Shadow Gate by Kate Elliott

Yordenas is walking. Go quickly if you don’t want your whereabouts known to him! Go now!”
    His urgency impelled her. She took a step, and a breath of fetid air washed her. She took another step into a spitting salt spray with the crash of surf far below, and another step to warm rain in her face amid the racket of crickets and the smell of damp grass. Her hands smarted as blood rushed back into the skin. The pulse beneath her feet throbbed with a third tone, hot and intense, the presence of blood washing down the path like an incoming tide.
    She could not run within the confines of the labyrinths, but because she was compact she could negotiate the path’s twists and turns economically, keeping ahead of the other presence. The muzzy confusion of earlier days had lifted and she felt both the widening focus and the pinpoint awareness of her surroundings from her days as a reeve when her instincts—right up until the last day—had served her so well.
    She was back in the game, one step ahead of fear. Flirting with danger, the rush that her eagle had taught her to love. Wasn’t all of life like that: never more than one step ahead until the day death caught you?
    The path spilled her into the center of the labyrinth, where the horse waited, looking aggrieved, if horses could look aggrieved, as if to say: “Why did you take so long?”
    Gods, she was thirsty. Hands shaking, she filled the bowl and drank her fill, the water blazing into every part of her body. She sank down cross-legged, panting, and rubbed her forehead. Night had fallen. Knowing a cliff plunged away on all sides, she dared not move, not unless the horse was willing to fly at night, something an eagle could not do because they depended so heavily on their vision. She’d heard tales of eagles who could be fooled or forced into flying at the full moon, but she’d never had such luck with Flirt.
    But as she sat with a sweet breeze steady against her face, she realized the mare actually had a kind of sheen to it that might be described as a
glow.
Its coat was not so much pale gray as luminescent silver. Indeed, the horse had an unnatural look, a ghost in truth, if ghosts flicked their tails and tossed their pretty heads.
    Why did the cursed mare keep bringing her to Guardian altars? Her chest was tight the way a person gets when they don’t want to breathe for fear of inhaling where they know there will be a noxious smell.
    A Guardian altar. A winged horse. A cloak. A simple begging bowl. Light from her palm, if she needed it, and a patterned labyrinth through which she seemed able to speak across distances to others like her.
    She knew the tale. She could chant the words or tell it through gesture, as every child could.
Long ago, in the time of chaos, a bitter series of wars, feuds, and reprisals denuded the countryside and impoverished the lords and guildsmen and farmers and artisans of the Hundred. In the worst of days, an orphaned girl knelt at the shore of the lake sacred to the gods and prayed that peace might return to her land.
    A blinding light split the air, and out of the holy island rising in the center of the lake appeared the seven gods in their own presence. The waters boiled, and the sky wept fire, as the gods crossed over the water to the shore where the girl had fallen.
    And they spoke to her.
    Our children have been given mind, hand, and heart to guide their actions, but they have turned their power against themselves. Why should we help you?
    For the sake of justice, she said.
    And they heard her.
    Let Guardians walk the lands, in order to establish justice if they can.
    Who can be trusted with this burden? she asked them. Those with power grasp tightly.
    Only the dead can be trusted, they said. Let the ones who have died fighting for justice be given a second chance to restore peace. We will give them gifts to aid them with this burden.
    Taru the Witherer wove nine cloaks out of the fabric of the land and