Euan walked back through the stares of the people. Most had warmed into respect. He would have to cultivate that. Respect was even better than fear for keeping a king in power.
Halfway back to the circle where the young men were still dancing, Euan stopped. The earth felt as if, just for a moment, it had shrugged.
He looked around him. It was still a blazingly hot, brilliantly sunny morning. People were going about their business as if nothing had happened.
The trickle of sweat down his back meant only that the air was hot. Its coldness was his imagination. A breeze had come up, that was all, gusting through the camp and taking the edge off the heat.
Clouds were brewing overhead. They often did in summer. They could boil like this, turning from purest white to blue-black and breeding lightning.
Euan turned away from the dance toward the priests’ tents. The breeze was stronger. It pushed against him as he walked, until he had to push back or be blown aside.
Gothard’s captives were sitting in a circle in the center of the tents. Priests surrounded them, making no attempt to interfere.
Gothard sat in the middle with the starstone in his cupped hands. His eyes were shut. He looked as if he was asleep.
The clouds were raging overhead. The wind had freshened. It swirled in the circle, catching at the ends of plaids and tangling the boys’ hair into knots.
Euan could see the strain in their faces. One or two had tears running down their cheeks. Whatever was happening behind those eyelids, it was as grueling as any battle on the field.
The storm had begun to turn slowly, like an eddy in the river. The wind rose to a scream. Gothard’s face was still expressionless, but his fingers twitched, tightening on the stone.
It was trying to break his control. If it succeeded and the storm broke over them, it would flatten the camp and everyone in it.
What Euan was going to do was either madly brave or absolutely foolhardy. He would lay bets on both. He stepped between two rapt and motionless mages and stood in the center of the circle.
He did not look up. He did not want to see what swirled there. He took Gothard’s face in his hands and spoke without raising his voice. “Gothard, stop it. You’re alerting the enemy to our exact position. Send your storm somewhere else.”
Gothard neither moved nor opened his eyes. The storm was growing. Euan could no longer see its edges.
Euan held himself steady and kept his voice quiet. “Shift the storm,” he said. “Send it over the river.”
He could not tell if he was even heard. All he could do was keep saying it, until maybe the words would sink in.
Was the wind shifting?
“Yes,” he said. “Across the river. Away from here.”
Gothard tensed. Euan braced for an eruption. None came.
One of the boys was gasping for breath. Euan dared not take his eyes off Gothard. There was no magic in what he did—it was plain human will. He willed Gothard to take the storm in his hand like the ball in a child’s game, and toss it into Aurelia.
It was not that easy. Euan did not care. Whatever the mage had to do, let him do it—and do it now.
“Now,” he said.
The wind died to a brisk breeze. Scraps of sunlight scattered across the circle. The boiling mass of cloud, spitting lightnings, rolled off toward the river. Veils of rain trailed beneath it.
Euan stepped back carefully. One of the boys was down, with priests hovering over him. From what Euan could see of him, he was blue and cold.
The rest were coming out of it, some less slowly than others. They had priests to look after them. Gothard could look to himself.
He was awake—his eyes were open. They were as black as the storm he had sent across the river. “Next time you do this,” Euan said to him, “be sure you do it when the emperor is in reach. Otherwise you’re wasting power.”
“Now you’re a master of the magical arts?” Gothard covered the starstone and laid it away. “We’ll be ready when the battle comes. I have the way of it now. We’ll give them such a storm as the world never saw.”
“Leave us a few men to fight,” Euan said. “There’s no glory in sending armies to oblivion.”
“Even if it wins you an empire?”
“I’d like to have a hand in winning it,” Euan said.
Gothard rose and shook himself. “I’ll take the emperor and leave his armies to you. Will that content you?”
“Admirably,” Euan said.
Thirty-Six
Past the fort the banks rose steeply and the river narrowed, roaring between the high walls. The next ford was miles downstream.
Trees closed in. The plain was ending, giving way to a forest of oak and beech and maple. On the far side, invisible in the dark but perceptible to Valeria’s senses, the land began to rise. The trees there were dark and tall. Faintly across the water, she caught the clean sharp scent of pine.
The road ran as close to the river’s edge as it dared. The stallions set a fast pace, surefooted in the dark.
It was cooler under the trees, and their speed woke its own wind. Even so, as the night passed, Valeria felt a change in the air. When the branches opened enough to see, there were no stars.
Daybreak was quiet, still and very hot. The sky was like hammered brass. They stopped for an hour to rest, then went on. None of them asked to stop longer.
The storm broke near noon. The wind came first, roaring through the trees and shrieking in the gorge. Thunder followed, crack after deafening crack, then blinding flashes of lightning. Woven branches sheltered them for a while—until a tree crashed down across the road, nearly taking Rodry with it.
There was no shelter—no convenient cave, and nowhere to get out of the wind or the sudden torrents of rain. The road was blocked in front of them. It was no safer to turn back, and certainly not to go off the road into the deep woods.
The fallen tree was all the shelter there was. It was an oak, riven with age and old lightning, and it had fallen solidly, braced on the spread of branches and the remains of its roots. The riders pulled saddles and baggage off the horses and scrambled under the rough-barked roof, just as the skies opened.
