Song of Unmaking

by Caitlin Brennan

  He should be much closer to Gothard before he gave in to the urge. If his brother shifted camp, he would have to perform the working all over again. He was not sure he had the strength for that.

  He walked where the patterns led him, which was turning into its own exercise in strangeness. He had never traveled afoot in his life. His feet were insulted. It took an unbearably long time to cross an unbearably short span of ground.

  It was the only choice he had. Somewhere ahead, there had to be a horse. He would walk until he found it.

  Valeria snapped awake. Something was—not wrong, no. Different. The patterns of the world had changed.

  The stallions were quiet, but she did not trust them. There was a distinct air of smugness about them.

  They were up to something.

  She rose and dressed and ran her fingers through her hair, tugging out a tangle. She could hear Rodry breathing in the room next to hers. From Kerrec’s on the end, she heard nothing.

  The skin tightened between her shoulder blades. She glided silently toward the flap of canvas that was his door. There was no sound beyond.

  The room was empty. She found the place where he had slipped out. The memory of his presence led away from it, as clear to her eyes as the moon’s road.

  As quickly and quietly as she could, she ran back to her room, gathered her belongings and stuffed them into their bag. She slung it behind her and returned equally quickly to the room Kerrec had abandoned. His track was as distinct as before. She slipped beneath the heavy canvas of the tent and followed where he had gone.

  He had eluded the wards and the guards with exquisite ease. She followed his pattern exactly, and the wards slipped over her and the guards saw through her. It was a beautiful thing, a magical thing, the work of a master.

  He had gone nowhere near the stallions. None of the mortal horses was missing, either. Kerrec had walked away from his captivity.

  A rider on foot must be a most unhappy beast. Valeria, who had walked everywhere until hardly more than a year ago, was better suited for it.

  Past the river, his trail was harder to follow. The patterns were different there. Still, if she narrowed her focus, she could see him clearly.

  He was moving quickly for a man who never walked where he could ride. His magic was strong, but it felt somehow frayed. He was expending strength without regard for the cost.

  She quickened her pace. The moon was sinking. Dawn would come soon. She would wager Kerrec did not know how close to the edge he was. That part of his judgment had never quite come back.

  She was almost running. Her legs ached and her lungs burned.

  Hooves thudded behind her. She turned, purely by instinct, and caught flying mane. The horse’s speed carried her up onto a broad back.

  Her arms clamped around Rodry’s waist. The mane she gripped was black, and the back she sat on was bay, gleaming darkly in the moonlight. The power of the spirit within was so strong that it nearly flung her to the ground.

  Rodry was riding Briana’s bay Lady, who had been safe in Aurelia the last Valeria knew. What that meant—what it promised—Valeria was almost afraid to ask. A Lady in Aurelia was unheard of. A Lady across the frontier, outside the empire, in the middle of a war and the very real threat of Unmaking…

  “Rodry,” she said in his ear. “How—”

  “Later,” he said tersely.

  She bit her tongue. The Lady’s gallop slowed. The stars were fading. The patterns were shifting too fast to follow.

  If Valeria had learned nothing else in her year on the Mountain, she had learned to flow into the patterns. If she was inside them, she could understand them.

  Magic was swirling, rising like mist out of the ground. Power was drawn to power, and Kerrec with his broken magic and his conquered stone was irresistible. Strange things were creeping toward him, distilling out of the air and oozing up from the earth.

  Valeria knew where he was. It was a sudden knowledge, as if an eye had opened and seen him lying in a bed of bracken.

  He looked as if he had fallen there. He had managed to raise wards, and his spell of concealment was tattered but still serviceable. To the eyes of Valeria’s magic, it was like a swirl of smoke around the fitful glow that was Kerrec.

  The Lady halted so abruptly that Rodry and Valeria lurched onto her neck. She shook her head irritably and shrugged them back where they belonged, then stamped. The earth rang under her hoof.

