The Mountain's Call
Page 26
“Braggart,” Euan muttered. He braced himself visibly and kicked his horse forward.
Sabata went in with a bare instant’s hesitation. The stink of magic did not seem to trouble him. If anything, it relaxed him.
The first courtyard was empty, but the witch lights drifted inward. Euan snarled at them but followed. In the second courtyard, men were waiting to take their horses.
The Caletanni dismounted gratefully, groaning as they worked out the knots and cramps of hours in the saddle. Valeria stayed where she was.
One of the men came forward and bowed to the pavement. His eyes rolled at the stallion, but he said with creditable steadiness, “Lady, a place is prepared for him. If you will come…?”
Sabata snorted with a complete lack of elegance, and shook his mane. He yawned in the man’s face and advanced on him.
The man turned rather quickly. He did not exactly run, but his stride was very quick.
This house was even larger and more complicated than the lodge. Its wall enclosed a small city of buildings, with the largest in the middle and the rest clustered around it, and bits of garden running through them all.
There seemed to be several places in which horses were kept. One, close by the central house, looked as if it had been recently vacated and hastily cleaned. Its walls were stone and its doors were thick and bound with iron.
It was a prison for horses. Sabata curled a lip at it but did not object to being led in. There was straw to sleep on, hay to eat and barley in the manger beside the barrel of clean water. He circled the stable three times, inspected the scents that had been imperfectly scrubbed away, and left a ripe and redolent marker directly in front of the door. Then he went to his dinner.
Once he was settled, the guide relaxed perceptibly. He blinked at Valeria, looking somewhat stunned, and said, “Lady, we understand that you look after him, and that is his wish. But if there is anything you need, or that he needs—”
“He’s satisfied,” Valeria said. “He’ll do until morning, if no one troubles him.”
“Oh, no, lady,” the man said fervently. “No one would dare.” He swallowed. It was hard to tell in lamplight, but his cheeks seemed to have gone slightly darker. “Lady, my name is Belus. I’ll come if you call me.”
Valeria blinked. She reeled in a moment of intense homesickness, tied to a memory. Men had been like this with her sister Caia—blushing and babbling and offering her anything, anything she wanted, she only had to ask.
No one had ever blushed or babbled at Valeria. It must be Sabata, she thought. The awe of him attached to her.
Even so, she caught herself smiling as Caia used to do, and saying sweetly, “Belus. I’ll remember. You’re very kind.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, lady. The kindness is all yours.”
She let her smile linger, let him bow and kiss her hand, and escaped, she hoped, without embarrassing either of them.
The memory of home clung as she made her way through the maze of this place, following a witch light that came to find her outside Sabata’s stable. Two rooms to sleep in, one room to gather in, a room for her mother’s herbs and potions, a kitchen, a storeroom, a privy on the other side of the kitchen garden—what more did a house need? The room she was supposed to rest in was as big as her father’s house and his cow barn and half the outbuildings. The bath beside it had a tub big enough to swim a horse in. There was enough gold and silver, silk, mosaic and colored stone to buy the whole village of Imbria and everything in it.
She could imagine her mother standing in that elaborate room, dressed in her plain and practical clothes, with her hair in its tightly disciplined knot and her brow lifted ever so slightly. “Getting a bit above yourself, aren’t you, girl?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Valeria said to the memory, startling the maid who had come in to bathe and dress her.
The girl did not stay startled long. She was used to oddities, her manner said. She was quick, quiet and impervious to protests. She had been sent to serve, and she would serve. That was that.
Valeria had heard of the tyranny of servants, but this was her first experience of it. It was disconcerting to begin with, but on top of memories she had been suppressing since she ran away to answer the Call, it was close to unbearable. She would far rather, that night, have been back in her mother’s root cellar than sitting in this gilded prison, balanced on the sword’s edge between betrayal and treason.
Chapter Thirty-Six
It was after noon by the time Briana had finished making her father’s excuses. Clerks and servants accepted plain speaking, but lords in council needed endless circles of discussion before they would concede that yes, the emperor should seclude himself before the great rite of his reign. She made sure it was understood beneath the surface that the emperor was ill, although with what, she left it to them to speculate.
She was exhausted as she made her way back to her rooms. Maariyah’s brother-in-law had slipped her mind completely.
Maariyah had not forgotten, nor had she let her kinsman escape because Briana was hours late. When Briana came in, Maariyah was waiting for her, and there was a man snoring on one of the couches in the anteroom. He was so obviously in need of sleep that Briana hated to wake him, but Maariyah was not so tenderhearted. She set him brusquely on his feet and said, “Tullus. Pay your respects to the emperor’s heir.”
He was certainly a soldier. There was no trace of sleep in his face as he snapped to attention and saluted Briana with the full ceremonial. It was somewhat lacking in the usual clash and glitter, since he wore neither armor nor livery, but she took it in the spirit in which it was meant.
“At ease,” she said.
She sat in a chair. He would have kept on standing, but she leveled her eyes at him until he dropped stiffly to the couch.
