Caitlin Brennan - Song Of Unmaking

“To prove something,” the Master said. “I still am not sure…” He caught Oda’s eye and stopped. The stallion’s ears had flattened briefly. It was a warning, and one he was well trained to listen to.

He let his breath out sharply. “As you will,” he said to the stallion. Then to Valeria he said, “You will ride the Dance. Oda will carry you. He insists on it.”

Valeria felt her heart stop, then start again, hammering hard. “The Dance? The Midsummer Dance? But—”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was testy. “In the ordinary way of things, you would be years from earning any such honor. But the stallions have made their will known. You must ride, and Oda must carry you. No matter how dangerous that may be, they are adamant.”

“‘Even the Master is their servant,’” Valeria recited.

He leveled a glare at her. “This is not a game, child.”

“No?” said Valeria with a flash of sudden temper. “Aren’t we playthings for the gods?”

“I would hope we may be more than that,” Briana said.

The air that had been crackling between Valeria and the Master went somewhat more safely quiet. Briana nodded to herself. “Good. We can’t have you fighting. We need you—all of you—more than ever.”

Master Nikos cleared his throat. “This is a difficult thing. What we’re seeing here, and foreseeing, and dreading, is that our life, our art and magic, will never be the same again.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Briana asked. “For years, you’ve cut yourself off from everything but your own art and knowledge and concerns. Time was when the names of the Master and the First Riders were as well known as the emperor’s own. Now hardly anyone could name you, let alone the others—and few of those who know can be said to care. You are the empire’s heart, and yet not only has the empire all but forgotten you, you yourselves have forgotten what you are supposed to be.” She met his shock with a hard, clear stare. “In the old days, riders from the Mountain would follow the emperor to war. They fought beside him and Danced the outcome of his battles, and often won them for him—or died in the trying. The emperor has sworn that this year, this war, will break the back of the barbarian horde. Where were you when he called for his mages? What were you doing when his armies marched to the border?”

“Lady,” Master Nikos said in a soft, still voice, “we have fought our own kind of battle on your father’s behalf, and taken losses that will be years in the mending. If you command us to send riders to the war, we will obey. But we have precious little strength to spare.”

Briana offered no apology, but her gaze softened somewhat. “If I had such authority, I would bid you continue to heal, but be prepared to open your gates and bring down your walls.”

“All signs do seem to point in that direction,” Master Nikos said. He sounded as exhausted as he looked. “We’ll do what we can, lady.”

“That’s all anyone can ask of you,” Briana said.

Master Nikos was clearly not happy to have been read so harsh a lesson by a woman a third his age, but it had made him stop and think. After a while he said, “We’ll perform the Dance as the gods will it. Then may they help us all.”

There was no inquisition of riders, either to settle the question of the Lady’s testing and choosing or to protest the word that came down from the Master’s study. Valeria was to ride the Midsummer Dance on a stallion who had withdrawn to the high pastures before Kerrec came to the Mountain. That gave the Dance the Master, the four First Riders, two Second Riders, and one rider-candidate.

The news reached Kerrec after he left the schoolroom, late in the morning after the testing. He had thirty-one new pupils, some older than he, and they were not the easiest he had ever had. He was mildly surprised not to see a thirty-second, but his sister had been keeping out of sight since the testing.

That was a small mercy. Thirty-one men and boys had discovered that there was no reprieve from either testing or studies. Those who had come from the legions were even less inclined to suffer in silence than spoiled lords’ sons or haughty journeyman mages. “It’s just like the bloody army,” one of them had grumbled when they straggled into the schoolroom.

“At least in the bloody army they let you sleep it off after you’ve won a battle,” someone else said, yawning till his jaw cracked. “Up at bloody dawn to clean bloody stalls. I thought we signed on to be riders, not stablehands.”

Kerrec had a lecture for that, which he decided not to deliver. They were in awe of his rank, at least, and he was kind to their aching heads and churning stomachs, though he doubted any of them was aware of it. He set them simple exercises that would engage their stumbling brains and teach them—or in many cases remind them of—the beginnings of focus.

He could use a course of that himself, he reflected grimly as the rider-candidates dispersed to their afternoon lessons. He would follow them later, to judge each one and mount him accordingly on the stallion who would be his schoolmaster.

He was on his way to Petra’s stable and a lesson of his own when he crossed paths with Gunnar, who was on the same errand. Gunnar was frowning. “Bad news?” Kerrec asked him as they went on together.

“That depends,” Gunnar said. “Did you know our most troublesome pupil is riding the Dance at Midsummer?”

“Valeria?” Kerrec could not find it in him to be surprised. “How?”

“Another whim of the gods,” Gunnar said. “Oda is carrying her—the old one.”

“I thought he had died in that body,” Kerrec said.

“Apparently not.” Gunnar’s frown deepened to a scowl. “A Lady comes to the testing and makes an impossible choice. A Great One returns from the dead to dance the Dance with a novice barely past the Call. And we were thanking the gods that there were no women Called. We were too complacent.”

So they were, Kerrec thought. Gunnar went his way, to find his lofty Alta and school the lesser figures of the Dance. Petra was waiting for Kerrec to do the same. His groom was not Valeria as it should have been—it was one of the others of that year, Kerrec’s cousin Paulus.

From his expression, which was even more sour than usual, Paulus had heard the news. Valeria’s way had never been easy, but this would make it even more difficult.

Kerrec wrenched himself into focus. The truth, his heart insisted on reminding him, was that of the eight who would ride the Dance, the greatest danger to it was not Valeria. It was Kerrec.

Valeria lacked training. Kerrec lacked worse. He lacked strength, focus, and full control over his magic. The voice inside him was whispering its poison even in daylight. Sometimes he could not see the sun for the cloud of hatefulness around him.

Petra would protect him, just as Oda was clearly meant to protect Valeria. This was not supposed to be a Great Dance, in which the fabric of time itself could be unraveled and then rewoven. It was a Dance of foreseeing. It opened the future, but not to alter it. It was meant to read the patterns only, then chart a course through them.

The emperor’s Augurs would be there, looking for signs of hope or warning for the war. That was all they would expect and all they would see.

Kerrec turned his back on the voices inside—both the one that laughed and mocked and egged him on to death and worse, and the one that told him he was wrong to do this. He was not strong enough.

With Petra he would be. He had to be. He mounted, took up the reins and began the day’s exercises.