Shattered Dance

by Caitlin Brennan

  Now in summer the tribes found themselves blessed with plenty because there were so few to consume it. But the legions were taking care of that. All along the river and for a week’s march into the hunting runs of every clan and tribe, they were building forts and marking out towns and taxing the tribes to pay for them.

  Taxes were not only paid in hides and furs and fruit of the land. They wanted human bodies, young men and women to till the fields and join the legions, and older folk to labor in the towns and build the forts. If those were not given willingly, the soldiers took them.

  They had not come as far as Dun Mor. Rumor had it that an embassy was coming to greet the new high king, but there was as yet no sign of it.

  Euan had gone on this hunt in part to elude the embassy if it came. He had set up his hunting camp in a valley that had held many a war camp in the days when the people could afford to indulge in such things.

  Strictly by coincidence, of course, various of the more distant clans had happened by for a night or a handful of days or a fortnight. They were not plotting a new war, not so soon after the last one, but they were making themselves known to the Ard Ri and coming to know him in turn.

  They all told the same story of famine and death, loss and sorrow. Some clans were gone. Others were so broken that they had joined with others to survive. They were even talking of going to the legions and giving themselves up, becoming citizens in return for houses to live in and bread to eat.

  That was the empire’s way. First it conquered with steel and magic, then it corrupted the hearts and minds of the people it had defeated. It took away their spirits and transformed them into imperial citizens, slaves to their multitude of gods and their armies of mages.

  This was his predecessor’s doing. Euan had the dregs and remnants and a legacy of bitterness that he could use to his advantage. He could turn the empire against itself. Gothard was part of that legacy, with his imperial blood and his potent magic.

  The sorcerer had not been trying hard enough. His instrument had left Briana alive, though it was like him to prefer suffering to a clean death. In that he was a better son of the One than Euan, who would rather get rid of the obstacle and move on. Gothard liked to toy with his prey, even if it cost him the victory.

  This time he would not do that. The tribes had lost enough. The empire would pay—and Gothard might dream of ruling it, but that would not last long. Gothard had never been meant to be emperor.

  Euan stood straight under the tumbled sky. A storm was brewing, appropriately enough. The wind tugged at the long plait of his hair and tried to unwrap the plaid from around his body. He tucked it in tightly and strode away from the huddle of priests’ huts.

  The camp proper filled the valley of a narrow river, down below the hilltop on which the huts were perched. Euan let the slope of the hill carry him down into it. He was almost running as he reached the bottom, loping long-legged through the outlying tents. Most of the men who lived in them were still sleeping off the night’s excesses, but those who had drawn sentry duty were at their posts, awake and sober.

  That was a change Euan had made, and he had enforced it. After a laggard or two endured a long and exquisitely painful night with the priests, the rest had seen the virtue in keeping close watch on all the ways in and out of the camp.

  All was quiet, this morning’s guards said. A young boar had blundered in among the Imbri, but he had killed no one and wounded only a few. Euan found him turning on a spit over a clan chieftain’s fire.

  His flesh had a sweet taste. The creature must have been feeding on the succulent roots that grew along the river. A dozen of those had been roasting in the same fire. They made a fine accompaniment to the boar’s meat.

  Euan’s hosts were honored to have the high king at their fire. Euan was careful to eat not so much that anyone in the clan went hungry but not so little that he seemed to spurn their hospitality. He downed a cup of their mead, too, and listened to the inevitable ode to the beauty of the chieftain’s daughters—any three of whom, their father declared, would be worthy mothers of royal heirs.

  When at last they would let him go, Euan went on his way, replete but not content. He had been studying patience. It might be years until Aurelia was in his hands, this latest game of Gothard’s notwithstanding. Today he could not seem to be still.

  He should take the high seat and set about being king. But as he turned rather desultorily toward the council circle, he was waylaid by a small whirlwind. He laughed and caught it and spun it completely around.

  His son whooped with delight. But when Euan stopped and set him on his feet, he looked up with an unexpectedly somber expression.

  Euan’s grin died. “What is it?” he asked.

  Conor’s frown mirrored his father’s. “They’re coming,” he said.

  Euan suppressed a sigh. The child was given to such utterances. He should get a thrashing for them, because they were not fitting for a warrior and a king’s son, but Euan was too soft-hearted. “Who is coming?”

  Conor’s eyes narrowed. He was not looking at Euan, not by then. He could see through things—very far, sometimes.

  That too should not be permitted. Children who showed such signs were given to the priests to be killed or made one of them.

  Euan could not endure the thought of either. This was his heir, the son whom he had lifted up in front of the people. He would be king when Euan had had enough of it.

  “Listen to me,” Euan said. “Whatever you see, don’t tell anyone but me.”

  “I know,” said Conor. “I remember. They can see, you know. They don’t need to hide it.”

  “What, priests?”

  Conor shook his head sharply. “Priests are full of emptiness. These are full of everything. They’re coming here. They’ll be with us after you run down the spotted stag.”

  “You’re not making sense, boy,” Euan said.

  “I will when you see them,” said Conor.

