Enchanter's End Game

Olban demanded with a sharp intake of his breath. His hand went immediately to his sword.
    Adara raised her hand to shade her eyes and stared at the approaching horsemen intently.
    "No," she replied. "They're Algars. I can tell by the way they ride."
    "I hope they have some water with them," Ce'Nedra said.
    The dozen or so Algar riders rode directly toward them with a great cloud of yellow dust rising behind them. Adara suddenly gasped, and her face went very pale.
    "What is it?" Ce'Nedra asked her.
    "Lord Hettar is with them," Adara said in a choked voice.
    "How can you possibly recognize anybody at that distance?"
    Adara bit her lip, but did not reply.
    Hettar's face was fierce and unforgiving as he reined in his sweating horse. "What are you doing out here?" he demanded bluntly. His hawkface and black scalp lock gave him a wild, even frightening appearance.
    "We thought we'd go riding, Lord Hettar," Ce'Nedra replied brightly, trying to outface him.
    Hettar ignored that. "Have you lost your mind, Olban?" he harshly asked the young Rivan. "Why did you permit the ladies to leave the forts?"
    "I do not tell her Majesty what to do," Olban answered stiffly, his face red.
    "Oh, come now, Hettar," Ce'Nedra protested. "What's the harm in our taking a little ride?"
    "We killed three Murgos not a mile from here just yesterday," Hettar told her. "If you want exercise, run around the inside of the forts for a few hours. Don't just ride out unprotected in hostile territory. You've acted very foolishly, Ce'Nedra. We'll go back now." His face was grim as a winter sea, and his tone left no room for discussion.
    "We had just made the same decision, my Lord," Adara murmured, her eyes downcast.
    Hettar looked sternly at the condition of their horses. "You're an Algar, Lady Adara," he said pointedly. "Didn't it occur to you to bring water for your mounts? Surely you know better than to take a horse out in this kind of heat without any precautions at all."
    Adara's pale face grew stricken.
    Hettar shook his head in disgust. "Water their horses," he curtly told one of his men, "and then we'll escort them back. Your excursion is over, ladies."
    Adara's face was flaming with a look of almost unbearable shame. She twisted this way and that in her saddle, trying to avoid Hettar's stern, unforgiving stare. No sooner had her horse been watered than she jerked her reins and dug her heels into his flanks. Her startled mount scrambled his hoofs in the gravel and leaped away, running back the way they had come across the rock-littered valley floor.
    Hettar swore and drove his mount after her.
    "Whatever is she doing?" Ce'Nedra exclaimed.
    "Lord Hettar's rebuke hath stung our gentle companion beyond her endurance," Ariana observed. "His good opinion is dearer to her than leer life itself."
    "Hettar?" Ce'Nedra was stunned.
    "Hath not throe eye informed thee how it doth stand with our dear friend?" Ariana asked in mild surprise. "Thou art strangely unobservant, Princess."
    "Hettar?" Ce'Nedra repeated. "I had no idea."
    "Mayhap it is because I am Mimbrate," Ariana concluded. "The ladies of my people are most sensitive to the signs of gentle affection in others."
    It took perhaps a hundred yards for Hettar to overtake Adara's plunging horse. He seized her reins in one fist and jerked her roughly to a stop, speaking sharply to her, demanding to know what she was doing. Adara twisted this way and that in her saddle, trying to keep him from seeing her face as he continued to chide her.
    Then a flicker of movement no more than twenty feet from the two of them caught Ce'Nedra's eye. Astonishingly, a mail-shined Murgo rose up out of the sand between two scrubby bushes, shaking off the sheet of brown-splotched canvas beneath which he had lain concealed. As he rose, his short bow was already drawn.
    "Hettar!" Ce'Nedra screamed as the Murgo raised his bow. Hettar's back was to the Murgo, but Adara saw the man aiming his arrow at the Algar's unprotected back. With a desperate move, she ripped her reins from Hettar's grip and drove her horse into his. His mount lurched back, stumbled and fell, throwing the unprepared man to the ground even as Adara, flailing her horse's flanks with the ends of her reins, plunged directly at the Murgo.
    With only the faintest flicker of annoyance, the Murgo released his arrow at the charging girl.
    Even at that distance, Ce'Nedra could hear the distinct sound the arrow made when it struck Adara. It was a sound she would remember