If this did not go beyond earthly matters, we would not have intervened. There is much you might accomplish to thwart the plans of an old evil. May we Ride together again some day, Green Rider.

Joy turned her horse back among the other ghosts. The mass merged into itself, then lifted and dissipated like a fog carried off on a breeze to the heavens. Still, the rhythm of the Wild Ride pulsed in Karigan’s ears.

RIDE’S END

The world slowed down, though colors still smeared like water on paint. A massive stone structure of towers and parapets and crenelated walls loomed ahead with colorful pennants streaming from its loftiest heights.

An arched entryway flanked by rounded turrets gaped before her.

Behind her stood the guardhouses, the portcullis suspended between them, ready to cut off an invasion should an army attempt to swarm across the narrow drawbridge spanning the moat and assault the castle. A wall encircled the castle and its grounds. Somehow, the ghosts had carried her miles in just moments to the courtyard where she now stood before the castle of King Zachary.

The Horse’s hooves crunched on gravel. She dismounted and, hands shaking, unbuckled the message satchel from the saddle. She left The Horse standing there, no worse from his strange run.

Time lagged again, and Karigan swayed as if the ground moved beneath her feet. The pennants, each representing the provinces, snapped into definition. Though their lines were no longer blurred, their motion was jerky and slow.

When her footing grew solid again, she proceeded to walk the distance across the courtyard to the castle entrance. Guards in black and silver stepped forward with halting movements to intercept her. They had not managed two steps by the time she was far beyond their reach.

As she walked beneath the arched entryway, more soldiers attempted unsuccessfully to stop her in jerk-and-stagger movements. They were too slow, she was too fast. Their voices were muffled, the words drawn out in a moronic drone.

She strode through a great corridor past guards and courtiers stalled in time. Most did not note her passage. Lamps lit along the walls flickered absurdly slow, casting a wash of strange tones of bronze and gold along the corridor. The corridor, she hoped, led to King Zachary’s throne.

Coats of arms and weavings adorned the walls, and these remained static and clearly defined. She focused on these things rather than the unnatural, disorienting motions of the people around her.

Two doors appeared ahead of her, open. Some huge oak tree had been felled to create them. The firebrand was carved into one, and the crescent moon in the other. Two guards clad entirely in black were posted beside the doors. They were Weapons, but even they weren’t immune to the time anomaly.

She swept past them and through the doors into a vast chamber. Sunlight lanced through tall and narrow windows at cross slants. Voices echoed off the vaulted ceiling in a weird and long drawn out babble. Black-clad guards stood like pillars in shadowy recesses.

A tapestry of Zachary’s family crest, a white Hillander terrier against a field of heather, occupied the space behind the throne. It was said that the brave little dogs had rooted groundmites out of their earthen burrows during the Long War.

Below the tapestry stood two men and a woman attending a man who sat in an ornate chair. A white terrier sat up from where it had been lying at the seated man’s feet. Before it was on its feet, Karigan had crossed the cavernous room. The three people and the king were just beginning to look up at her.

Slam!

Like walking into a wall, like the ground being pulled out from beneath her feet, the force rocked through her body and she fell away piece by piece, like feathers from a burst pillow cascading in a soft flurry.

She lay in a field immersed in sunlight. Sunlight leaked through her closed eyes. Asters and goldenrod droned with bees lighting from one blossom to another. A swallow chirped somewhere above her. She felt warm and drowsy. The light, the light . . . Something cool and wet ran along her cheek . . .

Time and motion snicked into place, like the latching of a door. Karigan shook her head, willing the stinging drone of bees and shock of light to leave her. She sighed, closed her eyes, and settled down to continue her nap, but the cool, wet something now licked her hand. She cracked open an eye. A pair of brown eyes gazed back at her from beneath a clump of white fur. The terrier panted and looked at her with a grin.

Karigan widened her eyes. Dog! Castle! Zachary! She sat up too fast, and spiraled back down to the woolen runner in front of the king’s dais. The buzz filled her head again, but it might have been the voices of people around her. This time when she looked up, four blades wielded by black-clad Weapons were pointed at her chest.

“This is no Green Rider I’ve ever seen before.” A man’s voice with a hard edge to it.

“Could it be another assassin?” the woman asked.

“Her coming here smells of magic,” said a second man with a sniff.

Karigan had fallen on the message satchel. She rolled to her side to unwedge it, and the Weapons pressed the tips of their blades against her chest.

“Message.” Karigan’s mouth felt too full of tongue. “Message for the king.”

“Let us see it,” said the first man.

Karigan took the paper from the satchel and handed it to a Weapon who in turn passed it to someone she could not see. Indistinct murmurings echoed off the walls of the cavernous room, which seemed, rather, like whispers issuing from the fresco-painted figures on the ceiling. The age-cracked figures of kings, queens, knights, and the god, Aeryc, riding the sickle moon, and the goddess, Aeryon, haloed by the sun and peering from behind a cloud, all looked down on her. Among them, and at the center, was a great black horse whose arched neck and flanks rippled with motion.