Song of Unmaking

by Caitlin Brennan

Every night he struggled to remember what he had been before. He had been a master of his art, endowed with magic of great power and beauty. His discipline had been impeccable. He had mastered the world’s patterns and could bend them to his will.

  That was gone. The whole glorious edifice had fallen into ruin. All that was left was a confusion of shards, grinding on one another like shattered bone.

  Very carefully he eased out of Valeria’s arms. It hurt to leave her—but it hurt more to stay. She was everything that he had been and more.

  It was not envy that he felt. It was grief. He should have been her match, not a broken thing that she could only pity.

  He was unprepared for the wave of sheer, raw rage that surged through him. The rage had a source—a name.

  Gothard.

  He could name the red blackness that laired in the pit of his stomach, too. It was hate. Gothard had done this to him. Gothard had given the Brother of Pain his orders. Gothard’s malice and spite had broken Kerrec’s mind and shattered his magic.

  Gothard his brother, Gothard the half-blood, had nothing but loathing for his brother and sister who were legitimate as he was not, and for his father who had sired him on a hostage. He wanted them all dead—and he had come damnably close to succeeding.

  He had escaped defeat and fled from the reckoning. No one, even mages, had been able to find him. But Kerrec knew where he was. He was in Kerrec’s mind, taking it apart fragment by fragment.

  Somewhere, in the flesh, he was waiting. Kerrec had no doubt that he was preparing a new assault on everything and every person who had ever dealt him a slight, real or imagined. Gothard would not give up until they were all destroyed.

  With shaking hands, Kerrec pulled on breeches and coat and boots. It was halfway between midnight and dawn. The school was asleep. Even the cooks had not yet awakened to begin the day’s baking.

  In the stillness of the deep night, the Call grated on his raw edges. He had enough power, just, to shut it out.

  He went to the one place where he could find something resembling peace. The stallions slept in their stable, each of them shining faintly, so that the stone-vaulted hall with its rows of stalls glowed as if with moonlight.

  Petra’s stall was midway down the eastern aisle, between the young Great One Sabata and the Master’s gentle, ram-nosed Icarra. Kerrec’s friend and teacher cocked an ear as he slipped into the stall, but did not otherwise interrupt his dream.

  Kerrec lay on the straw in the shelter of those heavy-boned white legs. Petra lowered his head. His breath ruffled Kerrec’s hair. He sighed and sank deeper into sleep.

  Even here, Kerrec could not sleep, but it did not matter. He was safe. He drew into a knot and closed his eyes, letting pain and self-pity drain away. All that was left behind was quiet, and blessed emptiness.

  Valeria knew that she was dreaming. Even so, it was strikingly real.

  She was sitting at dinner in her mother’s house. They were all there, all her family, her three sisters and her brothers Niall and Garin, and even Rodry and Lucius who had gone off to join the legions. The younger ones looked exactly as they had the last time she saw them, almost a year ago to the day.

  She was wearing rider’s clothes. Her sister Caia curled her lip at the grey wool tunic and close-cut leather breeches. Caia was dressed for a wedding in a dress so stiff with embroidery that it could have stood up on its own. There were flowers in her hair, autumn flowers, purple and gold and white.

  She glowered at Valeria. “How could you run away like that? Don’t you realize how it looked? You ruined my wedding!”

  “There now,” their mother said in her most quelling tone. “That will be enough of that. You had a perfectly acceptable wedding.”

  Caia’s sense of injury was too great even to yield to Morag’s displeasure. “It was a solid month late, and half the cousins couldn’t come because they had to get in the harvest. And all anyone could talk about was her.” Her finger stabbed toward Valeria. “It should have been my day. Why did she have to go and spoil it?”

  “I didn’t mean—” Valeria began.

  “You never do,” said Caia, “but you always do.”

  That made sense in Caia’s view of the world. Valeria found that her eyes were stinging with tears.

