Shattered Dance

Kerrec would hardly unbend so far as to laugh in front of a student, but his glance at Valeria had a flicker of mirth in it. He knew how he seemed to these raw boys. Sometimes it distressed him, but mostly he was indulgent.

Valeria could remember when he had been truly terrifying. He was merely alarming now. He was even known, on rare occasions, to smile.

She slipped her hand into his. His fingers laced with hers, enfolding her in warmth. She knew better than to lean on him in front of half a dozen rider-candidates and their instructors, but his presence bolstered her wonderfully.

Orontius finished his lesson without falling into further disgrace. Lucius was waiting his turn, holding the rein of Kerrec’s stallion Petra. Valeria caught his eye and smiled.

“I’ll teach this one,” she said.

“Are you sure?” Kerrec asked.

He was not asking her. His eyes were on Morag.

Valeria’s temper flared. She opened her mouth to upbraid them both, but the words never came. She felt…strange. Very. Something had let go. Something warm and wet. Something…

Kerrec swept her off her feet. She struggled purely instinctively, but his single sharp word put an end to that. She clutched at his neck as he began to run—biting back the question that logic bade her ask. “Why carry me? Can’t I ride?”

She knew what his answer would be. Not now.

The baby was coming. Not this instant—Valeria was not a mare, to race from water breaking to foal on the ground in half a turn of the glass. Human women were notably less blessed. But the birth had begun. There was no stopping it.

She had thought she would be afraid. Fear was there, but it was distant, like a voice yammering almost out of earshot. The pains were much more immediate.

They were sharper than she had expected, and cut deeper. They wrenched her from the inside out.

Kerrec was with her. He would not let her go.

A very remote part of her was comforted. The rest was in stark terror.

The pains were too strong. They should not be like this. They set hooks in the deepest part of her, the part that she had buried and bound and prayed never to see again.

The Unmaking had roused. Absolute nothingness opened at the core of everything she was.

All because she had read a spell in an old and justly forgotten book, not so long ago. It had been quiescent since she came back to the Mountain from the war and the great victory. She thought she had overcome it.

She had been an idiot. It had been waiting, that was all, biding its time until she was as vulnerable as a human creature could be.

She should be riding out the pains, guiding her child into the light. Instead, all the power she had went into holding back the Unmaking.

She did not have to panic. Her mother was there. So was Kerrec. They would keep the baby safe. She had to believe that.

She could feel Kerrec around her, holding her. His quiet strength brought comfort even through the terror that was trying to swallow her. It was always there, always with her, no matter where she was or what she did. It was as much a part of them both as the color of their eyes or the shape of their hands.

She leaned back against him. It was a strange sensation, as if she moved her body from without with a third hand while the rest kept a death grip on the Unmaking. His lips brushed her hair, a gesture so casual and yet so tender that she nearly wept.

She had no choice but to hold on and be strong. No one could help her with this. No one here even knew.

They could not know. If they did, they would try to help—and the Unmaking would lair in them, too. She would rather give herself up to it than destroy them.

That hardened her heart. Her grip had been slipping, but now it firmed. She walled the Unmaking in magic, calling on the strength of the Mountain and the stallions who were always within her.

She would never have dared to do that if it had not been for the three whom she protected—not only her lover and her mother but the child who struggled to be born. The Unmaking must never touch them. That was a great vow, as deep as the Unmaking itself.

Valeria lay barely conscious against Kerrec’s body. Pains racked her, but her spirit was elsewhere. She had gone far inside herself behind walls and wards so strong he dared not break them for fear of breaking her.

“Is it always this way with mages?” he asked her mother.

Morag’s frown was etched deep between her brows. “I’ve never midwived a horse mage before. No one has. Her body is doing well enough. The baby is coming as it should. But—”

“But?”

“I don’t know,” Morag said, and that clearly angered her. “Is there something about horse magic that makes this unduly difficult?”

“Not unless the old riders are right and it matters that she’s a woman.” Kerrec shook his head as soon as he said it. “No. That’s not what it is. It’s not our magic at all.”

