Kerrec was practicing those virtues himself. He did not single Valeria out, and he certainly did not dismiss her. He taught her as he did the rest, with a keen eye and a dispassionate word.
So that was how it was going to be. Valeria decided to find it encouraging.
After their very simple lesson, even Maurus, who could almost ride, was groaning in pain. The boys creaked and limped their way through the cooling out of the horses and the removal of saddles and bridles and the cleaning of same—all part of the discipline.
They were not very good at it. Valeria would be undoing a good part of it later—as she had this morning. That was her discipline, as menial labor was theirs. They were all being taught lessons that they needed to learn.
Hers were not over, either. When she slipped away, one of the servants was waiting with new orders. There was a library in Riders’ Hall, and she was to continue her studies there. He had a list, written in Kerrec’s hand, and exercises that, if she did them all, would more than consume the day.
If Kerrec thought he could wear her out with tedium, he did not know her as well as he thought he did. She came prepared to find the books in boxes or on the shelves, but they were all on a table under the window, marked where he had asked her to read.
She thought for some time about throwing them at the wall. But he wanted her to do that. She sat down instead and opened the first book.
Focus was the first of all disciplines. She focused on the words. After a while, as they were meant to, they became the world.
Twenty-Six
At first when Kerrec realized that Valeria had followed him to Aurelia, he had felt such a confusion of anger and panic that he could hardly think. But after a day’s reflection and a night’s sleep, he came to a different conclusion. When he saw her riding with the young nobles who insisted that he teach them, he knew what to do about her.
It would have been simpler without her. With her, there was more that he could do, and more hope that he could get it done before he was hunted down and stopped. But he would have to deceive her first, and that might not be possible.
He had to try. Though it was almost physical pain to push her away, for her own safety he had no choice but to do it.
He was going to die. He had seen it in the Dance that he nearly broke. Death in the imperial family, and great magic broken and poured away in the maw of the Unmade. He had to make that death count for something—and part of that was not to lose Valeria.
He put her to work as if she had still been in the school. It was hard work and long, but she was easily capable of it. Most of it kept them apart—which he was careful to encourage.
While she was absorbed in books and horses, Kerrec went hunting in his father’s treasury. He hunted not in the body but in the mind, with magic.
What he was looking for would have been easy to find if he had been whole, but his magic was still very much a broken thing. First he had to bring the shards together, then he had to smooth the ragged edges. When he had done that, he had to slip the thread of his power past the wards on the treasury without being caught. Only then could he search for what he had left there.
It was slow and often grueling. He could not ask for help. If anyone knew what he was doing, there would be a great outcry and a barrage of questions and recriminations, and time would dribble away until it was too late.
He began the working the first night after Valeria arrived. He went out into the city to a certain house that was crumbling in ruin. He shuddered to pass the sagging gate, but he forced himself through it.
It was no easier inside. This was not where he had been broken—that had happened far away from here, in a hunting lodge in the mountains. But the power that had ordered his breaking had lived in this house. Fragments of it were still here, even more scattered than the remnants of Kerrec’s magic.
He only needed a little. He went as deep into the house as he could stand. There was nothing living here but the rats, and the buzz of insects in the disheveled garden. The fountain was clogged and dead and the pool stagnant, breeding slime. The corpse of a bird floated in the water.
He held his breath and hurried on past. The house beyond was deserted. Its walls were cracked and its staircases crumbling. There was nothing there that he could use.
He circled around to the outer court. It was in even worse repair than the rest. Part of the colonnade was fallen, and the paving looked as if something had blasted it with fire.
He picked his way to the center of the charred circle. Something gleamed there. Carefully he brushed away ash and broken stone.
It must have been a ring once. The gold had melted into a shape like a rough coin. A stone rested in the middle. It was a very ordinary-looking thing, like a small pebble that might appear in one’s shoe, dark grey and rounded.
It was more than he could have asked for. This stone had belonged to Gothard. It had fed his magic and he had fed it, until he was much stronger than he could ever have been without it. That was what a mage of stones was, and how he performed his workings.
Maybe Kerrec would not need that other thing, if he had this. The stone was dead, having exhausted itself in some great working, but Gothard’s essence was still in it. It might be enough.
Kerrec slipped it into a pouch of leather lined with silk, being very careful not to touch it with his bare hands. When he straightened he reeled, briefly dizzy. All this ruined magic put him too much in mind of his own.
He stiffened his back. It was nothing like his. He was mending. This never would. It was all turning to dust.
He brought the stone back to Riders’ Hall. Dinner was waiting in the rooms he had moved to yesterday. He was not hungry, but his body needed to eat. He ate without tasting any of it.
He should rest. Tomorrow was soon enough to begin the next step in his plan. But while he ate, he stared at the stone that he had laid on the table. The more he stared, the more he understood, and the less happy he was.
This stone could not do what he had hoped, after all. It was too small, and it was dead. He needed the master stone, the stone through which Gothard had given the lesser stone its power.
