Shattered Dance

As he rode each precise circle and undulating curve, shifting pace from walk to trot to canter and back again, he began to perceive another riding court in a different city. The horse under him was a little shorter and notably broader. The neck that arched in front of him was narrower and lighter, and the mane was not smoky grey but jet-black. The little ears that curved at the end of it were red brown, the color called bay.

Kerrec kept his grip on the unexpected working. He bent his will until his awareness separated from that other rider, so that he seemed to ride side by side with his sister. Alea bowed to Kerrec’s sister’s mount, the bay Lady who alone of all the mothers of gods had chosen a mortal rider and left the Mountain.

They were riding the same patterns. That was not a coincidence. Each bend and turn brought them into harmony.

Briana smiled at her brother. “Good afternoon,” she said as serenely as if they had not been riding this paired dance across eighty leagues of mountain and plain.

Kerrec acknowledged her with an inclination of the head. With the Lady leading, the pattern was growing more complex, though still simple enough for Kerrec’s young stallion. In its curves and figures was the vision Maurus had given Valeria.

Briana’s expression did not change. She had taken it in, Kerrec did not doubt that, but she showed no sign of what she was thinking.

He would not ask, either. He had done what was necessary. The empress knew what Maurus had seen. It was for her to decide what to do about it.

The ride went on, which somewhat surprised him. It was a Dance, a doorway through fate and time, though there was no ritual and no formal occasion and no flock of Augurs to interpret it. To a Lady, all those things were inconsequential.

She had chosen to Dance now for reasons that might have little to do with Kerrec’s message. The only wise course was to ride the Dance and ask no questions. Answers would come when, or if, the Lady pleased.

These patterns seemed harmless and sunlit, but Maurus’ vision underlay all of them. A priest of the One God, a cabal of idle and disaffected nobles, an altar of sacrifice that had seen long and bloody use—all that was clear enough, one would think. Yet another conspiracy raised itself against the empire, or more likely this was an offshoot of older and failed conspiracies.

But the priest had said something that would not let Kerrec go. The creature had mocked the circle that summoned him. Something beyond them had brought him there—some great power in Aurelia, strong enough to conjure evil out of air.

That made Kerrec’s back tighten. He caught himself before he passed that stiffness to Alea. The stallion did not deserve it, and the Dance assuredly did not need it.

Tomorrow Kerrec would ride to Aurelia. Whatever was going to happen there, he would do his best to be ready for it. So would his sister. So would everyone else whom either of them was able to warn.

Meanwhile he rode the Dance, taking its patterns inside him, committing them to memory. They might be useful or they might not. The gods knew. It was not for a mortal, even a master mage, to judge—though he might come to conclusions of his own, given time and space to think about it.

Chapter Nine

“You’re sure of this?”

Valeria paused in tightening Sabata’s girth. The rest of the caravan was still forming in the pale dawn light. The question did not surprise her, but the one who asked it did.

Master Nikos held the rein of a stallion nearly as majestically ancient as Valeria’s Oda, who waited patiently in the line of stallions who would go riderless on this first day of the journey. Valeria acknowledged Master and stallion with a nod of respect. “I am sure,” she said.

The Master glanced at the cluster of people beyond Valeria. Morag was already in her cart with the nurse beside her. Grania, having eaten a hearty breakfast, was peacefully asleep.

“They’ll be safe,” Valeria said. “My mother may be only a village wisewoman, but she’s a strong mage.”

“Your mother is not ‘only’ anything,” the Master said. “I don’t fear for her or even the child. It’s you I’m thinking of.”

“I’m not weak,” Valeria said. “If I’m even slightly tired, I’ll ride in the wagon. My mother has already delivered the lecture, sir.”

Master Nikos’ lips quirked. “Of course she has. My apologies. We’re overly protective of you, I know. For all the grief we’ve laid on you, you are precious to us.”

Valeria almost smiled. Her eyes were trying to go misty—a last remnant of the easy tears of pregnancy. “I know that, sir,” she said. “I won’t do anything foolish. I promise.”

