Cy Skywalker
Elf
Joined: 21 Mar 2007
Posts: 207
Location: NJ, USA
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 Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 12:19 pm Post subject: The Yingyn Riders (revamped) |
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Click click swish--claws on flagstones, feathers brushing the sides of the alley. Io was a small yingyn rooster, breed uncertain, feathers iridescent black with streaks of orange running down his neck from his small head. Anaba had tacked fast; her knees ached as the saddle threatened to slip under her if she did not cling so tightly to Io’s sides. He clucked, unsettled. This lane on the outskirts, where the craftspeople set up their stands and the butcher’s and tanner’s smells would not pervade the city, was narrow and brokenly cobbled in gray stone.
It had taken time for the guardsmen to get their fat white hens, but she could hear them coming now. They shouted, polite at first. “Madam! Madam magehalf, please return!”
She flicked a look behind her. Three mounted guards followed her, emerging around a corner; two men and a woman in slate-blue tunics and black swordbelts. Anaba’s orange cloak and long black hair flapped out on the edge of her vision. Io juked and cackled. Anaba swung her gaze forward again and leaned low in the saddle. The smell of clean feathers filled her nostrils.
Nothing unusual had happened yesterday, nor any day before. The strangest thing this week was that Anaba and Neu had seen a horse. It pulled a cart loaded with grain beside the deep canal down from the western plateau. Probably the first of the season, said Neu, and he marveled with Anaba at the large animal’s smooth brown flanks and blonde mane. The rider high on the cart paid them no attention; he hailed from the west, so his eyes were only for the castle and city.
On the next day the drops of variety became a torrent. Guardsmen pushed in to the courtyard ringed by the homes of Neu and Anaba’s friends.
Most mages lived near to their kind in the Magic Quarter. Of course some lived away from Castillion, the High City of the Kingdom. Magic could be helpful anywhere. Magepartners could be found anywhere. Castillion’s population sustained the Quarter sufficiently, however, and mages were not needed so much that an effort was made to further their reach. Magic could be helpful anywhere--but it was not essential like farming, or smithing, storytelling or judgment.
Saying one mage implied two people, one born to magic and the second taken as partner. Although identifiable by other mages, the single person could not use magic before finding a volunteering second. Apparently the human mind does not harbor that much power. Most mages, though not all, were comprised of one male and one female. Most but not all had a purely platonic relationship. Love and marriage were not discouraged, nor encouraged.
Without warning each magepair was brought before the princes and the Council for interrogation concerning research into unpatriotic, foreign arts. Neu had refused to take part. Neu had ran--
and told her to flee. His psychic presence stirred in the back of her mind like a second self.
Ahead, the low gray stone wall around the town’s outskirts blocked the alley mouth. As they neared it Anaba pressed against Io’s neck on his left side; the yingyn veered to the side and on to a wider road paved only in flattened, tan dirt. Some people looked up from their pottery wheels here as Anaba and then the guards--closer than before, shaking out their weighted nets--passed swiftly by.
The houses of the city and their backdrop, the grassy hill and white stone castle, rose up higher before Anaba like a line of stakes. She grew tired of flight. She reached under the front of the saddle for her wand which she had wedged between the thick saddle and the black blanket. Its normal couch, behind her right ear and into her long hair, would not do during speedy riding--
“Don’t fight.” said Neu. As if he were embracing her she heard him speak beside her ear. “Ride for the black forest.”
She gasped.
“I will meet you,” said he.
Again she ducked. The guards had stopped calling. Yingyns are not made for endurance speed. Her rooster possessed longer legs than the guards’ hens, but soon they would throw the nets and catch her shoulders or Io’s feet. “Turn here--to the West Line!” She whispered. Although Io could not understand her speech he followed her touches with the reins and ran for the nearest city gate. The membranes to either side of his beak puffed in and out too quickly; pits and then bubbles in the skin of his face paling from healthy red to tired tan.
Nearest gate, a simple array of wooden slats, an opening in the wall manned by no one--Io pushed through. Immediately before her Anaba could see the wide West Line track and, down a long grassy slope, the unnaturally dark trees of the Old Weald. Such gnarled trunks beginning below the level of the road added to the unsettling atmosphere of that horizon. To Anaba’s left the city wall ran past shops decorated with cloth awnings and the owners’ wares. Beyond the Line from this the land rose and the foreboding forest petered out toward the first of the pastures. No one entered the dark forest. No one dared to speak why--that is how horrid it is, the elders said, and every listener became a frightened child when rumors of unspeakable horror began to spread.
Anaba urged Io on across the track, fleetingly praying that he would not fail, reminding herself to take deep breaths instead of shallow gasps. Her partner had told her to go on, and she trusted him to give good orders as she trusted him to follow her own. This time, he certainly knew more about their predicament than did she.
Had she been on her own she would not have said a predicament existed.
Io balked at the slope but continued on as Anaba leaned and nudged him with her heels. A guard threw a net from the center of the road. It tangled with Io’s tail, spooking him forward faster; the stones tied at the edges of the web of ropes pulled its weight through Io’s long tail-feathers, not onto his back. He could continue on. Anaba glared into the unnatural dusk at the Old Weald’s edge.
In her next heartbeat’s time Neu’s presence disappeared from her senses. It was as she had been struck blind, and only then realized the riot of color, the rainbow circus, that had existed before her. Flick--blindness. Flick--all senses cut off. Love of her life, soulpartner, dead.
Anaba sucked in a rush of lukewarm air and choked. She grabbed around Io’s neck and sunk her face into the feathers at the nape. Walls of life fell away from her on all sides--a skeleton on a peak, cliffs avalanching, Anaba could not remember how to scream.
Io dashed into the woods. He bent some long feathers of his wings as he tried to flap down the suddenly steep and dark slope with his wings trapped under the girth. He did not know his rider had just become the first in humankind’s memory to be split from her magepartner. He knew, as he stopped stumbling and stood on the mossy ground in the new gloom, that no one was coming in after him. His rider was no longer steadying her own balance nor giving instructions.
Io sleepily wondered farther into the forest.
A/N: I hope you enjoyed. This is a rewrite of the first chapter of The Yingyn Riders, my fantasy novel. If more people become interested due to this chapter, the complete novel will be reconciled with it. Please review constructively.
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"“what would people be without love?”
Tru thought it over. “Rarer?”"
~"Gingercake", in the fanfic "In the deep end", found on fanfiction.net. |
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