The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  They did not go elsewhere after all. In the deep clean straw of an empty stall, with a stallion leisurely chewing hay on either side, they went down in a tangle.

  His clothes came off first. Hers were more stubborn. He unbound the breastband with the sense of a man unwrapping a gift.

  She was not what she would be, not yet. Her curves were scant, her breasts still budding. When she was grown she would be magnificent. Tonight she was as lovely as a young doe in her first season.

  That was not simply poetry. He truly was her first. She had courage—her breath hissed at the pain, but she did not cry out. Her legs locked around his waist, and her fingers wound themselves in his hair. He was well and truly bound.

  Her thighs were strong. She had endurance, and a rider’s sense of rhythm. She rode him like one of her stallions, with a casual assumption of authority that left him breathless.

  He could have been outraged, but she had driven all rational thought out of his head. He had come to seduce her, and she had bound him with her spell. It was astonishing—glorious.

  He tried, but he could not keep up with her. He was the great bull of the people, high prince of the Caletanni. He fell in defeat before a slip of an imperial girl.

  He dropped like a stone. She rose over him. She could kill him now. He had no strength to stop her.

  She brushed his lips with a kiss, and stayed there, hovering, with those gold-flecked eyes fixed on his face. Princes were always stared at, and handsome ones even more so. Even at that, he had never been examined quite so thoroughly. He wondered, with a shiver deep inside, just how much she could see.

  She neither killed him nor denounced him. She smiled, long, slow and deeply content, and ran her finger down his face from eyebrow to jaw. “Beautiful,” she said.

  His cheeks flushed hot. Her touch cooled them, then her kisses heated them again.

  Before she could drive him quite insane, she released him from her spell. With a long sigh, she slid down to lay her head on his shoulder, and stretched her arm across his chest.

  He dozed for a while. When he started awake, she was still there, warm against his side. Her breathing was deep and even, but when he moved, it quickened. She looked up from the hollow of his shoulder.

  His smile had no calculation in it. He was glad to see her there, glad to be there.

  She did not smile back. Her eyes turned smoky grey when she was thinking. “You were my first,” she said.

  “I know.” He drew her hand up to his lips and kissed it. “It’s a great honor.”

  “You do mean it.” She sounded faintly surprised. “I thought men of your nation were—”

  “Barbarians?” He grinned at her. “We are. It’s an honor to be chosen by a king’s daughter.”

  “I’m nothing royal. You know that.”

  “I do,” he agreed. “You’re something more. The white gods dance for you.”

  “Not that it matters to their riders,” she said.

  Euan struggled mightily to hide the surge of excitement. She was bitter—how much, he had not suspected until he heard it in her voice. She was much further gone than he had thought.

  The One had not done giving gifts, it seemed. Euan had to take this one very carefully, and take even greater care not to drop or break it.

  When he could trust his voice to be noncommittal, he said, “Riders are only human, even if they are famous sorcerers. Not like the stallions, who are gods.”

  “Riders make the laws,” she said. “They say I can’t be one of them. If I’d been born a man—”

  “If you had been born a man,” Euan said, “you wouldn’t be what you are.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’d be a rider.”

  Imperials made a great virtue of logic. Euan did not see the use in it himself. He paused for the duration of a breath, then asked, “Have you ever heard of the School of Olivet?”

  Her frown answered him even before she spoke the words. “No. What is that?”

  “It’s a school of horse mages,” Euan said. “Olivet was a master here, but after a while he tired of the laws and limitations and withdrew to found his own school.”

  “Did he?” She was intrigued, but she was not ready to surrender yet. “Why would he do that?”

  “Have you ever thought that you might not be alone? How many others have come this far only to be turned away? You’re the strongest, and you won the testing, but even you have been shunted aside. Wouldn’t you rather be the chief of riders that you were meant to be?”

  She sighed so deeply her body shuddered. Still she clung to her resistance. “If it’s such a wonder of a place, why have I never heard of it?”

  “It’s not spoken of here,” he said, “as you might imagine. They won’t want you of all people to learn that there’s a place where you’ll be welcome. You’re too strong, and they’re afraid of you. They’re keeping you where they can see you.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but there was no word of it before, either. I listened to all the travelers’ tales. There was never one about Avila.”

  “Olivet,” Euan said. “He was hidden for a long time. For years he was with us. Then he had his own Call to come back to the empire and open a school. That was not so long ago. It’s still new, and with this school suppressing anything that’s said of him, travelers won’t be telling tales yet. In time they will. I don’t have any doubt of that. Maybe some of them will be of you.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  He could feel her withdrawing. There was more he could have said, but he stopped before he lost her. He had tempted her. He should let the temptation sleep now, and let her think.

  He slipped away while she was deep in thought. She made no effort to stop him. He would come back, and she would want him again, and ask him what more he knew.

  He would tell her. Then, the One willing, she would fall into his hand. If the One was especially kind, the stallion would come with her, the young one whose life she had saved.

