Song of Unmaking

by Caitlin Brennan

  Another part of the magic made him deeply happy. The reticence that had been such a curse was not exactly gone, but it was much diminished. With Valeria it was almost not there at all.

  The night before they came to Aurelia, the crowds of mourners went by in slow procession all night long. From the tent Kerrec could hear their passing, the slow shuffle of feet and the catch of a sob.

  Valeria had fallen asleep. Her face in the lamplight was still faintly flushed from loving, her hair tousled, lying in curls across her forehead. He stroked it softly back from her cheek and brushed her lips with a kiss. She smiled in her sleep.

  He dressed quickly and slipped out into the chill of midnight. Torches flared around the bier. The line of people was not quite as long as it had been in daylight. He joined it quietly.

  No one recognized him. It was dark and he was plainly dressed. He looked ordinary enough—no blazing mark of imperial blood on his forehead, and no white stallion to betray his rank and art. Petra was safely and contentedly asleep on the horselines.

  Something had been happening as he drew closer to Aurelia. It was so gradual that at first he did not even notice it. In the past few days however, he had begun to realize that his senses were changing.

  He could feel the land. It had always been there in the back of his awareness, part of the gifts that came to him from his blood and breeding, but this was stronger. It was like the sense of patterns that made a horse mage, deepened and strengthened until it sang in his bones.

  Standing here in this slow procession of his own people, almost within sight of the imperial city, he felt as if the whole of the empire was contained in his body. From the far south of Gebu to the far north of Toscana, from Eriu to Parthai, it was all there inside him. He could tell where it was thriving and where it was ill—though not quite yet how or why.

  “Sir, are you sick? Do you need to sit down?”

  Kerrec blinked and shook his head to clear it. Somehow he had come as far as the torches. A woman was standing in front of him, with a much younger man behind her—her son, he supposed. She had a broad weathered face and a knot of greying hair, and she stood foursquare on solid feet. Her eyes were shrewd but kind. She had magic, not a great deal but enough to dazzle his newly altered sight.

  She would have been a Beastmaster, he realized, if she had gone into any of the orders. She petted him as if he had been one of her animals, and offered him a flask that turned out to be full of deceptively innocuous cordial. The first sip was sweet and pungent with herbs. The second set him back on his heels.

  His benefactor grinned. “Wakes you up proper, doesn’t it?”

  “Very proper,” said Kerrec once he remembered how to breathe. “I may actually live to see the morning.”

  “Good,” the woman said. She tilted her head toward the bier. “It gets you in the heart, that. Even if you never knew him to talk to, he was there, being good at what he did.”

  People behind them nodded and murmured. One said, “The young one, the heir, is just like him, they say.”

  “I’ve seen her riding out,” said someone else. “She’s a little thing, and a beauty, but there’s steel in her. She rides as well as a man.”

  Kerrec held his breath, but no one mentioned the late heir who was a rider. They were all focused on Briana and on the emperor who lay under the pall. Kerrec was almost in front of the bier now.

  He had been riding beside it for well over a month. He had kept vigil over it for part of almost every night. Tonight was different. All these people who had never known the emperor and yet loved him, and the sense of the land inside Kerrec, came together into a pattern he had not seen before.

  This was Aurelia—not courts and princes or legions or gods on the Mountain. These people coming from far away, most of them on foot, to pay their respects, were the heart of the empire. They tilled its fields and tended its cattle and marched in its legions. Aurelia was a living thing because of them.

  Kerrec had always set himself above them. Even as a rider-envoy, mingling with the common people, he had kept his distance. He was not one of them. His world was altogether different.

  Tonight he was part of them and they were part of him. They shared his sorrow. They looked after one another, as the woman had done with him.

  It was a new world. He was not sure that he was comfortable in it, but neither could he turn his back on it.

  The bier was in front of him. The white pall glowed faintly—dawn was coming. He laid his hand on it.

  There was no life or spirit inside it. That had gone long since. Still, there was memory, and the magic unfolding inside of Kerrec. He bowed to that and gave it a tribute of tears.

  After the last of them passed by the bier, they dispersed in ones and twos and fours. Kerrec slipped aside and watched them in the slowly swelling daylight. He wanted to remember their faces. Then when he thought of Aurelia, he would remember them and this night and the way the land had come alive inside him.

  Fifty-Four

  The city of Aurelia was waiting for its emperor to pass for the last time through its gates. All of its walls were hung with white. Its people were dressed in white and carrying sprays of white flowers, strewing petals on the processional way as the honor guard and then the bier entered the city.

  The legion would not come into Aurelia. That was a very old tradition from the days when emperors were made and broken by the legions, and any adventurer with a mob of rebels could call himself a general and storm the imperial city. Now as in those days, the Valeria withdrew to the old barracks and parade grounds that lay eastward along the shore.

  The dead did not enter the city walls, either, except royal dead. Everyone who died in the city or in the barracks was buried in the city of tombs beyond the legionary camp. But the emperor would lie in the crypt of the palace, in the royal chamber directly beneath the hall of the throne.

  Every living emperor or empress ruled above the bodies of his forefathers. That was the custom. There was power in it, binding whatever magic the living ruler had to the combined magic of the dead.

  Kerrec had been taught this while he was still his father’s heir. It struck him vividly as he rode beside the bier into the city he had declined to rule. If it had not been for the stallions and Valeria, he might have broken and run, fleeing toward the Mountain.

  They kept him where he was, part of his father’s honor guard. It was by no means traditional for the emperor to go to his burial with white gods and their riders in attendance, but it seemed fitting.

  Briana, by tradition, could not meet the bier at the city gate or beyond. She had to wait at the palace gate, dressed from head to toe in white silk, with her own guard and the loftier notables of the court around her.