Kerrec had taken the master stone from Gothard during the Great Dance. In his mind he could still see it, dark and round and heavy in his hand, pulsing with magic.
After the Dance was over, he had surrendered it to his father’s mages. They had warded and secured it, then laid it away in the treasury. They were unlikely to release it for the asking, considering the state Kerrec was in. If he wanted it, he would have to take it.
This was not a safe or easy thing to do alone. If Kerrec had caught a younger rider doing such a thing, he would have set the boy sharply to rights.
Kerrec was not alone. Petra was in his heart, as always. He had the stallion’s strength if his own failed.
The stallion was thinking of Valeria. Kerrec shut himself off from the vision of her face. She more than anyone must not know what he was doing—because she more than anyone could stop him.
Tonight he set wards—that was all. He had brought books from the library to help his memory. They stayed where they were, heaped on a table, unopened.
He was proud of that. His nightly struggles were bearing fruit. The patterns were there when he looked for them. He shaped and wove them into protections for the lifeless stone and the working he was planning.
Then he had to rest. He was not as frustrated as he might have been. He was stronger than he had been in a long while. He had not collapsed yet, nor did he feel as if he was going to. A rider cultivated patience. Horses were not easy or simple to train, and haste or compulsion could do great damage. If Kerrec thought of himself as a ruined horse, he could see a way through.
It was three days before Kerrec’s pupils realized either that Valeria was female or that she was a rider. She would have let them go on thinking she was an excessively reserved and haughty nobleman from somewhere in the provinces, but Kerrec either tired of the game or never had been playing
it at all. On the fourth day since Valeria met them, while they were bringing their horses out in the court, he said, “Valeria. Come here.”
His eyes avoided her face. He was as cold as he had ever been, all First Rider, with no friend or lover left.
She hardened her heart as much as she could. “Sir?” she said as a rider-candidate should.
“Take these two—” he tilted his head toward Vincentius and Maurus “—and teach them to sit a horse.”
“Sir,” she said.
They were all staring. Tigellus, who had appeared the second day, looked appalled. The rest were simply fascinated.
“Gods!” Maurus said in a loud whisper. “Is that—?” His eyes darted to Sabata and went wide. “Oh, gods. It is. And we never—”
Sabata arched his neck and stamped. The common little cob was gone. He laughed in the boys’ faces, chasing the chosen pair to the far end of the court.
Valeria followed with their mares. The boys were mute with awe, which for Maurus was unheard of. She left Vincentius holding his mare’s rein while she fastened a long line to Maurus’s mare’s bridle and sent her out on a circle.
They were both in sore need of education. Valeria taught them as she had been taught, but with care not to overtax them. They were soft young courtiers, not rider-candidates.
They still thought themselves hard used. The rest were done long before them. They almost fell from their horses, each one, and stumbled into the stable.
Sabata was still waiting for Valeria. He was unusually patient. She mounted him warily, but he made no attempt to punish her for all his standing about.
After three days of beginners’ exercises, Sabata was ready to dance. Valeria was ready to oblige him. He was still young and his discipline was imperfect, but simple figures of the Dance delighted him.
They delighted the two boys, too. When Sabata came to a final halt, Vincentius and Maurus were standing in the stable door, grinning and applauding. “We want to do that,” Vincentius said.
“If you listen when we teach you, you will,” said Valeria.
“How long did it take you to learn?” Maurus asked.
“For this, every day and night for most of a year,” she said. “And there are more years to come. This is the simplest of our arts. Sabata only came off the Mountain a year ago. He’s just learning—as I am.”
“A year,” Vincentius sighed.
“Eight years for a stallion. Twice that for a rider.” Valeria dismounted and rubbed Sabata’s neck where he loved it best, feeding him his bit of sugar.
She pulled off saddle and bridle. He nuzzled her, looking for more sugar. When there was none to be had, he wheeled and leaped into a gallop. The gallop had sparks in it, sudden leaps and exuberant curvets, settling to a lofty, floating gait that made the boys’ jaws drop.
Then, like any sensible horse, he dropped and rolled, wriggling in ecstasy, both sides and then his back. It was a perfectly absurd thing to do, and perfectly mortal. He came up crusted with sand, shaking from nose to tail, with mane flying and dust coming off him in clouds. He snorted and shook his head and trotted purposefully toward the stable.
Kerrec watched and listened from a window above the court. Valeria considered herself a solitary creature with few social graces, but wherever she was, whoever was there, she always knew what to do or say. She was as comfortable with the princess regent as she was with servants and stablehands.
He sighed, not exactly in envy. He could train a horse or a rider. He could lead a council or sit in judgment. But when it came to making friends, he never knew where to start.
Valeria was doing exactly what he needed her to do. While she was busy with those eager boys, she would not be wondering what Kerrec was doing.
He had a brief, piercing memory of her skin under his hand, as soft and smooth as cream, and the taste of her kiss. He shut them away. He had wards to build and a master stone to find. Then…
First things first. One step at a time—just as with the horses.
