He would not last long, nor could he be in pain. And yet Valeria could not leave him to die in fear and confusion. She left Sabata where he stood, with some relief that he immediately began to search for bits of forage among the brambles.
The red gelding’s eye was already glazing. Valeria stroked peace into him. He sighed as he let go, and his body went still.
She bowed over him, murmuring a blessing in his ear.
A stone clattered. She whipped about.
A tall figure swayed on the bank. His body was a tapestry of bruises. He did not seem aware of her at all. He was pulling another out of the water, battling the strong current.
Valeria was beyond insane. She got a grip on one wet and slippery arm and helped to heave the drowned man onto the shore.
She looked down into Euan Rohe’s face. A nearly identical face bent above him—Conory his cousin, too numb for grief.
Euan’s lips were blue. He was not breathing. He was as battered as Conory, and at least one leg appeared to be broken—ribs, too, from the look of them. But that did not matter to a drowned man.
“No,” Valeria said.
She should be rejoicing. A great enemy of Aurelia was dead. He would have killed her or worse if he had caught her, and then he would have gone on with his long fight against the empire.
Twice now she had helped him to escape imperial justice. Against divine justice she had no defense.
Maybe not—but she could try. She sat astride him, ignoring Conory’s gasp of outrage, and set her lips to his. She breathed for him—forcing air into the waterlogged lungs even as she pressed water out of them. Broken ribs ground under her hands.
He remained cold and still. Conory reached to fling her aside, babbling of insult and dishonor.
Euan coughed, convulsed then heaved up a great quantity of water. Almost too late, Valeria tipped him onto his side and held him until there was nothing left inside.
He was broken—rather badly. But he was alive. She set a kiss on his lips that were no longer blue or cold, weaving into it as much healing as she knew how to give. If the gods were kind, it would take root and grow. If not…
As she straightened, she met Conory’s stare. “Take care of him,” she said.
Conory said nothing. She had not expected him to love her, but the absence of hate took her somewhat aback. If anything, he regarded her in pity.
She did not try to understand. Sabata was waiting. He had recovered enough strength to carry her, but she spared him for yet a while.
Conory made no move to follow them. Just before she rounded the cliff, she looked back. He bent over Euan, rubbing warmth into cold limbs.
More likely than not, Euan would die. He was a long way from home, at the bottom of a cliff, with no one to help him but one exhausted clan brother.
The healing she had given him would be enough. It had to be. Valeria had made the last choice she could make between Euan Rohe and the world she was born to. This time it was irrevocable.
Chapter Forty-Two
Past the bend of the river, Marina and Oda stood together, waiting. Water still streamed from them. Marina’s nostrils fluttered as Valeria approached. Oda raised his head but made no sound.
Valeria sagged and nearly collapsed. Thank every god and power, they were safe.
She ran her hands over Marina who was nearer, down his legs and under his belly, lifting his hooves to peer at the soles. Apart from a scratch and a bruise or two, he was unharmed.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his mane, not ready to let the tears run yet, but too overcome to stop herself. With an effort she made herself let go.
Oda was shivering. As she left Marina, his knees buckled. By the time she had run to his side, he was down.
His eyes were calm. There was no fear in him. He was not mortal. He knew what he faced.
Her hands, seeking frantically, found the broken shaft behind his elbow. The arrow that had missed Marina and Sabata had struck him in the heart. Somehow he had gone on, surviving the fall and the river, until she found him and he could let go.
“No,” she said. “Oh, no, no. Not you, too. I can’t lose you.”
Not lose. He gave her the rare gift of words. With them came a deep, singing joy and a sense of profound peace.
She tried to fight it, but he had gone beyond the obedience a white god chose to offer his rider. As she knelt in the mud and stones with his head in her lap, he let go the flesh in which he had lived for so long.
All the world was light. In that single, blinding instant, she saw the whole vast expanse of fate and time, the patterns woven when the world began and unraveling at the world’s ending. It lay like a shining net over the face of nothingness, a web of creation in the midst of endless unbeing.
She fell back into her body with a gasp of shock at its countless small pains and dragging exhaustion. Already her memory of that moment of godhood was fading. She tried to hold it, to fix it in her mind, but it slipped away.
Oda was gone—in body as well as spirit. She looked for grief, but in its place she found supernal calm.
He had not left her. He was still there in the circle of stallions, watching over her. She reached for him, wishing with mortal persistence for the solidity of a living body. But he had left that behind.
One last time he gave her words. When all hope is gone and all that is is unmade, call to me. For that I came to you. For that I stay.
He did not answer the questions that came flooding. When she pressed him, the rest of the white gods closed in, easing her gently but firmly away from him.
She knelt in the mud, wrapped in a cold mantle of fog. There was nothing left of Oda but the mark of his body on the bank and the brightness in her heart.
Marina’s breath ruffled her hair. Sabata closed his teeth on her sleeve and tugged.
It was time to go. She rose slowly, weighed down with grief for everything that she had lost. The sense of distance had come back, the dullness inside her that had afflicted her since she let Gothard bind her with a spell.