  The wild magic went perfectly still. The mist paused in its ascent. The moon hung motionless in the sky.

  The Lady breathed out sharply. The world began to turn again.

  The wild magic sank back under the earth. The patterns were still blindingly complex, but there was order and reason to them.

  Valeria slid to the ground. Kerrec was close, almost underfoot. Her eyes could not see him at all—she had to look for him with her other senses.

  She pulled him out of the bracken. He was conscious and, though he swayed dizzily, he could stand. He looked at her with eyes that had gone beyond bitterness. “Will I never escape you?”

  “Not in this life,” she said.

  “You and the Ladies,” he said. “There’s no hope for any of us.”

  Was he smiling? It must be a trick of the light.

  If Valeria did not take control of herself soon, she was going to kiss him—and where that bit of foolishness had come from, the gods knew. She was already swaying forward. She stiffened her spine and said, “Here, mount.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll walk.”

  “On those feet?” She leveled a glare at Rodry. He had already dismounted, which was wise of him. He held the Lady’s stirrup and waited.

  The glare wheeled back toward Kerrec. “Mount,” Valeria said.

  However stubborn he was, Kerrec could not resist a horse’s back. He bowed to the Lady first. She flattened ears at his silliness, but she would have been even more annoyed if he had not done it.

  He took a deep breath and swung onto her back, then held out his hand. “You, too,” he said.

  Valeria shook her head, but Rodry said, “Get on. I can run with her. Can you?”

  “I’m sure I could if I tried,” she said.

  “Stop that,” said Kerrec. “Either you ride with me or we leave you behind. There’s no time to waste.”

  Valeria might have kept on resisting if it had been only the two men, but the Lady’s eye rolled at her. That and the restless heel convinced Valeria as nothing else could. She ignored Kerrec’s hand and lifted herself onto the Lady’s rump once more.

  Even as she found her seat, the Lady bucked lightly. Valeria found herself pressed against Kerrec’s back. She had to fling arms around him or be pitched to the ground.

  The Lady’s satisfaction thrummed through her. So did a sense of pressing urgency.

  Rodry stood at the Lady’s stirrup, smiling up at Valeria. This was not real to him, she thought. He had wandered out of the world he knew into the realm of gods and magic.

  So had they all. They rode in the rising dawn, trusting the Lady to take them where they needed to go.

  Not only the powers of earth were stirring around them. Men were moving in clans and tribes, marching toward the river. Something had roused them and brought them all together. Battle was coming.

  When the sun was well up, the Lady stopped. She had brought them to a stream that flowed down a sudden hill into a clear pool. There was grass for her and water for them all, and in a bramble thicket, sweet blackberries that they shared with one another and a flock of birds.

  Rodry caught a fish in the pool, tickling it with his fingers until it lay stunned. He cleaned it and rubbed it with salt and herbs and packed it in clay, and built a tiny fire that sent up no smoke at all.

  While the fish roasted and the Lady grazed, Valeria planted herself in front of her brother and said, “Tell.”

  He spread his hands. “What’s to say? I woke up and you were both missing. I thought you might be with the horses. I fou
nd Her instead—” he said it exactly like that, with overtones of awe “—and She told me to get on her back and ride.”

  “She told you?” Kerrec asked. Valeria had thought he was asleep.

  “I heard her, sir,” Rodry said. “It wasn’t words, exactly. It was more that I knew she wanted me to ride, and I had better be quick about it. She’s one of Them, isn’t she? Though she’s not a stallion. Or white.”

  “They aren’t all greys,” Valeria said.

  “Or all stallions, either,” said Kerrec. “I thought I had seen everything. An army scout riding a Lady as if she were a common horse—ye gods, if the riders only knew.”

  “Why?” said Rodry. “Have I done something wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong if a Lady allows it,” Kerrec said. “But it is unheard of.”

  Rodry ducked his head. “I won’t ride her again,” he said. “It was only—she was so insistent. I couldn’t say no to her.”

