The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  He wanted to seize her and shake her, but that would have been a very unwise thing. “If you’re caught in one more difficult situation, you can bet the emperor’s gold that you’ll be tossed out of this place. Now will you leave, or do I have to pick you up and carry you?”

  She did not like it, not even slightly, but he had got through to her at last. She stared at her bruised and knuckle-split hands as if she had never seen them before, locked them tight under folded arms, and vanished into the rear of the tavern.

  She had escaped none too soon. Just as Euan saw the last of her, a troop of guards tramped and rattled toward the tavern. They found Euan standing over the unconscious and badly battered Gavin, and the rest of his warband forming into a shieldwall between their prince and the world.

  Euan called them off. “Go on. Let be. This is my fight.”

  They would not obey him. The wine was still in them, even if it had gone sour. There was a battle brewing, and for once in his life Euan neither wanted it nor could see a way out of it.

  “What is this?”

  The voice was clear and cold. It brought the guards to rigid attention. Even Euan’s kinsmen yielded to it. Euan felt its power, the power of a strong mage.

  First Rider Kerrec surveyed them all. His brows drew together at the sight of Gavin. He knelt on the filthy floor and laid his hand on the bloodied forehead. Euan found he could not move, either to retreat or to resist.

  Kerrec looked up beyond Euan at the man in sergeant’s stripes. “He’s still alive. Fetch Healer Martti. Tell him to bring his kit.”

  The man ducked his head like a servant and ran.

  Kerrec had already forgotten him. He ordered the guards to herd Euan’s kinsmen together and escort them back to their quarters. They would hear from him later.

  That left Euan stripped of his shieldwall, with half a dozen guards around him and Gavin barely breathing at his feet. “I’m sure you can explain this,” Kerrec said.

  “You can’t tell by looking?”

  Kerrec’s nostrils flared ever so slightly at the insolence. “I would rather you told me.”

  “There was a woman,” Euan said. “They had got into the wine. They were attempting to force it on her.”

  “I see no woman,” said Kerrec.

  “She escaped,” Euan said.

  “Indeed,” said Kerrec. “There was a woman. And you tried and sentenced the one who forced her.”

  “It is my right,” Euan said.

  “Not here.”

  Euan did not answer that.

  “You realize that if he lives, he’ll be expelled from the School of War. Hostage or no, he broke one of the sterner of our laws.”

  “I do know that,” Euan said. “Our laws are like enough to yours.”

  Kerrec inclined his head slightly. “You are not the law here. Whatever you were, that has to be forgotten. For this you could be court-martialed.”

  “For defending a woman?”

  “For stepping above your present station,” said Kerrec, “and for violating the peace of this place.”

  “That was already violated,” Euan said, “although the woman was not.”

  Euan was head and shoulders taller, but Kerrec still managed to look down his nose. “The woman was fortunate. You will stay until we know whether this one lives or dies. You are his servant and his dearest brother. Do you understand?”

  “Well enough,” Euan said. He kept most of the growl out of it.

  Gavin would live. He would be a long while healing, and he might not walk as straight as he had before, but Martti the healer had skill enough to keep his soul in his body. He had the proper fear of the One God in him, too, once he was awake enough that Euan could remind him of the imperial sentence for holding a woman against her will.

  As for Euan, there was no court-martial after all. Whatever Kerrec had done or said to the powers in the School of War, no one said anything of that night’s doings. Euan was safe—and so, thank the One, was Valeria. The plot could go on.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Valeria could have killed Euan. How dared he order her about as if he were a rider? But damn him, he was right. She could not afford another moment in the hard glare of the Masters’ scrutiny.

  She did as he told her. She left him to face the consequences of the whole bloody mess, and took the coward’s way, out the back and down an alley reeking of stale beer and worse.

  She nursed her bruises and her skinned knuckles and ran through the memory over and over. She should never have gone near the tavern. She had gone looking for Euan, and found a nightmare unfolding itself all over again.

  Euan’s kin were like any other males in a pack. The wine was in them, they saw a female, they had to have her. The serving girl was fortunate that they had fixated on getting her drunk. What they would have done after that, Valeria knew all too well.

  Her mind had gone blank. She was remotely aware that she had got Gavin down and was taking him apart. She was equally conscious that when she finished doing that, he would be dead.

  She wanted him dead. She looked into that broad freckled face and saw another not terribly unlike it, bending over her, grinning as he set about raping her. There was no Kerrec this time, no one to stop her from taking her revenge—until Euan came roaring in, twice as big and just as maddening as that other rescuer. Then it all went from bad to worse.

  She could not face Kerrec that night. She hid in Sabata’s stall. He did not mind, and his straw was deep and clean. When he lay down, she curled against him.

  She did not mean to fall asleep. It was dawn when she woke. There was just time to scrub her face and hands in the rain barrel outside the stable before she had to begin the morning’s duties.

  Her dreams had all been of stallions and the Dance. They usually were, but tonight they had been stronger and clearer. The stallions were speaking to her in their way. She dreamed their dreams, the dreams of gods. They stayed with her after she woke and through the whole of that day.