She took the measure of him. He was a big man, though not as big as a barbarian, with a rough-hewn face and deceptively flat dark eyes. There was no magic in him, but when he looked at her, those eyes narrowed slightly.
Her own narrowed to match them. Deliberately she strengthened her wards. He squinted and drew back a barely visible fraction.
He could see magic. It was an uncommon gift, and useful, too, in serving mages.
“You have a message for me?” she asked.
His back stiffened even further. If he was as honest as she suspected, this was not easy for him. He took refuge in soldier’s discipline. “Lady,” he said, “what I do dishonors my position, but I can’t help but—”
“I understand,” she said. “The empire’s honor is greater than that of any single man in it, even if he be the emperor’s son.”
“Yes, lady,” he said. “I’d never do it otherwise. But this—”
“Your lord is plotting treason,” Briana said. “There’s been an attempt on the emperor’s life.”
The stiffness left him all at once. Briana braced to catch him if he fell over, but he kept his feet. “Maariyah said you knew, lady,” he said.
“Yes,” Briana said.
His shoulders flexed. He would have wriggled like a child, she thought, if he had not had his dignity to consider. The words burst out of him all at once. “Some of us are loyal to the emperor above and beyond the oath we’ve taken to our lord. We saw what our lord did to his brother, who would have been emperor but for the gods’ Call—it’s no doing of our lord’s that the prince was taken out of captivity and sent back broken to the Mountain. We heard what our lord would do, and who would be his allies. He’ll lead barbarian armies into this city, lady, and they’ll raise him on their shields and make him emperor. We can’t stomach that, lady.”
“You have a plan?” she asked. She took care not to mention that Kerrec had not gone to the Mountain. What a man did not know, he could not betray.
“It’s dangerous, lady. My lord is a mage, and he’s strong. But yes, we do have a plan. I saw him once, lady, when he’d laid his stones aside. I don’t know why he did it—maybe he wanted to
test himself. He was there without them, lady, and there was magic, but it was dimmer than what I see in you now, with all the wards on you and the protections over you. With his stones he’s a blaze of living light. Without them he’s a candle burning low.”
Briana nodded. “I remember when he was tested, when the order first took him. He had a profoundly ordinary level of power, but the Master told my father that he had a remarkable affinity for the stones.”
“We think,” Tullus said, “that we can separate him from them. We need help—a mage, someone with power over wards, who knows something of stones. Once they’re out of his reach, he can be taken and dealt with as his actions deserve.”
“I believe there’s a saying for that,” Briana said. “Easier said than done.”
“We think we can do it, lady,” Tullus said. “He’s caught up in his barbarians and his plot against the Dance. He’s not looking to his guard for trouble—not just now.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“As sure as we can be, lady,” he said.
Briana pondered that. After a moment she said, “It’s a risk. From what we’ve heard of the plot, he’s not the power that’s most important to the Dance.”
“No, lady,” said Tullus, “but that power is only kept in check by his shields and compulsions. Without him there may not be any plot.”
“That power,” she said. “Do you know what it is? Have you seen it?”
He nodded. “It’s a slip of a girl, lady. She was Called to the Mountain, they say, though how that can be, I can’t imagine. They wouldn’t take her, but somehow she got hold of one of the stallions. She’s thrown in her lot with my lord. She’s bedmate to one of the barbarians—the one who leads them, the prince from over the border.”
“A woman?” Briana said. “A woman was Called? She has a stallion? Are you sure? She’s not one of the false mages, the ones who follow Olivet? Is not Olivet himself with my brother?”
“She was Called to the Mountain, lady,” said Tullus. “That I’m sure of. Olivet is with my lord, yes, but he’s got no power left. Whereas she—lady, what your brother is to the stones, she is to the stallions. I wager she’s even more, because she’s a strong mage even without the horses. I heard the high ones talking, lady, and they think she can turn the Dance. The stallion she has, they call him a Great One.”
Briana sat very still. She had not known any of this. No rumor had come from the Mountain, nor had Kerrec said a word of it. Which meant that the Mountain had suppressed it. Unless her father knew, and had chosen not to tell her. Or—
Tullus was waiting, cultivating patience as guards and soldiers learned to do.
She could not make a decision so quickly. But she could say, “You’d best go before you’re missed. Watch yourself, and wait. I’ll send word as soon as I can—no later than the morning, and sooner if possible. Don’t do a thing, do you understand? Lie low, and take utmost care that your lord suspects nothing.”
“I understand, lady,” he said. He rose and bowed and left directly, like the well-trained guardsman he was.
For a long while after he was gone, Briana sat where she was, chin on fist, scowling at the air. The pattern she had been seeing had had Gothard in it, of course, and the barbarians, and the discredited rider Olivet. This young woman, if she existed, was a completely new thing.
Kerrec was awake. He was in the garden, sitting at Briana’s worktable, frowning at one of the books in which she had been searching for an answer to her father’s trouble.
He looked up as she came toward him. “There are no answers here,” he said.