He patted her hand a little awkwardly—such gestures were foreign to him—and led his stallion on past toward the head of the caravan.

Valeria finished tightening the girth with a little too much help from Sabata. He was losing patience. He could never understand why caravans took so long to move. If he had had any say in it, they would have been gone an hour ago.

Valeria slapped his questing nose aside and swung into the saddle. He nipped at her foot, but he did not swing his hindquarters or try to buck. He knew better.

His flash of temper made her laugh. She was still grinning when Kerrec rode up beside her. He grinned back and stole a kiss.

“You’re in a fine mood this morning,” she said.

“So are you.” He let the reins fall on Petra’s neck and turned to scan the faces of the riders who had come out to see them off. Everyone was there, from the youngest rider-candidate to the First Riders who would stay behind to welcome the Called and dance the Midsummer Dance.

Valeria’s eyes lingered on each face. All of her yearmates were staying behind to continue their studies, along with the rest of the recently Called. She caught herself committing them to memory, as if she never expected to see them again.

She shook herself before she fell any deeper into foolishness. She was only going away for a season or two. The Mountain was still home and always would be, however far she traveled.

Still, this was a new thing she and Kerrec were doing. No one could be sure what would come of it. Then there was Maurus’ message. She was not fool enough to think that because armies had been defeated and mages destroyed, others would not spring up to take their place.

For today she would focus on her increasingly fractious stallion and her still recovering body and try not to wallow too much in the last sight of the school that she would enjoy until at least the coming of winter. The caravan was beginning to move. The sun was up and the night’s mist was blowing away. It was a glorious morning, a fine day to be riding to the imperial city.

Morag kept a careful eye on her daughter. Valeria, like most young things, suffered from delusions of invincibility. She was still recovering from a hard birth—harder than she or her otherwise perceptive lover seemed to understand.

If Morag had had any hope of being listened to, she would have kept Valeria in the wagon from the start. But Valeria was a rider. She had to ride—it was as vital to her as breathing. So, it seemed, was her insistence on riding the wildest of her three mounts.

God or no, the beast was being an idiot. Morag let him know it in no uncertain terms.

She was somewhat gratified that he deigned to notice. He still jigged and danced, but he stopped plunging and flinging himself about. After a while he settled even more, until he was walking more or less quietly, with only an occasional toss of the head or lash of the tail.

Valeria was still riding with that upright and beautiful carriage which distinguished the riders of the school, but Morag could see the subtle stiffness in her shoulders. Just as Morag decided to comment on it, Valeria swung her mount in toward the wagon and stepped from his back to the wagon’s bed.

It was prettily done. Morag acknowledged it with a sniff. Valeria was a little pale but otherwise well enough.

The tension left Morag’s own shoulders as Valeria made herself comfortable amid the bags and bundles that Morag had agreed to carry for the riders. The nurse, who was no fool, handed the baby over to her mother.

Valeria did not melt as some women did in the presence of their offspring. Her affection was a fiercer thing. She cradled the small blanket-wrapped body in her lap, head tilted slightly, and watched the child sleep.

Morag was growing drowsy herself. The wagon’s rocking and the clopping of hooves and the slowly rising warmth of the mountain summer were incitement to sleep.

She had little need to guide the mule. The caravan surrounded her with protections as strong as she could manage herself. It was full of mages, after all.

They were quiet about it, but they were on guard. Very little would get past them unless they let it. They had learned that lesson all too well.

Morag slid into a doze. She kept her awareness of the road and the caravan and the magic that surrounded it, but her consciousness slipped free.

It wandered for a while, drifting into Imbria and passing by her husband and children who were there. That was a pleasant dream, and it made her smile.

Gradually the dream darkened. It came on like a summer storm, a wall of cloud rolling in from the east. There was no clear vision in it, only formless darkness and the howl of wind.

A tower rose on a bleak hilltop like one of the old forgotten fortresses in her native Eriu. Wind and rain battered it. Lightning struck it and cast it down.

