dreams and sat straight up in bed. “I’m fine! I’m fine!”
When no one responded, she realized she was alone with an empty chair beside her bed.
It took her a moment to recall where she was—not her own chamber, but in a room in a royal guest suite.
She gazed at the opulent furnishings and decor.
Definitely not her chamber. The last thing she solidly remembered was startling Ben.
He hadn’t magically put her back to sleep, but she should have known better than to accept a cup of tea from a mender. He’d dosed her.
She hopped out of bed onto the deep carpet. They’d put her in one of her own nightgowns, but she saw a fresh set of her civilian clothes neatly folded on a dresser.
She peered out the window to discover a fresh coating of snow on the castle’s western grounds. How much time had passed? How long ago had the harvest ball and Feast of Vendane been? A few days? It was all very disorienting.
Well, she thought, if no one was here keeping an eye on her, perhaps she could escape. Not that this room in the royal wing wasn’t comfortable or luxurious, but she missed her own chamber and her cat. Her horse, too. As fine as her accommodations were, a pretty cage was still a cage.
And she was fine. No longer did the sensation of falling through the heavens afflict her.
No longer did she experience strange visions that she couldn’t remember but felt only a whisper away, separated from the here and now by the thinnest of veneers, like a skin of ice on a puddle.
She hugged herself as if to ward off the freezing chill of the endless dark.
Enough, she told herself. She needed to make her escape.
She hastily washed up in the basin of water beside her bed and threw a sweater over her nightgown.
She stepped into her slippers as they were the only footwear she could find, and grabbed her other belongings.
She crept to the room’s doorway, wary of encountering anyone who would order her back to bed.
If her quarters were anything like Estora’s apartments, there would be bedrooms in one direction, and public rooms in the other.
She peered this way and that. No one seemed to be about, so she tiptoed into the corridor and headed in the direction of where she supposed the sitting room to be.
When she reached its doorway, she paused and cautiously peered inside.
A fire crackled on the hearth, but no one was there.
With a sense of elation that freedom was nigh, she hurried across the sitting room to the door that led to the outside world. Slowly she cracked the door open and looked out, but it was all black, as in, Weapon black. Travis stared sternly down at her.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
“I want to see my cat.”
He did not reply, but a voice from behind her declared, “Rider G’ladheon, no one has given you permission to leave.”
“Oh, dear gods, no,” she muttered. “Not Cranky Aisla!”
Travis, who was near enough to hear her, raised an eyebrow. Slowly she turned around.
“Mender Aisla,” she said.
“That’s right. You are not supposed to be out of bed.”
“I’m fine,” Karigan said. “I’ll rest if I must, but in my own chamber.”
Aisla crossed her arms and shook her head. “I don’t particularly enjoy watching you sleep, but no.”
Karigan shuddered at the idea of Aisla watching her while she lay helplessly asleep and snored. She looked to Travis for support in her bid to escape, but he was unmoved. Thus defeated, she shuffled her slippered feet back toward her room, fuming all the way.
Ben was subsequently summoned to check her out. When he arrived, she turned away from the window where she’d been watching the snow fall and glared at him.
“Now, don’t look at me like that,” he said.
“You will not dose me or do the forehead-touching thing,” she replied.
“That’s for me to decide. How are you feeling?”
“Annoyed. And I’m starving. Why won’t anyone let me leave?”
“Good sign you’re hungry. You don’t like it here? It’s nicer than the mending wing.”
“I want my own chamber.”
He set his mender’s satchel on a small table. “It is up to the king, but if I tell him you are well enough, he will undoubtedly release you.”
She stood stolidly by the window with her arms crossed. “Why is everyone being so stubborn?”
“I am not sure we are the ones who are being stubborn.” He sat hard in the chair with an exhausted air. “Frankly, Karigan, we’ve had to keep watch so we could anchor you; that is, hold on to you so you wouldn’t slip away to wherever it is that you go.”
“Where I go...”
He nodded solemnly. “Even the queen did so with assistance from the Weapons.”
“I remember seeing her sitting in that chair.”
“The king, too. He spent many hours with you.”
Dear gods, she thought, feeling slightly faint. Why would he . . . ? She knew why he would, but he shouldn’t have. She was thrilled he had, but also alarmed. Dear gods. If people hadn’t known what lay between them, they surely did now.
“Don’t worry,” Ben said as if sensing her thoughts, “it has all been carried out with discretion.”
She wasn’t sure it made her feel any better. “How long have I been laid up?”
“Several days.”
“Several days?”
“Nearly a week. I had to keep using the sleep spell on you or dosing you—now don’t look at me like that!
It helped decrease your episodes. We’ve let you stay awake now because you haven’t had an episode in a couple days.
I don’t know what happened to you at the harvest ball to cause these epi sodes, some force of magic or your ability gone amok, but all of us who anchored you at one time or another felt as if we were being dragged into a vast well of darkness, though there were pinpoints of light like stars.
” His eyes lost focus as he remembered. “It was indescribably cold, suffocating. Very disorienting. Frightening, no matter how brief the experience.”
She left the window and sat on the edge of her bed.
His words brought her experiences back to her so clear and sharp, of tumbling through the heavens even as the avatar’s armor died and left her exposed to the airless nothingness.
So cold it burned. The terror of being lost forever, falling, falling . . .
“Karigan?”
“Huh?”
“I was afraid you were about to slip away again,” he said.
“I was just remembering.” Except her other visions remained vague and dreamlike. She rubbed her face to dispel the cobwebs. “What became of the wraith?”
“It escaped. Disappeared.”
