Song of Unmaking

by Caitlin Brennan

  “So you do,” said Euan sweetly. He turned on his heel. It was a somewhat longer way to the river than if he walked by Gothard, but he was not eager to risk a blade in the belly.

  Unfortunately for his hopes of escape, he was much weaker than he wanted to be—and Gothard was well fed and armed with magic. His hand gripped Euan’s arm and spun him back. Euan struck it aside with force enough to make Gothard hiss with pain, but the moment for escape had passed. He was not going anywhere until this was over.

  “Suppose I take you with me,” he said. “What’s our bargain? You help me become high king and I help you become emperor? What guarantee does either of us have that we’ll get what we wish for?”

  “There are few certainties in life,” Gothard said. “Don’t you love a good gamble? There’s a crown for you and a throne for me, and power enough for the two of us. Or we’re both dead and probably damned.”

  “I can’t say I dislike those odds,” Euan said. “Come on, then. Take what you need and follow. I want to be well away from the river by sunup.”

  “In a moment,” Gothard said. “Wait here.”

  Euan considered telling him what he could do with his damned arrogance, or better yet, walking away while Gothard did whatever he had taken it into his head to do. But curiosity held Euan where he was—and weakness, if he was honest with himself. The heat of the star’s fall was nearly gone. The cold was sinking into his bones.

  Gothard strode directly toward the pit where the star had fallen. Euan knew what he was looking for. He was a mage of stones, after all, and the star was a stone.

  It weighed heavier than ever in Euan’s traveling bag. A hunted renegade, stripped of his warband, needed every scrap of hope or glory that he could get his hands on if he wanted to stand up before all the tribes and declare himself fit to be high king. This was a gift from the One, a piece of heaven. It carried tremendous power.

  How much more power might it carry if a stone mage wielded it—and if that stone mage was sworn to Euan?

  Gothard was a wrathful man and a born traitor, and he was probably mad. But he had powers that Euan could use—if Euan could keep him firmly in hand.

  This was a night for taking risks. Euan stood on the edge of the pit and looked down. Gothard was crawling on hands and knees, muttering what might be spells, or more likely curses.

  The firepot was cold. The starstone felt as if it had turned to ice. It was so cold it burned Euan’s hand as he held it up. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  Gothard’s back straightened. The pale oval of his face turned toward the moon. His eyes glowed like an animal’s.

  His voice echoed faintly against the sides of the pit. “Where did you find that?”

  “Not far from where you’re standing,” Euan said. “It was hotter than fire then. Now it’s bloody cold.”

  “What were you thinking to do with it?”

  “Make myself high king,” Euan said.

  “Are you a stone mage, then?”

  Euan refrained from bridling at his mockery. “No, but you are. What will you give in return for this?”

  “What do you want?” Gothard asked. “We’ve already bargained for the high kingship.”

  “Now I’m assured of it,” said Euan. “Wield your powers for me. Help me win the war that’s coming. Then we’ll talk about the empire we’re going to take.”

  “All with a single stone,” Gothard said, but Euan could hear the yearning in him.

  Euan could feel the power in the stone, too, though thank the One, he had no magic to work with it. His soul was clean of that.

  “This is a star,” he said. “There’s nothing stronger for your kind, is there? I see it in your eyes. You’ve never lusted for a woman the way you lust for this. This is every bit of magic you lost when your brother took your master stone—and as much again, and more that I’m no doubt too feebleminded to comprehend. I want my share of it, cousin. Swear by it—swear you’ll wield it in my cause.”

  “I swear,” Gothard said. His eyes were on the stone.

  It was growing warmer in Euan’s hand, or else his fingers were too numb to tell the difference. It seemed both heavier and lighter.

  Its power was changing. Gothard was changing it—without even laying a hand on it.

  Euan refused to give way to awe. He would use a mage for his purposes, but this was still a half-blood imperial with the taint of treason on him. Gothard would keep his oath exactly as long as it served his purpose, and not a moment longer.

