Shattered Dance

by Caitlin Brennan

  She was more beautiful than this lady, though to be fair, not by much. She always smelled of horses. Theodosia’s perfume was subtle and exquisite, like all the rest of her.

  Kerrec had to stop thinking of Valeria or he would not be able to do this. He focused his mind deliberately on the patterns that surrounded Valeria, wrapped them tight and secured the edges and tucked them away. Then he looked at Theodosia for herself.

  She waited patiently. That more than anything was an art of princes. Kerrec had it when he trained horses or riders, but he had lost it in the rest of his life. He would have to get it back.

  He moved toward the bed, carrying himself light and alert, as if he approached a mare of whose temper he was uncertain. Theodosia did not shy away, nor did she lash out. Her eyes on him were grave, studying him.

  He hoped she found him acceptable. It was too late to change her mind—the rite bound them until one of them died. He might not have chosen that, but she had asked for it. Maybe she had hoped to bind him, but she had also bound herself.

  He eyed the bed and considered strategies. She was not going to come to him, that much he could see. He risked shocking her by discarding his robe.

  She neither flinched nor looked away. He could not tell if she knew what a man looked like. He made his way across the expanse of bed, trying not to make too much of a fool of himself.

  She did not laugh at him. Neither, when he reached her, did she make any move toward him.

  He sat on his heels, at a loss. None of the few women he had loved in his life had sat so still or shown so little evidence of desire. They had all wanted him at least as much as he wanted them.

  If Theodosia had been a horse, he would have known what to do.

  Well, he thought, why not? He shifted carefully until he sat cross-legged just within reach. From there he could see that her stillness concealed a deep tension. She held the coverlet like a shield, pressed tight above her breasts.

  Wise noblemen made sure their daughters were taught to do their duty in the bedchamber. It seemed the Prince of Elladis was not wise. This lady was terrified, and doing everything she could to hide it.

  Once Kerrec realized that, rather to his surprise he relaxed. Terrified creatures, human or animal, were nothing strange to him at all. He stayed where he was, deliberately unthreatening, and let her accustom herself to having him so close.

  It did not take long. He ventured the beginning of a smile. She smiled shakily back.

  He held out his hand. After a moment she took it. He sat still until she steadied. Then, slowly, he asked with a closing of the fingers.

  If she had refused, he would not have pressed her. But she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she moved, letting the coverlet fall.

  Her breasts were full and firm. The gown that covered them was all but transparent. It aroused him in subtle ways—more than if she had been naked.

  Her eyes widened. She never had seen a man, then, or been warned of what happened when his body warmed to a woman.

  She was brave, or else she remembered stallions—for surely she had seen those. She neither screamed nor fled. He let her examine him, which she did with a remarkable lack of embarrassment.

  Another man might have seized her and done what was necessary, but if Kerrec had done that, he would have lost her. He steadied his breathing and held the moment, though that meant holding it a little short of pain.

  Just as he decided that tonight was going to come to nothing, she rose to her knees. Her cheeks had flushed. She touched him diffidently, then with more confidence, tracing the shape of his shoulder and the length of his arm.

  She had good hands, light but clear in their intent, as a horseman’s should be. He shivered slightly, pleasurably, as they explored his body. Again he resisted temptation. If he touched her in return, she would lose her courage.

  Rather than deadening his desire, this enforced restraint made it all the stronger. He set his teeth to keep from groaning aloud.

  She leaned forward suddenly and brushed his lips with hers. It was like a kiss of subtle fire. He dared to offer something more, something deeper. With a sound half of fear and half of surrender, she opened to him.

  His body tried to surge toward her. With all his strength he held it back. She took him instead as suddenly as she had kissed him, driving him back and down with strength that caught him by surprise.

  Either she had had a little teaching after all or her body knew more than her mind could have learned in her father’s palace. She bestrode him as if he had been a stallion.

  A soft cry escaped her. There was pain, but beyond it was pleasure. Kerrec knew better than any how that could be.

  This was no torture, and he was no Brother of Pain. As she stiffened, he moved swiftly, piercing the barrier and then holding still while she woke to understanding of what he had done.

  At the first sign of softening in her, he began to move in the old dance, slow at first and gentle, then faster as she warmed to him. She was unskilled and they were not so closely matched that they fell naturally into one another’s rhythm, but Kerrec was a rider and this was his art.

  His mind was oddly cool and distant. His body took pleasure where it found it, but the rest of him kept to itself. When the climax came, he held it for as long as he could, until her breathing quickened and her body pulsed and he could let go.

  She fell back, still breathing hard. The gown clung to her sweat-dampened body. Her scent was sweet and strong, poised on the edge between alluring and cloying.

  He kissed her softly. She stared without recognition, then a smile bloomed. “Beautiful man,” she said.

  Women always said that. He had learned to suffer it. He laced his fingers with hers and brought them to his lips. “Beautiful lady,” he replied.

  Her smile deepened. “I’m very fortunate,” she said. “I could have been given to an old man or a cruel one, or a man who simply took what was his and never asked if I was willing.”

  “No rider would do that,” Kerrec said.

