The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  “All you need to do,” said Euan, “is break the pattern. Olivet knows how, even if he no longer has the power to do it. He’ll teach you.”

  “For what? So you can destroy the empire?”

  “Don’t think of it that way,” Euan said. “Think of it as creating a new empire, one where your powers will be acknowledged and respected.”

  “Under barbarian rule.”

  “Would that be so bad?” he asked.

  “I’ve heard about your god,” she said. “He tolerates no rivals. Above all, he tolerates no magic.”

  “Now that’s not true,” said Euan. “Magic is held within strict bounds, yes, but isn’t that what the Mountain does?”

  She shook her head again, harder. “I can’t do it. I can’t betray my people, my nation, my whole world. Even—” Her throat closed. She forced it open. “Even for him.”

  “Very well,” Euan said. He leaned over the rail, but his eyes were still on her. “One word,” he said, “and your rider is dead.”

  She stared at him. He was so much at ease, so sure of himself. He was still smiling, even in the face of her horror as she saw him clearly for the first time.

  She had thought she knew him. She had never mistaken his loyalties, and she had certainly not taken him for a friend to the empire. But she had been so blinded by his big beautiful body and his wild red hair that she had let herself slide past what it meant that he was a prince of the barbarian horde. Worst of all, she had deluded herself into thinking that because he was her lover, he would not use her to get what he wanted.

  He had been using her from the first. She was a weakness, a gap in the pattern. He had used her to widen the gap.

  Now he thought he had her. Kerrec was his weapon.

  There was no way he could know what they had done in that cave. He was not doing this out of jealousy. He was doing it because—why? Because he thought she was slavishly devoted to her teacher? Because he had eyes and she was an idiot, and he had known long before she did that she was in love with Kerrec?

  Kerrec would tell her not to give in. No one man was worth the empire.

  She was not a man. The school had made sure she knew that in every way possible. She was a woman, and she did not think as a man thought. She did not see this as a simple sum, a life for an empire. It was more complicated than that.

  Kerrec would hate her with a true hate, but he would be alive. He would find a way to stop her, or else to stop the barbarians once the Dance was disrupted. If he was dead because she refused Euan’s bargain, none of that could happen. No one would know what Euan was doing.

  She bowed her head. Her sullenness was not feigned, but it also concealed the fact that her eyes had fixed on Kerrec’s face. Let them think they had her, as long as Kerrec lived to fight them. She was expendable, far more than he was. If she was vilified as a traitor, that would not matter to her. She would be dead and he would not.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll take your bargain. On one condition. Help me get Kerrec out of here. Let him go, and never betray him, or by all the gods, I will make you wish you had never been born.”

  “Help you—” Euan laughed in disbelief. “You can have him alive, keep him as a pet, walk him on a leash in the garden—but what makes you think I would possibly let him go?”

  “If you really do need me,” she said, “you will do this. What does he matter, after all, once you have me? His magic’s broken. He’s dead to the empire. He’ll never muster troops or rally the people. He’s no danger to you.”

  Euan eyed her, then the man below. His doubt was like a pressure on her skin. Still, he was male enough and young enough to be cocky. “His magic is really gone?”

  “There’s nothing he can use,” she said. She did not add, “Now.” Magic could mend, if slowly, but Euan had not asked and she was not about to tell him.

  “Eh, well,” Euan said after a while. “He’s barely alive as it is. If we toss him out, he’s not likely to live long.”

  “Give me a day to do what I can for him,” she said. “Then help me get him out.”

  She was pushing her luck and his patience, but not quite to the breaking point. He let out a breath and said, “Well enough. Go with the guard and wait. Tell the servants what you need. He’ll be there as soon as I can get him out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It seemed unbearably long before a pair of Euan’s guards brought Kerrec to Valeria’s room. The servants had brought most of what she needed, including a copper tub and half a dozen tall jars of steaming water. They bathed him as if he were an infant, while he lay helpless, drifting in and out of consciousness.

  It hurt more than she could have imagined to see him like this. She had to stop and pull herself together before she went to work. He was alive, that was what mattered. She would find what was left of his mind once she had done what she could for his body.

  When he was clean, she let the servants lay him in her bed, but she stopped them before they covered him. There were not many new wounds, but they were subtler and more painful. Most were burns in the tender skin of the inner thigh and the webs of the fingers.

  She salved them carefully, hoarding her anger. Anger could feed magic. She would need it if she was going to undo what the torturer had done to his mind.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. He winced in his dream. Everything was pain, his face said, even unconsciousness.

  She had one day. Then she had to send him away.

  It would have to be enough.

  Her mother had taught Valeria some of what she meant to try. The rest was part of the dreams she had had all her life. His magic was broken—shattered. She had to try to make it whole again.

  When she was small she had broken her mother’s greatest treasure. It was a bowl from somewhere so far away that no one knew its name. It was shaped like a flower unfolding, and it shimmered in a shade of green that her father said was only seen in the sea. Strange and elegant fish swam on it in relief, around and around.