  Euan would have to make sure that that was a very long time. He was aching, frozen, dizzy with hunger and exhaustion, but he laughed. He was on his way home, and he was going to be high king.

  Three

  Euan Rohe walked into his father’s dun a handful of days before the dark of the year. A bitter rain was falling, but the west was clear, a thin line of pale blue beneath the lowering cloud.

  The dun was older than the Calletani, a walled fort of rammed earth and weatherworn stone. The wall enclosed a half-ruined tower and a clutter of round houses built like the traveling tents of the people. The king’s house was built around the tower, with his hall in the center. All of it sat on a low hill that rose abruptly out of a long roll of downs.

  In milder seasons it was a vast expanse of grass and heather shot through with the silver lines of rivers. Now it was a wilderness of ice and drifted snow, whipped with wind and sleet.

  Gothard could have brought them there on the backs of dragons, or conjured chariots out of the air around the starstone. It was Euan who had insisted on taking the hard way on foot over the mountains and through the forests into the heartlands of the Calletani. It was a long road and grueling, but it was honest.

  It had also given Gothard ample time to learn the ways and powers of the stone. Euan had no objection to the provender it brought, either the game that walked into his snares or the wine that appeared in his cup. It kept them both alive and walking. It protected them against either discovery or attack, and smoothed their way as much as Euan’s scruples would allow.

  “You’re as stubborn as the damned horse-gods,” Gothard had muttered one evening, while a blizzard howled outside the sphere of light and warmth that he had conjured from the stone. “They won’t fly, either. The harder their worshippers struggle, the happier they are.”

  “That’s the way of gods,” Euan said.

  Gothard had snarled at that, but Euan refused to change his mind. Magic was a dangerous temptation. He would use it if he had to, but he refused to become dependent on it.

  They walked, therefore, and Gothard played with the stone, working petty magics and small evils that made him titter to himself when he thought Euan was asleep. Gothard had never been what Euan would call sane, but since he had gotten hold of the starstone, he had been growing steadily worse. He was not quite howling mad, but he was on his way there.

  He had been talking to himself for two days when they passed the gates of the dun—a long ramble that Euan had stopped paying attention to within the first hour. Part of him listened for signs of immediate threat, but it all seemed to be focused on the riders and their fat white horse-gods, Gothard’s dearly loathed brother, his even more dearly loathed father, and occasionally the sister whom he direly underestimated. Gothard, in true imperial style, had convinced himself that the females of his kind had neither strength nor intelligence.

  At last, under the low and heavy lintel of Dun Eidyn’s gate, he stopped his babbling. There were no guards at the gate, and only a single sentry snoring on the wall above. The two wanderers went not only unchallenged but unnoticed.

  Euan resolved to do something about that at his earliest opportunity. Winter it might be, but armies could still march and raiding parties rampage through unprotected camps and ill-guarded duns.

  There was no one abroad within the walls. Smoke curled from the roofs of the round houses, and lights glimmered beneath doors and through cracks in shuttered windows. Even the dogs had taken shelter
against the storm, which with the coming of dark had changed to sleet.

  The door to the king’s house was unbarred, and also unguarded. The guard who should have been there was inside with the rest, in the warmth and the smoky firelight of the hall, finishing the last of the day’s meal and passing jars of wine and skins of ale and mead. The songs had begun, the vaunting that would bring each warrior to his feet with the tale of his own exploits and those of his ancestors for as far back as the rest would let him go.

  Euan stood in the shadow of the doorway, letting it sweep over him. Five years he had been away, fighting his father’s war and living as a hostage among the Aurelians. He needed time to believe that he was back at last—and to see what had become of his people in the time since he was gone.

  He recognized many of the faces, though some had gone grey and not a few had gained new scars or lost an eye or a limb. Too many were missing, and a surprising number were new—young, most of those. They had been in the children’s house when Euan left, or had come to the tribe as hostages or in marriage alliances.

