Caitlin Brennan - Shattered Dance

On this clear summer morning, several days after her outburst to Sabata, she was done picking at her breakfast. Grania was still engrossed in hers.

It was hard to rouse herself to leave them, but each day it grew a little easier. The stallions were waiting. There were belongings to pack and affairs to settle. Tomorrow they would leave for Aurelia.

Today Valeria had morning exercises to get through, classes to learn and teach and the latest arrival of the Called to greet. Last year’s flood of candidates had not repeated itself. So far this year, the numbers were much more ordinary and the candidates likewise. None of them was already a mage of another order, and they were all boys, with no grown men taken unawares by the Call.

She was glad. This was not the year to tax the riders with more of the Called than they had ever seen before.

She should get up and go. But the sun was warm and its patterns on the floor were strangely fascinating. She had been studying the art of patterns, learning to see both meaning and randomness in the veining of a leaf, and significance in sunlight.

Riders were mages of patterns more than anything, even more than they were both masters and servants of the gods who wore the forms of white horses. The pattern she saw here was exquisitely random. Shadows from the leading of the window divided squares and diamonds of sudden light.

The different shapes blurred. Valeria blinked to clear her sight. The oddness grew even worse.

It did not look like sunlight on a wooden floor any longer but like mist on water with sunlight behind it. As she peered, a figure took shape.

She had played at scrying when she was younger, before she came to the Mountain. A mage filled a cup of polished metal—silver if she could find it, tin or bronze if not—and turned it so that the light fell on but not in it. Then if one had the gift, visions came.

Valeria had never seen anything she could use. She was not a seer. That magic had passed her by.

And yet this pattern on the floor made her think quite clearly of scrying in a bowl. There was a face staring at her out of the mist, young and worried and startlingly familiar. It brought the memory of last summer in Aurelia before Kerrec ran away to the war, when six young nobles had come to Rider’s Hall to learn to ride like horse mages.

Maurus was the first who had come, along with his cousin Vincentius. He had been one of the better pupils, too. In time he might make a rider, though he had no call to the school on the Mountain.

He was staring at her with such a combination of recognition and relief that she wondered what had made him so desperate.

If she had fallen into a dream, it felt amazingly real. She heard Maurus’ voice at a slight distance, as if he were calling to her down the length of a noble’s hall, but the words were clear. “Valeria! Thank the gods. I didn’t know if this would work. Pelagius promised it would, but he’s only a seer-candidate, and I wasn’t sure—”

His head jerked. It looked as if someone had shaken him. When he stopped shaking, his words came slower and stopped sooner. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to babble. I couldn’t think who else to talk to, and I was afraid you weren’t coming to the coronation Dance. You are coming, aren’t you?”

“I do intend to,” Valeria said.

“Good,” he said. “That’s good. I hope you get here in time.”

“Why?” said Valeria. Her stomach knotted. It was not surprise, she noticed. It felt like something she had not even known she was expecting. “What’s wrong?”

“Pelagius says I can show you,” Maurus said, “but you have to help. It’s pattern magic, he says. You have to bind it to my face and voice, then you’ll see it.”

Maurus did not sound as if he knew what he was saying. Somehow that convinced Valeria that she was not dreaming. This really was the boy from Aurelia, and he really had reached her through a scrying spell.

However fond Maurus might be of his own voice, he was not a frivolous person. If he had gone to such lengths to convey this message to her, it must be urgent.

It could be a trap. Both the empire and the Mountain had powerful enemies, and Valeria had attracted her fair share of those. She would not put it past one of them to bait her with this child and then use the spell to destroy her.

She could smell no stink of betrayal in either Maurus or the working that had brought his consciousness here. What he asked of her, she could do. It was a simple magic, taking the patterns of the message and opening them into a whole world of awareness.

There were rough edges in this working, raw spots that told her the mage who wrought it was no master. She had to be careful or her own patterns would fall apart, trapping her inside the spell.

It had been easier when she did it in the schoolroom with First Rider Gunnar steadying her. She had to be the steady one here.

She bound her consciousness to each thread of the pattern that Maurus had brought with him. When she had every one in her control, she turned her focus on the center and willed it to open.

It burst upon her in a rush of sensation. She saw and heard and felt and even smelled the dark room, the altar, the circle, the creature they conjured out of nothingness. The words they spoke buried themselves in her consciousness.

As abruptly as the vision had come, it vanished. Maurus stared at her from his puddle of sunlight. He was dimming around the edges and his voice was faint. “Valeria? Did you get it?”

“I have it,” Valeria said.

“What should we do? Do you know what it is? Do you think you can stop it?”

“I don’t know yet,” Valeria said, trying not to be sharp. “I have to think about it. I’ll do what I can—that much I promise.”

Maurus sighed. She barely heard the sound. “I trust you,” he said, “but whatever you do, I hope you can do it quickly. I don’t think there’s much time.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “We’ll be in Aurelia in a fortnight. If something threatens to happen before then, go to the empress and show her what you showed me. Don’t be afraid—and don’t hesitate. Tell her I sent you.”

Maurus’ mouth moved, but Valeria could not hear what he said. The light was fading. The working was losing strength.

Before she could ask him to speak louder, he was gone. An empty pattern of sun and shadow dappled the floor. Grania was asleep in her nurse’s arms, and Valeria was unconscionably late for morning exercises.

Valeria went through the morning in a daze. It seemed no one noticed but the stallions—and they did not remark on it. Their mortal servants were distracted by the preparations for the riders’ departure.

She did not remember what she taught the rider-candidates in her charge, except that none of them suffered loss of life or limb. Her own lessons passed in a blur.

For those who were traveling to Aurelia in the morning, there were no afternoon lessons or exercises. They were to spend the time packing their belongings and seeing to it that the stallions were ready for the journey.

Maurus’ message changed nothing. She was still leaving tomorrow. That battle was long since fought and won, and she had no intention of surrendering after all.

The baby was old enough to travel. The nurse would help to look after her, and Morag was riding with them as far as the village of Imbria. Grania would be nearly as safe on the road as she was on the Mountain.

It was by no means a surprise that a faction of nobles was plotting against the empire. That was all too commonplace. But that Maurus should have come to Valeria in such desperation and nearly inarticulate fear, made her deeply uneasy.

It was not like Maurus to be so afraid. He was a lighthearted sort, though not particularly light-minded. Very little truly disturbed him.