  Kerrec said nothing to her. He did not even notice her bruises. He would have said something cutting if he had, of order and discipline, and the necessity of keeping her head down and her nose out of trouble.

  Men were all the same. She hated them. If it had not been for the stallions, she would have shaken the dust of that place from her feet.

  The stallions wanted her to stay. The Call was still in her, had become her. Magic simmered in her veins. Her bones were full of it.

  Men had failed her, but stallions would not. She would learn from them and let the men do as they pleased.

  Valeria’s solitude was complete. No one but Kerrec ever spoke to her, and he did it rarely outside of long days’ lessons in riding, in books of magic and horsemanship, and in the daily duties of riders in the school. Among humans she was as close to invisible as she could be.

  Among the stallions, at night and in the early mornings when the rest of the humans were either asleep or engaged elsewhere, she learned little by little to be a rider. She learned how to sit on their backs and call in the magic and master the powers that she raised.

  One morning toward the middle of summer, she had been practicing a particularly difficult variant of the Dance. Petra was teaching her, with Sabata watching, because he was charged with learning it as well. Just as she finished the third repetition, she felt a ripple on the edge of her concentration.

  The stallions were unconcerned, but her hackles had risen. She looked toward the edge of the field in which she was riding, and saw a red wolf watching. His amber eyes were intent, trying to take in what he was seeing. The fur on his neck and back stood straight up, and he growled softly in his throat.

  She blinked, and the wolf became a man. Euan Rohe stood beside the field.

  She had not seen him since the night in the tavern. He had been hunting her, and she had been eluding him.

  Now he had caught her, in more ways than one. She slid from Petra’s back and thanked him politely as was proper. He bowed h
is head, blowing warm breath into her hand. She fed him a handful of sugar and walked with him back to the stable.

  Euan followed. The stallions did not try to drive him off. Even Sabata, who could be terribly jealous, was choosing to tolerate him.

  Sometimes she could not understand the stallions. When Petra was cooled and brushed and settled in his stall with a manger full of hay, Valeria faced Euan.

  He was visibly careful not to seem threatening. It was hard, as big as he was, but he made himself as small as he could. “You ride very well,” he said.

  She brushed that aside. “What do you want? You know you’re not supposed to be in this part of the school.”

  “Are you supposed to be doing what you’re doing?” he shot back. “I’m just an uncouth barbarian, but I don’t think a first-year candidate is allowed to creep out with the white gods in the morning.”

  “They called me,” Valeria said. “I’m supposed to cultivate obedience.”

  “Why then,” he said, “I’m cultivating repentance. I’m sorry for what my kinsmen did. Gavin will live, but as soon as he can travel, he’ll be sent away. He won’t lay a hand on any woman in Aurelia again.”

  “Good,” she said, “though you’d have done better to kill him. There’s blood between you now.”

  “That’s as it may be,” he said. “I’d rather not be sent down for murder.”

  “There is that,” she admitted.

  He looked hard at her. “You,” he said. “Are you well? What they did, for a woman it’s a hard thing—whether she’s the victim or the defender. Even a woman as strong as you.”

  She realized that her jaw had dropped. He stood there, big and bright and outlandish, and understood more about her than any supposedly civilized man ever had.

  He did not seem to know how unusual he was. He frowned. “You’re not well. That’s why you’re avoiding everybody. By the One! I’ll kill that son of a—”

  “I am well,” she said as firmly as she could. “I just never—no man ever—you’re not like anyone else.”

  “Why? Because I haven’t gone after you like a bull in rut?”

  She laughed shakily. “Yes, because of that. And because you understand. How is that? What makes you different?”

  He shrugged, rolling his wide shoulders. “I have a mother. Sisters. They talk to me. Sometimes I even listen. My mother swore an oath when I was small that she would never let me grow up thinking I was better than a woman. ‘Bigger is not better,’ she said. ‘Usually it’s worse. Remember what the imperials do to a man who rapes a woman, and reflect on the reasons why.’”

  “Was she one of us?” Valeria asked.

  His gust of laughter was more than half shock. “God, no! Her ancestors were kings when my father’s fathers were still grubbing in the mud.”

  “So your blood is pure,” she said. She had to touch him. She could not help herself. He tensed a little as her hand came to rest over his heart, but he did not draw away. “We’re distant cousins, I think. My mother comes from Eriu.”

  “That’s why,” he said. Was he breathless? “That’s why your eyes are different.”

  “Mongrel eyes,” she said. “No pure blood here.”

  “Purity only matters if you’re a priest or a king.”

  “Are you both?”

  He was oddly reluctant to answer. Finally he said, “Not a priest. Priests are…strange.”

  “So are mages.”

  “It’s not the same.” His finger brushed her cheek. She shivered. “You don’t know you’re beautiful.”

  She should have struck him for that, but she could not lift her hand to do it. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Never,” he said.

  “I’m not—”

  “Learn to see yourself,” he said. “Beauty is power. Beauty and magic and brilliance all together—those can rule the world.”