  There were more than he remembered. They filled the circle of the hall, overflowing to the edges. There were more shields and weapons hung on the walls, and a good number of those were bright and new, not yet darkened with smoke or age.

  He had feared to find a weakened clan and a faltering people, but these were strong. They were eating well for the dead of winter—the remains of an ox turned on the spit in the center, and the head of a wild boar stood on a spear beside the high seat. The king was wearing its hide for a mantle over a profusion of plaids and a clashing array of golden ornaments.

  The old man was gaunt and the heavy plaits of his hair and mustaches had gone snow-white, but his back was still straight and his hand was steady as he drank from a skull-cup. The pale bone was bound with gold and set with chunks of river amber, and the wine inside was as red as blood. It was imperial wine—drinking defiance, the king liked to call it.

  He was arrogant enough to leave his dun unguarded and his doors unbarred. Some downy-cheeked stranger was chanting, badly, the lay of a battle Euan himself had fought in. People were already hooting and pounding the tables to make him stop.

  Euan raised his voice above the din, drawling the words as if he had all the time in the world. “Now, now, that’s not such a bad vaunt for a stripling. He’s even got his father killing three generals, and there were only two that I remember—and I killed them both. Look, that’s old Aegidius’s skull my father’s drinking from, and there’s the nick where I split it, too.”

  While he spoke, he moved out into the light. He knew what he looked like, wrapped in rags and filthy tatters, with ice melting and dripping from his matted beard. He allowed a grin to split it, flashing it over them all, until it came to rest on his father’s face.

  It was expressionless, a schooled and royal mask, but the yellow wolf-eyes were glittering. Euan met them steadily. “Good evening, Father,” he said.

  The hall had gone silent except for the crackling of flames on the hearth. No one even breathed. Out of the corner of his eye Euan caught the flick of fingers. Someone was trying to expel him as if he were a ghost or a night spirit.

  That made him want to laugh, but he held the laughter inside. He had played his hand. The next move was his father’s.

  Niall the king studied him for a long while. Euan knew better than to think that slowness was the wine fuddling the old man’s brain. Niall was clearer-headed with a bellyful of wine than most men were cold sober.

  At last he said, “So. You made it back. Took you long enough.” He filled the late General Aegidius’s skull to the brim and held it out. “This will warm your bones.”

  That was a great honor. Euan bent his head to acknowledge it, but he did not leave the door quite yet. “I brought you a gift,” he said.

  He held his breath. Gothard might choose to be difficult—it would be like him. But he came forward at Euan’s gesture.

  He was even more rough and wild a figure than Euan, with his mad eyes and his pale, set face. He stank of magic, so strong it caught at the back of Euan’s throat.

  “Uncle,” Gothard said in his mincing imperial accent. “I’m pleased to see you well.”

  The king did not look pleased, but neither would Euan have said he was displeased. The bastard son of the Aurelian emperor and a Calletani princess was a potent hostage—even without the starstone.

  Niall would have to know about that, but not in front of the whole royal clan.

  Maybe he caught a whiff of it. Anyone with a nose could. His eyebrows rose, but he asked no questions.

  “Nephew,” he said. He beckoned to the servant who stood closest. “Take him, feed him. Give him what he wants to drink.”

  Gothard had been disposed of, and he could not fail to know it. Euan did not find it reassuring that he bowed to the king and let the servant take him to a lower table—not terribly low, but not the king’s table, either. A flare of temper would have been more honest, and a blast of magic would have been almost comforting.

  Now Euan would have to watch him as well as the rest of them. But then, that had been true from the moment Gothard shed the skin of his magical protection and stood up in the camp he had failed to save. Gothard was no more or less untrustworthy than he had ever been.

  For Euan there was a place beside his father and the best cut of the ox that remained. Tomorrow he would be looking out for daggers in the back, but tonight he was the prince again, the king’s heir. He was home.

