Shattered Dance

by Caitlin Brennan

  It was all a game of lies and diversions. Kerrec sprang toward the priest. The creature recoiled, startled, and stared at his empty hand.

  The blade slid smoothly up between Gothard’s ribs. The membrane of his heart resisted, but Kerrec was prepared for that. He drove the knife home.

  The priest’s weight fell on him. The knife’s hilt dug into his belly. He twisted, but those arms were like steel, grinding his ribs together and squeezing the life out of him.

  Valeria could not remember what it was to be whole. Was that what this was, this sense of fullness where she had been utterly empty?

  She was in the gallery again or still, swaying on knees that had gone weak. The Dance had slowed but still continued. The floor was solid and the walls were up. Riders and stallions were, in a manner of speaking, thatching the roof.

  Petra Danced with the rest, but his saddle was empty. Movement caught Valeria’s eye. Two figures, one in black and one in brown, grappled across the gallery.

  Bright blood stained the brown coat. The anger that had brought the world back to itself was still there, burning under her breastbone. Maybe she ran or maybe she flew, but however she had come there, she fell on the man in black. He whirled away from Kerrec to turn on her.

  Lank fair hair trailed across her face. Muscles coiled, whipcord and steel. The two of them rolled and tumbled down the stair.

  Valeria lay winded on the floor of the hall, throbbing with bruises. The priest’s face hovered over her.

  Memory gripped her and would not let her go. She lay in a field outside of a town called Mallia. A pack of nobles on the hunt had brought her to bay. Their leader fell on her, tearing at her coat and breeches, ripping them from her.

  This was his face. It was thinned to the bone and bleached of color, but she would never forget the shape of it. Nor would she forget how it had dropped away and Kerrec’s had replaced it, black curling hair and hawk’s profile and strange light eyes. She thought he meant to rape her, too, until she saw what he did to the man who had tried it.

  He had taken summary justice on that field. Valeria could still see the two swift cuts and the offal cast away, and the raven that caught them and carried them off.

  In those clouded eyes she saw the same memory, twisted into bitterness and unending hate. That one unflinching act had led to this.

  For every act there is a consequence. Valeria had learned that from her mother. She drove up her knee—with not nearly as much effect as if he had still been entire, but it caught him by surprise.

  She heaved him off her. He rolled away. She went after him.

  A white shape reared up over her. She flung herself flat.

  The stallion screamed in rage. Strong black hooves clattered on the pavement. The priest knotted himself into a ball.

  Valeria lay beneath the broad white belly. It was not Sabata’s—he was still dappled with youth. Marina was never so low or so wide.

  Oda’s head snaked down, plucked up the priest by the nape and shook him quite literally out of his skin.

  Valeria had no dinner to lose. Her stomach tried to vomit itself up instead.

  Oda dropped the raw and bleeding thing that had been a man and methodically, dispassionately trampled it to a pulp. When there was nothing left of human life or shape, he turned back toward Valeria and blew gently in her face.

  His breath was sweet. She reached for the warmth of him, but he was already fading. A moment more and he had melted into light.

  He had come as he had promised. His justice had been even more summary than Kerrec’s. It had been no more necessary, either.

  Men and stallions—there was no reasoning with them. She stood up stiffly, averting her eyes from what was left of the priest.

  The Dance was almost done. The riders were beginning to look human again. The void was still there beneath all that was, as it always would be, but the earth no longer faced dissolution.

  Sunlight slanted through the high windows, casting clear golden light on the floor. Figures of lords and ladies, priests and mages and servants, took shape in it. The court came to life again in the midst of its mortal dance.

  Their patterns caught and tangled around the stallions. To them the white gods must have appeared out of air, standing statue-still around the edges of the hall.

  As the babble of curiosity and speculation swelled to a roar, Briana descended the stair and approached the Lady. The dancers had drawn away from her, so that she stood in a circle of silence.

  Briana sank down in a deep curtsey until her forehead touched the crimson billows of her skirt. She rose smoothly, with exquisite grace. “Thank you,” she said.

  The Lady shook her ears—as close to a shrug as made no difference. She turned, imperious.

  Briana eyed the multitude of her skirts and the height of the Lady’s back. The Lady knelt.

  That was clear enough. Briana gathered her skirts as best she could and sat astride.

  The Lady stood upright and pawed once.

  Valeria felt that stroke in her own body. Doors of the spirit slammed shut. Powers receded, sinking deep into the earth. The stars fell into their accustomed orbits, and the sun shone with all of its remembered warmth.

  The world was real again. Inside Valeria was a memory and a deep scar, but she could not find the Unmaking.

  It was gone. She could not believe it, but the more she hunted for it, the clearer it was that it was not there to be found. When the Lady remade the world, she had also remade Valeria.

  Strong arms held her up. She clung as fiercely to Kerrec as he clung to her.

  He was alive, breathing, standing upright. His ribs creaked when he breathed, and the wound of the knife in his back still seeped blood, but the rest of him was sound enough.

  There was a new, deep quiet in him. The others would have no memory of the oblivion that had taken them all, but it was sunk in him as it was in Valeria. Some fraction of it would never leave them.

