Free The Swan Riders by Erin Bow Page B

possession. I chose the Rider with the fastest horse.”
    â€œSo, Rachel and Francis Xavier,” I began.
    â€œThink so,” said Talis. “I mean, not like they sent me a save-the-date card, but I’m definitely getting that vibe.”
    â€œIs it allowed, that the Swan Riders . . .”
    â€œFraternize?” Talis grinned. “Oh, sure. The only thing more disruptive than romantic entanglements among the Swan Riders would be secret romantic entanglements among the Swan Riders. And one way or another they’d be pairing up, you know. They’re so young.”
    And—I was startled to realize—they were young. They were all young.
    Sri was hard to peg. She might be in her twenties. But Francis Xavier and Rachel were younger—my age—though Rachel, of course, was currently being Talis, and therefore acted like a centuries-old half-insane demigod.
    But it wasn’t just them. All the Swan Riders who had come to the Precepture were very young. At the time, I’d been too busy noticing that they’d come to kill us to remark upon their age. But now that I had, it made no sense. An army composed entirely of young people? “But why?” I said. “Why are they all so young?”
    â€œNeuroplasticity, mostly,” said Talis, feeding slips of grass into the embers of the fire. For a moment I thought that was all he was going to say: a very Talis sort of explanation. “It’s the same reason most of the successful AIs were very young. I was twenty-two, and that was pushing it. Ambrose—your Abbot—back in the day, he was sixteen. Young people take the upgrade better. And they have a better chance of surviving what we do to them.”
    I did not like that we . But I did not say so, and Talis pressed on. “Plus, also: joining a cult? That’s a young man’s game.”
    But even that did not compute. They joined young, but what happened to them after?
    And what was happening to Sri?

    A third hour. The fire was cold. The jerky was eaten. The horses were well rubbed and groomed. Francis Xavier had taken his hair out of its knots and brushed oil through it, and was now reknotting it, section by section, pulling it so tight against his scalp that it looked painful.
    And Talis was pacing. Hopping up onto a rock and back down again, just to move. Like Elián had once been, Talis was terrible with stillness.
    I missed Elián. I missed him with a fierceness I did not dare look too closely at. He was out here, somewhere, in this tense and empty country.
    Elián.
    And Xie.
    And also, a life in which horses did not figure. Gordon Lightfoot had sure hooves and a willing heart, but I was not making much progress as a rider. I was stiff from my rib cage to my kneecaps, and my chest and shoulders felt as if they’d caved in around my heart.
    Sri had shown me stretches, her hands on the small of my back, on the points of my shoulders.
    And Xie had tried to teach me once—
    I got up.
    I’d thought it was unregal, or at least un-Scottish, but Xie had tried to teach me the sun salutation. I’d demurred, but I’d seen her do it every day. Her body stretching, in work clothes in the evening, and in the mornings, bare.
    I stood straight. I took a deep breath. I arched my spine backward. My throat exposed, my breasts lifted, my heart opening—Xie.
    The structure of the sun salutation was enough, though barely, to keep me from overloading.
    What would I do, when I lived past my body?
    And what had happened to Sri?
    Talis stopped his pacing and watched me.

    At three hours and twenty-five minutes, Sri’s horse came back.
    Sri was not on it.
    The horse, Roberta, came pounding down the main line at speed, then crashing down the embankment toward us. FX shouted something I didn’t have enough context to translate and threw his arms open in front of her. Roberta reared and dodged but slowed enough for Talis to catch the