“Then what—”

“I can’t tell,” Kerrec said with tight-strained patience. “She won’t let me in. And no, I can’t force it. She’s woven the wards too well.”

“We’ll do our best without her, then,” Morag said. “Damn the girl! She’s never in her life made anything simple.”

Kerrec bit his lip. He would be the first to admit that the two of them were all too well matched.

The body in his arms went stiff with a new and stronger contraction. The life inside sparked with fear. He smoothed the world’s patterns around it—not so much that the birthing stopped, but enough to take away the worst of the pain.

He walled his own fears inside. That much of Valeria’s example he could follow. He had to be steady and strong to bring his daughter into the world.

There was a deep rightness in that. The patterns opened to accept her. She was a strong spirit, brimming with magic. She yearned toward the light.

He showed her the way. It seemed terribly long and slow, but as human births went, it was remarkably fast.

Valeria woke in the middle of it. Her consciousness flared like a beacon. The child veered away from Kerrec and toward that much brighter light.

He caught them both. Valeria was reeling with pain and confusion. All her patterns were scattered, her magic trying to shake itself to pieces.

The child’s own confusion and the shock of birthing drove her toward her mother—like calling to like. Kerrec throttled down panic. Now of all times, he must be what he was bred and trained to be.

He breathed deep and slow, as he willed Valeria to do, and quieted his mind and heart and the rushing of blood through his veins. As he grew calmer, the patterns around them lost their jagged edges and smoothed into the curves and planes of a world restored to order. For strength he drew from the earth, from the Mountain itself that was the source of every rider’s magic.

The stallions were there, and their great Ladies behind them, watching and waiting. Kerrec was bound in body and soul to the stallion Petra, whose awareness was always with him. But this was a greater thing.

He had never sensed them all before. Sometimes he had seen them through Valeria’s eyes and known for an instant how powerful her magic was. She could see and feel them all, always.

This was not a shadow seen through another’s eyes. It was stronger, deeper.

The white gods had drawn aside the veil that divided them from mortal minds and magic. None of them moved, and yet this was a Dance—a Dance of new life and new magic coming into the world.

Kerrec dared not pause for awe. The gods might be present and they might be watching, but they laid on him the burden of keeping his lover and his child alive. They would do nothing to help him.

It did no good to be bitter. The gods were the gods. They did as they saw fit.

Under that incalculable scrutiny, he held the patterns steady. The pains were close together now. Valeria gasped in rhythm with them. She spoke no word, nor did she scream. She took the pain inside herself.

Morag moved into Kerrec’s vision. He had all but forgotten her, lost in a mist of magic and fear.

“I need you to hold her tightly,” Morag said, “but don’t choke the breath out of her.” She placed his hands as she would have them, palms flat below the breasts, pressed to the first curve of the swollen belly. “When I give the word, push.”

Kerrec drew a breath and nodded. His legs were stiff and his back ached with sitting immobile, cradling Valeria. He let the discomfort sharpen his focus.

Morag’s voice brought him to attention. “Now,” she said. “Push.”

Valeria began to struggle. She was naked and slicked with sweat, impossibly slippery in Kerrec’s hands. He locked his arms around her and prayed they would hold.

Morag slapped Valeria, hard. The struggling stopped. Valeria was conscious, if confused.

“Now push,” Morag said to them both.

Valeria braced against Kerrec’s hands. He held on for all their lives and pushed as Morag had instructed.

For the first time in the whole of that ordeal, Valeria let out a sound, a long, breathless cry. Kerrec felt the pain rising to a crescendo, then the sudden, powerful release. Valeria’s cry faded into another altogether, a full-throated wail.

“Her name is Grania,” Valeria said.

She was exhausted almost beyond sense, but she was alive, conscious and far from unmade. The Unmaking had subsided once more, sinking out of sight but not ever again out of mind.

Morag and two servants of the school had bathed Valeria and dressed her in a soft, light robe. Two more servants had spread clean bedding, cool and sweet-scented. Valeria lay almost in comfort and held out her hands.

