Shattered Dance

by Caitlin Brennan

  Valeria refused to suffer the comparison. She was what she was. But she could not help feeling tall and awkward and grossly underschooled as she stood in the shadow of a pillar and watched Kerrec’s wife conduct the business of her office.

  This palace was a fair reflection of the self that Valeria saw—and like those rooms and gardens, the princess was a surprisingly comfortable presence. Valeria had not been looking for comfort. She wanted to hate everything about this woman.

  That would have been too easy. Briana’s counselors were nothing if not perceptive. Most of them were mages and most had known Kerrec before he was Called to the Mountain. They would hardly have forced him to mate with a woman he could not stand.

  It would not be at all difficult to like this bride they had chosen for him. She was soft-spoken and gentle but her will was steel.

  Valeria saw it in the justice she dealt a petitioner who had stolen a sheep. The man swore on holy images that the sheep was his. Theodosia nodded gravely and spoke a word over the likenesses of Sun and Moon on which his hand rested. Then she asked, “This is true?”

  “As true as the sunrise, highness,” the man declared as he began to draw his hand away.

  The image of the Sun clasped that hand in stony arms. He shrieked like a girl and pulled back with all his strength, but the image gripped him fast.

  “Do you swear?” Theodosia asked as coolly as ever.

  He stood shaking and sweating, with all the color gone from his face. When he opened his mouth, he screamed again. The image’s grip must have tightened.

  “Indeed,” said Theodosia. She flicked her hand.

  The image let him go. He fled without waiting to hear her judgment.

  A little showy, Valeria thought, but effective. No one else dared test the princess’s patience. One or two of those who were waiting, in fact, ducked their heads and slipped away.

  After the last petitioner had spoken his part and received his judgment, Theodosia turned her calm gaze toward the shadow where Valeria still stood. “A fair day to you, rider,” she said.

  Valeria had not been trying very hard to hide—if she had been, no one would have known she was there. She came out from behind the pillar, debated modes of respect and settled on a short nod. “And to you, princess.”

  Theodosia smoothed her skirts—the first gesture Valeria had seen that was not perfectly measured. Her eyes were better disciplined. They maintained their impenetrable calm.

  Valeria could not hope to equal that seamless self-control. She stood at ease and let the silence stretch. That, she was good at.

  Theodosia smiled faintly. “So, rider. Have you come to challenge me?”

  “No,” said Valeria, “nor to order you away from him, either. I wanted to see what you were.”

  The perfectly plucked brow arched. “And?”

  “I understand why they chose you.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  Valeria frowned. “I don’t think we can be friends,” she said.

  “That would not be proper,” Theodosia agreed.

  “But,” said Valeria, “we had better be allies. Is that possible?”

  “Always,” said Theodosia. “Even the worst enemies may work together for a common cause.”

  “Are we enemies?”

  “I think not,” Theodosia said. And then, deliberately, “No more than you and the Ard Ri of the clans.”

  Valeria went still. “So. You had something to do with that.”

  “Not I,” said Theodosia. “We do however have a friend in common.”

  “Not Euan?” Even as she said it, Valeria knew that was impossible. Her voice went flat. “Pretorius.”

  Theodosia’s eyelids lowered in the subtlest of nods.

  “That man is no friend of mine,” Valeria said with banked heat.

  “Ally, then,” said Theodosia with unshakable composure.

  “I wonder,” Valeria said.

  “He is impeccably loyal to the empire,” Theodosia said.

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “I am,” said Theodosia. “He handled you badly, I see. I’m sorry for that. He’s a strong ally and a great mage, and a good friend in tight places.”

  Valeria set her lips together. She supposed he had been a friend when he pulled the earth out from under Euan Rohe’s warband so that Valeria could escape. But that needed more forgiveness than she had in her. She would never be sure of him, of what he wanted or whom or what he served—apart, of course, from himself.

  It was enough for now that she spoke civilly to Kerrec’s wife and received civility in return. Theodosia she did trust.

  It was instinct rather than reason, and in some things she might trust Theodosia to act powerfully against her. But those things would be clear and Theodosia would warn her. At heart, for all her artifice, Theodosia was an honest woman.

  Valeria was almost at peace with herself as she walked slowly to Riders’ Hall. The riders had come back and were scattered through the hall, riding or resting or practicing their magic.

  She found Kerrec in his workroom, scowling at columns of numbers. Valeria leaned over his shoulder and tapped one of them with her finger. “There’s your problem. It’s been entered twice.”

  He aimed the scowl at her. “How did you do that?”

  “Fresh eyes.” His shoulders were one long knot. She worked her fingers into it. “I’ve been to see Theodosia.”

  The knot turned to iron. She dug in. He gasped. “Gods! Are you trying to kill me?”

  “Not you,” said Valeria, “and not Theodosia, either. I like her.”

  “You do?”

  “Did you know you’re having twins?”

  He surged up and around and out of her grip. His eyes were almost white.

  “You didn’t know,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’ve been avoiding her.”

  “Not intentionally,” he said through clenched teeth. “There was the little matter of the world being unmade.”

  “And remade.” She drew a breath. “There is something you should know.”