  “Nor should you if she asks again,” Kerrec said. “At ease, soldier. It’s obvious we’re in the gods’ hands—or hooves if you will. All we can do is go where they lead us and do what they ask of us.”

  “Are they leading you?” Valeria muttered. “Or are you forcing them to accept whatever you please?”

  Of course he did not answer that.

  Rodry prodded the fish in its casing, which was now baked hard. He wrapped his cloak around his hand and lifted it gingerly from the coals, laying it on a flat rock that he had brought from the pool. With the hilt of his dagger, he cracked it open. Steam hissed forth, with a delectable scent.

  The fish was cooked perfectly. Valeria savored her share of the sweet flesh, washing it down with water from the pool.

  She was the last to finish. The others were ready to break camp. Rodry doused and buried the fire, and Kerrec smoothed the ground they had trampled. Valeria saddled the Lady once more.

  “He’s close,” Kerrec said.

  Rodry nodded. “We’re not far from where the camp should be. They’ve been hunting these runs—there’s no game left. They’ll have to move either ahead or back.”

  “Are we in time?” Kerrec asked. His voice was cool, but Valeria felt the urgency behind it.

  “We should be,” Rodry answered. “We’ll be there by morning. I don’t think the battle will be tomorrow. The day after, maybe, or the third day.”

  “Soon,” said Kerrec. He mounted with casual bravura, without touching the stirrup.

  Valeria chose this time to mount in more mundane fashion, setting foot in the stirrup he had scorned and holding out her hand. He arched a brow, but he swung her up behind him.

  Forty-Two

  Rodry was scouting. Kerrec was sustaining wards. Valeria had nothing to do but offer strength if they needed it.

  She caught herself dozing off with her face buried between Kerrec’s shoulders. The familiar smell of him, the movement of the Lady under them and the warmth of the sun shining through the trees, lulled her to sleep.

  Her dreams at first were peaceful and inconsequential. Even while she was in them, she knew their memory would be gone when she woke.

  Gradually they changed. This sunlit forest, this summer warmth, twisted little by little. The Unmaking stirred.

  It was not the wild magic that woke it. That was strange to her senses, but it was real and solid and completely in the world.

  Beneath it was something else, something dark and old and cold. Words came to her. The roots of the One. In her mind she saw the roots of trees digging deep into black earth. Blind things crawled on them. Dissolution was caught in their knotted tendrils.

  She clawed her way out of the dream. The sun had shifted distinctly westward. The Lady stood motionless in the shadow of trees. Rodry crouched just in front of her. His whole body was alert.

  Kerrec’s head turned slowly. Valeria heard the passage of at least a dozen men. They were moving quietly but not stealthily, slipping through the trees.

  “Cymbri,” Rodry breathed, “from over the mountains. This weapontake has reached far.”

  Valeria wondered how he knew. She could glimpse them now, flashes of bright hair and bright metal and the dizzying patterns of their mantles. They were moving quickly, loping like wolves on a fresh trail.

  After they were gone, Rodry waited a long while before he would leave the covert. The Lady was patient. Kerrec sat quiet on her back, but Valeria dismounted.

  Rodry frowned. She scowled back. She crept away, slipping around the trunk of a huge tree.

  No barbarian lay in wait for her there. She relieved herself as quickly as she could. As she set her clothes back in order, she paused.

  This country was a tracery of brooks and streams and little rivers. They had had to cross at least a dozen since the day began. One trickled past the tree, murmuring to itself. The sun sparkled on it. Tiny fish danced in the water.

  Patterns shifted and flickered. She should turn her eyes away and go back to the others, but the flash of light on water held her just a moment too long.

  The streambed transformed into a wide and rolling field. The fish became armies on it. The emperor’s legions marched in their armor. The enemy came on in hordes, naked and painted blue and red and yellow, with torques of gold or bronze or copper. They fought with great axes and swords so heavy they needed two hands to lift.