Kerrec cradled their daughter, looking down into that tiny, red, pinched face, as rapt as if there had never been anything more beautiful in the world. He gave her up with visible reluctance.

“Grania,” Valeria said as the swaddled bundle settled into her arms. Maybe the child would be beautiful someday, but it was a singularly unprepossessing thing just now. She folded back the blankets, freeing arms that moved aimlessly and legs that kicked without purpose except to learn the ways of this new and enormous world.

Valeria brushed her lips across the damp black curls, breathing the warm and strange-familiar scent. “Grania,” she said again. And a third time, to complete the binding. “Grania.”

She looked up. Morag was smiling—so rare as to be unheard of. Grania had been her mother’s name. It was an honor and a tribute.

Valeria was too tired to smile back. Kerrec sat on the bed beside her. She leaned against him as she had for so many long hours. As he had then, he bolstered her with his warm strength.

She sighed and closed her eyes. Sleep eluded her, but it was good to rest in her lover’s arms with their child safe and alive and replete with the first milk.

Her body felt as if it had been in a battle. Everything from breasts to belly ached. That would pass. The Unmaking…

Despair tried to rise and swallow her. She refused to let it. She should be happy. She would be happy. That old mistake would not crush her—not now and not, gods willing, ever after.

Chapter Six

The room was full of shadows and whispers. All the windows were shrouded and the walls closed in with heavy dark hangings. But the floor was bare stone, and a stone altar stood in the center, its grey bulk stained with glistening darkness.

Maurus struggled not to sneeze. He was crowded into a niche with his cousin Vincentius. They each had a slit to peer through, which so far had shown them nothing but the altar and the lamp that flickered above it.

Nothing was going to happen tonight. Vincentius had heard wrong—there was no gathering. They had come here for nothing.

Just as Maurus opened his mouth to say so, he heard what he had been waiting for.

Footsteps, advancing deliberately, like the march of a processional. Maurus’ heart pounded in his throat.

The door opened behind the heavy sway of curtains. Maurus stopped breathing. Vincentius’s face was just visible beside him, pale and stiff. His eyes were open as wide as they would go.

This was the gathering they had come to see. When the full number had come through the door and drawn up in a circle around the altar, there were nineteen of them.

They were wrapped in dark mantles. Some hunched over as if trying to be furtive. Others stood straight but kept their cloaks wound tight.

Vincentius thrust an elbow into Maurus’ ribs. Maurus had already seen what his chin was pointing at. One of the figures nearest them had a familiar hitch in his gait.

Maurus’ brother Bellinus had been born with one leg shorter than the other. It made no apparent difference on a horse and he had not been judged unfit to inherit their father’s dukedom, but lately he had been acting odd—bitter, angry, as if he had a grievance against the world.

Maurus bit his lip to keep from making a sound and tried to breathe silently. Vincentius’ breath was loud in his ears. Any moment he expected one of the people in the circle to come looking for either or both of them.

The circle turned inward on itself. The air began to feel inexplicably heavy. Maurus’ head ached and his ears felt ready to burst.

Out of that heaviness grew a deep sound, deeper than the lowest note of an organ, like the grinding of vast stones under the earth. The floor was steady underfoot, but far down below it, Maurus thought something was stirring, something he never wanted to see in the daylight.

The circle moved, drawing together. Blades flashed in unison. Each shrouded figure bared an arm and cut swiftly across it. Blood flowed onto the already glistening stone.

Those arms were scarred with knife cuts healed and half-healed and barely scabbed over. It was true, then, what Maurus had heard. These worshippers of the unspeakable had been meeting nearly every night to make sacrifice in blood.

No one had been able to say what that sacrifice was for. Something dark was all Maurus could be sure of.

He had imagined that he could do something to save his brother from whatever it was. But hiding behind the curtain, huddled with his friend whose elder brother was also somewhere in the circle, Maurus felt the weight of despair. He was a half-grown boy with a small gift of magic. He should never have come to this place or seen what he was seeing.