  “That you agreed to be the barbarians’ queen?”

  She sagged against the wall. “You knew?”

  “Not until this morning,” he said. “Briana told me. She said it probably wasn’t her place to say it, but someone should tell me before you did, in case I said something unfortunate.”

  “Did you?”

  “I don’t think I said anything at all.”

  She searched his face. He was not angry. He did not seem flattened by the betrayal, either.

  “I agreed willingly,” she said.

  “But you didn’t stay.”

  “It doesn’t matter? What I did?”

  “Of course it matters,” he said. “I also remember where I was and why you left. We can have a rankling quarrel or we can remember that the world has been remade.”

  “Even for us?”

  “Especially for us,” he said.

  He had thought about this—more carefully than she had, if not nearly as long. She reached to touch his face. His finger traced the line of her cheek.

  She bit her lips. His twitched upward. There was no hope for them ever to be apart. They even thought alike.

  “Can you bear it?” she asked him.

  “If you can.”

  She pulled him the rest of the way and bound him with a kiss.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Morag rode into Aurelia with her husband beside her in the wagon and Portia behind, stretched out in comfort with Grania asleep in her arms. The baby had howled most of the way down from Imbria, but as they came out of the hills onto the plain, her wailing had stopped.

  Grania was well and thriving—Morag assured herself of that every hour at least. She ate and slept as she should. She crawled around the wagon bed and babbled at people and animals who passed—more likely the animals than the people—but she never cried. It seemed she had cried herself out.

  Three days of blessed quiet were more than anyon
e with a baby deserved. Morag swept the child into her lap as Titus maneuvered mule and wagon into the crowd of people looking to squeeze itself through the gate.

  “Last time I was here,” Titus muttered, “there weren’t half as many people.”

  “That was twenty years ago,” Morag said tartly, “and you weren’t trying to get in the week before a coronation.”

  “Yes, and whose idea was that?” he shot back. “If anyone had listened to me, we’d have waited till after it was over, then we wouldn’t be fighting for road space. Not to mention inn space. What if—”

  “We don’t need an inn,” she said. “We have a place to stay.”

  “What if we don’t? Where else will we go? I’ll wager every crack and cranny is packed full of people come to see the empress get her crown.”

  “Stop fretting, old man,” Morag said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  He rolled an eye at her, but he stopped fussing. He was a wise husband, all things considered.

  The wagon crawled toward the gate and on through it. The streets were as crowded as Titus had feared, but Morag had the way clear in her head, as the riders’ Master had told her. Straight down the processional way, left through the cattle market, up and around and down into a broad square lined with blank walls.

  There were not so many people there. Most of them clotted around the temples and the palace or overflowed the markets. Most of the traffic on this street was highborn or connected to it—nobles and servants going about their business.

  A farm wagon from the provinces attracted its share of supercilious glances, but Morag stared them down until they flinched and scurried past. Grania bounced and laughed in Morag’s lap, shouting after them in her own peculiar language.

  Riders’ Hall was as unprepossessing as Nikos had said. Morag found that reassuring. She always had hated pretension.

  The wagon just scraped through the widest of its gates. Luckily for Titus’ nerves, the courtyard inside was more than big enough, and there was a man in it, squat and stocky and smelling of horses.

  He did not have riders’ magic but he had something close to it. “Sir and madam,” he said with commendable courtesy. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  Morag nodded. The stableman took charge of the mule and wagon and handed its passengers over to a flock of servants.

  That was its own ordeal, but Morag brought them to order. She dismissed all but three, one of whom would escort them to a suitable room while the second arranged baths. The third brought word to the Master that his guests had arrived.

  They were well trained, as one would expect of servants in the horsemasters’ house. In very short order, all four guests were bathed, fed and installed in a room of reasonable size and minimal pretensions.

  Morag’s messenger to the Master came back with a message of his own.

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  She beckoned to Portia. The nurse had the baby dressed and ready. Morag took her granddaughter in hand and nodded to Portia, who was not at all displeased to enjoy an hour’s peace.

  The school was thriving, from the look of it. The riding courts were full of horses and young riders. Morag, with Titus behind, followed the Master’s servant to the second of the two courts.

  Both Kerrec and Valeria had students on the long line. Their instruction was completely separate and yet they moved together like partners in a dance. Their voices intertwined and their corrections had the same intonation and often the same words.

  Morag’s brow rose. Her dreams and the pattern of omens since she left the Mountain had troubled her deeply. When she heard that the First Rider had married a princess and Valeria had gone across the border, she had been beside herself.

  All that had kept her from galloping after either or both of them had been those same omens. Grania was safe as long as Morag protected her. If Morag left her, gods alone knew what would come hunting.

  Morag had stayed in Imbria until the gods’ own storm lashed the world from end to end. In the middle of it, the earth had shrugged and then straightened itself like a carpet shaken out over a floor.

  The quiet that followed was enormous. All the omens had changed. The flow of the world’s magic was clean again.

  Then she told Titus to get out the wagon. They were going to Aurelia.

  He only asked one question. “Any particular thing we’re going to see?”

  “The coronation,” she answered.