She fumbled in the purse for the stone. Ugly, useless thing—it had failed to do what it was meant to. Instead it had betrayed her.
She would cast it in the river and be rid of it. Maybe then her head would clear.
Her fingers were stiff and unwieldy. The stone eluded them, rolling away amid the coins and oddments. When she thought she had it, she drew out a bit of barley sweet that she had stolen from the riders’ dining hall months ago and forgotten to feed to the horses.
Sabata was glad to relieve her of it. He was also insistent that she stop dallying about and get on his back. He was refreshed. He could carry her. They must go.
She gave up hunting for the stone. Night was coming and it was a long way yet to the border.
Her heart was near to breaking. She was going home, but she left behind a whole world. She had had such hopes for it, and now they were all gone.
She blamed Gothard, which was just, but she blamed Pretorius even more. He had wielded magic to save her, and he had succeeded. For that she supposed she should be grateful.
Oda was gone and Euan Rohe might be dead. She hoped Pretorius paid for that in the currency of the tribes, with ample pain and a slow death.
Kerrec had been suffering through an odd, fretful day. Chill rain had been rolling in off the sea since yesterday, and the horses were restless and irritable. During the morning exercises, one of the most placid of Briana’s geldings objected unreasonably to a shadow in the corner of the school, flung off his young rider and bolted.
The boy would recover from his cracked collarbone. The rest of the exercises proceeded less explosively but were only a little more satisfying. Kerrec ended them early and sent everyone home.
He had more than enough to do in his study, but his mind refused to focus. The rest of the riders were out and about, some pursuing their training in the library or the riding court, others taking a holiday. He contemplated joining one or the othe
r.
Both were tempting, but he could not decide between them. He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. The world around him felt oddly fragile, as if a hard blow would crack it.
The patterns were as dark and confused as ever. The Augurs had not had a sensible reading of the omens since Briana was wounded. Each day the signs grew less comprehensible.
Today they were impossible. When he tried to follow the line of each major and minor pattern, it disappeared into fog and murk.
Either the world was ending or the patterns were being undone. The thought was preposterous, but it would not let him be. Something at the core of things was causing it to unravel.
No one else seemed aware of it. The orders of mages were chasing priests and sacrifices and courtly conspiracies. The Augurs were peering into their books of omens and finding no answers there.
They were looking in the wrong places. This thing was not coming for them. It was already in them, laired in their hearts.
When Kerrec had the time, he was going to be very much afraid. He stared at the books and written pages scattered over the worktable. They were suddenly strange, as if he had never seen their like before.
The lines of letters shaped a pattern. It looked like a map, a landscape of mountain and moor cut through with rivers. A wild hunt rode there, pursuing a shadowy quarry.
The hunt ended on a cliff above a river gorge. The quarry fell, and the hunters fell with it, tumbling down into the wild white water.
Kerrec felt the dizziness of the fall and the shock of icy water. He recoiled before he followed the rest of the way, torn out of the body and cast into nothingness.
The pages were simply pages again, and the words only words. His head ached dully.
He rose, staggering and then steadying himself. He needed Petra’s back and the calm of the riding court. In those patterns he would find his center.
Gunnar and Nikos were there ahead of him, intent on their own exercises. Kerrec watched while he led Petra out and warmed the stallion’s muscles, letting their patterns inform his. It was a peaceful pursuit and long familiar, and today it was blessed.
As he rode the familiar exercises, it seemed there was a fourth white stallion in the court with them, a shining shape that flickered in and out of his vision. Its patterns wove through the rest, completing some and binding others.
Sometimes a Great One who had passed out of the body would come into the school and join in the exercises—for the pleasure of the dance, it was said. Kerrec had not seen it since he was a Fourth Rider, ten years and more ago. Then it had been a bit of brightness on a dark winter day, a rarity to remember but never quite understand.
As he recalled it, the Great One had seemed solid in the light and transparent in shadow. This one was a pattern of light and darkness, only intermittently wearing the shape of a horse.
They all ended together as if on the same note of music. The Great One melted into the light, just as Kerrec recognized the strong arch of the nose and the deep eye.
Kerrec called after him, but he was gone. Truly gone—departed from the body.
Rider’s discipline was second nature, but Kerrec had to fight for the patience to cool Petra out, then unsaddle and groom him and feed him his ration of hay. Nikos and Gunnar were still tending their stallions when Kerrec was done.
He stood in the aisle and tried not to shake. Nikos looked out over the stall door. “Steady, lad,” he said.
“That was Oda,” Kerrec said. “He’s left the body.”
“Yes,” the Master said.
“It doesn’t matter to you?”
“It matters a great deal. But the consequence will happen in its own time. The patterns he danced with us were patterns of stability. They bade us hold fast and wait.”
“I can’t do that,” Kerrec said. “If Oda is dead, Valeria has lost her strongest guardian. She may be dead or dying herself.”
“Do you feel that?”
Kerrec stopped short. “I feel nothing. The place where she was is empty.”
He had not known that until he said it. The bottom dropped out of his stomach. “Dear gods. Valeria is dead.”