The sound from within the earth grew deeper still, setting in his bones. Blood congealed on the altar. The circle began to chant.

It was all men’s voices, but they sang a descant to the earth’s rumbling. The words were not in a language Maurus knew. They sounded very old and very dark and very powerful.

They tried to creep into his mind. He pressed his hands to his ears. That barely muffled the sound, but the words blurred just enough that he could, more or less, block them out.

His skin crawled. His head felt as if he had been breathing poison. He was dizzy and sick, trying desperately not to gag or choke.

It all burst at once with a soundless roar. The earth stopped throbbing. The chant fell silent.

Above the altar with its thick shell of clotted blood, the air turned itself inside out. Maurus’ eyes tried to do the same. He squeezed them shut.

He could still see the flash of everything that was the opposite of light, of nothingness opening on oblivion. As terrified as he was, he needed to see it clearly—to know what it was. He opened his eyes, shuddering so hard he could barely stand up.

Oblivion spawned a shape. Arms and legs, broad shoulders, a head—it was a man, naked and blue as if with cold. He fell to hands and knees on the altar.

Lank fair hair straggled over his shoulders and down his back. He was so gaunt Maurus could see every bone, but there was a terrible strength in him. He raised his head.

His eyes were like a blind man’s, so pale they were nearly white. But as he turned his head, thin nostrils flaring, he made it clear that he could see. He took in the circle and the room and, oh gods, the curtains that shrouded the walls.

He must be able to see the boys hiding there. Maurus tried to melt into the wall. If there had been a way to become nonexistent, he would have done it.

The strange eyes passed on by. The pale man stepped down from the altar. He was tall, and seemed taller because he was so thin. One of the men who had summoned him held out a dark bundle that unfolded into a hooded robe.

That face and that lank hair were all the paler once the body was wrapped in black wool. The voice was surprisingly light, as if the edges had been smoothed from it. “Where is it?” he asked. “It’s in none of you here. Where are you hiding it?”

“Hiding what, my lord?” asked one of the men from the circle.

The pale man turned slowly. “Don’t play the fool. Your little ritual didn’t bring me here. Where is the maw of the One?”

The man who had spoken spread his hands. “My lord, all we are is what you see. We summoned you by the rites that were given us by—”

“Empty flummery,” the pale man said. “Great power called me. Your blood showed me the way. Now feed me, because I hunger. Then tell me what you think you can do to bring the One into this place of gods and magic.”

“We trust in you, my lord,” said the other. “The message said—”

“I was promised allies with intelligence and influence,” the pale man said. “I see a pack of trembling fools. That’s comforting in its way, I do grant you. If you’re such idiots, those we want to destroy might even be worse.”

“My lord—” said the spokesman.

The pale man bared long pale-yellow teeth. “This game we play to the end—ours or theirs. We’ve failed in the Dance and we’ve lost in battle. This time we strike for the heart.”

A growl ran around the circle, a low rumble of affirmation. Obviously they took no offense at anything this creature might say.

The creature swayed. “I must eat,” he said. “Then rest. Then plan.”

“Of course, my lord,” the spokesman said hastily. He beckoned. The circle closed around the pale man. It lifted him and carried him away.

Maurus swallowed bile. The stink of blood and twisted magic made him ill. He was afraid he knew what they had been talking about—and it brought him close to panic when he thought of his brother caught up in such a thing.

There had been other plots against the empire. The emperor had been poisoned and the Dance of his jubilee broken, with riders killed and the school on the Mountain irreparably damaged. Then in the next year the emperor had gone to war against the barbarian tribes whose princes had conspired to break his Dance. With help from two of the riders and the gods they served, he had destroyed them—but their magic had destroyed him.

Now his daughter was shortly to take the throne as empress. There would be a coronation Dance. Surely the riders who came for that, along with every mage and loyal noble in the city of Aurelia, would be on guard against attack.

Which meant—

Maurus did not know what it meant. Not really. He did know that his brother was caught up in it, and that was terrible enough.