In the ruins where it had been, the earth opened like a mouth. The heart of it was nothingness.

That nothingness swallowed everything. Earth and sky vanished. There was nothing left but oblivion.

Valeria gulped air. In her dream there had been nothing to breathe, nothing to see, nothing at all except the Unmaking.

She lay in her nest of bundles and bags. Dappled sunlight shifted over her. Her daughter stirred in her arms.

She welcomed every bit of it—even the knot in her back and the whimper that turned to a wail as Grania woke to pangs of hunger. In Valeria’s dream, it had all gone. The Unmaking had taken everything.

She surrendered Grania to the nurse and sat up in the wagon bed, rocking with it as it descended a long slope.

From the driver’s seat, her mother looked over her shoulder. Morag’s green eyes were unusually dark.

“You saw, too,” Valeria said. The words slipped out of her, too quick to catch.

Morag’s nod was hardly more than a flicker of the eyelids.

“That’s not good,” Valeria said. “If it’s as strong as this, this close to the Mountain…”

“Maybe you should turn back,” said Morag.

“We can’t do that.”

“But if the Mountain can protect you—”

“Who will protect the empress?”

“Doesn’t she have every order of mages at her command?”

“Not against this.”

Morag turned on the bench, leaving the mule to find its own way. “What about the baby, then?”

Valeria’s glance leaped to the bundle in the nurse’s arms. Her face flushed. She had not thought that far at all.

“I’m not a good mother, am I?” she said. “I love her. I’d kill anyone who laid a hand on her. But there’s so much more to the world than that one thing.”

“There is,” Morag said in a tone that gave nothing away.

“She doesn’t come first,” Valeria said. “You knew it before I did.”

“I know you,” Morag said. “You’re not meant for the small and homely things.”

That was the truth. Valeria had not expected it to hurt quite so much. All the dreams she had had while she carried Grania, the things she had imagined that she would do, beginning with the simple human task of feeding her, had melted as soon as Grania saw the daylight. The agony of bearing her and the torment of the Unmaking had come too thoroughly between them.

Valeria shook her head, sharp and short. She was making excuses.

The truth was much simpler. Valeria was born this way. No amount of wishing could change her.

Grania had finished nursing. Portia’s eyes asked and her arms stretched out, offering her to Valeria.

Valeria shook her head again, just as sharp as before. She turned back to her mother. “Will you take her? Just until we see what’s happening in Aurelia?”

“That would be sensible,” Morag said. “Unless her father objects.”

“He won’t,” said Valeria. At least, she thought, not to that. He would agree that Grania was safer in Imbria than at the heart of whatever was coming. What he would say to Valeria’s making the decision without him…

She would face that when it came. They had the journey. She could still see him happy, delighting in his child. Before the clouds rolled in. Before the world’s weight was on them again, as sooner or later it always seemed to be.

Chapter Ten

Kerrec found his daughter fascinating and somewhat terrifying. She was so small and so utterly dependent on her elders, and yet the patterns that took shape around her promised to be as wide as the world.

Even more terrifying was what happened to his heart when he held her in his lap. He was a cold creature—all his passion was given to his art and to Valeria. Even his father’s magic had not been enough to give him a warm heart.

When he looked at his daughter, he burned so hot he did not recognize himself. He had heard of people who would die for their children—women usually, mothers possessed of a love so fierce there was no end to it. He had thought those claims exaggerated until he held this mite of a thing in his hands, wet and squalling from her mother’s womb, and knew they were a dim shadow of the truth.

Time’s passage did not lessen this feeling at all, but it did teach him to contain it. From being so full he could hardly think, he advanced to merely being besotted. Eventually he supposed he would simply be madly in love, and that would be the way of it for as long as he was alive.

Madly in love, he could understand. He had that for Valeria. He did his best to see this in a similar light, if only to make the rest of life easier.

He had traveled the road from the Mountain so often that it was nearly as familiar as the way from his rooms in the school to the stallions’ stable. But Grania’s presence in her grandmother’s wagon made it all seem new. He was more alert than he had ever been, more watchful for any sign of danger.