  Rodry cuffed Valeria lightly, but still hard enough to make her ears ring. “Don’t mind her,” he said. “She’s just jealous because her lover is a live smith instead of a dead imperial heir. That’s how girls are, you know. Princes, even dead, are better than anything else.”

  “Kerrec is not dead,” Valeria said.

  “Prince Ambrosius lies in his tomb,” said Rodry. “It’s empty, of course. But who notices that?”

  “That was his father,” Valeria tried to explain, “being furious that his heir was Called to the Mountain instead of the throne. He declared him dead and stopped acknowledging his existence until there was no other choice. Isn’t that what Mother has done to me? I’ll be amazed if she’s done anything else.”

  “Mother knows you’re alive,” Rodry said. “She’s not happy about it, but you can hardly expect her to be. She had a life all planned for you, too.”

  “So did the gods,” said Valeria. “Even Mother isn’t strong enough to stand in their way.”

  “Don’t tell her that,” her brother said, not quite laughing. He bent toward her and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll see you soon.”

  She frowned. “What—”

  The dream was whirling away. The end of it went briefly strange. It was dark, a swirl of nothingness. She dared not look into it. If she did, she would drown—all of her, heart and soul and living consciousness. Every part of her would be Unmade.

  The Unmaking blurred into the bell that summoned the riders to their morning duties. Valeria sat up fuzzily. The dream faded into a faint, dull miasma overlaid with her family’s faces.

  Kerrec was gone. He had got up before her, as all too usual lately.

  She would be late if she dallied much longer. She stumbled out of bed, wincing at the bruises that had set hard in the night, and washed in the basin. The cold water roused her somewhat, though her mind was still full of fog. She pulled on the first clean clothes that came to hand and set off for the stables.

  Half a dozen more of the Called came in that morning, and another handful by evening. There had never been that many so soon after the Mountain began its singing. Some of the younger riders had a wager that the candidates’ dormitory would be full by testing day.

  That would be over a hundred—twelve eights. One or two wagered that even more would come, as many as sixteen eights, which had not happened in all the years since the school was founded.

  “We’ll be hanging hammocks from the rafters,” Iliya said at breakfast after the stallions had been fed and their stalls thoroughly cleaned. The thought made him laugh. Iliya was a singer and teller of tales when he was not studying to be a rider. He found everything delightful, because sooner or later it would go into a song.

  Paulus was as sour as Iliya was sweet. He glared down his long aristocratic nose and said, “You are all fools. There has never been a full complement of candidates, not in a thousand years.”

  “There was never a woman before last year,” Batu pointed out from across the table. He was the most exotic of the four, big and broad, with skin so black it gleamed blue. He had never even seen a horse before the Call drew him out of his mother’s house, far away in the uttermost south of the empire.

  Valeria, most definitely the oddest since she was the first woman ever to be Called to the Mountain, offered a wan reflection of his wide white smile. “Are you wagering that more will come?”

  “That’s with the gods,” he said.

  “More females.” Paulus shuddered. “Even one is too many.”

  “Everything’s changing,” Batu said. “We’ll have to change with it. That’s what we were Called for.”

  “We were Called to ride the white gods in the Dance of Time,” Paulus sa
id stiffly. “That is all we are for. Everything leads to that. Nothing else matters.”

  “I’m rather partial to wine and song myself,” Iliya said. He drained his cup of hot herb tea and licked his lips, as satisfied with himself as a cat.

  Valeria was long accustomed to his face, but once in a great while she happened to notice that in its way it was as unusual as Batu’s. In shape and coloring it was ordinary enough, with olive-brown skin and sharply carved features, but he was a chieftain’s son from the deserts of Gebu. The marks of his rank were tattooed in vivid swirls on his cheekbones and forehead.

  The Call had brought them here from all over the empire. They had passed test after test, and were still passing them—as they would do for as long as they served the gods on the Mountain.

