Maybe it was not Gothard after all who had broken him all over again. Maybe the Healer was right and the Mountain itself had blindly undone the alien spell—and Kerrec had seen and heard it as the voice he hated most in the world. Now, as the Mountain retreated behind him, so did the sickness that had gripped him for so long.
He was not healing, but he was not disintegrating, either. Parts of him were waking with pain that made him think of a frozen limb coming to life.
There was no particular order to it, no pattern he could shape to the purpose. That frustrated him—and maybe it was a good thing. He was beginning to see patterns again, if not to be able to shape them.
Every night on that road, a courier would come with dispatches for the regent. Briana stayed awake by lamplight, night after night. During the day, unless it rained, she often had a dispatch in her hand, reading it while the Lady made her agile way up and down the steep tracks.
It was a little eerie to watch them. The eye saw a rather pretty but also rather stocky bay mare carrying a rider of ambiguous gender and evident scholarship, whereas the mind knew that they were a being above gods and a woman who would, in the fullness of time, rule the empire. The outer appearance barely even hinted at the truth.
Did the Master know that one of the Ladies had left the Mountain for the first time in a thousand years? Did he understand what it signified?
Kerrec was not sure he did, either, but that it was significant, he was absolutely certain. It was yet another sign that the world—like Kerrec—was no longer what it had been.
If Kerrec had been one of his own students, he would have upbraided himself for wallowing. He was prone to that, he had to admit.
On the fourth evening after he left the school, a summer storm had blown away with winds and lightning, leaving a sharp chill behind. Their camp was in a sheltered place, a grove of trees that grew thick and tall. Long after the rest, even Briana, had gone to bed, Kerrec sat sleepless by the fire.
The horses were quiet. The pair of guards whose turn it was to stand watch were settled on an outcropping of rock, all but invisible in fitful starlight. Now and then lightning flashed away to the east.
Kerrec clasped his knees and rocked, resting his eyes on the dance of flames. The patterns there were as nearly random as anything could be, and yet, like all patterns, they had meaning for those who could see. He could, almost. It was tantalizing how close he was to making sense of them.
By now the rising of frustration was all too familiar. He breathed deep and tried to smooth it away. He was not successful, but the effort made him feel a little better.
Petra left the horselines, trailing an inexplicably loosened lead. A darker shadow followed—the Lady, also free of her tether. They settled on either side of him, sighing and groaning and lying in the soft leaf mold.
Kerrec, not quite trapped between them, went briefly, perfectly still. He would expect this of Petra, but the Lady had not come to him before. As far as he had ever known, she was barely aware of him except as yet another fool of a male.
Her eye rolled toward him. Flames reflected in it, flickering gold and red against liquid darkness. Their dance had the same sinuous, interwoven shape as the stallions’ Dance.
His hands were cold. His breath came hard. The voice in his head was trying to come back, mocking his weakness and foolishness and insufferable stupidity.
The Lady’s teeth snapped just in front of his face. The voice stopped abruptly. Kerrec was alone inside himself, except for the deep quiet of Petra’s presence. That had always been there, even when he was altogether broken.
He lay back against the stallion’s solid and breathing warmth. The Lady lipped his foot but did not nip it. Her neck angled just so. He rubbed it with toe and heel, slowly. She leaned into it, whickering with pleasure.
He relaxed slowly. He was safe between them, warm and protected. And yet, as he rested against Petra and worked his toes into the Lady’s neck and shoulder, his eyes kept coming back to the fire.
The patterns were no clearer, but his mind was less foggy than it had been in a long while. He had been drowning in confusion and self-pity—as if his broken magic was all that he was, and without it he had nothing worth keeping.
Passivity. That was the word for it. Always giving way. Never acting, always being acted upon. Dancing the Dance, following its patterns, but never living them.
If that was a vice, then every rider suffered from it. They studied their magic, trained their stallions, and rode the Dance in season. They never did anything. When the world crashed in upon them, they had no inkling as to how to face it. All they knew was how to be carried through patterns they seldom shaped—and then only at the emperor’s will.
No wonder Gothard had captured Kerrec so easily and broken him so completely. Kerrec had let him. Even Kerrec’s healing had come from outside, a spell laid in him to do its work apart from his will. He had done nothing to heal himself.
He was a weak and spineless fool. A man with a backbone would have stayed out of the Dance. For that matter he would have done something, anything, long before that, to drive out the thing in his head and force his mind and magic to heal. Even if he had failed, he would at least have tried.
It was not the Mountain’s fault he had fallen to pieces. It was not Gothard’s fault, either—not at the heart of things. Gothard could not have attacked him if he had not been open to it.
Magic needed two forces—a mage to perform the working and a thing or animal or human to be worked upon. Will could be broken and volition destroyed, but Kerrec had been—was—a master mage. He should have stood up to it.
He should stand up to it now. Here he was, yet again, being carried off in a direction not his own. Gothard’s voice or spell or whatever it was was still there, eating away at him. Maybe the Mountain made it easier for a stone mage to work his petty evil, but Kerrec would not be any more or less strong in Aurelia than he had been in the school. If Kerrec was a weakling, then that was true wherever he was.