“No.”
He stared at Nikos.
“If she were dead,” Nikos said, “we would all know.”
“Would we? Do we know anything at all? Everything we knew has turned on itself.”
“We would know,” said Nikos.
“I have to find her,” Kerrec said. “Do you understand? I can’t be patient any longer. I have no discipline left.”
“You must be patient,” Nikos said. “You will be patient. If she is safe—and she still has two stallions and a master mage to defend her—anything you do may harm more than help. If she is in danger, I believe devoutly that she will do her utmost to find you.
“Think, too,” he said, “that from the beginning this has been a game of feints and indirection. If you gallop off alone to play knight rescuer, you lay yourself open to attack. Stay here where your power is strongest and wait. If she can come to you, she will.”
“And if she cannot?”
“Are you a mage, sir?”
Kerrec opened his mouth to snap that of course he was. But that was not what Nikos was asking. He wanted Kerrec to stop thrashing and think.
Yes, Kerrec was a mage. He carried the full weight of two magics, the pattern magic of the Mountain and the earth magic of the emperor. But again, that was not what Nikos meant.
He had not had so thorough a dressing-down since he was new to the Mountain. It stung, as it was meant to. First Rider he might be, but he was carrying on like a love-struck boy.
He bent his head stiffly to his Master. Nikos inclined his glance in return. “I’ll not do anything to endanger myself or any of us,” Kerrec said. “You have my word.”
“I trust you,” Nikos said.
That was both simple and devastating. Once Kerrec was away from the stable, he had to sag against a wall and think carefully about breathing.
Nikos was a quiet man. He could deceive even the First Riders into thinking that he was little more than a glorified headmaster. He kept his school in order, made sure it ran smoothly and rode herd on the riders.
He was also a master of masters, a mage of great and subtle power. As a trainer of men as well as horses, he had few equals.
Kerrec felt as if he had been ridden to a standstill. He pushed himself erect. There would be no wild ride into the east, but he had been all but ordered to do whatever else he could to get Valeria home.
The Master Seer covered the silver scrying mirror. His broad ruddy face had gone sunken and sallow. “I can’t. There’s nothing to see.”
“Try harder,” Kerrec said, relentless.
Master Omeros started as if stung, but he shook his head. “Four times I’ve tried with all my art and power. She is nowhere to be found.”
“She is in this world,” Kerrec said. “She is not dead.”
The Seer spread his hands. “Rider, I am sorry. If I could find her, I would.”
“Look for a spell,” Kerrec said. “Look for nothingness.”
“Rider,” the Seer said, “the world is full of it and growing fuller. I can’t know what is hers and what is not.”
Kerrec bit back the words that came flooding. Master Omeros had done his best. It was hardly fair of Kerrec to afflict him with his own anxiety and frustration.
He thanked the Seer as honestly as he knew how. Master Omeros nodded wearily. “I wish you well,” he said, “and pray we all find a way through what is coming.”
“Gods grant it,” Kerrec said.
Chapter Forty-Three
Valeria had no clear memory of the road between the river gorge where Euan Rohe’s warband died and the walls of Aurelia. There must have been garrisons, towns, caravanserais. She must have eaten and slept and made sure that her remaining stallions had forage and places to rest. The whole of that journey was a long, dim dream.
She woke from it twice. The first ti
me, she was about to cross the river that marked the border of Aurelia. As she paused on the edge of the ford, she saw Pretorius in front of her.
She thought he might be barring the way as he had before, but when she rode through him, nothing happened. She turned on him. “Why?” she demanded.
There were more meanings to that word than even she could keep track of, but she suspected that Pretorius could. Even so, she was surprised when he answered. “Fate,” he said.
She reared back slightly. “What, you’re the gods’ instrument?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I hope,” she said, “that you suffer every torment you’ve ever inflicted on your victims. All but death. I don’t want you to die. I want you to live and know pain.”
“The Ard Ri is alive,” he said. “He’ll walk with a limp for the rest of his life, but he’s mending.”
Valeria could not breathe, let alone speak.
Pretorius’ eyes were bright and preternaturally clear. “When all this is done, you above all will understand. Go on now. Finish what you’ve begun.”
She was not a child or a servant, to be ordered about as if she had no will of her own. She opened her mouth to say so, but he was gone, vanished into the mist.
She was melting herself, falling back into the long dream. Whatever thoughts or questions she had were gone as thoroughly as Pretorius.
The second time she woke, she found herself outside the north gate of the royal city, under a grey and tumbled sky. Sun was another thing she did not remember. All through her dream, she had traveled in clouds and fog.
A storm was brewing over Aurelia. The sea roared against the harbor walls. Wind shrilled around the towers. Even the gulls had sought shelter rather than battle the gale.
She was the only person to pass through what was usually a busy and crowded gate. The streets beyond were all but empty.
It was not only the storm. The city lay under a pall of fear. When she looked for the source of it, she recoiled.
The Unmaking was closer to the surface than it had ever been. Only long practice and great effort kept the spell inside her from opening wide and swallowing itself.
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