He did not look affable then. She wondered who would bear the brunt of his ill temper. The guards who were forced to stay with him would earn their pay.
So would she, riding without human escort in the midst of the barbarians. Part of her agreed with Pretorius that she was doing a deeply foolish thing. She clung to the part that had spoken before she paused to think. That part was often wiser than the rest of her.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Euan’s men were still struggling with their horses when Valeria joined them. The beasts were either shaggy moor ponies—absurdly small for such long-legged riders—or liberated imperial remounts. The red gelding Euan was riding was branded on the left hip with the mark of the legion Valeria was named for.
That was deliberate, she was sure. Euan was no more graceful a rider than she remembered, but the School of War had taught him at least to stay off the horse’s mouth and stay balanced in the middle.
That was more than she could say of the rest. The worst of them rocked and swayed on their staggering horses, while the poor beasts spun and yawed in protest.
A properly diplomatic envoy would have averted her eyes. Valeria was capable of no such thing. She gritted her teeth for as long as she could, which was not very long, then waded in.
Within the hour, a much improved company rode out, with girths tightened and bits properly fitted and men riding, if not well, then somewhat less abominably. None of them seemed unduly put out. Euan’s amusement persisted in making her own lips twitch, though she did her best to stop it.
She fixed her eyes firmly on the road ahead. It was a broad highway by the standards of this country, a whole foot wider than a sheep track, winding up the hill from the camp.
Down below, the clans had gathered to see their high king off. She would have expected a chorus of whoops and shouting, but instead they stood in a long curving line and sang.
Her command of the language was not strong enough to make sense of the words, but the melody made her shiver. It began low and ended high, a long wailing sound like the cry of the wind through empty places.
Euan saw the shiver. His brow arched. “You were expecting a paean to my glory?”
“What is it?” Valeria asked. “It sounds like a dirge.”
“It says, ‘Remember you are mortal. Life is fleeting, death is eternal. Be wise, be brave, come back to us.’”
Valeria shivered again. “I’m not in Aurelia, am I?”
“Some of your countrymen might beg to differ,” Euan said.
“Not I,” she said.
The song was fading, carried away on what wind there was. The day had dawned warm and was growing hot as the sun rose. It was a heavy heat, thick and oppressive, under an all but colorless sky.
The horses were sweating already though the day had barely begun. Their riders had stripped to breeks and stowed their plaids to ride half-naked.
Valeria wished she had the courage to do the same. Her shirt was light and let the air in while keeping the sun out, but it weighed on her. Even her skin would have seemed heavy on such a day as this.
Marina under her was in little distress. The black skin showed through the white coat behind his ears where the bridle lay, and he had the slightly pungent, slightly salty smell of warm horse, but he breathed easily. He had not broken out in a sweat as the mortal horses had.
Euan’s escort had fallen into a rough and frequently mutable order, some behind and some in front of her. Euan seemed content to leave her to herself. Sometimes he forged ahead and occasionally he brought up the rear.
The camp was already out of sight beyond the hill, invisible as if the earth had swallowed it. The moors stretched ahead as far as the eye could see. Neither mountain nor forest rose to break that long, rolling expanse.
Its beauty was subtle but strong. The grey of rock and the gold and green of grass and the purple of the heather, with here and there the bright yellow of gorse, told her where the clan plaids had come from. They were woven images of the land.
The magic here was less jarring than it had been nearer the border. Either Valeria was growing used to it or the proximity of the empire had disrupted its patterns. Here they flowed almost uninterrupted.
They were not familiar patterns, but they were not chaos, either. They made sense in their way, like the tangle of brush in a thicket. Each strand had grown for a reason, and the whole had meaning, though she lacked the knowledge to interpret it.
She had not expected to find something to love in this country. What had been a land of exile could become a face of home, if she let it. Its wild beauty could work its way into her heart, as its wild people already had.
She glanced sidelong at Euan, who had fallen in beside her. His profile was clean cut, the nose long and straight, the jaw firm. He denied any knowledge or possession of magic, and yet here in his own country he was shimmering with it.
He was bound to this land as Briana and Kerrec were to Aurelia. She doubted he knew it or would want to know. Euan was willfully ignorant of anything that had to do with magic.
His was a darker binding than Kerrec’s. Blood and pain secured it. Strong warriors had been sacrificed so that he could win it.
Valeria was riding deeper into his land—putting herself in his power, Pretorius would say. All the men around her were Caletanni. Euan had brought his own warband on this riding, leaving the rest of the clans and tribes behind.
As the sun rose toward noon, she began to understand that the distance was blue for another reason than the heavy heat. There was a pall of smoke over it. When she shaded her eyes and looked close, she glimpsed a red line of flame.
The moors were burning. Euan’s face was grim as he took in the extent of it.
“It’s not gone as far as Dun Gralloch yet,” he said to Conory who had ridden up to join him.
“Cullen Moor is gone,” said Conory. “There can’t be much hope for Duncillian.”
