The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  She went out riding that second morning, alone except for the inevitable company of guards. Her dreams through the night had been dim and confused. Little of them stayed with her after she woke, but the mood they left was even darker than before.

  She had to get out of the palace and the city. The walls were closing in. Everything reeked of imminent disaster.

  “Sometimes,” she said to her captain, “magic is a curse.”

  Demetria not only had none of her own, she had been born with wards against it. Magic could get no grip on her. She was immune. Fortunate woman.

  She did not trouble Briana with false sympathy. A jut of the chin sent two of the guards ahead. She raked her eye down the line of the rest until it straightened. Briana in the middle, thoroughly protected, wished that she could go whirling off into the sky and be free of it all.

  People in the city recognized the imperial heir, but her plain clothes and the small size of her escort warned them not to turn her passage into a procession. Now and then someone called her name. Once a stone flew. It struck a guard’s shield and glanced off.

  The guards at the northern gate saluted as Briana rode through. She acknowledged them with a nod. Her eye was already on the road, which miraculously was empty of travelers. Somehow all the people flocking to Aurelia for the emperor’s jubilee had chosen not to travel in that hour. The road was hers. She took it as a gift of the gods.

  The village of Sosia stood on a hill above the northward road. A fold of the land cut off the view of the bay, and a long wooded ridge shielded it from the blasts that blew off the mountains. The lack of a view kept the noble and the wealthy away. The soft winds and gentle rains made the grass grow richer there than anywhere round about. Sheep and goats thrived there, and cattle grew fat on the lush grass.

  Briana had stopped there often before after a gallop on the plain. There was a dairy near the center of the village, where a traveler could stop for a jar of milk, fresh and foaming from the goat or the cow, a loaf of bread, and a wedge of pungent cheese. That day there were airy, faintly sweet cakes plump with raisins, that came with a pot of honeyed fruit and another of clotted cream.

  Briana sat in the garden in front of the dairy to eat her dinner. Since she was the only one there apart from the guards, she could claim the table under the rose arbor. The trellis was thick with white-and-scarlet blooms, and dizzy with fragrance.

  She was calmer, but her mood was no better. She ate as much as she could stomach and left the rest for the guards. They had eaten as well as she had, but they were never averse to another round.

  The girl who had served them was discreet and quiet. Briana was somewhat surprised after she had eaten, as she was thinking of getting up and riding on, to look up and find the girl standing in front of her, shifting from foot to foot.

  Briana knew that look well. Training kept the scowl from her face and made her ask politely, “Yes?”

  “Lady,” said the girl, “I’d not trouble you, but Grandmother asks—Grandmother begs your pardon, but—would you come, please?”

  Briana glanced at Demetria. The captain rose from the bench by the flower bed, but there was no danger here that Briana could sense.

  Briana did not need to ask why the grandmother had not come herself. The old woman was blind and bedridden, but she had a gift, and that gift was foresight. If she asked a favor of Briana, she knew what she did and why. Briana would be wise to do as she asked.

  Beyond the dairy barn was a small stone building, very old, that had been the farmhouse before the family grew prosperous enough for the handsome structure of stone and timber that stood on the other side of the garden from the dairy. The old house was gutted and the thatch on its roof had worn thin, and from the look and the smell, goats had been living in it until quite recently.

  Now there was a stocky, common-looking grey horse dozing with its head down and its lower lip slack, and, lying in a bed of clean straw, a man.

  “We found them here this morning,” the girl said. “The horse won’t let us near the man. He’s sick, we can see that much. He wakes up sometimes and talks, but his words make no sense. The horse kicked the healer priest out the door. Grandmother said tell the lady in the garden, she’ll know what to do.”

  The horse lifted its head. Briana caught her breath. In an instant he had transformed from nondescript cob to living god.

  Now that he had put aside his pretense of mortality, she recognized that elegant arch of nose and that calm dark eye. “Petra?” she asked.

  He dipped his head. Her eye leaped to the man in the straw, knowing who he was even before she saw his face. She sprang toward him and dropped to her knees. The dairy girl squeaked in alarm, but Petra made no move to stop her.

  Her brother drew into a fetal knot under her touch. She felt as much as saw the marks of torture on him, bad enough on his body but harrowing on his spirit. The whole beautiful structure of his magic was charred and broken.

  Someone or something had set a protection on him. She could feel it, too deep almost to reach. He was healing, slowly, from the inside out. But there was so much hurt, so much ruin…

  She could not give way to either horror or rage, not yet. “Demetria,” she said without turning, “find a cart and an animal to pull it.”

  “We have a cart,” the dairy girl said. “Mother has a mule.”

  “That will do,” said Briana. “Go with my captain and show her where they are. Then ask your mother to make a posset with curds and honey and such herbs as she knows of, for strength of spirit. Bring it back as quickly as you can.”

  They left together, the girl running, Demetria striding long-legged behind her. Briana put them out of her mind and bent over Kerrec.

  He was awake. His eyes were blurred, but they struggled to focus on her face. “Briana?” His voice was a raw whisper.

  She could have wept with relief that he knew her. “Kerrec? Ambrosius?”