Valeria was wedged between her brother and Kerrec. Past the arch of Kerrec’s nose she could see Sabata’s cream-white tail and wet grey rump, and past that, a wall of water.
It was not too horribly uncomfortable. The storm had broken the heat—her face was cold though the rest of her was warm. The wind had died. The rain came down in torrents.
Rodry was snoring gently. It must be true that people said about soldiers. They could sleep anywhere.
Kerrec’s eyes were shut, but his body was stiff beside her. A shudder ran through him.
Valeria’s arms moved without her willing it, to pull him close. He did not fight her off. She held him until the shuddering stopped.
The rain came in waves, each as fierce as the last, through most of that day. The road had turned to a muddy river. The tree diverted it or they would have been swimming.
Late in the day, at last, the gusts of rain began to weaken. The clouds broke. The sun peered through.
Rodry yawned noisily. His elbow dug into Valeria’s ribs. She had been dozing, but that brought her sharply awake. Kerrec’s head was heavy on her shoulder.
They untangled themselves from each other and the tree, emerging stiffly into a wet and glistening world. The horses had wandered off in search of grass, but they were still within sight.
More trees than this one were down. The road was washed out. The riverbank had collapsed a bare three furlongs past where they had waited out the storm. It looked as if something vast and voracious had bitten into the cliff. Valeria could hear the river roaring below.
If they had gone on, they would have been caught in the fall. “The gods are angry today,” Rodry said, “but not with us.”
“You don’t think so?” said Kerrec. “There’s no road left.”
“We’ll make one,” Rodry said. “I�
�m thanking the gods we’re alive to do it. We’d best start now, while there’s daylight. There is—or used to be—an old way station a few miles on. We can spend the night there.”
Kerrec turned slowly, sniffing the air. He was scowling. “Yes. There’s another storm coming. The horses should be under cover for that, if it’s cold as well as wet.”
Valeria was no weathermaster. She could smell rain and mud and far too much water, but she could not see where that promised another siege of wind and rain. Still, if Kerrec was right, she would far rather be sleeping under a roof than half inside a fallen tree.
The road was as difficult as Valeria had feared. It was washed away in too many places. Even where it survived, it either hung precipitously above the river or was blocked by slides of mud or rock.
They slipped and struggled and scrambled. More than once they had to shift trees that were too high or tangled for the horses to jump or climb over. They led the horses more than they rode.
The sun hung low when at last they found the way station. It was built of earth and wood and stone, and seemed to grow out of the steep slope beside the road. The roof had held and the hillside did not seem likely to let go quite yet. Better still, it was a good furlong from the cliff’s edge.
There was room inside for a dozen horses and a troop of soldiers. For three of each, it was a palace—and it was dry. Wood was stacked against the far wall, more than they would ever need. A barrel stood just outside, brimming over with rainwater.
Rodry built a fire in the stone hearth. Valeria and Kerrec tended the horses, rubbing them down and feeding them handfuls of barley that they had brought from the cohort’s stores. Grass grew on the hillside, but there was a rick of hay in the station, well cured and still fresh.
“The legions think of everything,” Valeria said as the horses lined up at it, settling in for a long night’s browse.
Kerrec responded, which surprised her. “They’ve been preparing this war for years. There are people whose whole life is the pursuit of tiny details—even to the provision of hay for scouts and outriders. That’s how the empire runs, you know. Not on princes and councils and the occasional Dance.”
“‘The fate of every war is in the clerks’ hands,’” Valeria quoted from one of her lessons in the school.
“Quartermasters, too,” Rodry said as the fire caught hold. He fed it bits of tinder. “Supply clerks. Keepers of the roster. People who count every bean.”
“So what are we?” Valeria asked.
“Extraneous,” Kerrec said.
There was a glint in his eye. It nearly knocked Valeria flat. Kerrec—joking, however grimly. Who would have thought it?
Rodry caught the flicker of humor, too, but he had no way of knowing how rare it was. He grinned. “That puts us in our place, doesn’t it?”
Kerrec warmed his hands over the rising flames. Valeria shivered. It was hard to believe it had been breathlessly hot only this morning. The fire was more welcome than she could have imagined.
The thunder came back as they shared a surprisingly pleasant dinner, followed quickly by the rain. Dry and warm and almost guiltily comfortable, they ate their bread and dried meat and sharp cheese and shared a packet of honeyed figs, rich and sticky and sweet.
Sabata came to the scent of sweetness. Valeria shared her figs with him. When they were gone, he licked her hands clean, then sighed and groaned and folded up beside her.
She propped herself against his large warm bulk. Rodry was watching her. His eyes had gone wide again. “I keep forgetting,” he said. “What you are. What he is.”
“Try to remember,” she said with a hint of sharpness. “Then forget it matters. I’m still me. I haven’t turned into anything different.”
“No?” Rodry made tea with a mix of herbs that Valeria knew well. It was her mother’s. It smelled of her. Mint and chamomile, rose and vervain, to calm the mind and encourage sleep.
