“I should hope to give you more than that,” said Kerrec.
She gave him back his hand. “You have been the very soul of consideration,” she said. “You don’t need to try so hard. Be the friend you want to be and not the husband you’re not truly suited for.”
Kerrec stiffened, but he smiled. “I feel properly rebuked,” he said.
She patted his shoulder as a friend would. “You have a kind heart,” she said. “Go now, you look exhausted. Come back when you’re rested and your mind is at ease. Until then, if I can help you, call on me. Whatever I can do, I will.”
Kerrec drew breath to say that there was one thing—that she could delve into her dreams and find the priest.
But she was carrying his child. It was no more than the tiniest spark as yet, so fragile that a breath could blow it out. There were Oneiromancers of great power and skill, masters of their art, dreaming dreams at the empress’ command. Theodosia’s task was subtler and much more important.
He leaned forward and kissed her brow. “I know that,” he said, “and I will. Rest well, my lady.”
Her smile stayed with him as he left the palace and returned to Riders’ Hall. There might have been a hint of sadness in it.
He told himself he was imagining things. She had been telling the truth. She was happier than she had ever expected to be. She thanked the gods for giving her such a marriage to such a husband.
Now she was with child. He was glad, but not as glad as she was. She shimmered with joy.
No happiness was perfect. He of all people should know that.
He would sleep tonight, he thought. The nightmares would not be so very bad.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The world was spinning faster than Valeria could run. After she spoke with Pretorius on the wall of Dun Mor, she went down to the kitchens and ate as much as she knew was advisable. She drank rather more than that.
Then she found Euan Rohe among the hunting dogs, judging the worth of a pack of half-grown puppies. His glance when he saw her made her skin shiver. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will do it.”
He waded through dogs and clansmen—none of whom she had noticed until that moment—and swept her up and spun her completely around, baying like one of the hounds. By the time he set her down, her ears were ringing.
He was dizzy with gladness. She did not know what she felt. Dizziness, yes, but it could be shock—or desperation.
This must be what Kerrec had felt when he agreed to marry for the empire’s sake. Except that he did not love the woman and barely knew her.
The sickness in Valeria’s belly and the coldness in her heart came near to breaking her. No matter what choices she made or what happiness she found for herself, she would always mourn what could not be.
She had to put it aside, bury it deep and teach herself to forget. That was a dream. This was the life she had to live. It was a good life, a useful life, with a man she knew and loved.
Valeria had no illusions that Euan Rohe would soften toward Aurelia for her sake. Yet he might change how he waged the war—and for certain they could make a marriage.
It would be a wild ride, more like war sometimes than love. With Euan clasping her so tight she could barely move and with his jubilation blazing around her, she caught the fire of it herself.
This could be glorious. It could also be a disaster.
She shut her ears to that small voice. When Euan bent his head to kiss her, she reached up, hungry for the taste of him.
Then the headlong gallop began. There were clans to summon, feasts to prepare, celebrations to be part of.
That Valeria was a foreigner seemed to matter little. Men took wives outside their clans—far outside them sometimes. Their rites were aimed at welcoming a stranger to the tribe.
When that stranger was the high king’s chosen, the whole nation gathered to greet her. But because women of rank did not speak in public or show their faces outside of their own quarters except for the ritual itself, when for the first and last time all the people looked on their queen, Valeria was not asked to prepare her own wedding. That was left to the high king’s mother, who presided over a world of which Valeria had hardly been aware.
A good half of the dun belonged to her and the rest of the women and the children—girls of all ages and boys up to five or six summers. Boys older than that went to the men’s side. Girls and women lived on the women’s side from birth until they died. They only left it to be sent to other clans in marriage.
Within an hour of making her choice, Valeria stood in a hall as large and high as the men’s hall but much more interesting to her eyes. Its beams were carved and gilded and its stone walls were softened with embroidered hangings. Instead of rushes strewn on the floor for the dogs to piddle in, woven mats kept the paving warm and clean.
The hall was full of tall fair women in gowns of grey-green and saffron and gold, misty blue and violet and the browns of peat or walnuts or the pale nut of the beech. Even the children were as tall as Valeria or nearly so. She saw a brown head here and there, and one or two were not quite as tall as the rest, but she was the only little dark person in that assemblage.
One of the tallest came toward her with the grace of a queen. Her hair was more red than gold, and her eyes were amber. She looked strikingly like Euan Rohe.
Valeria wondered if she should bow. A rider did not, and that she still was. She settled for the tilt of the head that signified high respect.
The queen responded in kind. Her gaze was level, measuring Valeria minutely. Valeria could not tell if she approved.
What Valeria could tell was that Euan’s son came by his magic honestly. The queen was a mage. Her power was a banked fire, but it was strong. Even more than Euan, she was a part of this earth, bound to the land.
Euan lived on it. His mother lived in it. She was the earth’s child.
In Aurelia she would have been a wisewoman. Here she was a queen.