He could laugh at himself, recognizing the stallion’s instinct to protect his offspring, but his wariness was no less for that. He had been ambushed on this road before and carried off to torments he would never forget, no matter how old the scars were or how thoroughly they had healed.

Nothing like that would happen now. Those enemies were dead, and their plot in the end had failed. Whatever new evil was brewing, the riders were no longer cursed with naiveté. They would never be caught off guard again.

As a First Rider, Kerrec lent his magic to the working of wards and his strength to sustaining them. By the third day out from the Mountain, the spells were strong enough to stand on their own. No one rider needed to watch over them.

All the while he focused on protecting the caravan, he was aware under his skin of his lover and her mother and his daughter whom they guarded. A riders’ caravan had never brought women who were not Valeria with it before, let alone a baby. Kerrec had thought that some of the riders would grumble, but they were almost as besotted with Grania as he was.

There was always someone riding beside the wagon or even sitting in it, hovering over the baby and, when she was not riding among them, Valeria. Grania was never alone and never unprotected. Her mother and grandmother slept with her at night and guarded her by day with an intensity that began to make Kerrec uneasy.

Between those two and himself, Kerrec would give little for the chances of anyone who presumed to lay a hand on Grania. But there was more to it than that.

They knew something. He wanted to believe they were not hiding it from him deliberately, but at camp in the evenings, Valeria had little to say though she was perfectly willing to join with him in other ways than words. Her mother was preoccupied with the nurse and the baby. No one else knew there was anything to notice.

He resolved to wait them out. Whatever it was, it would not strike the caravan without raising the alarm.

To be sure of that, Kerrec heightened the defenses with a portion of the magic he had from his father. Now the earth was on the alert and the land was armed. Whatever came would have to contend with the deep magic of the empire as well as the stallions and their riders.

The working came wonderfully easily. Horse magic and imperial magic flowed together. They were all one. There was no division within them.

Kerrec had not expected that. As always, the Mountain strengthened some powers and suppressed others. He had been growing unawares, becoming something quite other than he had been before.

It was not a frightening prospect, though it fluttered his heart somewhat. There was a profound rightness in it. As he rode out of the mountains, he basked in magic that was whole and more than whole.

He would never take it for granted again. Nor would he forget that the higher his fortunes rose, the lower they could fall.

Valeria could feel Kerrec watching her. She had not wanted to worry him unnecessarily, but he was too perceptive. He knew she was keeping something from him.

He would not ask. When they lay together, he said nothing but a murmur of endearments. Time and again, she meant to say something, but she let each moment pass. She was a coward and she knew it, but she could not seem to help herself.

The longer she waited, the harder it was to break the silence. She had to do it soon. The days were passing and the road was growing shorter. The time would come when Morag left the caravan and turned toward Imbria. Grania would go with her—but Grania’s father would quite naturally want a say in it.

The night before Morag was to go, Valeria sat up late with her. The nurse snored softly in the tent.

It was a clear night, starlit and warm. Valeria rocked Grania in her lap. “I swear,” she said, “she smiled at me today. It wasn’t gas pains, either.”

“No doubt,” said Morag. “She’s waking to the world as they all do. She knows her mother, too.”

Valeria’s mood was as changeable as summer weather. It clouded swiftly and completely. “Does she? How long will that last?”

“I’ll make sure she doesn’t forget.”

“Maybe it will be only a few days,” Valeria said. “Maybe a week. Or two. Just a little while.”

“Maybe,” Morag said.

Valeria resisted the urge to clutch Grania to her breast. That would only alarm her and set her crying. “Gods. What are we doing?”

“Keeping her safe,” said Morag. “One thing we can say for all those royal and noble conspirators. Unless they need fodder for their wars, they seldom trouble to notice the lower classes. As long as we keep our taxes paid and our heads down, they stay out of our way.”

Valeria nodded reluctantly. “What’s another peasant’s brat? Even if they knew to look for her, they wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Wouldn’t they?”