  She looked from her friends’ faces to others in the hall. Most of the lesser riders were there this morning. The four First Riders dined in their own, much smaller hall, usually with the Master of the school for company. Today Master Nikos was here, sitting at the head table with a handful of Second Riders.

  He caught her glance and nodded slightly. Valeria’s existence was an ongoing difficulty, but after she had brought all the stallions together to mend the broken Dance, he had had to concede that she belonged among the riders. To his credit, he had accepted the inevitable with good grace—which was more than could be said for some of the others.

  He was probably praying that all of this year’s Called were male. She could hardly blame him. They had troubles enough as it was.

  She pushed away her half-full bowl and rose. The others had had the same thought. There was a classroom waiting and a full morning of lessons, then a full afternoon in the saddle.

  Iliya danced ahead of her, singing irrepressibly, though Paulus growled at him to stop his bloody caterwauling. Batu strode easily beside Valeria. He was smiling.

  It was a good morning, he was thinking, clear for her to read. Most mornings were, these days, though the school had come through a hell or two to get there.

  Maybe there were more hells ahead. Maybe some would be worse, but that did not trouble him, either. Batu, better than any of them, had mastered the art of living as the stallions did, in the perpetual present.

  Eight

  When winter’s back broke, so did the king’s spirit. He had been fading since the dark of the year, as if he had hung on until his heir came back. Now that Euan Rohe was here, with an acknowledged son of his own, he could let go.

  It was soft and slow, as deaths went. He slept more and more and sat in hall less and less. Little by little the king’s various offices fell to Euan.

  There were guards on the gates now, inner and outer. The roads were watched and the borders guarded. Nothing could take the clan by surprise.

  Spring came with the breaking of ice and the howling of wind, and storms that lashed sleet and rain instead of sleet and snow. The clan began to emerge from its winter’s idleness. The hall became a practice ground. Even when the storms raged, men of the clan went out hunting or raiding.

  Scouts were coming in, nearly as ragged as Euan had been. The empire was moving. The emperor and his legions were gathering for war.

  Gothard spent most of his time with the priests as either their prisoner or their pupil—or maybe he was their master. Euan was not minded to inquire. Gothard stayed out of Euan’s way, and that suited Euan perfectly.

  On the day when the last of the ice broke in the rivers, the latest storm had blown away. Sun shone dazzling bright on the winter-wearied dun. Euan thought he might go hunting boar. He was tired of stringy roast ox and even more tired of being penned up in walls.

  On his way to the hall to call up a hunt, he came face-to-face with Gothard. If he wanted to give himself a fit of the shudders, he could reflect that he had been looking straight down the passage and seen Gothard nowhere until he appeared directly in front of Euan.

  “It’s happening,” Gothard said.

  Mages, Euan thought sourly. “What is happening? War?”

  “Among other things.” Gothard smiled. Whatever he was thinking, it gave him great pleasure. “You’d better be ready. As soon as the weather breaks, the high king’s calling the muster.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Euan said—unwisely, maybe.

  “I don’t think so,” Gothard said.

  “I command you.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  The skin tightened between Euan’s shoulder blades. He was not sure what he wanted to say yet. When he was, he would say it, no matter what it cost.

  At this particular moment, he pushed past Gothard. He had a boar to hunt, and the men were waiting.

  Euan’s uneasiness stayed with him through the hunt and the killing of the boar and the return to the dun. Nothing there had changed. The king was a little weaker, a little greyer, but that had been going on for months.

  Every night, no matter the hour, he looked in on Conor first, then his father. Tonight he found himself turning toward his father’s sleeping room. He refused to call it a premonition. Gothard had raised his hackles. He had to be sure there was nothing in it.

  Niall was asleep. Lamps burned in a cluster, spoils of the last war with Aurelia. Murna sat beside the bed, stitching at a linen shirt.

  Euan wanted to believe in that quiet ordinariness, but he kept seeing Gothard’s face. There was nothing ordinary here. The quiet was a lie.