At length she nodded as if she had asked a question and received an answer. “Rider,” she said in barely accented Aurelian. “My name is Murna.”
“Valeria,” said Valeria.
“For the legion, yes,” said Murna. “I’m to make you welcome and teach you what you need to know. The rest will help. I understand you speak our language?”
“A little,” Valeria said in that language.
“Good,” said Murna, still in Aurelian. “You will learn more. But first there is a ritual. Please indulge it, and trust us. We mean you no harm.”
That roused a spark of apprehension, but Valeria did not let it show on her face. “Of course, lady,” she said. But as women came forward to take her in hand, she dug in her heels. “One thing we must all understand. I remain a rider. My horses, my freedom—I keep those. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly so,” said Murna as the women surrounded Valeria.
They carried her off with much chattering and laughter, remarking freely on the cut and color of her clothes and hair and cooing over her skin. “Like cream,” one said.
Her own was milk, which was hardly to be sneered at, either. Valeria resisted the urge to fight her way out of the crowd, even as they started to undress her.
When she was naked, too shocked to be ashamed, the crowd opened to reveal a silver cauldron steaming on a hearth. Before she could ask if they meant to cook and eat her, they lifted her into water perfectly balanced between warm and hot. A dozen hands bathed her with sponges and handfuls of herbs that foamed over her skin and hair and filled her nose with fragrance. Then they coaxed her down into the cauldron.
The water came to her chin. In spite of herself, her whole body let go its tension, pouring it out in the scent of herbs and sweet blossoms. She hardly needed urging to duck beneath the surface and wash the foam out of her hair.
They raised her up with her skin all rosy, tingling with cleanness. A linen shift was waiting, with a gown to go over that, woven of green and brown and gold, almost the same color as her eyes. She w
ondered how they had known.
Then her glance found Murna, who was watching in silence. Euan had told them, of course.
The women had begun to sing. It was no one song but a mingling of many—cauldron songs and weaving songs and sweeping songs. For Valeria there was a greeting song, which turned into a song of joy that the high king was taking a bride.
The high king’s mother did not seem as delighted as the rest. She was reserving judgment, studying Valeria with a cold clear eye. She reminded Valeria of her own mother, with the same iron backbone and indomitable expression.
Valeria knew better than to smile. A smile was a confession of weakness. She nodded instead, briskly, as her mother would have done.
Murna nodded in return. It was a détente of sorts. In time it might turn into an alliance.
Today Valeria was to learn the ways of the women’s side. She had no duties as yet, but she was expected to know what each duty was and how and by whom it was performed.
It was at least as complicated as her lessons on the Mountain. She would be expected to know every name and face, because not only were these the friends and servants her choice had given her, they would be her companions for the rest of her life.
If she thought too much on that, she would lose all her courage. She focused on the moment, on the faces in front of her and the names that went with them.
The day whirled away into night. She was not to sleep again in the queen’s bed until the title was formally hers—and that would be when next the moon was dark. Now it was full, which gave her half a month to learn all she was expected to know.
The bed she was given all but filled one of many tiny rooms around the edge of the hall. Besides the bed, it just managed to contain a stool and a box for belongings. A curtain divided it from the larger space.
The bed was wide enough for two—just. That was a good thing, because Euan Rohe was in it, waiting for her.
She should not have been surprised. “Don’t you have carousing to do?” she asked.
He grinned. “Yes,” he answered.
“They’ll be missing you.”
“I don’t care.”
Nor did she, but if she was to do this, she had to do it properly. “Is this allowed?”
“It’s encouraged,” he said. “They all know where I must be. If I know them, they’ll be wishing me luck.”
Valeria could believe that. Young men were the same everywhere.
This young man was splendidly eager for her. For an instant she hesitated—caught between the dream she had to leave behind and the reality she had chosen. What she felt was grief—and yet, with it, a kind of dizzy joy. She dropped her gown and shift and sprang into Euan’s arms.
The day after Valeria made her choice, her life fell into the rhythm that it would keep. She was up at dawn, slipping out of Euan’s warm embrace and pulling on her riding clothes. Her stallions were pastured outside the dun in an enclosure of their own, separate from the rest of the horses.
That enclosure was roughly the size of a riding court. It was level and not too stony, and the grass was cropped short by sheep and cattle before horses ever came there.
She had found her saddle and bridles in the stable of the dun and brought them down with her. She groomed and saddled and rode each horse, practicing the exercises that she had been studying before she left Aurelia. The stallions had their own opinions as to her proficiency, which she took to heart.
It was hard instruction but fair, and it took her through dawn to sunrise. As she cooled down Sabata whom she had ridden last, she saw Pretorius sitting on the stone wall that rimmed the pasture. He had a satchel of books and a purpose in mind.
He was choosing to forget what she had said to him on the wall. She never would—but she needed the instruction he was willing to give. Even if she never used it, it was part of a rider’s training. She would cling to that for as long as she could.
