The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  She nodded. “It’s the stallions, I think, or some magic of the Mountain. There’s no ill-wishing in it.”

  “None that you can see.”

  “I trust it,” she said, “and him.”

  He sighed. “I wish that I could do the same. I do see that he believes what he told you. But as he is, with the deep torment—the truth may be altogether different.”

  Briana did not think so, but she had had enough of arguing. “If there is a plot,” she said, “and you can’t deny that it’s likely, regardless of who is behind it—let us lay a trap to catch its perpetrators. If there are none, we lose nothing but time and a little magic. If they do exist, with luck and the gods’ help we’ll stop them before they make their move.”

  He did not dismiss it out of hand, which she had been afraid of. He did not embrace it, either, but she had not expected that. He said, “I suppose that’s reasonable. What did you have in mind?”

  Very little, she thought, but she could hardly tell him that. “We need the riders,” she said. “They have to know of this.”

  “No,” her father said. “If we break their seclusion, we play into the enemy’s hands—if he exists. We disrupt the Dance before it even begins.”

  “But they have to know,” she said. “They have to be warned.”

  “You think they haven’t been?” His glance caught Petra, who stood in the doorway, so still and silent that he might have been made of marble. “Believe this, child. They know.”

  “But—”

  “Whatever we do,” he said, “we do without them. If there is a plot, it’s more important than ever that the ritual of the Dance be observed in every particular.”

  She had to accept the logic of that. In any case her thoughts were only half-formed. She had to delve deeper into her books and remember the lessons of her own magic.

  The emperor stooped and kissed her forehead. She half thought he flinched, but no fire leaped from her. She was properly restrained and contained within herself.

  “Stay here,” he said, “and do what you can. I’ll see that your duties are taken care of until this is over.”

  “So you do believe him,” she said with a small surge of elation.

  “I believe that he believes it,” he said. “Good night, daughter. Rest if you can. You’ll need your strength if you’re to fight a battle.”

  She bent her head. He smiled, a surprisingly warm smile in so stern a face. He was so like his son, in mind as well as body, that her eyes pricked with tears. Dear gods, she prayed. Protect them both. Guard my father. Heal my brother. Save us all from the storm that is coming.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Euan’s tongue circled Valeria’s nipple, then flicked with a sudden flutter. She gasped. He laughed, a low rumble. She wound fingers in his thick hair. His erect organ throbbed against her thigh. She gathered herself to slide down and take it in.

  She froze. White fire had leaped inside her, searing through the darkness, burning away any thought but one.

  She never remembered leaving the bed, let alone leaving Euan. She must have paused for a moment, because when she was truly conscious again, she was outside in the morning chill, and she had her riding clothes on. Euan was there, she supposed, but she had no thought to spare for him.

  Sabata had come back, and he had captured himself a human. Mestre Olivet pressed against the wall of the lodge, as white as the hoarfrost. The stallion snapped wicked teeth in his face.

  “Sabata,” Valeria said mildly. She did not trouble to raise her voice. Olivet looked ready to drop down in a fit.

  Sabata’s ears flattened, but he moved back a step. Olivet’s shaking did not lessen. Valeria realized in a kind of horror that he could no longer read a horse. That was not even magic, it was simple observation, and any horseman could do it. He could not see that the threat was ended, only that the great white thing was still too close. He was blank with terror.

  Gods help her, she would never in this world want to become what this man had become. The spell of Unmaking inside her stirred uneasily but then subsided. She asked Sabata politely to draw away even farther. He obeyed with little grace, but he did it.

  She moved in beside him. His ears stayed flat, but he did not offer to bite or kick. She slid her arm over his back and laid her head against his neck and said into that little curling ear, “You fool. You endless fool. Why did you come back?”

  The ear flicked. He snorted wetly. He was not going to answer her. Nor was he going to leave, no matter what she might be thinking.

  She meant to get rid of him. She could at least try to chase him off with whips and stones. But he curved his neck around her and pressed his soft nose into her palm and blew warm breath on it, and she fell completely under his spell. She could have fought it. She chose not to, and maybe that was cowardly. But when she was as close to him as this, she was that much farther away from the Unmaking.

  Sabata would not undo the spell trapped inside Valeria. It was too deep, he said, and too firmly rooted. If he removed it, it would cost her all her magic and much of her self.

  “But it’s small,” she said as she settled him in the stable he had been in before. “There’s hardly anything to it. Surely—”

  He turned his back on her and buried his face in hay. She struck his broad round rump with her fist, but he did not even flinch. She spun and stalked away.

  He was in front of her, barring the door. She had not heard him move.

  She wanted to retreat in dignity. The sight of him, so solid and so very much of this earth and yet so incontestably a god, broke her down in tears.

  He was more than strong enough to hold her up while she cried out all her fear and worry and guilt. She was clean and empty when she finished. If there had been a wind blowing, it would have passed straight through her.

  She washed her face in the rain barrel outside the door, and put herself in as much order as she could. Sabata had gone back to his hay. However dangerous it had been for him to come back and risk Unmaking, she was glad he was there.