  His brows knit. “I don’t—who—”

  “Never mind,” she said. “Rest. You’ll be home soon.”

  “Home? Do I—where—”

  “Hush,” she said.

  He closed his eyes. She stayed by him until the girl came with the posset, then she poured it into him. He was reluctant but obedient.

  That was completely unlike him. She had been angry at whoever or whatever had done this to him. Now she was growing afraid.

  The cart came none too soon. She had no plan, but Demetria had been thinking while Briana alternately grieved and raged over what had become of her brother. In a little while the captain had arranged it all. Kerrec was on his way to Aurelia, and Briana drove him in the covered cart, while the one of her guards who looked most like her wore her clothes and rode her grey mare back into the city.

  Chapter Thirty

  The guards and their apparent mistress returned to the palace by the public gate. The mule cart with its hooded and silent driver went in by the servants’ entrance. No one remarked on the undistinguished grey cob tied to the tail of the cart, or asked to see what cargo the driver brought in.

  That served Briana well, but she would have words with the captain of the palace guard when this was over. She drove the cart into the kitchen court, where Demetria was waiting with half a dozen guards.

  Two of them took charge of the cart. They would take it back to Sosia. The rest lifted Kerrec out, wrapped in a rug, and carried him to Briana’s rooms. The grey cob followed, flickering in and out of vision. Briana had not known the stallions had the art of invisibility, although it should hardly be surprising. After all, they were gods.

  Briana had the guards carry Kerrec to the pavilion in her private garden. It was secluded and easy to defend, and Petra could come and go as he pleased. There was a bed in the airy space, in which Briana slept in the heat of the summer. With shutters up and carpets on the tiled floor, and a fire in the shielded hearth, it was comfortable even in winter.

  Just now, at the beginning of autumn, when the days were still su
mmer-warm and the nights were barely hinting at winter’s chill, it would serve Kerrec well enough. Briana had a bath brought in, with her most discreet servants to attend it, and saw him bathed and shaved and restored to his usual self.

  By the time he was laid in bed, her jaw ached with clenching. Wherever he had been, he had crossed paths with a Brother of Pain. The pattern of weals and scars was unmistakable.

  So was the way he swam in and out of consciousness. He had been subjected to the deeper torments. They would seem small when they began, but over time they ate away at the mind and spirit. For a mage of his particular order and power, they were devastating. They took aim at the roots of his discipline and eroded them until the power turned on itself. Then the torturer could simply stand back and watch the structure crumble.

  Briana had a healer’s gift and a fair grounding in the art, but this was beyond her. She paced the floor in a controlled fury, dimly aware that guards and servants stayed well out of her way. Abruptly she stopped. A white wall had presented itself in front of her.

  She met Petra’s steady dark stare. “There’s no one in the healers’ temple that I trust,” she said to him. “Not for this. Whoever and whatever did this, to dare such a crime, to capture and torture a rider—he would have to be very brave indeed, or absolutely mad.” She lashed out with pure fury. “And you! Where were you? How could you let this happen?”

  Petra neither lowered his head nor looked away. His eyes were full of stars.

  He was not human, and he was not mortal. The patterns of the Dance, the tides of time and fate, were embodied in him. Her mind was too small to comprehend all of what he knew.

  “That’s nonsense,” she said. He could blast her where she stood, and she did not care. “You let down your guard. You failed. Who was strong enough to snatch your rider from under your nose? Who?”

  “Gothard.”

  She spun. Kerrec was awake. His eyes were clear.

  “Gothard?” she echoed. “Our brother Gothard? He was never mage enough for this.”

  “It seems we underestimated him,” Kerrec said with something like his old dry wit. “Listen carefully. You have to warn the riders. There’s a plot to kill our father and disrupt the Dance. They have a mage, a raw power driven by anger and malice, who can break the pattern. That one is even stronger than Gothard. Master Nikos will know who it is and why. The barbarians are using both Gothard and the other. I’m afraid—they never said, but I’m very much afraid—that even if they fail with the Dance, they’ll succeed in the rest. Even if the Dance is safe, the emperor will be dead.”

  He stopped, breathing hard as if the effort of so much clarity had exhausted him. She gripped his hands. He was slipping already, falling back into a fog of confusion.

  “Kerrec,” she said, wielding his name like a weapon. “Kerrec!”

  His head rolled on his neck. His face had gone slack. She resisted the urge to slap him back to consciousness. He was beyond that. He had gathered every scrap of coherence that he had, and every fragment of memory, and set it all in those few words. Now there was nothing left.

  She whirled to face Petra. “Fetch my father,” she said.

  If the stallion had been human, his brows would have gone up. She went well past presumption in ordering him about as if he were a servant.

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “I’m desperate. A guard or servant won’t bring him, not for this. Even for me he won’t do it. For you he’ll come.”

  She hoped he would come. Father and son had not parted amicably at all. To this day the emperor would not hear his son’s name spoken, either the one he had carried as imperial heir or the one he had claimed as a rider. Both Ambrosius and Kerrec were dead and gone.

  “Tell His Majesty,” she said to Petra, “that there is no one else I can trust, and no one who can help. No one else can break the riders’ seclusion. For the empire’s salvation, let him come.”