Vincentius slid down the wall beside him. His face was the color of cheese.

He always had been a sensitive soul. Maurus pulled him upright and shook him until he stood on his own feet again.

The worshippers of the One had gone. The corridor was silent. The lamp guttered over the altar.

Maurus dragged Vincentius with him around the edge of the room—as if it made any difference now how furtive they were—and peered around the door. The passage was deserted as he had thought.

It was almost pitch-black. The lamps that had been lit along it had all gone out. Only the one at the farthest end still burned, shedding just enough light to catch anything that might have stirred in the darkness.

Maurus eyed the light over the altar, which was burning dangerously low. He was not about to climb on that blood-slicked stone to retrieve the lamp. He would have to brave the dark, and hope no one came back while he did it.

Vincentius had his feet under him now. He could walk, though he had to stop once and then again to empty his stomach.

That might betray them, but there was nothing Maurus could do about it. He dragged his cousin forward with as much speed as he could. His mind was a babble of prayer to any god that would hear.

Halfway down the corridor, something scraped at the door. Maurus froze. Vincentius dropped to his knees, heaving yet again, but this time nothing came up.

There was nowhere to hide. Maurus pressed against the wall—as if that would help—and bit his lip to keep from making a sound.

The scraping stopped. Maurus waited for what seemed an age, but the door stayed shut.

There was no one on the other side. The stairway leading steeply upward was better lit but equally deserted.

Maurus stopped at the bottom and took a breath. There was no escape on that ascent. If he was caught, he could be killed.

The men who kept this secret would not care that he was noble born, only that he had spied on their hidden rite. He set his foot on the first step and began the ascent. Vincentius was already on the stair.

Maurus followed as quickly as he could. His heart was beating so hard he could not hear anything else.

He had not been nearly as afraid in the dungeon below. That had been plain insanity. This was the edge of escape. If he failed, the disappointment would be deadly.

Vincentius reached the door first. His hands tugged at the bolt. The door stayed firmly shut.

Maurus’ terror came out in a rush of breath. He pushed Vincentius aside and heaved as hard as he could.

The door flew open. Maurus nearly fell backward down the stair.

Vincentius caught him. The eyes that stared into his were blessedly aware. They dragged one another through the doorway and into a perfectly ordinary alleyway in the city of Aurelia.

The sun was up. They had been all night in the dark below. People would be looking for them.

“Let’s go to Riders’ Hall,” Vincentius said, putting in words what Maurus was thinking. “We’ll say we thought one of the mares was foaling. Maybe she did. If we’re lucky.”

Maurus nodded. “I wish Valeria was there. Or even—you know—him. They’d know what to do.”

“Riders will be there soon—a whole pack of them. Coronation’s in less than a month. They must be on their way from the Mountain by now.”

“But,” said Maurus, “what if that’s the plot—to stop the Dance again? Or if it’s supposed to come off before they get here? Or—”

Vincentius looked as desperate as Maurus felt. “I don’t know. This wasn’t even my idea. Didn’t you make any plans for after?”

“I just wanted to see what Bellinus was doing,” Maurus said. “I thought I’d corner him later and make him stop. Even though I knew, from what I’d heard, that nobody can do that. The only way out is to die.”

“What about us, then? Do we even dare to tell? We don’t know what they’ll try to do. Mages must be spying, too. Someone must know—someone who can do something about it. They’ll stop it before it goes any further.”

“Are you sure of that?” Maurus said. “Maybe we should go to the empress.”

“Nobody gets near her,” Vincentius said. “Even if we could, what would we say? I thought I recognized some of the voices. That’s all well and good, but if I give any of them up, how do we know they won’t lead the hunters to your brother?”

Maurus’ head hurt. The only clear path he could see still led toward Valeria. She had taught him to ride last year before she ran off to save the world, she and the First Rider who had been born an imperial prince.

Valeria was the strongest mage he knew, and one of the few he trusted. She would know what to do.

What if she did not come with the riders to the Dance? Would they even let her off the Mountain after all she had done?