  Just as she passed out of sight, she had a flicker of vision, as if she had seen around a corner to another place and, maybe, the same time. She saw Kerrec on Petra’s back, and a woman so like him that she must be his sister.

  Her knees buckled in relief. She nearly fell. Once she found her balance, her step was lighter. She went to find Mestre Olivet.

  He was in seclusion, the guards said. She could imagine him lying with a cold cloth over his eyes, convincing himself that he had been afflicted by a terrible evil.

  If he was that appalled by the close proximity of a white god, how true or accurate were the patterns he was teaching her? She had thought that she would know if they were false. Could she be sure of that?

  It was too late for doubts. She retreated to the library, for lack of a better thought, and hunted in it for something that did not have to do with magic.

  She fell asleep over a florid romance of a hundred years ago. Its patterns were silly and hackneyed and harmless. They gave her a gift of simple dreams, common and ordinary, with no foreboding in them.

  Euan Rohe did not want to leave Valeria alone that night, as strange a mood as she was in now that the stallion had come back. But he had an obligation he could not refuse. He had to hope that she would still be there when he came back, and that the lodge and its inhabitants would be intact.

  He brought himself up short for thinking that. Valeria had made her choice. She wanted the Mountain, and no one else would give it to her. The stallion should reassure her. By coming back, he had proved that his allegiance was to her and not to the Mountain.

  In any case Euan could not stay to tell her these things. He was not quite disastrously late, but it was a bruising ride. One of his warband lost his horse to a misstep. The horse went down and came up three-legged.

  The man was winded but otherwise unharmed. They left him with the carcass of the horse. Either he could walk back to the lodge or he could wait for them to c
ome back that way, and beg a ride on someone’s crupper.

  Euan would have started walking, himself. Wolves and mountain cats were not particularly hungry at this time of year, but a dead horse was as much meat as some of them saw in a year.

  It did not seem that Tavis thought of that. He was sitting by the horse when Euan glanced back, looking as if he meant to fall asleep as soon as the others were out of sight.

  Euan shrugged. Some men had to learn wisdom the hard way. Usually it killed them.

  There was no time for idiots tonight or any night between now and the Dance. The priests were waiting in the place that Euan’s men had found for them. It was a strange place, a perfect circle in the earth, with sides as sheer as walls except to the west, where part of the wall had come down with time and rain. There was a track of sorts, too steep and slippery for horses, and bad enough for men trying to find their way in the last of the daylight.

  Euan’s skin crawled as he picked his way down to the floor of that place. It was almost perfectly flat. There must have been grass and trees in it—he could see the remnants along the edges—but the priests had peeled away the earth’s skin to reveal a floor of black glass. In the center of it they had raised the sacred stone, by means that Euan did not have the rank or the calling to understand. It was black, and by the law of the rite must be unshaped, as it was taken from the earth. It thrust like a finger toward the darkening sky.

  There were three priests. There should have been nine, but it was a long way from the border and a long stretch of empire, with legions and imperial spies, in between. Euan was glad to see as many as there were. Three would be enough, in this place, to raise what must be raised.

  All of his men were there except for Tavis. Those who had been living at large in the country, away from Gothard and his suspicions, had come in intact, which was even more of a wonder than the number of priests who had survived their journey.

  Euan was the last to come down to the floor of the valley. Full night had fallen. The stars for once were not veiled in mist or rain, but were hard and clear. The air had a snap of frost.

  This was a rite of night and stone. There would be no light or fire.

  The sacrifice was bound to the stone. They must have brought him from the lands of the Caletanni. He was no imperial, with his hair so fair it glowed in the starlight, and skin as white as milk. There was not a blemish on him, not a mark of the torture that would have already begun.

  He was drugged, his head rolling slackly against the stone. He looked as if he had already gone to the white place, the place where men went when they were in perfect pain, or when they were going to die.

  The priests let fall their dark robes. They were naked beneath, shaved clean from head to toe. The marks of their clan swirled over their bodies in dizzying patterns, seeming to move independently of the skin, writhing and coiling.

  Euan knew better than to look too close. The chant was befuddling enough, almost but not quite overwhelming the soft whimpers and strangled screams of the victim as he was given to the One.

  It was a slow sacrifice. The cause was powerful and the need great. The invocations were the strongest and the summonings the most terrible. They called the darkness to veil the stars. They begged the One to favor their undertaking, to give them strength for the great thing that they would do in the imperial city. An emperor dead, the pattern of destiny disrupted, the tides of the world shifted and the false gods destroyed—all before the next phase of the moon.

  The priests betrayed no suggestion of doubt, no sign of fear. This would be, because it was the will of the One.

  They painted the stone with the victim’s blood. He lived a long time, long enough to see his entrails wound nine times around the stone and sealed with iron. At the last they wrought the blood eagle, although by then there was little blood left in him. The pale wings of the lungs and the white arches of ribs glorified the One.