  Petra lowered his head slightly and turned, trotting out of the pavilion. The sound of his hoofbeats died away. She could only hope he would do as she asked. Otherwise she would have to go to the emperor herself and beg.

  Of all the things the Emperor Artorius might have expected to find waiting in his rooms when he came up from dinner, a white god was one of the last. The beast had sent his servants into hysterics and reduced his guards to wide-eyed helplessness. He was standing in the middle of the emperor’s private parlor, as incongruous a figure as one might expect, apparently sound asleep.

  Artorius was not deceived. He bowed as an emperor should before a god, and said courteously, “My lord.”

  The stallion’s eyes opened and his ears came up. He pawed lightly, with care not to damage the floor, and cocked an ear. The emperor, it was clear, was to follow him.

  The emperor was tired. The day had been long and his duties burdensome. He was planning a war as well as a jubilee. Sometimes he could not have told which was which.

  Nevertheless, this was a god. He had never had such a visitation, nor had he heard of such a thing. If nothing else, it sparked his curiosity. He sighed for his lost sleep, but he bowed again, lower than before, and waited for the stallion to lead him.

  Briana had fetched an armload of books from the palace library and was buried in them when her father followed Petra through the garden. Night had fallen. The stallion glowed like a full moon, lighting the emperor’s path. She looked up, blinking, as he mounted the flight of steps into the pavilion.

  He was not scowling, which was encouraging. He seemed surprised to see her, which was less so. She resisted the urge to hide Kerrec from him. She waited for him to see that the bed was occupied, then to realize who it was.

  His face went cold. He turned on his heel, but Petra blocked his way. Briana thought her father would actually shoulder the stallion aside, but he clearly reconsidered.

  “Father,” she said to his back, “please. This goes beyond a family quarrel. A First Rider has been taken and tortured. There is a plot against the Dance and against you.”

  The emperor did not move. “Tortured?” he said.

  “Come and see.”

  If he had tried to leave then, she did not think Petra would have stopped him. He took a long while to decide, but in the end he turned back and went to stand over Kerrec.

  Kerrec was deep asleep. Briana had laid on him a simple but effective spell, using moonlight and water and earth from the garden.

  The emperor bent and drew back the blanket. Mage light was brighter than lamplight and much less forgiving. He cast it across the still but breathing body.

  Artorius was in no hurry to speak. Briana went back to her books. She had yet to find what she was looking for, which was a way to restore her brother’s memory and rebuild his magic. She refused to accept that there was no such thing.

  She had almost forgotten that her father was there when he said, “You had better tell me what you know.”

  She paused to shift her mind from a treatise on the nature of memory, then told him what Kerrec had told her, word for word. His expression did not change as he listened. When it was done, he asked, “That’s all he told you?”

  “It was all he could tell,” she answered.

  “It’s very little,” he said.

  Briana should have expected that. This was yet another skirmish in the old war between father and son, and neither of them had any sense when it came to the other. She would have knocked their heads together if it would have done any good at all.

  She settled, this time, for banked heat and fiercely controlled temper. “Isn’t it enough that Gothard is plotting to kill you and take the throne, with the barbarians to support him? They’re plotting to disrupt the Dance and shift the tides of time in their favor. What more do you need?”

  “Surer proof than the word of a dead man,” the emperor said coldly.

  “What of the word of a First Rider?”

  “A First Rider whose mind and magic are broken. Who knows what he actually saw, as opposed to what he wa
s persuaded to see?”

  “He saw Gothard,” Briana said. “I believe that. He was lucid when he told me. It was the truth.”

  “I need proof,” the emperor said.

  “Can’t you use your common sense? Do you really know where Gothard is?”

  “He has been riding through his estates in the north,” the emperor said, “administering them as a prince should do.”

  “Are you sure of that? Are you absolutely sure?” She did not wait for him to answer, but pressed a little harder. “In what way is his word or the word of his messengers more to be trusted than that of a First Rider?”

  Artorius was not to be swayed, even by logic. “No matter what the charges, no matter how black the treason, any court of justice would demand no less. The word of one man is not enough. You know this. You’ve judged more sternly than I have in matters affecting the empire.”

  “So I have,” she said, “and I believe my brother. This is urgent, Father. It’s eleven days until the Dance. That’s precious little time.”

  “Then use it well,” he said.

  “At least increase your guard,” she said, “and call in the mages of the Watch. If the seers have seen anything—if the Augurs have marked the omens—”

  “It will all be done,” he said.

  She eyed him narrowly. If he was indulging her fancies, she would call him to account for it.

  He was looking down at Kerrec again. She could not read his expression. He laid his hand on Kerrec’s forehead. It was not a caress. Her skin prickled.

  There was a hiss and a sharp crack. The emperor recoiled. Blue light arced between his palm and Kerrec’s brow.

  Without a pause for thought, Briana cast a damping spell. The small hairs on her body no longer stood erect. The scent of ozone dissipated. Kerrec lay as still as before.

  The emperor flexed his fingers. A slow breath escaped him. “Something has warded him,” he said.