Valeria started violently. Grania woke and opened her mouth to wail. Kerrec gathered her up and crooned at her. She subsided, staring rapt at his firelit face. After a moment she crooned back.

Valeria was not breathing. Kerrec knelt and then sat beside her, careful not to jostle the baby. Grania gurgled at him.

That was a smile. Even Morag could not fail to see it.

It gave Valeria little joy. Her heart stabbed with guilt.

Kerrec looked up from his daughter’s face to her mother’s. His gaze was level. “I think you have something to tell me,” he said.

Valeria swallowed. Her throat was dry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have—I have this terrible habit of—”

“Yes,” he said. “What is it? What do you see?”

“Unmaking,” she said baldly.

There was a brief, perfect silence. Then he said, “Ah.” Only that.

“We didn’t destroy it,” she said, “or the people who worship it. It’s still there. It still wants us. We’re everything it isn’t, you see.”

“I see,” he said. “The coronation?”

“Or the Dance. Probably both. Briana is wound up in it so tightly I can’t see where she begins and the rest ends. It’s Maurus’ vision and more. They—whoever they are—have opened doors that should have been forever shut.”

He nodded slowly. His eyes were dark in the firelight. “So you’ll send Grania out of the way.”

“I hope so,” said Valeria. “Are you angry?”

“No,” he said. “If this storm swallows everything, she’ll be no safer in Imbria than in Aurelia. But she might last a little longer.”

“She’s going to last a lifetime,” Valeria said fiercely. “I’ll stop it. I don’t care what I have to do, but I will do it.”

“So shall we all,” he said. He held his finger for Grania to clasp. She reached for it with clear intent and caught hold, gripping as if she would never let go.

They parted with Morag at the crossroads, half a day’s wagon ride from Imbria. Grania was asleep in the nurse’s arms. Valeria should not have been disappointed—this was a six-weeks-old child, too young to know anything about grief or farewells—but the heart was not prone to reason.

She kissed the small warm forehead. For an instant she paused. Was it too warm? Was Grania brewing up a fever?

If she was, all the better that she was going to Morag’s house instead of traveling on to Aurelia. The wisewoman would look after her.

It hurt to pull away. Valeria embraced her mother quickly and tightly, then half strode, half ran toward Sabata. If Morag said anything, Valeria never heard it through the roaring in her ears.

Kerrec took longer to say goodbye, but even that was only a few moments. When Valeria looked back, he was riding toward her with a perfectly still face and the wagon was rattling away over the hill to Imbria.

Valeria stiffened her spine. She had done the best she knew how. Grania was as safe as anyone could be.

The rest of them were riding into the whirlwind. She reached for Kerrec’s hand.

It was already reaching for hers. With hands clasped, riding knee to knee, they turned their faces toward Aurelia.

Chapter Eleven

Briana was playing truant. There was a hall full of nobles waiting for her to open their council and another hall full of servants intent on making this coronation more splendid than any that had gone before, and a temple full of priests awaiting a rite that she could not put off. And here she was, dressed in worn leather breeches, creeping off to Riders’ Hall to see if Corcyra had foaled yet.

Her heart was remarkably light. Too light, she might have thought. It was a kind of madness, as if after a long and arduous struggle she had come to the summit of a mountain—and leaped.

The earth lay far below, just visible through a scud of cloud. Her body would break upon it, she knew with perfect surety. But while she rode so high, all that mattered was the joy of soaring through infinite space.

It was still early morning. The air was cool and sea-scented. The night’s fog had burned off already, promising a warm day later.

As she walked down the passage between the palace and Riders’ Hall, her back straightened and her shoulders came back. The weight of her office was no more than she could bear—she was born and bred for it and trained from childhood to carry it. But even she needed to escape now and then.

The passage had numerous turnings and branches. The one she chose ended in the stable, which at the moment was empty except for a stocky bay mare and the young black, Corcyra. All of her sisters had foaled days ago. They were in pastures outside of Aurelia now, running with their offspring and getting fat on the rich green grass.