“Dun Gralloch stands on its rock,” Euan said. “Whatever’s up there will be safe until the fire passes.”
“Can’t you stop it?” Valeria asked.
“Nothing stops the wildfire,” Conory said.
Euan’s eyes narrowed. “Rain stops it.”
“That comes when it wills,” said Conory.
“Not always,” Euan said. His gaze was on Valeria. “Not where she comes from.”
This much Valeria could say for Euan—he never wasted an opportunity. Need, his messenger had said. This was the need.
“You’d have done better to bring Pretorius,” she said.
“He’s not that kind of mage,” said Euan.
“How do you know?”
He shrugged.
“He told you.”
She did not mean Pretorius. From the flicker of Euan’s eyes, he knew it.
“Where is he?” Valeria demanded. “Where is he hiding?”
“Nowhere near here,” Euan said. “He’s in the priests’ huts back in camp.”
“Hiding,” she said.
“Not from you. He told me you can bring the rain.”
“That art is beyond me,” Valeria said.
“He said not. He said your power is so great and your bond to the gods so strong that you can call the wind and it will obey you.”
Valeria laughed. It was that or hit him, and she had already done that. “You should know better than to trust that one.”
“In this I do,” Euan said. “I can read, you know. I read a book a two when I was on the Mountain. There isn’t anything a rider can’t master, is there? Even the lightning.”
“I am not a Weathermaster,” Valeria said.
“Have you ever tried?”
“A vital part of every mage’s art,” she said, “is knowing when to stop. I don’t have the training.”
“But it’s in you.”
She brought Marina to a halt. Euan’s chestnut stopped so abruptly he tipped out of the saddle and fell ignominiously into the heather.
He lay winded but grinning. S
he had no smile to offer in return. “Gothard wants me dead,” she said. “Did that never occur to you when he was telling you what I can and cannot do?”
“Of course it did,” Euan said, still wheezing a bit. “It’s dangerous, but you’re sitting here with three gods around you. They’ll help if you ask.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I asked your brown mage,” he said. “No one knows what you are capable of, because no one has ever been like you. Look ahead and tell me you’ll let people die because you wouldn’t try.”
“That,” she said quietly, “was badly judged. Do you know what happens if a mage exceeds her skill but not her power? Did either of your so-wise counselors tell you that?”
“Ask your gods,” he said.
She did not mean to look up and see how much closer the flames were and how much higher they burned than just a moment ago. Her nose caught the faint acrid smell of smoke.
As barren as this country seemed, it was home to a dozen clans with duns and camps and scattered farmsteads. All of those were burning or would burn if nothing stopped the fire.
Kerrec could have brought the rain. He was a First Rider. He had arts and skills that she could only dream of.
He was in Aurelia siring heirs for the empire. She was the only rider in this part of the world—still a rider-candidate, not even tested for Fourth Rider.
Marina cropped grass idly. Sabata seemed asleep. Oda was watching her.
He had an unusually large and liquid eye. Sometimes he allowed her to read the expression in it. Just now it was like deep water.
He had come off the Mountain a year ago, long after he was thought to have died in the body, to carry her in the Midsummer Dance. He had stayed for reasons no one professed to understand.
“Was it for this?” she asked him. “Were you behind all of it? Is the fire yours?”
He did not dignify that with so much as a flick of the ear.
“I can’t do it without you,” she said. “Any of you. If I can’t trust you, if you turn against me, I’m done for—and so is everyone else, between the fire and the magic.”
The men were listening. She meant them to be. They should understand what they were asking.
Rider’s discipline was many things. One of those was to know one’s limits, and what would happen if one transgressed them. She had hardly even arrived on the Mountain when two of the Called died because one could not rein in his magic. Briana had been tricked into the same deadly mistake.
Valeria was not that much of a fool. She watched the fire burn and reckoned the lives and possessions it would take before it reached the edge of the moor.
That was a long way. She sensed the lives in spite of herself, hundreds and thousands of them. They lay like a web of jewels across the grey-green land, gathered in duns and hunting camps. Here and there were sparks of magic, but most were simple mortals, as human as any of her own people.
Her hands were shaking. She pressed them to Marina’s neck. She knew what one did to call the lightning. It was like calling any other power.
Controlling it was not so easy. Neither was summoning the clouds and commanding the wind, then making the rain. It was all patterns, seeing and then shaping them. The Dance was a similar magic, stronger by far and more dangerous—but weather-working could undo the patterns that made the wind blow and the sun shine. It might not unmake the world, but it could starve a city or drown a nation.
If she saved these lives, other lives in other parts of the world might suffer. The patterns were unimaginably complex—even more so than the tangled thicket that was the magic beneath this earth.
A god could understand them. She laid them before the stallions, both those in front of her and those who were always in her heart. “Help me,” she said simply.
She would never demand. She would only ask. She spread her hands and offered them humility. “Not for me,” she said. “Not for any glory.”
The white heads bowed. The dark eyes bade her open her spirit.