  That was as beautiful and terrible as battle always was. But Valeria’s eye was drawn into the darkness of the forest. Old things crouched there, cold things, dark and strong. Their power focused on the legions’ heart.

  The emperor held all the threads of war and magic in his hands. His mages and generals worked his will. If he fell, the army would flounder. The tide of battle would turn.

  Valeria watched him fall. The power that struck him down felt familiar. It was Gothard, but he had changed.

  The Unmaking was part of him now. It lodged in something that he kept close, a stone, she supposed—but heavier and colder and darker than any stone she had known before. It felt like the darkness between stars, utterly empty and yet filled with power.

  Kerrec had seen this. He was obsessed and probably mad, but he saw the truth. Gothard’s power, bound by blood to both the emperor and the princes of the Calletani, was the key.

  The emperor fell. The armies fought on, but the heart had gone out of them. Two legions retreated. One, the Valeria, stood its ground. The enemy rolled over it and destroyed it.

  Then came the Unmaking.

  “Valeria!”

  Kerrec’s voice flung her out of the vision. His hands gripped her shoulders painfully, shaking her until she squawked in protest. His eyes were blazing. “Gods help you, woman! If I lose you—”

  “If you lose me, what? You’ll sing a rite of thanksgiving?”

  He let her go so suddenly she dropped to her knees, and stood glaring down at her. He was not going to answer.

  She pulled him down to face her. “We have got to stop this,” she said. “You don’t have to hide anything from me any more. If we’re both going to be whole and strong for what’s to come, we have to—”

  “I don’t care if I die,” he said, “but I refuse to be the death of you.”

  “That’s not your choice to make,” she said.

  He sat on his heels. “You are difficult,” he said.

  “And you are not?”

  “I don’t know how to be anything else.”

  “Now that is true,” she said. If she did not burst out laughing, she would burst into tears. Since it was not useful to do either, she settled for saying, “Can you at least try to stop breaking my heart?”

  She had tried to say it lightly. He looked as if she had knocked the breath out of him. “I didn’t—I was trying—”

  “I know.”

  “You’re not going to let me be.”

  “I can’t.”

  “And you wonder why riders never tangle themselves with women.” He reached, startling her. This time his grip was much gentler, his hands resting on her should
ers, drawing her to him.

  She could have stopped him. He was not holding her tightly at all. But she could no more have done that than she could have stopped loving him—even when she wanted to strangle him.

  He kissed her softly. There was passion in it, buried deep and sternly disciplined. She willed herself not to lock arms around his neck and cling.

  He drew back. For the first time in a long while, his face was unguarded. It was brief, hardly more than a moment, but it told Valeria everything she wanted to know.

  She took his face in her hands. He did not try to pull away. “Stop fighting it,” she said. “We’re riders. We can’t be alone if we try. Our whole art is an art of patterns, danced in twos and fours and eights. Never one by one. One is the enemy.”

  “I know how to train a horse,” he said, “and ride the Dance. This, I don’t know at all. I have no art and precious little talent for it.”

  “It’s just like training horses,” she said. “Open your mind and listen. Then do what your heart tells you.”

  “I’m afraid,” he said.

  All the rest of it had left her deliberately unmoved. Those brief words brought the tears springing. She blinked them back, hissing at her own foolishness. “So is the colt when he comes down from the Mountain. What do you do for him? Do the same for yourself.”

  He frowned. He always did that when he was thinking. After a while he said, “You’re training me.”

  “Gods forbid,” she said. “Great Ones aren’t trained. They’re educated. Wheedled. Persuaded.”

  “I’m not a—”

  “Sabata is easier than you,” she said. She bent forward and kissed him. He responded before he could have known what he was doing.

  She did not hold the kiss for long—just long enough to make his blood sing. When she sat back and lowered her hands, he caught and held them.

  He kissed each palm and folded the fingers over it. Then he rose. His head tilted. He was listening.

  She had heard it, too. More tribesmen were coming, slipping like wind through the trees.