  He grunted. He knew better than to argue with her when she was in that mood. From the speed with which he went to do as she told him, she could tell he had been fretting, too. Titus had his own magic, though he never made much of it.

  Now, after eight days on the road, they both saw what they had really come to see. Valeria was here, and so was Valeria’s man, in harmony that told Morag all she needed to know. The tension that had been riding with her drained away.

  Grania had been wide-eyed and quiet as they passed through Riders’ Hall, except when she saw the horses. She whickered at them as if she had been a horse herself. But when her eyes fell on her father, she all but leaped out of Morag’s arms. “Da!” she roared. “Da!”

  She had a noble pair of lungs. Every horse in the court stopped short, sometimes to the young riders’ distress. The horse mages grinned at one another, all but Valeria, whose face was perfectly blank—and Kerrec, who dropped the line and ran.

  It was worth a long week on the road to see that rigorously disciplined master mage sweep his daughter out of Morag’s arms and cover her with kisses. She bubbled with laughter, pummeling him joyously. “Da, Da, Da!”

  Valeria came more slowly. Morag peered narrowly at her, but she did not seem hurt that Grania so transparently preferred her father.

  Morag released the breath she had been holding, just in time for Valeria’s embrace. Titus wrapped his arms around them both and lifted them off their feet, laughing like the boy he had not been in some fifty years.

  Valeria laughed with him. Morag did not. She would have plenty to say to him—later. Kerrec had passed the baby to her mother. For a mercy, Grania did not protest.

  Valeria did not have Kerrec’s ease with the child. She knew how to hold a baby—she had held her share of them when she was in training to be a wisewoman in Imbria. But for her it was a learned skill. Kerrec simply knew.

  She kissed the round soft cheek and drew in the scent of the black curls, but she did not linger over it. She handed the baby back into Kerrec’s willing arms.

  Riders were attending to the horses, with many pauses to burble over the baby. They were all as besotted as Kerrec. He stopped once, remembering belatedly that he had duties, but a golden bear of a rider rumbled at him to let be.

  “We’ll finish for you,” the big man said. “You go.”

  Kerrec did not even pretend to object. He left the riders to it and carried his daughter off into the hall. As far as Morag could tell, they were conversing at a rapid rate, he in Aurelian and Grania in her own language.

  “That child will be spoiled rotten,” Valeria said.

  She sat with Morag by the hearth in Kerrec’s workroom, which seemed to be the most comfortable room in Rider’s Hall. The moon was riding high, shining through the window. The fire was welcome—though the days were still warm, the nights were growing cool.

  They were both replete with the feast the Master had laid on for his guests. There was wine to finish if they were minded. Morag had set her cup aside, but Valeria turned hers in her hands, resting her eyes on the dance of the flames.

  The men had gone to bed. Kerrec had Grania with him, rocked to sleep in the cradle that Morag and Titus had brought.

  Morag wondered how long it would be before he let the child out of his sight again. If she had to wager, she would say years—a dozen at least.

  Valeria took a more dispassionate view. “With him for a father plus a hundred uncles, she’ll never want for a thing. They’ll indulge her slightest whim.”

  “Probably,” said Mo
rag. “But they are horse trainers. They’ll give in to their instincts sooner or later.”

  “What, they’ll break her to saddle?” Valeria sipped from her cup, grimaced and set it on the table beside her. “I look at her and see twenty years of training exercises. He looks at her and sees the love of his life.”

  “You are the love of his life,” Morag said. “That is his firstborn, which is another kind of bliss altogether.”

  Valeria snorted softly. “Tell me again I’m not a bad mother. I thought I might feel differently when I saw her after so long, but it’s still the same. I’m not in love with her.”

  “You’re not a bad mother,” Morag said, “any more than I am. I’m not in love with my children, either. I love them with all my heart, but I don’t drift in a pink fog around any of them.”

  Valeria fell back in her chair, arms flung wide in mock despair. “Oh, gods. I’ve become my mother.”

  “It happens to the best of us.”

  “I never wanted it to happen to me.”

  “None of us does,” Morag said.

  She leaned toward Valeria and took her hand. The gesture was rare, and Valeria’s glance took note of it even as her fingers closed around her mother’s.

  “Child,” Morag said, “I’m proud of you.”

  Valeria’s brows rose. “Even though I’m nothing you ever expected me to be?”

  “You’re everything I hoped for,” said Morag, “just not in the ways I expected. That’s always the way with children. Yours, too, as she grows older. She’ll go her own way, which is seldom the one you might want for her—but in the end, if you raise her as I know you will, it will all come right.”

  “I hope so,” Valeria said. “It scares me—knowing how easy it would be to ruin her. Knowing…what I can do when I’m at my worst.”

  She was working magic, whether she knew it or not—drawing in the shadows and making the fire burn hotter, so hot the flames burned blue. The memories in it did not need to haunt either of them tonight.

  Morag broke the spell with a sharp gust of breath. “Ah,” she said, slapping Valeria’s hand hard enough to startle a yelp out of her. “Babies are tougher than they look. Bring her up right, teach her to ride and dance and tell the truth, and the rest will take care of itself.”