He steeped it as Valeria had learned to do when she was a child, then strained it and poured it into cups. Valeria’s heart was eager but her hand was slow to take it. It was redolent with memories.
Kerrec sniffed it suspiciously. His brow rose a fraction. He sipped with care but with evident pleasure. “A wisewoman’s brew?” he asked.
“One of Mother’s,” Rodry answered. “It’s safe—don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” said Kerrec. “It’s good.”
Valeria set her cup down untasted. “It is good, but someone has to stay awake.”
“Why?” Kerrec asked. “We’ll set wards. The stallions will watch for trouble.”
She shook her head. He was right, of course, but she was feeling contrary. “I don’t like this storm. It’s not aimed at us, but it might as well be.”
“It’s aimed at the army,” Rodry said. His usually good-humored face was grave. “Sir, do you think—?”
“Stone magic is bound to earth,” Kerrec said. “He, or any stone mage, could have brought down the hillside, but he has no power over air and water.”
“This isn’t a natural storm,” Valeria said. “Can’t you feel the power that drives it? If it’s not your brother, it’s another mage—or one of the barbarians’ priests. They all claim to hate and fear magic, but their priests use it freely, from all I’ve seen. They’ll Unmake the world if they can.”
She should not have said that. Deep inside her, the Unmaking stirred.
Sabata sighed in his sleep and snorted softly. The distraction was enough, just, to quell the Unmaking. She closed it off behind doubled and trebled wards, with Sabata mounting guard outside.
The others had gone on talking, as ignorant as ever of what she carried inside her. Rodry said, “With this much rain, the river’s already swollen. We may have to wait for it to go down before we can cross the ford.”
“How far is the ford from here?” Kerrec asked.
“When the road was still there, in good weather it was maybe half a day’s ride downstream. In this, with the road in gods know what condition, I can’t tell you how long it will take us. The banks drop down toward the ford. If that’s flooded, we’ll have to find a way around, then hope for better chances farther on.”
“And hope, as well, that we don’t run into the army before we can cross.” Kerrec hissed between his teeth. “Damn. If they could only have held off their storm-herding for a day, we’d be across by now.”
“Are you sure it was mages?” Rodry asked. “Maybe it’s not a magical storm at all. Maybe the gods are telling us something.”
“I am going across the river,” Kerrec said. “I am hunting down my brother before he kills my father and my sister and destroys the whole of Aurelia, then tries to take the rest of the world with it. The wind may rage and the gods may laugh, but I will do it. I will not stop until it is done.”
Valeria caught Rodry’s eye. It was not the words Kerrec said. It was the way he said them. Calm. Matter-of-fact. Absolutely unbending.
They should have knocked him down and bound him and hauled him back to Aurelia. But if Valeria had no power to do such a thing, how could Rodry? All they could do was stay as close as they could and protect him as best they might—and pray they found Gothard before Gothard raised the Unmaking.
Thirty-Seven
Valeria lay with Rodry and Kerrec in a thicket of bracken, looking down on what had been a shallow ford. It was a roaring flood now, overwhelming the banks and spreading far over a tumbled landscape of field and forest.
The road was deep underwater. Valeria could see where it had been, descending the long hill and disappearing into the muddy torrent. It ascended again on the other side, no longer the straight paved way of the imperial armies but a narrow rutted track winding upward into the trees.
“A pity the gods don’t fly,” Rodry said, with his eyes on that unattainable country.
Kerrec’s face was closed. “There’s another ford, you say?”
“The flood will go down,” Rodry said. “Where we need to go is south of he
re in any case. We’ll travel more of it on this side, that’s all.”
“And the army? Where is that?”
“West of the ford,” said Rodry. “It was camped at Tragante, two days’ ride from here, as of a week ago. If it’s moved, my wager would be that it’s gone farther south. The land’s better there for a battle. It’s rougher country here, and those trees up there can hide whole nations.”
“That’s where they are,” Valeria said. “Up there.”
Rodry nodded. “The emperor will try to lure them into the open.”
“Will he do it?”
“Eventually,” said Rodry. “They can’t resist a battle.”
“My brother can,” Kerrec said. “He’ll stay where he’s safe, and wage his war from a distance. Where did you say the Calletani camp was?”
“We’ll make our way south to Oxos ford,” Rodry said. “Be careful now. We’re a long way from the army, but there will be patrols. If you can raise that spell of yours again—can you work it by daylight or should we travel by night?”
“Night’s better,” Kerrec said, “but I’ll do what I can.”
Neither had asked Valeria what she could do. She bit her tongue. She was there because she insisted on it, not because they thought she could be of any use.
She could raise wards, at least, to keep mages from finding them. And she could see patterns—how the wind blew, how the light fell. There was war downriver, and a tide of death running even stronger than the flood.
It took them three days to skirt the flood. By then the river was still running high, but it flowed inside its banks again. On the fourth day, once more, the three of them looked out from a covert to a ford. Once again, there was no crossing it.
The river was down, the ford clear. There was an army camped beside it.
The emperor had not gone south from Tragante. He had brought his army north.
Kerrec had no words to say. Rodry’s shoulders sagged. Valeria did her best to keep the relief from showing on her face.
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