  “I don’t want to rule,” she said, peevish with discomfort. “I want to be a rider.”

  “There is a difference?”

  You wouldn’t understand.

  She did not say the words. She said instead, “Beauty gives nothing but grief. Give it a female body and every beast in the woods goes howling after it.”

  “For most beasts,” he said dryly, “female alone is enough.” He touched her again, this time to tilt up her chin so that she had to look into his eyes. “Think of what I said. It’s a weapon. You can use it.”

  “What, to conquer armies with the bat of an eyelash?”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  This time she did hit him, or tried. He caught her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist where the blood was running hot and quick. His breath was warm. His mustache tickled. It was almost enough to make her pull away, but not quite.

  She did not want to think of Kerrec’s smooth-shaven face or his graceful compact body. She knew that body rather well by now, having looked after it for over a month. This one she did not know at all.

  She should not try. He was an enemy. He tempted her, charmed her, seemed to understand her. He could be lying through his teeth.

  Her magic was useless here. She tried to remember the miller’s son whom she had been meant to marry, but even his name escaped her. If he was lucky, he had found another wife, one who was not already married to a strange and difficult magic.

  Euan had no magic beyond the fact of being young, male and royally born. He was beautifully clean and simple.

  She needed simplicity. She pulled his head down and kissed him. She meant to be fast and hard, but his arms went around her and his lips warmed. He turned her sudden attack into a long, slow, lingering thing.

  She was dizzy as if she had drunk the fiery poteen that her mother’s family sent from Eriu. Her body tingled. There was a deep warmth in her belly, spreading upward from the meeting of her legs. She ached there, but it was a pleasurable ache.

  His hand ran down her back, not too firm, not too light. It came to rest below the curve of her buttocks. She arched toward him. She could feel the hot, hard thing under his trousers.

  Her breath came fast and shallow. She had in no way forgotten her grievance against his sex. The anger in her was hot and strong.

  This was different. She wanted it. She needed it. She knew that if she took this, instead of being taken against her will, she would start to heal. It was important that she heal.

  The stallions were watching. They would let no harm come to her. This must happen. It was part of the Dance.

  Euan started to draw back, but Valeria stopped him. Even though he let himself be held, he said, “Not here. Not now. Tonight—somewhere safer.”

  She knew of nowhere safer than the stallions’ stable, but he would not understand that. “Tonight,” she said not altogether willingly. “Meet me here. I’ll think of a place where we can go.”

  He was amenable to that. He took his time in kissing her goodbye, but in the end he had to go. So did she. She was still Kerrec’s servant, as little as she wanted to remember it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Euan knew better than to betray the slightest hint of his elation. Not only had he caught the school’s most troublesome student at lessons he knew the masters would not have approved of, he had found her more than willing to play into his hand.

  He had been thinking he would need a long, slow campaign. Women who had been forced, in his experience, wanted nothing to do with any man. This one had transformed her anger into passion. He sensed in her no fear. It had burned away.

  The day was unbearably tedious. Only the urgency of his mission kept him from running out on it all. He must continue to play the well-mannered royal hostage. Valeria was part of a much larger plan, and he could not sacrifice the rest of it to his hunger for her.

  Evening came none too soon. Some of the imperial nobles in the House of War had taken it into their heads to be hospitable to the barbarians. Euan was hard put to escape
from the revel before dark. He had to confide in Conory, who looked enough like Euan by lamplight that if their hosts were too drunk to count, they might not notice that one of the barbarians was missing.

  He did not tell Conory who the woman was whom he was meeting. Conory was too polite to ask. It amused him to play at being Euan, while Euan, as he observed, had all the luck.

  Luck indeed, Euan thought as he made his way to the white gods’ stable. He had bathed before he went out, and put on clean clothes. His hair was still damp in its thick braid.

  She was not in the stable. The stallions had been fed, and were eating as stupidly as horses always did. Euan saw nothing godlike in it, or for the moment in the thickset white or greyish beasts who did it. Divinity in such circumstances was entirely a matter of faith.

  Euan found a chest to sit on, and perched there rather uncomfortably. The grinding of jaws and the rustling of hooves in straw, combined with the wine he had drunk before he escaped, made his eyelids too heavy to lift. He struggled to stay awake.

  Sleep crept up on him in spite of his best efforts. He started out of it to discover that night had fallen. Moonlight filled the stable.

  There was no moon tonight, and the stars were hidden in cloud. The light shone from the stallions, a blue-white shimmer, bright enough to cast shadows.

  Completely without thinking, Euan made the sign of the One. The stallion nearest, who had come to peer at Euan over the door of his stall, snorted wetly. Euan could have sworn he was laughing.

  In this ignominious state, wiping bits of wet hay and less delightful things from his face and coat, Euan looked up to find Valeria looking down. She was flushed and her cropped curls looked windblown. She wore the same nondescript coat and trousers as always. She was beautiful enough that for a moment he was content to simply stare.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as close to flustered as he had seen her. “I was kept later than I expected, then he found something else for me to—”

  Euan was on his feet. He would not have moved if she had recoiled, but her body swayed toward him.