“There are no answers anywhere,” Briana said, “and more questions than I can begin to keep track of.” She planted her fists on the book, blocking it if he had tried to go back to it, and leaned toward him. “Why didn’t you tell me a woman had been Called to the Mountain?”
He went rigid. Whatever she had expected, it was not that absolute, icy rage. His voice made her shiver, because it was so incongruously light and easy. “What, your spies didn’t give you an inkling? It’s been all over the school.”
“The school keeps to itself,” she said. “What did you riders do? Swear everyone at the testing to silence? Or simply put a spell on them?”
There was no answer in Kerrec’s face. She had not expected one. Nor was she about to take mercy on either his temper or his fragility. “Now I’m told that not only has this prodigy gone renegade, she’s our brother’s chief weapon. Didn’t you think it was of at least minor importance that there was a power of that magnitude, that far out of the ordinary, in the center of the plot against the empire?”
Kerrec’s eyes had no color at all. He cultivated discipline for a very good reason—he had a horrible temper. He also, even now, had magic enough to be dangerous. More dangerous than if he had not been broken, because his defenses were in ruins.
She would not let him see her flinch, but met his coldness with a flash of white heat. “Tell me what you know. Now.”
His lips were tight, but he got the words out, neat and precise. “Her name is Valeria. She comes from a village north of here. Her father was in the legions. Her mother is a wisewoman. Her Call is real and her power enormous. A Great One came to her, and the Ladies blessed her. She was champion of the testing.”
“And the riders rejected her because not only had no female been Called in a thousand years, the very thought of one scared them out of their wits.” Briana’s knees would no longer hold her up. She dropped to the chair across from him. “Are you all idiots?”
“I didn’t think I was,” he said, “but I was the worst of us all. The moment she heard of that charlatan Olivet, she ran to him. She sold herself to the enemy.”
“Was it that simple? What did you riders do to force that—apart from humiliating her, insulting her and denying the gods’ will in sending the Call?”
He thrust himself to his feet, scattering books and pens and inkpots. “You know nothing! How dare you presume to judge?”
She sat back, deliberately calm. “I am the heir to this empire. Judgment is my duty and obligation. I know you, and I know the rest of the riders. It’s easy enough to see what happened to a woman who not only passed the tests, she outdid every one of the men who was Called. How did she do it? Cut her hair and keep her coat on? Add a bit of glamour, maybe?”
He was shaking and his face was white, but he had not blasted her yet. “Yes, it’s our fault the enemy has a weapon this potent and with this much reason to turn against us. But if she had not been by her very nature dishonorable—if she had not gone running after a rutting bull of a barbarian—”
“You’re in love with her.”
Kerrec stopped short. “What in the gods’ name makes you think—”
“Brother,” Briana said, “stop. There’s no time for games. Are you absolutely sure she’s turned traitor?”
“I am sure,” he said.
Briana closed her eyes. She needed a moment’s peace, and time to think.
She could feel Kerrec on the other side of the table, smoldering in silence. Had she thought him cold? Yes—so cold he burned.
“Did you ever,” she asked him without opening her eyes, “even once, let her know you love her?”
“Yes!” It was a cry of pain.
“How late? Too late?”
“Far too late,” he said. “I can’t remember. I can’t see—I was dying. She had me taken from the Brother of Pain. She took care of me. I woke, and she—and he—were—”
Briana could feel how much he hurt. But she was a hard creature. She had to be, if she was going to rule the empire. “He?”
“The prince,” he said, all but spitting it, “of the Caletanni. Euan Rohe.”
Her eyes opened. Her brows rose. “Convenient,” she said.
“For her? Or for him?”
“He’s a magnificent young animal,” Briana said, “and by no means a fool. I’m sure he saw the opportunity and seized it—unlike the riders.”
“I don’t think you’re the one to be judging that,” Briana said. She drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “This complicates matters considerably. If it had been just Gothard and Olivet and a pack of savages, the plot would be a great deal less likely to succeed. With a horse mage of that strength, and a Great One…as the barbarians would say, that is a worthy opponent.”
“She is young,” he said, visibly scraping himself together, “and the Great One is barely out of colthood—he came in with the Midsummer herd. For all their strength, they’re all but untrained.”
“Which, of course,” Briana said, “makes matters notably worse. No training, no discipline. Add in a genuine grievance and you have quite a dangerous enemy. Unless…can we win her back again?”
Briana braced against the flash of sudden rage. Kerrec controlled it, but it lingered behind his eyes. “What can we offer that she’ll take? They’ll give her the Mountain and everything on it.”
“They have to win it first,” Briana pointed out.
That was empty bravado, and they both knew it. Briana turned her thoughts away from that particular trouble, for a while, and said, “There may be hope even with this. One of our brother’s guards has come over to us, and proposed that we separate our brother from the stones that strengthen his magic. He has allies, he says, and a plan.”
Kerrec seemed as glad as she to shift the conversation from Valeria. “Do you trust him?” he asked.
“He seems an honest man. He’s married to Maariyah’s sister.”