  “Riders are a rarity and a wonder,” she said. “If more of us knew what you are, we’d be importuning our fathers and brothers to make marriages with you, and never mind the princes we were meant for.”

  “It’s best kept a secret, then,” he said.

  She nodded with a tinge of regret. “Probably so. I’ll enjoy my good fortune in solitude, and thank the gods for granting it to me.”

  “The gods have blessed us,” he said honestly enough.

  She smiled again. Her eyelids were drooping, her body loosed with the aftermath of pleasure.

  Long after she fell asleep, he lay watching her. What he felt was not love but a fierce protectiveness, a sense that this was his and nothing must harm it. A stallion felt the same toward the mares of his herd.

  Kerrec must have slept. The lamp’s light had dimmed and the air had the first faint scent of morning. He lay beside Theodosia, not knowing at first what had roused him. Then she stirred again and cried out, a low wail that raised the small hairs on the nape of his neck.

  He drew her to him, holding her tightly. She shuddered in his arms. The scent of magic overwhelmed the sweetness of her perfume, filling his nostrils with the sharpness of heated metal.

  She was caught in a magical dream. He dared not force her to wake, though her trembling had grown so strong he feared for her. All he could do was hold her and pray, and muster what power he had to keep her safe.

  After what seemed a long while, her tremors stilled. Her breathing quieted. The reek of magic faded. She lay limp, drawing shallow breaths.

  The rhythm of her breathing changed. He looked into wide dark eyes full of sleep and something else that made his skin prickle.

  “Darkness,” she said in a voice he barely recognized. “Oblivion. I see…nothing. Nothing at all.”

  The Augurs had said the same after the Dance. Kerrec thrust down the surge of panic. Now of all times, his mind had to be clear.

 
“The One is coming,” she said. “The bonds of earth are loosed. When they break, so will all that is.”

  “Who—” Kerrec began—unwisely, maybe.

  “You know,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Where you hate most,” she said, “the One is there.”

  Kerrec did not hate anyone living, even the tribes who worshipped the Unmaking. He decided not to say so. In this half-trance on the edge of dream, she was not seeing as mortals saw.

  “Where you love most,” she said, “there also is the One. Between hate and love is the world’s ending. So close—so terribly, terribly close.”

  “What can we do?” he demanded. “How can we stop it?”

  “There is no stopping it,” she said. “The maw of Unmaking is open. No power of earth can close it.”

  “That can’t be true,” Kerrec said. “There must be a way.”

  She had no answer for that. She could only say, “Look to the east. It’s stronger there—but when the One comes, it will be strongest here.”

  “There is a way,” he said. “There has to be.”

  She was silent. After a while he realized that her breathing had settled into the rhythm of sleep.

  He would not sleep again that night. What she saw, what he felt in the patterns that shaped the world, woke such dread that he could barely move or think.

  That was the end of his wedding night, with a brass-bright dawn and a day of suffocating heat thereafter. He had four days of feasting to survive, and four nights of loving that at least were pleasurable, though she was not a passionate woman and he had not fallen in love with her. But after every night’s loving she slept, and in sleep she dreamed—and every dream led to the Unmaking.

  On the fifth day he found Valeria and her stallions gone. On the tenth, criminally late, it dawned on him that she had not gone to the Mountain. As he traced patterns in the wake of Theodosia’s dreams, he could not find Valeria where he thought to find her.

  He did find the skein of her presence interwoven with all of the stallions—but three had moved away from the rest. They had gone eastward toward the wall of shadow that was the frontier.

  They had gone to the tribes—to the One. If it had been Valeria alone, it would have been bad enough, but all her stallions were with her. She was riding straight into the jaws of oblivion, and they were carrying her as if it were eminently and blessedly safe.

  When the truth struck, he wasted no time with mortals—though both Briana and Nikos would feel the sharp edge of his anger. He went straight to the stallions in their stable and confronted the lot of them.

  They regarded him with bland curiosity, as if they had been mortal horses and he had been a crazed invader of their nightly peace. He refused to be drawn into the game. He stood in the center of the aisle and lashed them all with a hot fire of rage. “You did this. You let her go. Why? Why do you keep trying to destroy her?”

  Even Petra had no response to that. He buried his face in his manger, hunting for stray bits of hay from his dinner.

  Kerrec caught him by the forelock and pulled his head around. His eye was large and dark and completely opaque. “First Briana and now Valeria,” Kerrec said. “What do you have against our women?”

  The lid lowered over the unreadable eye. Petra nipped at Kerrec’s hand, an unexpected flash of temper.

  “Of course I don’t understand,” Kerrec snapped. “You won’t explain. At least let me warn her. She doesn’t know, does she? None of you told her. She’s going straight to the barbarians’ hell, and she thinks she’s doing—what? Playing ambassador? Bringing your light to the heathen?”

  In that eye he saw three stallions like a living spell of ward and protection. All around them was swirling chaos. Within their circle was quiet, and Valeria.

  Kerrec shook his head. “I don’t believe you. Are you our enemies after all? Do you want to see us gone? Is that what this is for?”

  Petra’s teeth closed on Kerrec’s wrist. Kerrec stood very still. Those jaws could snap off his hand with terrible ease, or crush the bones without breaking the skin.