  Sometimes Euan wondered if his offspring was touched in the head. But Conor’s eyes were clear and full of intelligence. He was in all respects a proper son of the tribes, and would be a strong fighting man when he was old enough.

  Euan cuffed the boy lightly, more love-pat than blow, and said, “Don’t tell anyone else what you’ve told me. Let them be surprised.”

  Conor nodded. He grinned when Euan swung him up onto a broad shoulder, and whooped like any other child. Please the One, there would be no more cryptic utterances today or for a good many days to come.

  As for what this one meant, Euan refused to wonder. It would happen when it happened.

  His only prayer was that Conor would remember his father’s warnings and keep his visions to himself. He always had. Pray the One he always would.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Valeria had been on the road four days before she realized that part of the caravan was not exactly like the rest. The armed men who she thought had been Master Pretorius’ escorts were in fact escorting a handful of prisoners.

  They were not visibly manacled. The chains of magic on them were masterfully subtle—Master Pretorius’ doing, which she could not mistake once she woke to its existence. They were dressed plainly and mounted on undistinguished horses. When they ate, they ate together, sharing the same bread and cheese and occasional scrap of meat or fruit as the rest of the caravan. No one in this riding traveled in state, least of all Master Pretorius.

  She might not have noticed the prisoners even as quickly as she did if one of them had not tried to escape. It was late in the day and a storm had caught the caravan, lashing it with wind and sudden torrents of rain. They were on the open road with no shelter within reach, and nothing around them but fields of ripening barley.

  They stopped to wait out the storm, sheltering as best they could under cloaks or beneath the carts or even the horses’ bellies. One enterprising soul thought to retrieve his tent and pitch it in a lull between squalls, but before anyone else could follow his example, a blast of
wind ripped the canvas out of his hands. Hard upon it, lightning struck the pole he had raised, blasting it to shards and hurling him headlong into the side of a cart.

  In the tumult that followed, the prisoner made a run for it. He almost succeeded—but he had reckoned without the pair of grey cobs that ran loose with the remounts. Oda and Marina between them ran him down and herded him within reach of Sabata’s teeth.

  He was mad or desperate if he had thought he could succeed in this open country, with a withered leg. Valeria knew him by that and by the resemblance to his brother Maurus. Maurus’ features were finer, but they had the same shape to the face and the same angle to the shoulders.

  The rain passed as suddenly as it had come. The man who had been struck by lightning would live, though not with the caravan. They left him in the Healers’ temple in the town beyond the fields.

  Bellinus went back to his fellow prisoners with even stronger bonds on him and actual, physical chains to make sure he stayed where he belonged. It seemed he understood now what the three stallions were—he watched them constantly with an expression that made Valeria’s shoulders tighten.

  It was two days and another storm before Valeria could catch Pretorius alone. She was sure that was deliberate. But she was wise to mages’ ways.

  She let the patterns fall together toward evening. Tonight they lodged in a caravanserai that had been built when this part of the empire was still the frontier.

  Its walls were three man-lengths thick. A moat had surrounded it once. The deep trench was a garden now, growing beans and corn for the kitchens, and apples and pears and plums in orchards around the edge.

  Master Pretorius took the air in the evening on top of the wall, looking down on rows of carefully pruned trees. Valeria could tell that he had been waiting for her.

  Her temper flared and then died. She neither liked nor trusted this man, but she had agreed to throw in her lot with him. The least she could do was treat him civilly. “Tell me,” she said, “what milord Bellinus and his associates are doing in this caravan.”

  Pretorius spared her the annoyance of pretending not to know what she meant. “We’re taking them where they think they want to go,” he said.

  “To the tribes? Have you lost your mind?”

  “Possibly,” Pretorius said. “Can you think of a more appropriate penalty?”

  “I can think of several,” she said, “none of which takes the risk of their turning the tribes against us once they’ve been handed over.”

  “The tribes have always been against us,” Pretorius said.

  Valeria bared her teeth at him.

  He smiled back. “Yonder fools think they want to worship the god of the tribes. We’ll give them their wish.”

  “You’ll give them over to pain,” Valeria said. “Who consented to this? Not Briana, surely. This isn’t like her.”

  “Her majesty has more pressing matters to occupy her,” Pretorius said. “This was her brother’s doing.”

  Valeria stiffened. “Kerrec? He’d no more do it than she would.”

  Pretorius shrugged, an eloquent lift of one shoulder. “Nevertheless, the order comes from him.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Valeria said, but even while she spoke, she felt her certainty wavering.

  Kerrec was a quiet man, a tender lover, gentle with those he loved, but he had a core of edged steel. Once she had seen it bare, when a young nobleman would have raped her on her way to the Mountain. Kerrec had appeared out of nowhere and struck the man down—then gelded him and flung the remnants to the crows.

  That cold ferocity, that merciless justice, could all too easily sentence a pack of traitors to the torments of the One God. Kerrec would know no guilt, either. When he was sure that he was right, nothing could shake him. In that he was altogether an emperor’s son.

  She missed him suddenly, terribly, even as she recognized the darkness in him. There was worse in her, much worse, and it was trying ever more persistently to wake.

  She could turn back. Nothing would stop her, even the stallions. She could make herself share him. Other women had done it. Surely she could, too.