She nodded, unsurprised. Lichant had been powerful. Unexpectedly powerful. Visions of Lichant driving its sword into Salvistar, and of her enemies feasting on his flesh.
She cried out in grief and despair into the yawning void of the universe and disgorged black vapor from her lungs like ocean water gushing from a drowning victim.
It streamed from her nose and her mouth.
She bled the substance of the heavens in which the avatar could travel, but which was ill-suited to a mortal woman.
· · ·
She sat up in bed. “I’m fine! I’m fine!”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said a crusty voice.
Through her clearing eyes, she found Master Mender Vanlynn and Aisla nearby enjoying a pot of tea.
“He did it again,” Karigan muttered.
“Did what?” Aisla asked. “And who?”
“Ben. The touch-the-forehead thing.”
“No,” Vanlynn said. “You did it all on your own this time.”
“I did?”
Vanlynn, her face all wizened wrinkles, nodded. “He told us you screamed, releasing dark effluvium, and collapsed. Apparently it was quite a scream. Poor Ben was rattled.”
“He wasn’t the only one,” Aisla said acerbically.
“He described your emissions as a peculiar substance that froze the air,” Vanlynn said, “but it quickly dissipated.”
Karigan rubbed her chest. It was sore. She had released what she absorbed when lost among the stars. Whatever it was that the heavens were made of, it had been within her. But now it was gone and she sighed in relief.
“I don’t think I’ll be slipping away anymore,” she said.
“Good,” Vanlynn replied. “Aisla, would you please send a runner to fetch Ben?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Aisla left the room, Vanlynn set her teacup aside.
“You are a very unusual patient, Rider G’ladheon.
I don’t entirely understand the circumstances around your malady.
I am not sure anyone does, but I get the sense you are not always who you seem.
” The master mender’s keen eyes sparked as she gazed at Karigan.
“I am not sure it is for any of us to understand. We live in very strange days.”
Karigan didn’t know what to say to that, so she kept her peace.
As the menders checked her over, Vanlynn mentioned a new constellation of stars that had formed around the same time Karigan had gone missing and that the star masters called it the Great Horse.
“He has been transformed.” The words slipped from Karigan’s mouth in a dark voice that lacked emotion as though she were not the one who had spoken them.
The menders stared at her with sudden fear and as if they did not recognize her. Aisla actually stepped back.
She learned from the menders that, after her disappearance at the harvest ball, in addition to her recovery time in the royal wing, not only had she missed the winter holiday, Night of Aeryc, but about a month had passed since Feast of Vendane.
“You’d brief awakenings now and then when you returned,” Vanlynn said, “where you fought us and seemed to speak in tongues.”
“What?”
“Some very strange language, if it was even that. It was like hearing it but not hearing it at the same time. Like a thunderclap without the sound. In any case, we found it safest to keep you sedated.”
A strange language. Might she have been more avatar than herself during some of those awakenings? Had Westrion been trying to speak through her in the language of the gods?
Blue light glowed from Ben’s hands as he passed them over her body. She felt empty. A good empty in terms of expelling what she had absorbed in the heavens, but a cavernous empty as someone who had eaten no solid food in a long time.
“I’m starving,” she muttered.
“They are bringing you food from the royal kitchen,” Vanlynn said, “and it will be here shortly. No fear of that. And I know you have many questions about what you have missed, but your officers can fill you in.”
“You missed emptying sick pots in the Rider wing,” Ben informed her.
Karigan grimaced. “Fever making the rounds?”
“Bad year for it,” he replied. “In a way you are fortunate to have escaped it. The worst has passed among the Riders, and everyone has recovered, or nearly so.”
“That’s a relief.”
Master Vanlynn stood and leaned on her cane. “You seem to be doing well, Rider. Do you agree, Ben?”
“She feels more normal,” he replied. “Mostly, at any rate. Before when I checked her with my ability, she felt very strange. Hard to describe.”
“Can I return to the Rider wing now?” Karigan said.
“We will inform the king you are doing well,” Master Vanlynn said, “and he will decide. In the meantime, eat what you can when your meal is brought in, but do not overdo and make yourself sick. You may have visitors, as well. I am told there are those who are anxious to see you and until now we’ve forbidden them, except those who tended and anchored you.
Aisla will remain for now to keep watch and ensure you do not relapse. ”
Oh, yay, Karigan thought.
As Ben and Vanlynn left the room, Aisla lingered behind and stared at her.
“What?” Karigan demanded.
“I am still trying to understand what makes you so special.” Aisla gestured at the room.
“These accommodations for a messenger, the attention of the king, queen, and master mender. I know you’ve accomplished important work for the realm, but so have many others and they haven’t received this attention.
Granted, they haven’t been made Eletians, but still. Why you ?”
Karigan knew the answer, but she certainly wasn’t going to speak of it with Cranky Aisla. If she were suffering from illness or injury and in desperate need of a mender, she wouldn’t willingly seek out Aisla if she were the last mender on Earth. She was, in a word, unpleasant.
“By the way,” Aisla said, “I heard you were betrothed. Word is that it’s old Lord Garvy. Congratulations.” There was a malicious look in her eye.
They thought she was engaged to Lord Toothless? “Not by a longshot,” Karigan said, “but I hear he’s looking for a sturdy young wife to bear him heirs. I’m sure he’d find you adequate for his needs.”
Aisla tossed her head. “Green Riders,” she said with a contemptuous air, and stomped out of the room.
She had, Karigan thought, a chip on her shoulder and a bad temperament for a mender. But Lord Garvy? Ew. Maybe it would be better to slip back into the heavens and hide from the world, but the idea of being adrift in that infinite dark with no one to anchor her was terrifying.