  “Do it,” he said, though his breath came somewhat fast. “Be honest for once. Do what you yearn to do.”

  Petra shook him, but lightly—then let him go.

  That surprised him. He stood a moment, rubbing his bruised wrist, not knowing what to say, before the words came flooding. “At least warn her. Tell her what she’s walking into. Give her a chance to defend herself when the darkness falls.”

  She has always had that.

  The gods never resorted willingly to words. Kerrec refused to let them sway him. “Warn her. Or let me. Take my words to her. Tell her to be watchful and defend herself with all the power she has. The Unmaking is waiting. It will swallow her if it can.”

  Petra stood motionless. Kerrec drove the words at him with voice and magic. “Warn her!”

  The proud head bowed. In the stalls around them, the stallions were perfectly silent.

  Valeria could speak to them all. No other rider could or ever had. If they deigned to send Kerrec’s warning, she would hear it. Please the gods, whether these or any others, she would listen.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Valeria had crossed the river during the war, but she had gone only half a day’s journey into the lands that belonged to the tribes. At that time the empire’s magic had reached no farther than the water. Everything past it was wild, untamed, with magic running free in earth and water and air. No orders contained it and no ranks of mages kept it tightly bound.

  Now that the war was won, she had expected to find the wild magic at least partly tamed. Imperial legions had been building camps and fortresses, with roads and the beginnings of towns, three and four and five days’ ride from the river. Tribute parties had ranged farther than that, though what they could have been collecting after the tribes’ great defeat, she could not imagine.

  And yet even along the river, the air was different. The veneer of imperial order was as thin as a sheet of parchment and hardly more substantial. Dark things, wild things, surged beneath.

  For any mage of the empire it was not the most comfortable country to travel in. For Valeria, even with the stallions to ground and center her, it was almost physically painful.

  Here the Unmaking had been worshipped for time out of mind. It was close to the surface of things, urging the nothingness inside her to wake and grow and swallow her whole.

  She should not have come here. She knew that within a day. By the fifth day she decided to turn back. Whether that was cowardice or foolishness or simple good sense, it was the only safe course.

  That night the caravan camped outside the easternmost outpost of the legion, which had been named Artoria in honor of the late emperor. The rest of the caravan could eat and rest in peace, but Pretorius and Valeria, in their office of imperial envoys, were obliged to dine with the commander.

  He was an older man, hard-bitten and devoid of illusions about this country he had been sent to tame. From his age and accent Valeria concluded that he had come up through the ranks—a rarity in this age, and testimony to the quality of the man who had done it. Pretorius the commoner-mage and Valeria the centurion’s daughter received as warm a welcome as Gerontius was capable of.

  The dinner he served was plain but well cooked, roast venison and summer greens and fresh-baked bread. Valeria had not expected to have an appetite, but the emptiness in her craved to be filled.

  Gerontius was a taciturn man, but with a little wine in him and the evening light to soften his mood, he unbent enough to ask, “You really mean to go on into the wild country?”

  “It’s not as wild as that,” Pretorius said. “The tribes are civilized after their fashion. They spend the winter in duns, which are built rather like this fort, and in the warm season they farm and hunt.”

  “And wage war,” said Gerontius.

  “Not this year,” Valeria heard herself say.

  “You don’t think so?” Gerontiu
s said. “War is their life’s blood. They’d no sooner give it up than one of us would give up breathing.”

  Valeria bit her lip before she said something unfortunate. This was the empire’s choice to stand point, this man who knew nothing of the tribes and did not care to learn. Any move they made, he would interpret as hostile. Then, no doubt, he would take what he considered appropriate action.

  She wondered if Briana knew anything of this. If she did, maybe she did not know what it meant. She had never been east of the river.

  Pretorius caught Valeria’s eye. She could not read his expression. “We are going eastward,” he said. “We bring gifts to the new high king.”

  “The high king should be bringing gifts to you,” Gerontius said. “His people belong to the empire now.”

  “They may not agree with you,” Pretorius said. His tone was light, pleasant. “We have our orders, Commander, as you have yours. Is there anything you can tell us of the man who rules the tribes?”

  “There’s not much to tell,” Gerontius said. “He’s a fighting man, they say, and well bred as they reckon it—he comes from a long line of their kings. Some say he speaks our language, others that he refuses to learn. He’s a better enemy of the empire than the old king, that much is certain, and they say he’s a better general. It’s not a matter of whether he’ll try to start another war but when.”

  “That is one of the things we’ve been sent to determine,” said Pretorius. “I’ve been given authority to enlist a cohort of your men. Can you spare them?”

  “I don’t think he should,” Valeria said.

  Both men stared at her. She would not have said they were affronted, but she had spoken out of turn. She watched them remember what she was.

  “If we go to the king’s dun with a troop of legionaries,” she said, “we go as conquerors. That will invite their hatred and possibly get us killed. We’ll be safer if we go as envoys from one royal personage to another. Aren’t embassies sacred to them? We have our guards, who aren’t obviously imperial troops, and our magic, which they aren’t trained to recognize. Those will protect us.”