It would not be easy or comfortable or safe. It might break her—because they were gods and she was fragile mortal flesh. But if she would do this, they would work through her.
It was different from a Dance. There was no movement of the body here. The magic did it all, drawing up strength from the earth and calling down power from the sky.
The patterns of wind and water, earth and fire, ran through her hands. One slightest slip and they would run through her instead of the air and blast her to ash.
The world turned in its orbit around her. To the Caletanni she did nothing but sit on her fat white horse.
Only Euan watched her as if he could see. She had taken him for a man completely without magic. She had been blind.
It was a different magic, one that eyes in Aurelia did not know how to see. She had had to leave her own country and learn to see the beauty beyond it, to understand what this man was.
No wonder she was so drawn to him. He would destroy Aurelia if he could, and use her to do it, and yet he was her match. His power was different and altogether unacknowledged, but it was tremendously strong.
There was the key, in that thought which crept through the glory of the working. The stallions gave her the art and the strength, but Euan Rohe gave her the powers of earth and water and air.
She called the clouds from the far cold mountains. They met the heavy heat of the moors and clashed like armies. Thunder cracked. Lightning ran in fiery rivers.
Fire on the earth cried out to be fed. Lightning had begotten it. Lightning would nourish it until it overwhelmed the world.
The skies opened. The rain came down.
The fire hissed in fury. Smoke billowed. Valeria turned her face to the torrent and laughed.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Right in the middle of that joyous shout of laughter, Valeria dropped as if shot. Euan had just enough warning to lurch up out of the heather and catch her.
She was lightly built and for one of his people she was small, but she was a surprising weight. She was all muscle, whipcord and steel. With the sense gone out of her, she was a dead weight.
Her body was cold. That was the rain—it had to be the rain. She had not killed herself for this.
He roared at his warband until they brought a plaid to raise over her. The tightly woven wool kept off the rain. Another plaid wrapped her body while Euan rubbed warmth into it.
He would not let her be dead. The magic had taken her wits away for a while. That was all.
She had warned him. But he was too caught up in being king to listen.
She was motionless in his arms. Her head lolled when he shook her. There was no breath in her. Her pale brown skin had gone green and then faintly blue.
Euan sprang away from her through the lessening downpour, caught the bridle of the nearest fat white horse and put all his rage and fear and despair into the glare with which he met that blank dark eye.
It was the old horse—he was snow-white and his head was more emphatically ram-nosed than the others. Euan raised his fist where the beast could see it. “You bring her back,” he said low in his throat. “You don’t get to keep her. She’s not ready to go. I’m not ready to lose her. Bring her back!”
The old stallion blinked stupidly. If Euan had not known better, he would have felt like a fool for imagining a dumb beast could understand human speech.
These beasts understood it perfectly well. One of the others, the young one who was still more grey than white, picked his way over the rocks to the place where Valeria lay. He thrust his long nose under the improvised canopy and breathed in her face.
Euan held himself back forcibly from driving the horse away. The air was notably cooler than it had been before the storm began, but still not cold enough for a horse’s breath to turn to steam. And yet there it was, puffing from the flared nostrils and drifting in tendrils around her.
More damned magic. If it brought her back to life, Euan would make himself be glad of it.
The stallion nuzzled her, nibbling her hair and the sleeve of her shirt. Her breast heaved. She rolled her head away from that insistent nose.
Relief was as sharp as pain. Euan looked the old stallion in the eye once more and said, “Thank you.”
The beast lowered his head, then raised it, nodding like a human king. Then he wandered off in search of grass.
Euan sucked in a breath and let it go. When he was as steady as he could be, he walked back toward Valeria.
The young stallion was still there. Though Euan kept a wary eye on him, he did not move as Euan ducked in under the plaid. Valeria was unconscious, but she was breathing.
“She needs help,” Conory said behind Euan.
Euan nodded. “As soon as the rain lets up, we’ll ride.”
“Back to camp?”
“Dun Mor is closer.”
“But if she needs the other mage—”
“Send a man to fetch him,” Euan said.
Conory went promptly to do that. Euan stayed beside Valeria, hoping futilely that she would wake.
She kept on breathing at least. Euan was reassured—until it dawned on him that the rhythm of the wind was the same as that of her breathing.
That terrified him out of all sense. Although it was still raining, it was no longer a cloudburst but a steady, soaking downpour that would extinguish every last ember. He called the warband together and gave the order to ride.
None of them argued with it. Even the horses seemed glad to be moving again.
The only difficulty was Valeria. Euan did not intend to fling her over a saddle like a sack of meal. When he tried to mount his gelding so that Conory could hand her up to him, the youngest of her stallions drove the gelding off and menaced Euan with hooves and teeth.
The beast had not gone near Conory. Euan took note of that with the ringing clarity that possessed him when he was in battle. Nor had the horse touched Euan, though the gelding’s rump would bear the scars for a good while.
The stallion was standing exactly where the gelding had been. Euan shook his head vehemently. “No. Oh, no. You don’t want to carry me.”
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