  His mother looked up. Her eyes were somber. “Tomorrow you should send out the summons to clan gathering,” she said.

  Euan nodded. That was the king’s duty, but the king was past performing it. The clans should have gathered to plan this year’s war before Euan came back—and here it was nearly spring.

  “Better late than never,” he said. Then, “How long do you think he has?”

  “The One knows,” she said.

  Euan suspected that one other was privy to that knowledge. He bowed to his father, though Niall was too far gone to see. “I’ll be back,” he said to his mother. “Don’t let anyone else near him while I’m gone.”

  Her eyes widened slightly, but she asked no questions. She took up her stitching again.

  It was only after Euan had passed the door that it dawned on him. That was not a shirt she was making. It was a shroud.

  Euan had a fair hunt to find Gothard. He was not in the priests’ house—as far as Euan dared to enter it—nor was he in the guesthouse or the young men’s house or the hall. At last, in the darkness before dawn, Euan clambered up the crumbling stair to the top of the tower.

  It was a steep and dangerous way in the dark, but Euan had climbed it often enough when he was younger. His feet still remembered which steps were safe and which were rotten. There were more of the latter now, one or two of which nearly cost him his neck, but he made his way past them.

  The tower’s roof had once been higher—by how much, even legend was not sure. It was high enough now that if Euan stood at the parapet he could see clear across the moor to the low squat of hill that was Dun Gralloch.

  Gothard was in the middle of the roof, lying on his back with his eyes full of starlight. Euan considered throttling him, but that could grow tedious with repetition. He stood over Gothard instead, blocking the starlight, and said, “Take your spell off my father.”

  Gothard blinked as if he had roused from a dream. “What? Spell? There is no—”

  “Poison, then. Whatever it is, undo it.”

  “I’ve done nothing,” Gothard said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I can see why not,” said Gothard, “but it is true. He’s dying all by himself.”

  “He was before you came here,” Euan said. “You’ve been kindly helping him on his way. Don’t try to deny it again. I can smell magic. He reeks of it.”

  “Therefore it must be my magic?” Gothard inquired.

  “Who else would it be? And don’t,” said Euan through clenched teeth, “go blaming my son.”

  “I wouldn’t d
ream of it,” Gothard said. He sat up. “I have something for you. Look.”

  He tossed it toward Euan. Euan caught it before it could fall.

  It was a stone, round and flat and polished smooth. His hand tingled when he caught it. He almost flung it down, but his fingers closed over it instead. “What’s this? A spell to finish my father off?”

  “It’s a seeing-stone,” said Gothard. “Look in it. Think of what you want to see, and there it will be. Wouldn’t you like to know where the emperor’s armies are?”

  “You know I would,” Euan said. “What’s the price?”

  “It’s part of our bargain,” said Gothard. “If it helps you win the war, so much the better.”

  Euan looked down at the stone. It was the size and shape of the mirror that an imperial lady would carry with her to ascertain that her face was properly painted. Not, he thought, that one particular imperial woman would care for such a thing.

  The stone shimmered as if reflecting starlight. Before he could turn his eyes away, the shimmer brightened and cleared. She was there, with the glow of lamplight on her face, turning the pages of a book.

  Her hair was longer than he remembered but still cut short. She was wearing the grey coat of a rider-candidate. That was what, more than anything else, she had wanted. It seemed that she had won it.

  He could have reached out and touched her. It was a great effort to resist.

  She seemed unaware of his eyes on her. When he wondered who else was in the room with her, the stone showed him an empty room and, more to the point, an empty bed.

  It surprised him how glad he was to see that. Euan was alive and standing on this tower because of her, but he was not the man she had chosen. That one…

  The vision in the stone began to shift. Euan wrenched his mind away from Valeria’s lover. He did not want to see the man or know where he was or even if he was alive. He turned his thoughts to the emperor instead.

  And there was Artorius to the life, asleep in a lofty bed, not only alive but clearly well—despite what Gothard had said of him.