  Four

  Euan woke in bed with no memory of having been brought there. He had lasted through four cups of the strong, sweet wine and uncounted rounds of bragging from the king’s warband. They were courting him—eyeing the king’s age and his youth, and reckoning the odds.

  The wine was still in him, making his head pound, but he grinned at the heavy beams of the ceiling. He was in the tower, in one of the rooms above the hall—he recognized the carving. Rough shapes of men and beasts ran in a skein along the beam. Like the tower, they were older than his people. He had known them since he was a child.

  His face felt different. His hand found a cleanly shaven chin and tidily trimmed mustaches. The rest of him was clean, too, and the knots and mats were out of his hair.

  He sat up. He was still bone-thin—no miracles there—but months of crusted dirt were blessedly gone. He was dressed in finely woven breeks, green checked with blue in a weave and a pattern that he knew. The same pattern in rougher and heavier wool marked the blanket that covered him. There was a heavy torque around his neck, and rings swung in his ears and clasped his arms and wrists. He was right royally attired, and every ornament was soft and heavy gold.

  He hardly needed to look toward the door to know who stood there, waiting for him to notice her. She was nearly as old as his father, but where age lay on Niall like hoarfrost, on Murna his first wife and queen, it was hardly more than a kiss of autumn chill. Her hair had darkened a bit with the years, but it was still as much gold as red. Her skin was milk-white, her features carved clean, almost too strong for beauty. They were all the more beautiful for that.

  She looked like a certain imperial woman—not the coloring, the One God knew, but the shape and cast of her face and the keenness of her moss-green eyes as they studied him. It startled him to realize how like Valeria she was.

  Well, he thought, at least his taste was consistent. He let the smile escape. “Mother! You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “I would hope not,” she said. “Whereas you—what have you been living on? Grass and rainwater?”

  “Near enough,” he said. “I’m home now. You can feed me up to your heart’s content.”

  She frowned slightly. “Are you? Are you really home?”

  “For good and all,” he said. “I’ll tell you stories when there’s time. I’ve seen the white gods’ Dance, Mother. I’ve brought an empire to its knees. It got up again, staggering and stumbling, but it was a good beginning.”

/>   “All men love to brag,” she said.

  “Ah,” said Euan, “but my brags are all true.”

  “I’m sure,” she said as if to dismiss his foolishness, but her eyes were smiling. “There’s breakfast when you’re ready. After that, your father will see you. Something about a gift, he said.”

  Euan nodded. “You’ll be there for that?”

  “Should I be?”

  He shrugged. “If it amuses you.”

  “It might.”

  She left him with a smile to keep him warm, and a parcel that proved to be a shirt and a plaid and a pair of new boots, soft doeskin cut to fit his feet exactly. Someone must have been stitching all night long.

  It was bliss to dress in clean clothes, warm and well made and without a rip or a tear to let the wind in. There were weapons, too, the bone-handled dagger that every man of the Calletani carried, the long bow and the heavy boar-spear and the lighter throwing spear and the double-headed axe, and the great sword that was as long as a well-grown child was tall.

  He left all but the dagger in their places. The day was dark as he went out, but the sun was well up—somewhere on the other side of the clouds. Last night’s glimmer of clear sky had been a taunt. Snow was falling thick and hard, and wind howled around the tower.

  It could howl all it liked. Euan was safe out of its reach.

  There was food in the hall, barley bread and the remains of last night’s roast, with a barrel of ale to wash it down. Euan ate and drank just enough to settle his stomach. If he had been playing the game properly, he would have lingered for an hour, bantering with the clansmen who were up and about, but he was still half in the long dream of flight. His feet carried him to the room where the king slept and rested and held private audiences.

  It was the same room he remembered. Just before he went away, the trophies of two legions had been brought there. They were still standing against the wall. The armor of the generals, their shields and the standards with their golden wreaths and remembrances of old battles, gleamed as if they had been taken only yesterday.