  The eldest of the priests intoned the blessing, anointing each warrior with blood gone thick and cold. Euan set his teeth at the touch of it on his forehead. Hot blood had a taste and a smell like none other, bright and strong as life itself, but cold blood stank of death.

  Death was the One’s beloved creation. He bowed his head to the power of it, and let himself be dismissed with the rest of the warband.

  The priests would wait until the fighting men were gone. Then they would dispose of the victim. By sunrise, even the bones would be gone, crushed to powder and scattered on the wind.

  So would it be for all the enemies of the One. Every worshipper of false gods. Every mage who was not sworn to the priesthood. Every living thing that walked apart from the truth.

  Valeria stared blindly into the dark. Sabata was a white light inside her, but within the light was its Unmaking. From that her dream had come.

  She had been Euan Rohe. She had felt what he felt, thought what he thought. She had lived inside his body for the space of an evening and a night.

  She knew him now. She knew what he was and what he meant to do. Gothard would live only as long as he served his allies’ purposes.

  When she looked inside herself, she saw no hatred of Euan. She was not even particularly horrified. By the customs she had learned from childhood, he was a blood-stained savage. In his own world he was a good man, loyal to his people and devoted to his god.

  She still wanted him, the warmth of his body, the taste of his lips, the way he knew all her tenderest places. If that meant she was corrupted, then so be it. She could not help what her body felt, even while her mind gave a name to everything she had done since she saved Kerrec’s life. That name was treason.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Traitor.

  He had a name again. His name was Kerrec. He knew her name, too. Her name was Traitor. The name she had used when she pretended to be a man, then the name she claimed when the gods betrayed the truth, were lies. Traitor was the truth.

  He was healing, but his heart would never be the same. He might never get back his discipline, either—not as it was before.

  There was warmth inside him, from which the healing came. It made him think of gentle hands and a soft voice speaking words he could not quite catch. It smoothed his ragged edges and mended his wounds, and helped him to make himself whole again.

  At first he thought Briana was doing it. Her spells did help, but they would have been useless without the deeper, stronger enchantment. He did not know who had worked it. It was not one of the stallions, although there was a strong flavor of them in it. It might almost have been—it almost felt like—

  She wanted nothing except to destroy him. Someone else had found him and worked the spell on him. Someday he would discover who it was. For now, the best thanks he could give would be to keep on healing.

  On what Briana later told him was the third day since she found him in the village, he remembered where he was and why he had been riding to Aurelia. With that memory came enough of the rest that he nearly broke again.

  Petra brought him back from the edge. Briana kept him there. He tried to get up and find the rest of the riders, but neither of his jailers would let him go. “They need me,” he insisted. “They have to know—I have to tell them—”

  “No,” Briana said, and Petra made himself into a wall that Kerrec was still too weak to pass. He sank down simmering, determining to bide his time.

  If there was any of it left. “What day is this?” he demanded.

  “Eight days until the Dance,” his sister answered.

  He nodded. He gave it more of a dying fall than he honestly felt. As he had hoped, she left him alone.

  Petra did not, but he was not human. He did not fret as Briana did. After a while he wandered off through the garden toward the manger that had been set under an arbor. It was kept full of sweet hay, and in the evening a servant brought an offering of barley and oats and a little corn.

  “You should go,” Kerrec said. He was the length of the garden away from the stallion, but that did
not matter to a god. “Now more than ever, the Dance needs the best and the strongest. You are both.”

  Petra ignored him. He was deep in the bliss of good hay.

  That was the most dangerous weakness of the union between riders and stallions. Each stallion bound himself to a single rider. If that rider was unable to ride the Dance, the stallion nearly always chose the man over the ritual.

  “You can’t do that now,” Kerrec persisted, although he knew it might do more harm than good. “This Dance means too much, and has too many threats against it. You have to let someone else ride you.”

  Petra was not listening at all. The quality of his not-listening was distinct. Kerrec was lucky, it said, that Petra did not erupt in outrage at the thought of another rider on his back.

  “Other stallions allow it,” Kerrec said.

  Not I. It was a mark of strong feeling that the stallion replied in words.

  That was as far as Kerrec dared to go. He eased himself out of bed, taking his time. Dizziness came and went. There was surprisingly little pain. He was weak, but not as weak as he had expected. He could stand. He could even walk.

  Whoever had sown the seed of healing in him, it was a miraculous thing. The harder he used himself, the faster it healed him. He knew of no school of magic that could do such a thing.

  At the moment he did not care. He was barefoot, with no shoes or boots to be found, but his clothes were decent enough. They were servant’s clothes, the plain brown tunic and trousers of a stablehand or a drudge in the kitchens. They were also near enough to the casual uniform of a rider.

  More of his memory came back as he walked through the garden and into the heir’s wing of the palace. This had been his once, and Briana had changed little of it. The archery range was still there. So was the stable, with a fair population of horses. Even some of the servants were the same.

  None of them seemed to recognize him. If he had had magic he could use, he would have cast a working to make them see whatever they expected to see. As it was, there was no outcry. No one called his name, either the prince’s name or the First Rider’s.