  That was Olivet’s great failing. He had been driven off the Mountain before he could secure any of the white gods. Now Euan was close to winning one, and the rider to control him. It was an entirely incidental gift of the One that the rider was female and beautiful, and that Euan could not get her out of his head.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Summer was passing. Up on the Mountain, the leaves were beginning to turn. Down in the school, tension was rising. On the day when summer turned to autumn, the chosen of the riders must be in the imperial city with their stallions, prepared to dance before the emperor. It was the greatest of the Great Dances, the dance of the empire’s fate.

  Eight riders would dance the Dance, and eight stallions. Twice that number would ride to Aurelia, attended by servants and guards. Most of those servants would be rider-candidates.

  They were fighting over it in their barracks. Valeria saw them in the mornings, bruised and scowling. One was sent away after he trapped another with magic. He was lucky not to be executed for it.

  Valeria had her own transgressions to atone for, if she should be caught at them. The nights were so full that she spent most of her days drunk on lack of sleep. The stallions taught her how to dream awake, or she would have had to make a choice. She would have had to give up either their teaching or the hours afterward with Euan.

  He came nearly every night to the stallions’ stable. When she was done with her lessons, he was waiting. He taught her his own art of resting without sleep, so that her mind could drift away while her body lay warm and sated.

  She was happy, although she knew perfectly well that it would not last. Euan could not stay. He would finish his year in the School of War, then go off to whatever else the empire had in mind for him. She knew he hoped to go home.

  For now, she could be glad that he was here. He was beautiful and strong, and he devoted himself to pleasing her.

  He had reasons for that, of course. She did not care to know what they were. If he hoped to use her as a spy, he would not g
ain much that he could use. The riders shared no secrets with her. What the stallions shared, he was not born to understand.

  A month before the Great Dance, the riders were ready to go. Valeria had packed and repacked Kerrec’s belongings and the few that were her own until she could count them off in her sleep. Petra would go, that went without saying. He was the strongest of the trained stallions, and Kerrec was his rider.

  The day before they were to leave, a powerful storm came off the Mountain. It lashed the citadel with wind and hail, and drenched it with rain. There was no riding in the outer courts that day, and the riders’ training took itself indoors for a day of books and harness cleaning.

  Valeria went looking for Kerrec at midmorning. He had promised to test her in certain exercises of magic, and she had been waiting for an hour, reading and rereading the same passage in the book of spells that he had given her to study. It was completely unlike him to be late for anything. He never forgot, either. Something must be wrong.

  She called up a small seeker spell and sent it on its way, and followed close behind.

  It did not go far, only to the Master’s study. Valeria knew better than to eavesdrop. That did not stop her from slipping as close to the door as its wards would allow, and sharpening her hearing with a subtle working.

  The prickle in her spine had been right. They were talking about her.

  “You know we can’t leave her behind,” Kerrec was saying. “She’s too dangerous on her own, and no one here is willing or able to deal with her.”

  “One of the riders will look after her if he’s commanded,” said Master Nikos. “The Dance will take most of your strength, and whatever is left, you know your family will want. You can’t let yourself be torn by the need to look after a child.”

  “That child,” Kerrec said, “is the strongest mage of her age and level of training that I have ever seen. Now granted I’m young and haven’t seen all that you have, but tell me the truth. Have you seen anything like her?”

  “Not in my time,” Master Nikos admitted grudgingly. “Even so, this is the most vitally important Dance of your life. It has been a hundred years and more since it was last done. It may not be danced again while you live. It must be done perfectly. The patterns must be flawless. There must be no slip or error, and no wavering. The empire’s stability rests on the execution of this Dance.”

  Kerrec could not have been pleased to be lectured as if he had been a rider-candidate, but his response was quiet. “I do know that. I am ready, and so is my stallion. Nevertheless, my student must come to Aurelia. That is a premonition, Nikos. She must come.”

  Master Nikos was silent for a while. Then he said, “I have a premonition of my own. No good will come of this.”

  “Less good will come of leaving her here,” Kerrec said. “When we reach the city, I’ll take her to my sister. She’ll be safe there while I’m occupied with the Dance.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Surer than I am that either she or this school will be safe if we leave her behind.”

  Master Nikos sighed gustily. “Very well. You know the risks and their cost. There’s nothing more that I can say.”

  “I don’t think you’ll regret it,” Kerrec said, “in the end.”

  “I would hope not,” said Master Nikos.

  One thing Valeria had not been letting herself think about. If she went to Aurelia, she would not see Euan again for months if at all. Like Kerrec, she knew she had to go, but it was not as easy as it might have been.

  Euan was not in the stable when she went there. She was late, but she had been later on other nights. Tonight, if he had come, he had not waited.

  The stallions were unusually quiet. Instead of their usual night’s instruction, they had given her a vision. She saw herself on Sabata’s back, riding a pattern she almost recognized. There were stars underfoot and darkness over her. Everywhere she turned was impenetrable night.

  It was a brief vision. There was nothing overtly frightening in it, and yet she could not get it out of her head. It had something to do with the Dance in Aurelia, but what, the stallions were not telling.

  She needed Euan. She needed his warmth and his solid presence, and the forgetfulness he could give her.