  His face was as clear behind her eyes as if he stood in front of her. The smell of him, the taste of his lips, the feel of his skin, struck so sharp and so close to the heart that she caught her breath.

  She met Pretorius’ calm dark eyes. Deep within them she saw a room. It was dim and lamplit, rich with silken draperies. Its chief furnishing, dominating all the rest, was an enormous and sumptuously carved bed.

  There was room enough on that gold-and-crimson coverlet for half a regiment. Two figures lay twined in the center. One was wrapped in a white robe so finely woven as to be transparent. The other was unabashedly naked.

  His brown hand traced the shape of her ivory face. She was exquisite, of course. Princesses in Elladis were bred like fine horses, and this was a triumph of that breeding.

  He was no less well bred and no less beautiful. He bathed her body in kisses until she purred like a cat.

  He smiled with tenderness that was bitterly, painfully familiar. He murmured in her ear—words of love, it seemed. In this vision Valeria could only see, not hear.

  Her heart went cold. Deep within it, the Unmaking raised its formless head. She spun away.

  If it had been simple courtesy, a dance of duty, she could have made herself bear it. This was more than duty. Maybe it was not the love she had shared with him, but it was close enough. He was not suffering for this sacrifice that he had made.

  She clenched her fists on the parapet. By the gods, she would not suffer, either. She would do what she had to do—just as he did. If she happened to enjoy it, so much the better.

  Pretorius’ satisfaction was distinct behind her. Of course this served his purpose, whatever that truly was.

  She let Pretorius think he had won the game. She trusted him even less now than she had when she first met him, but the stallions would protect her. They had their purpose, too, even more incalculable than his. The time would come when Valeria knew all of it—and then she would do as she thought best.

  That was probably blasphemous. She was hard put to care.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was a full ten days before Kerrec understood not only that Valeria was gone but where. He had brought that ignorance on himself, first because he could not escape the festive duties of a royal wedding, and then because his injured pride would not let him go looking for her.

  When he came to Riders’ Hall after the wedding and saw that she and her stallions were no longer in the city, he thought she had gone back to the Mountain. That hurt, but he could hardly quarrel with it. Gods knew she would be safer there from whatever was coming.

  Something most certainly was coming. Kerrec felt it in the earth. Patterns were changing, and not for the better. The empire braced as if for a monstrous storm.

  Theodosia dreamed of it. Every night she woke pale and shaking.

  The first night, the wedding night, began in exquisite discomfort. The day had been endless, with wedding and Dance and feast thereafter. Nothing disrupted the Dance, but the patterns it revealed were dark and confused.

  The Augurs could not read them. It was as if, they said, there was no future. The world went on for a little while in no particular order, then simply stopped.

  They would not admit to fear, but the recording Augur’s hand shook as he wrote in the scroll of the Dance. There had never been a foretelling like this before, although the omens had been leading to it since the broken Dance.

  Kerrec was already unsettled in his mind. The Dance and its auguries only made it worse. The feast struck him as a garish spectacle, an excruciating ordeal of stares and whispers and none-too-subtle intrigue.

  He could not eat and dared not drink. He feigned to do both. Theodosia at least was in some comfort—the noble bride attended her own feast with her ladies and the ladies of the court.

  With the coming of evening, both feasts ended with the
bride and the bridegroom carried off to be ceremonially bathed and robed and conducted to the wedding chamber. Kerrec felt his face go stiff at the ribald jests and bawdy songs. He was a frightful stick as the younger riders would say, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  The bath was not as bad as he had feared. The servants were respectful if inclined toward significant glances and slantwise smiles. The robe he was given was both simple and modest, without bawdry or extravagance.

  For the wedding and for as long after that as it suited both of them, Briana had given them the old queen’s wing of the palace. Theodosia had settled into it with the retinue and estate of a princess.

  This was Kerrec’s first sight of it under its new ruler. The rooms were clean and freshly appointed, and the furnishings were clearly to Theodosia’s taste.

  He found them more or less pleasing, as luxury went. Theodosia preferred elegance to opulence. The colors were subtle and rich, the furnishings often understated as such things went.

  The bedchamber was a notable exception. It seemed half as wide as a riding court, and the bed in it could have held a quadrille. Theodosia sat upright in that broad expanse of silk and linen, wrapped in layers of shimmering silk. Her veils were gone, her face bare and set as if she waited for a war and not her wedding night.

  One mercy they were granted. The wedding crowd did not follow Kerrec in and set up camp around the bed, roaring and singing while the groom did his poor best to deflower the bride. Some of them roistered without, but the room was large and the door thick. Kerrec could hardly hear the clamor.

  He bolted the door behind him, then made sure every other door was also bolted and the windows locked, with wards laid upon them all. That took very little time by the turning of the stars. When he finished, Theodosia was still sitting where he had found her, watching him with grave attention.

  Even here she was exquisitely coifed and gowned, with a shimmer of paint on her cheeks and eyelids. Kerrec would be a fool to compare her to Valeria, who had never worn paint in her life and whose hair was left to fend for itself. Sometimes she took it into her head to visit the barber and get it cut boy-short, but mostly she let it be.