  The children were not supposed to touch it. It lived on a shelf above the hearth, where the light caught it but inquisitive fingers could not reach.

  Valeria could not resist it. The more she thought about how she was not supposed to touch it, the more she wanted to hold it in her hands and feel its creamy smoothness.

  One day there was no one in the house. They were all out in the fields or working in the kitchen garden. She was supposed to be pulling weeds in the turnip bed, but her mother had been called away to deliver someone’s baby, and her brother Lucius was more interested in pretending to be a legionary in battle than noticing what his sister was doing.

  She crept into the house and stood looking up at the bowl. Sunlight came in through the small round window in the eaves, catching its green glory slantwise and making it glow in the dim room. It was the most beautiful thing she knew, and the most alluring.

  Valeria had some thought of climbing up the chimney or piling chairs and stools until they were high enough. In the end it was much easier than that. She thought about being up high with her hand on the bowl, and all at once she was. Her stomach was fluttering and her head was dizzy, but she was up in the air, bobbing gently under the rooftree.

  The bowl was just as cool and smooth and wonderful as she had imagined. She took it carefully in both hands, meaning to hold it for a few moments and then put it back.

  As she hovered there, cradling the bowl as if it had been a sleeping bird, something clattered in the yard. It startled her out of her skin.

  She dropped like a stone. The bowl slipped from her hands and shattered on the floor.

  She sprawled close by it. Later she would learn that she had broken her arm. Now she only knew that the bowl was in shards, and so was her life when her mother found out about it.

  She lay on the floor with her body a distant ache, and looked at the shards through a film of tears. They were still beautiful, but all broken. She could mend them, she told herself. She would find a
way.

  Her mother had come home and found her still on the floor. She had tried to get up, lifting herself with the arm that was broken. When the bones ground together, she fell down again. Then she vomited.

  She was a long time healing. While she did that, she set her own punishment, to mend the bowl as best she could. It took even longer than her arm, and it was never quite the same. When it was as whole as it could be, it went back on its shelf. She never touched it again, and she never looked at it. It was painful to remember what it had been, and to see how much less radiant it was now, because of her disobedience.

  All of that was in her mind as she contemplated the shards of Kerrec’s mind and magic. She had a day to start the healing that would have to continue on its own until he reached the Mountain. One advantage at least a man’s mind had over colored clay. Clay could only be glued and riveted together. Flesh and spirit could heal, if there was enough left of them to do it.

  It was a huge task—insurmountable. Step by step, her mother had taught her. First find a beginning, then take that shard and find the one that belonged next to it, and place them side by side. One by one, fragment by fragment.

  There was a pattern to it. That was the essence of Valeria’s magic, to see patterns. Kerrec’s had been a thing of beauty and incomparable complexity. Even broken, it hinted at its original shape.

  The first, essential shard was a white stallion gleaming in darkness. Petra was whole and perfect there as he was in the outer world. He had been waiting for all of time for Valeria to find her way to him.

  She almost fell out of the working in astonishment and relief. Somehow she had thought that because she had sold herself for a man’s life, the stallions would abandon her.

  There was no thought of that in Petra. He was the same as he always was. He invited her to mount.

  In her distraction and confusion, she did not know what it meant until she had accepted the invitation. The joining of his power to hers was like a stroke of sudden lightning. It knocked her flat.

  “Lady.” The voice was dim and far away. “Lady! Wake up!”

  It was Euan’s voice. He was shaking and slapping her, trying to bring her back to life again.

  Petra surrounded her with white brilliance. The mortal world retreated out of reach. She no longer saw the pattern of shards. She had become it.

  The stallion needed her. He could mend the shards, given time, but he was not human or mortal. She knew how the patterns should run.

  He danced the Dance. She shaped its movements.

  It was much broken and interrupted. Connections would not close, or would crumble as soon as they were made. Stray bits of magic sparked into flame, then turned on one another or on the two who tried to heal them.

  Without Petra’s protection, Valeria would have been far out of her depth. Even shattered, Kerrec was strong, and that strength was no longer constrained by discipline. Here was raw power, rebuilding itself almost faster than Valeria could control it.

  It kept wanting to twist, to go dark. She fought harder the stronger he became. She was growing afraid. He was too strong and too broken. She might be raising up a monster.

  That might be exactly what Gothard and the barbarians wanted. A First Rider perverted from the white magic was a terrible, an unthinkable thing. His very existence would disrupt the Dance of creation.

  “Valeria!” Euan was becoming more insistent, and intruding more strongly.

  She clung desperately to Petra. He was struggling even more than Valeria, torn and twisted by the corruption of Kerrec’s magic.

  The stallion’s immortal substance betrayed him. Valeria, bound more securely to earth, had that great bastion to cling to. Petra was too much of the higher realms. The seeds of darkness were drawn to him. If they took root and grew, he would be in worse condition than Kerrec.