  She knew where he must be, but she could not make herself go there. She had not set foot near the School of War since the brawl in the tavern. Tonight was not the night to face that memory.

  She slipped into Sabata’s stall. He cocked an ear at her but did not lift his head from his manger. She slipped her arms over his broad warm back and pressed her face to his neck, drawing in the warm smell of clean horse. It kept her from bursting into tears. Euan knew that she was leaving in the morning. He could at least have come to say goodbye.

  She left Sabata to his hay. He went with her into the night, riding soft and quiet in the back of her mind.

  Kerrec had been safely asleep when she crept out. He was awake when she came back, sitting in her cupboard of a room with the moon shining through its window, breaking through a wall of cloud. He looked as if he had been there for some time and was ready to stay until morning.

  Then she was almost relieved that Euan had abandoned her on this of all nights. The only scents on her were horse and hay and the sudden squall of rain that had drenched her as she crossed the last courtyard.

  “We’re leaving before dawn,” he said. “That’s the word from the Master. You won’t be sleeping much tonight, if you sleep at all.”

  If she had slept in the stable, she would have been caught there when the grooms came for the horses. Euan had been wise. Had he known? Or had he been prevented from coming?

  “Why?” she asked Kerrec. “Is something wrong?”

  “Probably not,” he said. “The guard’s been doubled. You’ll stay as close to me as my shadow. No wandering off. Do you understand?”

  “Tell me what it is,” Valeria said.

  She held her breath. She was pushing her limits, and she knew it.

  This time he let it go. “It’s nothing the Master can name. A feeling, that’s all.”

  “Can you name it?”

  His brows drew together. He had a surprising beauty by moonlight, like an antique carving.

  That was not a sensible thought. She was still missing Euan. This was a man and young, something she did not often remember, and he was sitting on her bed. She hated his arrogance and his cold distance, but she was in love with the way he moved. Even sitting still, he was perfectly upright, perfectly poised, with a dancer’s balance.

  Her wandering wits had taken her far away from the question she had asked. When he answered it, she almost did not understand what he meant. “I don’t know if it has a name. Something’s waiting on the road. We’d best be prepared for whatever it is.” He paused. “What is it? Do you know something?”

  “No,” she said. She was telling the truth. The vision the stallions had given her had nothing to do with this. It was about the Dance, and that was in Aurelia.

  “Ah,” he said as if it did not matter. “Well. Maybe it’s nothing. An extra company of guards won’t hurt us, and might even be useful. Some of those passes will need every hand we have, to get the mules and horses over.”

  “You’d think the stallions would fly,” Valeria said.

  He surprised her with a sudden smile. “Oh, but that would be too easy. They’ll make us work. It’s our lot in life.”

  She could not help but smile back. On those rare occasions when he showed the lighter side of himself, he was irresistible.

  He stood up. He seemed almost awkward, which was not like him at all. “You’ll want to sleep as much as you can. Be sure to wake at the night bell. I’ve left a thing or two for you in the outer room for the journey.”

  She did not know what to say except, rather weakly, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “Go. Rest. Until morning.”

  He left so quickly she almost thought he was running away. Could i
t be? Was the great rider afraid of a woman in her bedroom at night?

  Sometimes he was almost human. Then he found a way to make her hate him again. He would be his old and unpleasant self in the morning, she was sure. Meanwhile she was thinking of him in ways that would have made Euan furiously jealous.

  “I,” she said to the moon, “am an idiot. What would he want with me? He’s as blind to women as a eunuch priest.”

  The moon might have begged to differ, but Valeria was not listening. She stripped and lay down in her solitary bed. It was not cold, that much she could say for it. It still kept the warmth of Kerrec’s presence.

  She would rather have had a living body in her arms, even if it cost her whatever sleep she might have had. As it was, she slept longer than she had in a month, but when the bell roused her, she felt as if she had not slept at all. Her dreams had been dim and strange. They slipped away even as she woke, but the memory of sadness and the shiver of fear stayed with her.

  She shook it off. The storm had dissipated in the night. The sky was clear, the stars eerily bright. The moon was setting. It would be a fine late-summer day with a taste of early autumn.

  She dressed and hefted her pack and saddlebags. Kerrec’s gifts were waiting outside. The bow was a horseman’s bow, made light for a woman’s hand, but strong. There were two quivers of arrows with it, and a knife almost long enough to be a sword.

  That was a measure of his foreboding, that he went so far as to arm a woman. She slung the bow in its case behind her and belted the short sword around her waist. She was loaded down as she made her way to the market square where the caravan was forming.

  The stallions were waiting in the middle, four times four of them. A few had riders standing by them, but most dozed by themselves with a groom here and there. The rest of the horses were mortal beasts, and the pack train was a long line of mules.

  Petra napped, hipshot, near the end of the line of stallions. Valeria looked around for the sturdy chestnut that she had selected from the common stables yesterday. It would be like the grooms to forget to bring him out, but after a moment she saw him with the rider-candidates’ horses. Most of those were still riderless, which suited her perfectly.