He sat up between the Lady and Petra, fists clenched, glaring at the fire. He was not going to be weak. Not any more.
By the gods, he would find a spine. And then…
The fire flared in a sudden gust. Sparks flew. There was darkness behind them—absolute emptiness. Except for one thing. Gothard was there, with a stone in his hand.
It was a plain stone, lumpish and rather ugly, but it had such weight that Kerrec could feel it in his own hands, dragging him down. He fought it—yes, at last, he did.
It was reaching, working, acting upon a confusion of shapes and images. Armies marching, men in armor with swords and lances and short strong bows, men naked and painted and whirling axes about their heads, screaming soundlessly in the crackling of the flames. He saw his sister sitting on a throne that crumbled beneath her, and his father on a barren hill, looking up without fear into a maw of absolute blackness. He saw blood and slaughter. He saw it all whirl away into the void, absolutely and forever Unmade.
That was the pattern of the Dance he had almost broken. The Augurs had not seen it. But the stallions knew. The Lady knew.
And now Kerrec knew. What he would do with the knowledge, he was already sure of. But he could not do it now, however tempted he was to throw saddle on Petra’s back and bolt for the border. He had to put himself together first, mind and body, and find the heart of his magic. He could only pray that he could do it soon enough to stop the thing that was coming.
Twenty-Two
Valeria waited three days before she made her escape. If anyone was expecting her to run, he would be watching for it sooner than that. Therefore she gritted her teeth and hung on.
There were plenty of distractions. The Lady had gone with Briana. That did not surprise Valeria at all, but it seemed to take the riders completely aback.
Ladies never left the Mountain. That was an article of dogma so dearly held that some of the older riders seemed unable to accept any evidence to the contrary. They insisted wit
h religious fervor that she must have returned to the high pastures or else passed out of the body. Never mind that several people, including Valeria, had seen her trot out of the gate with Briana on her back.
Fortunately for their sanity, one tradition at least remained intact. Two days after the princess regent left, the young stallions came in at last. There was no Great One among them, though there were a good number with both breeding and talent. None of them tempted Valeria to take him for training, even if she had had the rank to do it.
Even the young ones were showing her the way. In the night after their coming, while the riders slept off the wine of a belated celebration, she found Sabata waiting impatiently in his stall. The gates had no mortal guards, and the wards that were on them were no obstacle to a Great One.
It would be a while—two or three days at least—before anyone realized Valeria was gone. She had found a spell in the library when she was supposed to be searching for something much more elementary, a trick of memory like the shifting of patterns that Sabata had wielded against Master Nikos. Everyone would think she was somewhere else, with someone else, or imagine that he had seen her passing by just a moment before.
The illusion would not last. Eventually she would be expected for something too solid to elude—then someone, probably a servant, would notice that her bed had not been slept in.
By then she would hope that the Master would throw up his hands and let her go. He might even be relieved. Valeria was an endless reproach to the riders’ existence.
Meanwhile she let Sabata find the road to Aurelia. It was a slow passage, because they both had to forage for food, but she was not in a great hurry. Kerrec would be settled in the city when she got there. If she dallied long enough, he might even be glad, or at least not too icily furious, to see her.
The truth of it was, she was enjoying the taste of freedom. There was joy in long days with nothing to do but ride and hunt, with no human to trouble her and no duties to disturb her peace.
Sabata was the best company she could ask for. He swung along the forest tracks and down the mountainsides, snorting happily to himself. When he stopped to graze, she slipped off to find whatever a human could eat. She came back with herbs, often, and wild roots, and fish from one of the rivers or streams, or rabbits or birds if she had time to set a snare.
She was almost sorry one day after she had lost count of the sunrises, to see the trees thinning and the land flattening, rolling down to the inner plains of Aurelia. Roads were more frequent here, with traffic on them. Towns stood on promontories or alongside rivers or at crossroads.
She avoided the towns for a while, feeling oddly shy and wild, but after a day or two she shook herself into some sort of sense. If these outland villages were too much for her, the city of Aurelia would send her screaming back into the woods.
She started small, with a village of farmers and woodsmen, where there was a tiny garrison of imperial soldiers and an inn that mostly catered to them. There was magic in the town, the subtle shimmer of a wisewoman’s workings. Valeria could see their effects in the number of healthy children and the general cleanliness of the place. Except for the garrison, it reminded her of Imbria where she was born.
She surprised herself with a stab of homesickness. On the Mountain she might dream of her family, but when she was awake she never for a moment regretted leaving it. She was a rider. That was all she had ever wanted to be. She was never meant to be a village wisewoman like her mother.
And yet here in this village of wooden houses and plain people, she remembered what home had been like before it meant stone halls and white stallions. The inn was anything but luxurious, but it was clean. Its keeper took Valeria for a young man and her stallion for an ordinary grey cob, and told her what she was doing there.
“Courier for the legion, are you?” he said. “Not many of those riding through here these days. Most of the action’s gone east to the frontier.”