By full morning she was back in the dun, studying the many things that a queen of the tribes should know. Evening found her again with Euan Rohe, whose appetite for her grew stronger the more he had of her.
On the second day she rode Sabata out of the pasture. She did not go out of sight of the dun, but they both needed to breathe freer air. Valeria brought the stallion back without too much reluctance, expecting Master Pretorius to be waiting for her, but he was not there yet.
Someone else was, a familiar small redheaded figure with a clear and penetrating stare. “You were in the hunting camp,” Valeria said.
“I came back,” the child said. “Will you teach me to ride?”
That startled laughter out of Valeria. The boy blinked, not understanding.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not laughing at you. Once when I was in Aurelia, a boy came and asked the same question.”
“Did you teach him?”
She nodded.
“Will you teach me?”
“I can try,” she said.
“Now?”
It was late already. Brigid would be waiting to teach Valeria to thread the loom for the simplest of the many complicated patterns that made up a clan plaid.
Valeria had hated weaving when she was learning it in her mother’s house. She would far rather teach a child to ride.
Oda was willing. He had carried this child before and was disposed to like him.
“Tell me your name,” Valeria said.
“Conor,” the child replied. “Conor mac Euan.”
Valeria stopped short. “Euan? Euan is your father?”
Conor nodded. “Don’t I look like him?”
“You’re his very image,” Valeria said. Now that she knew, it was obvious. He looked like Murna, too, with his long, strong bones and slanting eyes.
He must have been conceived when Euan was hardly more than a child himself, before he left to become a hostage in Aurelia. It was an odd sensation, not surprising exactly, but unexpected.
Would Euan feel the same when he found out about Grania?
That would not happen soon. Even if Valeria had trusted Euan, she trusted no one else here, including Master Pretorius and his Aurelian guards. She would keep that secret, whatever it cost her.
This boy was no secret, though no one had seen fit to tell Valeria about him. He must have been on the men’s side. He was young for that but not overly so.
He had a rider’s instincts and inborn balance. Unlike his father, who had no grace in the saddle, Conor rode as if he had been born there.
This first day’s instruction was brief. Pretorius arrived as it was ending. Apart from a raised brow, he said nothing. He simply opened his book and began where he had left off the day before.
Valeria was monstrously late to the women’s hall, but a queen-to-be could not be whipped like a serving girl. Her lessons there would take place when she chose to appear.
That was a great pleasure to discover. Valeria was not accustomed to privilege. She had always been under someone’s command, bound to obligations she could not shirk without punishment. There were such obligations here, but they were grander things than threading a loom or wrapping her tongue around new and alien words.
Even so, once she came round to those particular tasks, she applied herself diligently. They had their own significance, as did the people who taught her and those who saw her doing them.
A queen should be either loved or feared. Valeria was not a devotee of fear. She did her best to be loved by the people she had chosen and the king who, when the moon had finished waning, would be her husband.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Euan Rohe stretched and smiled. Valeria was out riding her horses, and he should be up now that the sun was. The sooner he began the day, the sooner he could end it with her in his arms again.
It was irresistibly pleasant to lie in this bed that smelled of her and remember the warmth of her body and the softness of her skin. In memory he traced the shape of her face that had become as familiar as his own, looking into those eyes that were nei
ther brown nor green, with flecks of gold like dapples of sunlight on a forest floor.
Entirely different eyes stared down at him, raising a brow at his visible arousal. That withered under his mother’s stare, but his smile barely faded. “Good morning, Mother,” he said.
“Very good for you, it seems,” said Murna.
His smile widened to a grin. “Isn’t she splendid?”
“She is rather remarkable,” Murna said.
The words were pleasing, but her tone wiped the grin from his face. “You think I made a bad choice.”
“She has the capacity to be a very good queen,” his mother said.
“But you don’t like her.”
“I don’t trust her.” Murna sat on the stool beside the bed. “She works hard, she means well, but she’s Aurelian to the bone.”
“She came here of her own will. She chose us.”
“She chose you,” Murna said. “She does love you—that’s clear in everything she does. And yes, I do like her. If it were only a matter of your happiness and her ability to please you, I would be glad you’ve made so good a match.”
“But?” he asked when she did not go on.
Her answer came slantwise. “Did you know she’s had a child?”
Euan frowned. “What? Of course she hasn’t.”
“The signs are clear if you know what to look for. Somewhere in Aurelia, she’s left a part of herself.”
Euan sat up. He could not seem to keep his mind focused on what Murna was saying. “You think it’s mine, then? Maybe she lost it. Maybe—”
“It’s more recent than that. The marks are still new. This past winter or spring, I would guess.”
“Well, good!” Euan said with forced heartiness. “She’s fertile, then. She’ll bear strong sons for the clan.”
“Ask yourself why she hasn’t told you,” said Murna. “Why is she hiding it?”
“Because it’s his,” Euan answered promptly. “He’s keeping it hidden, I suppose. With as many enemies as he has, everyone would be after it. If he knows his brother is still alive—”
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