  That was little enough price to pay for all that they had won. As they looked down into Briana’s gaze, they saw the same memory there, and the same lesson learned.

  Briana drew herself up on the Lady’s back. Her chin lifted. She raised her hands to the sun and loosed a clear, high call—the first note of the hymn to the newborn god. Its light poured down over her, crowning her with living gold.

  The stallions stirred. Petra stamped. Sabata whinnied shrilly.

  Once more they were to Dance. The weariness that had weighed them down had melted in the sunlight. The hall cleared, courtiers jostling and crowding to fill the edges and overflow up the stairs into the galleries.

  Valeria was untrained and unprepared, but that had never mattered to the stallions. Sabata was as young in the body as she was. This was his Dance as much as it was Petra’s or the Lady’s.

  When the moon was full, older stallions and trained riders would dance the Midsummer Dance. On this day of the moon’s dark, Valeria and Briana shared a different Dance altogether. It was a Dance of joy and victory, of life and light and renewed creation. It was, in the purest sense, a coronation Dance.

  Augurs would ponder its omens for years to come. Seers and dreamers of dreams would remember the patterns as they unfolded. Scholars and courtiers would debate its meaning, and the pious would declare it incalculable, like the gods.

  For Valeria it was a Dance—as much art as craft, a mingling of magic and skill that came as naturally to her as the air she breathed. The patterns it laid were as solid as the rest of this new-made world. It established order and gave shape to the randomness of things.

  She followed the lines of it as they appeared in front of her, matching Sabata’s paces to the shape and substance of the Dance. The others were doing the same, each on his own path, but all of those paths combined into a luminous whole.

  Inside Valeria where the Unmaking had been, the gods’ satisfaction was a swelling warmth. Even they had been afraid that their great stroke would fail and their gamble prove false. They had trusted
in mortal strength and human stubbornness, and that trust had proved well founded.

  When the Dance was over, Valeria was going to crawl into a corner and shake until her teeth rattled out of her head. For the moment she let the great working carry her, even as the doors of time opened and the movements of the Dance shaped the reign that was to come.

  Never in a thousand years had the empress herself danced that Dance. This reign more than any before it would belong to the ruler whose name it bore. For good or ill, she determined its course. She made the choices that would inform the reigns that followed.

  She bore up well—better than Valeria could have hoped to do. Whatever fear she felt, she was trained not to show it. She was steady before her people, clear and focused in her movements, directing the Lady along the paths that seemed most clear to her.

  Valeria did not agree with all of them. The time would come when she could say so, but in this Dance she followed where her empress led. So was the world’s order maintained and its foundations made strong, secure against the Unmaking.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The battle was over. The long war was won. Gothard was dead—truly, permanently dead—and his most vicious disciple had suffered the white gods’ justice.

  The Unmaking was gone. Valeria’s heart should have been whole.

  But she took no pleasure in praise and public adulation. She only wanted to go back to the life she had had before, when no one beyond the Mountain knew who she was. Being recognized on the street and in the palace, being followed and worshipped and exclaimed over, made her intensely uncomfortable.

  By the fourth day after the high court, Valeria did not want to leave Riders’ Hall at all. The day before, she had lost her temper at the baker from whom she was trying to buy a seedcake in the market. “Aren’t you the girl from the Mountain?” he asked. “I hear you saved us all.”

  He meant well. She knew that even as she lashed out at him. “I didn’t save anyone. I’m the one you all had to be saved from!”

  She left him blinking, holding her penny and the cake she had meant to buy. She was shaking and fighting back tears—stupid, senseless thing, but she seemed to have lost any discipline she once had.

  Then in the night, dreams beset her. She had been sleeping like the dead each night until then, safe and warm with Kerrec in her arms. Tonight she paid for that.

  She floated in the sea of Unmaking, adrift in absolute darkness. It was no longer inside her—even in the dream she had that blessing—but nothing that she had done or would do could diminish it.

  Out of nothingness, form began to emerge. Creation, she had learned at great cost, was as inevitable as destruction. She looked down into light, the flicker of lamps in a stone room, glimmering on the bright head of the child who sat cross-legged on a narrow bed.

  Conor mac Euan had been doing something aimlessly magical, but when he sensed her presence, he looked up and smiled. “Good evening,” he said politely. “I’m glad to see you well.”

  He must have been practicing. His Aurelian was almost without accent.

  “I’m glad to see you,” she said, and she meant it. “Everything’s well, then?”

  He nodded. “He’s got his leg in a splint and he’s walking with a stick, and he’s as cross as a bear in the spring. Grandmother says that means he’ll live.”

  Curse the boy for knowing her too well. Bless him, too. “Does he hate me too badly?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t hate you at all,” said Conor. “Mostly he’s sad. I would be, but the other one is teaching me to ride.”

  The other mage, he meant. That could only be Pretorius. “Is he really? Nobody’s gutted him for what he did?”

  “He’s an envoy,” Conor said. “And a guest. That’s why he stays here. Nobody will touch him.”

  Valeria could see that. If she ever got her hands on Pretorius, she would not answer for the outcome.

