She rode beside the creek now, but its spring-full rushing made only a white noise she found annoying. It was too loud. In the shade of the trees, she felt cold; in the sun she felt scorched. The horse sighed, and pulled a little toward the water. She halted it, clambered off feeling every stiff muscle, and led it down to drink. It laid its lips on the water and sucked; she could see the gulps rising up its gullet. She waited until it was finished, until it lifted its head and gave her a look and then tried to stray off toward some buttonweed twigs. She didn’t want to climb back on, but she had to.
She walked instead, leading the horse, until her legs felt better. By the sun, it was late morning. She didn’t really want to go on to the valley but where else could she go? Someone would ask, knowing where she always went . . . she pulled herself back into the saddle, and rode on.
The valley was smaller than she remembered, and she could feel nothing for it. The pines, the poplars, the creek, the meadow. She looked around it, trying to feel something . . . it was hers, it would always be hers . . . but all she felt was pain and emptiness. She slid off the horse and took the bit out of its mouth. She could walk around and let it graze for an hour before heading back. She remembered to loosen the girth, then took down a water bottle and drank. Her body wanted food, but her mind did not; she made it halfway through the lunch the cooks had packed for her before her mind won the battle, and she threw up what she’d eaten.
She felt faint, then, and sat on the cold ground with her head down on her knees; the horse snatched at the grass nearby, the ripping and chewing of grass punctuating her thoughts. What could she do? Emptiness behind her, emptiness before her.
In the middle of that emptiness, those few vivid moments when she had done something right, and saved someone else. Heris Serrano. Vida Serrano. What would they say now, if they knew all this? Would it explain what the admiral had wanted explained? Would it change anything? Or would it be worse, far worse, to let them know what had happened to her? She already had black marks against her; she had known from childhood that nothing in a military career is ever completely forgotten or forgiven. If she became not only the colorless, ordinary young officer from a backwoods planet, who just happened to do the right thing once and save a Serrano neck . . . if she admitted that she was damaged, fractured, prone to nightmares . . . that had to put her in more jeopardy. That had to risk being thrown out, sent home . . . except she had no home. Not this valley, not anywhere.
When her head cleared a little, she made herself drink again, and eat the other half of lunch. This time it stayed down. It tasted like dust and wood, but it stayed down.
She was home well before dark, handing over the dry, cool horse to the groom with thanks. Her stepmother hovered in the hall; Esmay nodded politely.
“I rode too far,” she said. “I need a long bath, and bed.”
“Could I send up a tray?” her stepmother asked. It was not her stepmother’s fault. It had never been her stepmother’s fault; she wasn’t sure her stepmother even knew. If her father had kept it such a secret, perhaps she didn’t know even now.
“Thank you,” Esmay said. “Soup and bread would be fine—I’m just too tired.”
She was able to get herself in and out of the bath, and she ate the food on the tray when it came. She put the tray back out in the hall, and lay on the bed. She could just see the corner of her great-grandmother’s note on its shelf. She didn’t want to see it; she didn’t want to see anything.
The next morning was marginally better. Luci, who clearly knew nothing, wanted her to come watch a schooling session with the brown mare. Esmay could think of no polite way out of it, and partway through the session came out of herself far enough to notice that the problem with the canter depart was Luci’s failure to keep her outside hip in place. Luci accepted this with good grace, and offered a tube of liniment for Esmay’s obvious stiffness. They went in to lunch together.
In the afternoon, her conscience would not let her avoid her great-grandmother any longer.
“You are very angry with me,” her great-grandmother said, not looking up from her embroidery. She had to use a thick lens and a special light, but she worked on it every day, Luci had said.
“I am angry,” Esmay said. “Mostly with him, I think.” Meaning her father, which surely her great-grandmother knew.
“I am still angry with him,” her great-grandmother said. “But I’m too old to put much energy into the anger. It’s very tiring, anger, so I ration it. A sharp word a day, perhaps.”
Esmay suspected humor at her expense, but the old woman’s face had a soft vulnerability that she’d never noticed before.
“I will say I was wrong, Esmaya. It was how I was brought up, but it was still wrong of me. Wrong not to tell you, and wrong to leave you as I did.”
“I forgive you,” Esmay said quickly. The old woman looked at her.
“Don’t do that. Don’t lie to me, of all people. Lies added to lies never make truth. You don’t forgive me—you can’t forgive me that fast.”
“I don’t . . . hate you.”
“Don’t hate your father, either. Be angry with him, yes: he has hurt you and lied to you, and anger is appropriate. You need not forgive him too soon, any more than you forgive me. But don’t hate, because it is not natural to you, and it will destroy you.”
“I’m going away, as soon as I can,” Esmay said. “And I’m not coming back.”
“I know.” Again, a sense of vulnerability, but not intended to sway her decision. Her chin firmed. “Luci told me about the herd. You are right, and I will argue for Luci when the time comes.”
“Thank you,” Esmay said. It was all she could say; she kissed the old woman and went away.
The days crept by, then the weeks. She counted them off; she would not cause a scandal by moving to the city for the rest of her leave, but she could not help watching the calendar. Her resolve had hardened: she would go, and never return. She would find someone—not Luci, who had no feel for it, but someone else—to become the valley’s guardian. Nothing here meant anything to her now but pain and sorrow; the very food tasted bad in her mouth. She and her father had spoken each day of other things; she had been amazed at both of them, the way they could evade any mention of or reference to that disastrous afternoon. Her stepmother took her shopping in the city; she allowed herself to be draped in suitable clothes; she packed them into her duffel to take along.
Then it was the last week . . . the last five days . . . the last four. She woke one morning stabbed by the sorrow that she had been in her valley, but she had not seen it. She had to go one more time; she had to try to salvage something, some real memory that was also a good memory, from her childhood. She had been riding almost every day, just to keep Luci company, so if there was a horse free, she could go now, today.
For the dama, there was always a horse free. A trail horse? Of course, dama, and the saddle, and the bridle. And might the groom suggest that this horse accepted hobbles well? Very good. She went back into the kitchen, and collected a lunch. She felt, if not happy, at least positive . . . the pull of Fleet, she thought, the knowledge that in just a few days she would be back in her new home, forever.
The valley opened before her, magical again, as it had been in her childhood . . . as she would remember it in the moment of her death. It hardly deserved the name of “valley,” although when Esmay had first seen it, she’d been so young it seemed large. Now she could see that what she remembered was merely a saucer in the side of the mountain, a grassy glade in which a small pool trickled away in a murmuring stream that would become a rushing noisy stream only further down. On one side were the dark pines, secretive, rising from rocky ledges, and facing them were the white-boled poplars with their dancing leaves. In this brief mountain spring, the new grass was spangled with pink and yellow and white, the windflowers and snowflowers . . . a few weeks later, the tall scarlet and blue lupines would bloom, but now all the flowers lay close to the ground.