  She did the only thing she could think of, which might be disastrous, but doing nothing was worse. She called the renegade magic to herself. She took it into her center, where her own magic was, and bound it to her own patterns.

  She had seen a healer priest do that once. A child had been badly burned on the arms and hands. The priest had taken skin from her back and thighs and bound it to the ruined limbs, where it had taken root and grown.

  It had to be flesh of the same body, the priest had said, or the binding would not hold. The body rejected what did not belong to it, even if in so doing, it destroyed itself.

  Magic must be different. Valeria felt Kerrec’s inside her, but it was not exactly alien. It was as if he had been made to fill her hollow places.

  If he could mend, he would mend there. She swam up from the depths into the plain light of day, and Euan’s terrified face.

  “What in the name of the One were you doing? I thought you were dead!”

  She was not ready for the storm of his anger and worry. She let herself flinch away from it. He softened as much as he ever could, with such a guilty expression that she could hardly even hate him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You scared me.”

  “Never,” she said through gritted teeth, “never hurl a mage out of a working like that. You could have destroyed us both.”

  He hung his head. She caught herself reaching to stroke his hair. “There now,” she said a little more sharply than she meant, “it doesn’t matter. I’ve done as much for him as I can. Have you found men and horses to take him to the Mountain?”

  “They’ll be ready by morning,” Euan said. He peered at her. “Are you really not dead?”

  “Do I sound dead?”

  He snorted. “No, but you look it. You should eat. They say mages need a great deal of provender when they’ve been working magic.”

  “Whoever your ‘they’ might be, they’re not far off the mark,” she said. “I could eat a little. And so should he.”

  Then finally she managed a glance at Kerrec. He did not look dead. He looked exhausted and bruised and deep asleep.

  “I don’t think even he can ride now,” she said. “He’ll need a wagon. Can you find one?”

  “It’s done,” Euan said. “You’re sure you want him to go to the Mountain?”

  “He’ll be safe there. They’ll look after him. And better for your purposes, he’ll be out of the way of the plot in Aurelia.”

  Euan nodded. “That’s sensible enough. When we win, the Mountain will be yours. Then you can do with him what you like.”

  She stared at him. “I thought I was going to Mestre Olivet’s school.”

  “That’s what Olivet wants to think,” Euan said. “He’s not thinking past himself, any more than Gothard is. I’ve lived on the Mountain. I’ve seen what’s there, and I’ve seen you. The Mountain is where the stallions are. You belong there. Think of the things you can do to change it, once the old order is gone.”

  Valeria looked at Euan with new and half-dismayed respect. Of all the temptations he could have offered, that was the strongest. Olivet was a fool who had long since lost his power over the stallions. She had no intention of becoming his pupil. But this was everything she dreamed of. If Euan could really give it to her, if it could really happen—

  She could not let herself think that way, even while she said, “I could rule? I could be the master?”

  “You could be whatever you wanted to be.”

  “That is tempting,” she said honestly. “I would need teachers, but—”

  “It seems to me,” Euan said, “that the stallions have been teaching you a great deal more than any rider has offered to do. I doubt they’ll stop because there’s been a change of regime among mortals. If they were as bound to imperial laws as the riders would like us all to think, you would never have been Called.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “They do have their own reasons for doing things. Maybe this is what they want. The empire has stood for a thousand years. Maybe now is its time to die.”

  “We do believe so,” said Euan. He ventured a liberty, reaching to touch her hand.

  Her first in
stinct was to pull sharply away. A second, wiser impulse held her motionless. She did not want this man, not any longer, or so she insisted to herself.

  Her body stood somewhat less on principle. Her hand turned to weave its fingers in his. He leaned toward her. She had no will to recoil. His kiss began as a brush of the lips, but deepened into passion.

  It was part of the game she had to play for Kerrec’s life. She told herself that. It was terribly easy to give way and melt toward him.

  He lifted her with no effort at all. The bed was occupied, but the rug in front of the hearth was not.

  Just moments ago she had been pure spirit. Now she was pure flesh. The fierce surge of pleasure grounded her firmly to earth. She was truly in herself again.

  Had Euan known what this would do for her? Maybe. Maybe not. In the end it hardly mattered.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Kerrec’s mind was in fragments like a mosaic on a palace wall. Here was gold, here was green, here was blue. There was the red of blood, spreading like a stain over the bright shards.

  He was not sane. He knew that, but he could not make it matter. The walls of training and discipline were broken. He could raise them again, if he lived long enough. If the Brother of Pain did not break him first.

  In his right mind he would never have touched Valeria. There was a price for that, and he was paying it. He knew he had escaped, but also that he had been captured again. He ached in every muscle and bone. His skin was on fire.

  The Brother of Pain had come, but Kerrec could not manage to be afraid. He was too full of longing for Valeria. He wanted her with a hunger that was no saner than the rest of him.

  He was empty of magic. All that was left was his awareness of her, and the brightness far down in the heart of him that had been there since he was Called to the Mountain. That was the mark of the white gods, the sense of their presence that would not leave him until he was dead.