  Conor’s clear eyes stared right through her. She could not tell what he thought. “He doesn’t ride as well as you,” he said.

  “Not much of anybody does, off the Mountain,” said Valeria.

  “Someday I will,” Conor said. His head tilted. “Will you talk to me sometimes?”

  “If I can.”

  “You can.”

  The dream whirled Valeria away, but not before she caught a glimpse into another room in the dun. Conor’s much older and more battered image lay on a familiar bed.

  Euan’s arm was flung over his eyes. His mouth under the red moustaches was turned down. He looked sulky, cross-grained—and alive. Her magic curled around him like faint glimmering tendrils, mending what was broken and strengthening what was whole.

  Valeria stooped in her dream and brushed a kiss across his lips. He started as if he could feel the touch. His arm came down. His eyes were wide, darting around the room. “Valeria?”

  She was already receding, drawn inexorably back into the dark. Just before the dream winked out, she saw how his face fell. It was only a small thing, no grand rage or paroxysm of grief, but it wrenched her heart.

  She made herself wake to the room that belonged to her and the lover who was meant for her. But the dream stayed with her. She could never be free of Euan Rohe, any more than she could expunge the guilt for what she had done—falling into Gothard’s trap and letting him use her magic to destroy them all.

  That morning she both taught and was taught in the riding court, but when she should have gone to court for a reception in the riders’ honor, she barricaded herself in the library instead. She expected Kerrec to come and reprimand her for rank discourtesy, but no one troubled her solitude.

  Probably no one noticed she was missing. Kerrec, who was most likely to, had more on his mind than ever. Most of it was good, now that the court had seen what use the white gods were. Kerrec was doing his best to make sure everyone remembered.

  He was good at it. It made her proud. But unlike the late prince Ambrosius, she had no talent for politics.

  It was as well that she had let herself be lured away from Dun Mor. She would have made a wretched queen.

  She opened the first book that came to hand and stared at it. Master Nikos had promised to test her for Fourth Rider by Midwinter Dance, if she applied herself diligently until then.

  She had a great deal to do. Pretorius had taught her reasonably well and the stallions were the best of teachers, but she had been rather distracted. She had to stop being distracted and start remembering how to focus.

  That was not happening today. She pushed the book away.

  There was one thing gnawing at her, one difficult thought that would not let her be. Kerrec had not asked her—yet—what she had done on the other side of the river, and she had not told him.

  She would, and soon. But that was not the difficult thing. Before she had that conversation, there was something she had to do.

  She pushed herself to her feet. She still had fits of dizziness—remnants of the spell and the toll it had taken on her body. This one passed as the rest had, and she promptly forgot it.

  She had grown terribly familiar with the passage between Riders’ Hall and the palace. It had been getting a great deal of use lately, and would get even more as Kerrec’s school grew. Half a dozen new pupils had appeared this morning, with more promised.

  At the moment Valeria was the only rider in that corridor. The lamps brightened ahead and dimmed behind as they should, with no fear of attack or ambush. That war really was over, though it was a divine surety that others would come.

  She passed by the usual door, which led to Briana’s rooms, and the increasingly usual one that opened on a servants’ passage not far from the great hall. The passage beyond was much less well trodden. She tried not to recognize the shape and spacing of the tracks in the dust, but she knew Kerrec’s distinctive narrow foot and long light stride too well for that.

  The most recent tracks, she could not help but notice, were old enough that a thin film of dust had fallen over them. That p
leased her too much. She should be dispassionate and practice rider’s discipline.

  She had her face under control, at least, when she reached the door and opened it. This part of the palace she had never seen. It had been closed off when she was here before.

  Now that she was in it, it surprised her. She had expected a great deal of overwrought ornament, flocks of chattering maids and clouds of perfume. Instead she found well-lit, airy rooms, the occasional discreet servant and, here and there, a subtle hint of scent.

  It was still not her taste, but she could have lived here. The colors were clear and not too soft, the furnishings understated. The servants noticed she was there but did not interfere.

  They recognized her, of course. Everyone did now. Strange because when she had mended the broken Dance, no one had remembered the rider on the white stallion. But Valeria in the high court, grappling ignominiously with a renegade priest, had impressed herself on every mind.

  In these cool and peaceful rooms, she found an unexpected degree of serenity. There must be a healing spell here, woven into the substance of each exquisite space.

  Maybe there was no need for magic. It could be simply the quiet and the soft notes of music playing at a distance, and the ripple of falling water as she passed by the door to a garden.

  She was tempted to linger, but she had to do this thing now, before her courage failed. She gritted her teeth and turned toward the jangle of human presence.

  The princess from Elladis held court as she did every morning, seated in a tall chair set four steps above a shimmering hall. Its pillars were of alabaster and its floor was a mosaic of silver and ebony and translucent white. The hangings on the walls behind the pillars were older than she could possibly be, but they had been newly cleaned. Their colors shone softly around the edges of the hall.

  Theodosia was as beautiful as Valeria had expected. Her skin was flawless and her features were exquisitely molded. When she moved, her grace bespoke centuries of breeding and a lifetime of training. Even the curve of eyelash on her cheek must be calculated to the last degree.