He sounded a touch nostalgic. “Which legion was yours?” she asked him.
“Third Antonia,” he said, straightening his thickened body into the sketch of a legionary’s salute. “Centurion of the fifth cohort Marcus Mezentius at your service, sir.”
It seemed her rider-candidate’s uniform was close enough to a courier’s to pass his expert muster. That could be useful. She dipped her head to him, offering the respect he deserved.
He was a fount of gossip, thanks to the garrison and a decent number of travelers between the mountains and the plain. Over venison pasties and dark ale, she heard tales from all over the north, and some even from the war—how the emperor was harrying the barbarians and they were harrying him, but neither side had as yet committed to an open battle.
There were rumors from the Mountain, too. “Some say another woman was Called,” he said, “and some say it was the princess regent, though if that’s the case, what was she doing all the way out there instead of staying in the royal city where she belongs? Me, I think there’s more song than sense coming out of that place. What’s so magical about riding a horse? Can you tell me that?”
Valeria could, given several days and a club for persuasion, but she shrugged and held her tongue.
“Look at you, now,” Mezentius said. “I saw you ride in as pretty as you please. What are they doing that you can’t?”
“Not much,” Valeria said, and that was the truth, more or less. “So—do you think the emperor should close the school?”
“I think there’s too much mystery-mongering and too little sense. Now if there was a rider or two and some of their fancy horses in every town, connected to the garrisons, maybe, wouldn’t that be a good thing? The nobles’ sons could learn to ride and the recruits could learn to fight on horseback, and we’d have extra defenses if we needed them. What good are they, after all, all walled in a hundred miles from anywhere?”
“They’re master mages, aren’t they?” one of the people in the common room said. He was local by the accent, dressed like a farmer who had done well for himself. “Maybe they need seclusion to work their magic.”
“If that’s true,” said Mezentius, “why do they do their Dances with as big an audience as they can get, and Augurs and nobles and princes and all? Can’t they do all that in a city like the other orders? Even Beastmasters have their master house in Aurelia. You’d think they’d be the ones living on a mountain.”
“Horses need pasture,” the farmer pointed out. “That’s not easy to find in a city.”
“There’s plenty of room on the plains,” Mezentius said. “Plenty better pasture, too, than what you find up in the mountains. You don’t see the aristos running their herds up there. They’re all down in the lowlands where the forage is better.”
“Harsh land makes strong stock,” Valeria said. “Have you ever seen the white gods?”
Mezentius shook his head. But the farmer said, “I did once. My wife’s brother was Called. We went up for the testing. They’re not what you’d expect at all. You look at them standing still, you think you’d have them pulling your wagon to market. But then they move.” He shook his head and sighed. “I never saw anything like it. They’re as solid as mud—then they turn to light and fire.”
“Magic,” Mezentius said.
Valeria wondered what he would think if he knew the sturdy dappled-grey cob in his own stable was one of the gods he dismissed so easily. She was only mildly tempted to enlighten him. It was more enlightening for her to hear what he had to say and ponder all the sides of it.
Maybe this was part of what the school had to become. Isolation had protected it for a long time—but as any soldier knew, the more power was concentrated in a single place, the easier it was to make it a target and destroy it.
She had much to think about that night and when she rode out in the morning. Mezentius tried to refuse the coin she offered him. “I’ll put in with the garrison,” he said.
It would have been easy to give way—but she was not a courier, and she could pay. She
had her rider-candidate’s pittance, which usually went to peddlers or alehouses, but she had seldom touched hers. She had a year’s worth. She was richer than she had ever been in her life.
Just when she was ready to tell this stubborn innkeeper exactly who and what she was, he took her silver penny. He gave her a blessing, too, and wished her a good journey. Then he slapped Sabata on the rump to send him on his way.
He never knew how close he came to having his skull kicked in. Sabata was not used to living like a mortal horse.
He would have to learn. He hunched his back and flattened his ears, but he refrained from bucking. That showed great restraint on his part.
She slapped his neck, which he did not object to. She was allowed the occasional insolence. He settled to a more acceptable pace, with one last, irritable headshake at the human creature who had taken such liberties with his celestial self.
Twenty-Three
Kerrec refused to live in the imperial palace. “I’ll live in Riders’ Hall,” he said. “It’s there, it’s suitable, and it deserves to be used for more than a few days every hundred years.”
He was braced for a fight, but Briana nodded. “That makes sense. I’ll send people ahead to get it ready for you.”
They were eight days out from the Mountain and a short day’s journey outside of Aurelia, resting for the night in one of the royal summer houses. It perched on a promontory above the river gorge, looking out over the plain to the city and the sea.
Kerrec could have lived here, high above everything, but there was no time for that now. He had to get to the city. There were things there that he needed.
The nights, here at the height of summer, were short, and dusk seemed to last forever. He sat on the terrace with Briana in the long twilight, sipping iced wine and watching the stars come out. “I do mean to do it,” he said. “Not just pretend to be an envoy, to keep us all from being shamed. I’ll make myself useful.”
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