Twenty-Seven
It took Kerrec ten days to find the master stone. Half of that he spent painstakingly constructing wards and gathering his magic—and sternly refusing to reflect that it would have taken him a fraction the time if he had been what he used to be. He was slow, but he could do it. That was what mattered.
Once his wards were raised and his magic brought together as best it could be, he focused on the dead stone that he had found. It had no magic of its own any longer, but it kept a memory of the power that had been in it. With that to guide him, he searched through the maze of magics that guarded the imperial treasury.
If he had not been the emperor’s son, he could never have done it. As with so many other workings on the palace, the wards of the treasury were set to respond to imperial blood. When he answered the Call, he had removed himself from the succession, but he was still royal born. The wards recognized that.
They were a powerful and complex pattern of workings, some of them centuries old. That made his task easier, somewhat. He was looking for a new working with a certain flavor to it, a taste of his brother. Gothard’s blood was royal, too, but he was half a barbarian. Kerrec set the search for stone magic that was half royal and half foreign.
His days were still taken up with the palace and the riding court, but he managed little by little to pass the latter to Valeria. The former was less simple. He did not want Valeria and Briana comparing observations and deciding that something was wrong with him.
Each day he came to council later and left earlier. He let Briana think the bloom was wearing off. He had to be careful or she would subject him to another inquisition of mages, but so far she seemed unsuspicious.
On the tenth night after he began, just before he was ready to give it up and fall into bed, he felt it. It struck him with a smell of cold stone and a memory of Gothard’s voice gloating over him while he lay in agony.
The rush of hatred nearly flung him out of the working—and nearly betrayed him. But in his days of restoring himself by sheer force of will, he had learned to set aside that hatred, storing it against the day when he could unleash it on its source.
Once his mind was clear again, he followed the thread of the seeking spell through the labyrinth of wards. There, at last, was the master stone that he had taken from Gothard and wielded in the Great Dance. His own presence was still on it.
Tomorrow, he thought, he would finish what he had begun. But when he rose from the chair he had been sitting in, pretending to read, and stretched every stiff and aching muscle, he knew he could not wait. If anything happened—if Briana suspected or Valeria caught him—that would be the end of it. He would not put it past Briana to lock him up and keep him there until there was no hope of doing what he knew he must.
Tonight, then. In spite of his desperate eagerness to have it done, he slept an hour or two. He needed the rest.
He woke when he had planned to—a bit of rider’s discipline. He dressed in the clothes that he had slipped out of the palace after one of his mornings there, plain shirt and breeches and soft shoes and a servant’s tabard. That, he had discovered some while since, would take him anywhere unseen. Who noticed a servant, after all?
Riders’ Hall was quiet. The servants were asleep. Valeria slept in her room and the horses in their stable. Petra was aware of Kerrec as always, but he passed no judgment. He was dreaming of high pastures on the Mountain and herds of Ladies, beautiful and powerful.
Kerrec shook his head and smiled as he slipped down the passage to the palace. A stallion’s mind was wonderfully simple, even if he was a god.
The door to the treasury was undistinguished. There was no guard on it. The wards were subtle, but he knew already how strong they were.
His own protections were in place. He simply opened the door and walked into the maze of rooms and corridors, doors locked and warded, and stairs in unexpected places. There were no heaps of gold and jewels lying about. Those were all in chests and boxes, shut away behin
d those unassuming doors.
The master stone was deep inside, where the strongest and most dangerous treasures were, workings of magic that had been made for or against the empire. They were all heavily guarded, but he could feel them inside him. They made his bones thrum.
He only wanted one of them. It was his by right, because he had won it. That surety gave him passage.
He walked carefully, as he would through a herd of horses who did not know him. They were wild and skittish and deadly dangerous. None of them would threaten him unless he touched them—but they were everywhere, crowding around him.
At length he stopped. The one he needed was in front of him. He reached to take it, but then he paused. This was too easy.
He stood in a dark room, windowless, but the wards and magic together shed enough light that he could see. The box rested on a shelf in the midst of a hundred more. It was labeled in a precise and scholarly hand.
It was the master stone. He had no doubt of that. He secured his wards again, strand by strand, exactly as the pattern demanded.
All the different magics in that place tugged at the working, twisting it in unexpected places. He held on to calm and to the pattern. No matter how long it took, no matter how desperate he was to take the stone and escape, he clung to discipline.
Only when the wards were secure and the pattern firm did he take the box. The stone was singing under the lid.
It knew him. It wanted to bind to his magic. That was what it was for.
He shielded himself yet again. It was harder now. He was tiring. The impulse that had brought him here was losing strength.
Just a little longer. He opened the box. The stone was wrapped in warded silk. He slipped it under his tabard, then closed the box and returned it to its shelf.
If anyone happened to look, it would seem that nothing was disturbed. A shadow-image of the stone lay in the box, a working that echoed the song he could still hear just under his heart.
Song of Unmaking Page 17