  Kerrec saw her down the length of the processional way. She seemed very small, standing erect and still under the great arch of the gate. He could not make out her face from so far away, but he could feel her in his heart. Grief for her father, fear of what she had taken on herself, determination not to let it overwhelm her—all of those mingled inside him, matching his own emotions almost exactly.

  If he had had a fraction less discipline, he would have bolted past the crawling oxen, burst through the honor guard and galloped toward his sister. She could see him as he saw her, in his simple rider’s uniform on his shimmering white horse. Her relief and gladness almost broke his resolve.

  This was the last imperial ceremony that would be celebrated in Artorius’s name. Out of respect for him, they had to let the rite unfold in its proper order. If that meant standing painfully alone in a flock of courtiers or riding at a maddeningly slow pace from the gate to the palace, then that was the way it had to be.

  Step by crawling step, the bier made its way toward the palace. The crowds that lined the road were silent. There was no music and no singing. The cart rumbled and creaked. The oxen snorted, grinding flowers under their hooves. The scent of bruised roses and jasmine was almost overwhelming.

  Kerrec held
his breath as much as he could. Petra shook his head and sneezed. Kerrec stroked his neck in sympathy.

  It only seemed that this march would take forever. It would be over soon. There was still the funeral to endure, but that would not take place until tomorrow. Tonight, Petra at least could rest.

  Petra snorted wetly and coiled his back, dancing for a moment—enthralling the part of the crowd directly in front of him—before he settled again to his scrupulously disciplined, meticulously cadenced, teeth-grindingly slow walk.

  At the palace gate, Briana’s attendants parted for the honor guard and the bier, then fell in behind. Briana was on the other side as Kerrec rode past. He glimpsed her face over the bier, but her eyes were not on him.

  The oxen hauled the emperor’s bier straight up to the great hall. Then the honor guard lifted it out of the wagon in which it had traveled for so long and carried it through the golden doors.

  The oxen were led away to a well-deserved rest. Petra and Sabata went in with the bier. Their riders’ choice had little to do with it. Once it was laid in the center of the hall where it would remain for the night, they took station on either side of it.

  Mages were waiting to build wards, and priests were ready to begin the long rite of the emperor’s burial. The stallions disconcerted them severely.

  Kerrec dismounted, with Valeria half a breath behind. This was not their vigil. They unsaddled and unbridled their stallions quickly, rubbed them down—to the scowling disapproval of not a few watchers—and retreated in as good order as they could.

  “Carry on,” Briana said when the shocked stillness continued. Her voice was quiet but clear.

  The Chief Augur started as if he had suddenly come awake. He raised his staff. The Master Cantor recovered his wits and drew breath to begin the chant. The priests remembered themselves and their places.

  Kerrec might have continued his retreat until he was completely gone from the hall, but he found he could not do it. He put saddle and bridle in Valeria’s charge and sent her off to Riders’ Hall—glaring down her objections.

  Luckily she was in as biddable a mood as she was capable of. She did as she was told. She would come back, he knew, but not for a while.

  The first rite, the rite of welcoming the dead to his hall for the last time, was a mere hour long. It required the heir to play acolyte to the chief priest of Sun and Moon. Any other living imperial offspring was expected to wait on the mages. As First Rider, Kerrec should have been accepting their service instead of giving them his, but in this rite he was no more or less than his father’s son.

  There was comfort in ritual. When he had to share duties with Briana, they moved together as smoothly as in a dance. She offered him the flicker of a smile, which he returned.

  The mages raised their wards and the priests welcomed the dead. Then the layfolk were free to go, except for the first watch of the emperor’s guards. The night’s vigil was a matter for magic and the gods.

  Earth must be placated and the powers of air comforted. For three and thirty years Artorius’s power had lain over his empire. Now it was gone, leaving a void that hostile powers would be eager to fill.

  “It’s only ritual,” Briana said in the sanctuary of her library. She had retreated there from the hall, dismissed guards and servants, and ordered a light supper for herself and her brother.

  She dropped to the low and much-worn couch that lay under the eastward window. Daylight was fading, the clouds turning crimson. She lay back and sighed so deeply her body shook. “You settled it all at Oxos, didn’t you? There’s no gap in the patterns. All our magic is whole and safe.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kerrec said. “We weren’t thinking about protocol at the time.”

  She shot him a glance. “Why are you apologizing? You did a magnificent thing. Sit, eat. I’ll be up in a moment.”

  Kerrec was not hungry, either. He went to stand over her, hooked a stool with his foot and pulled it to him and sat on it. “He gave me his magic. I couldn’t stop him. I know it was supposed to go to you. I—”

  “I have it,” she said. He stared at her. She nodded. “The land, the empire—I had them before he left. It goes with the regent’s office. The powers were given for use but not to keep. When he died, they changed. All the gates opened and the wards went down. That was how I knew, long before the message came, that he was dead.”

  Kerrec studied her for a careful moment. “You’re telling the truth. Then how—what—”

  “What happened to you? I don’t know. Maybe the mages do.”

  “I think mages are long past making any sense of me,” Kerrec said dryly.

  “Maybe so.” She sat up and leaned forward, hugging him hard. Then she held him at arm’s length, looking him up and down. “You look wonderful. I’ve never seen you this well or this comfortable with yourself. You look—you look like Father.”

  “I am not growing a beard!”

  She laughed much harder than his poor display of wit warranted. When she finally stopped, she sat grinning at him, with tears drying on her cheeks. “Oh, my dear, I needed that so badly. I needed you. Would you believe I’m scared? I’m terrified. What if I’m not good enough for all of this? What if I can’t do it?”

  “You’ll do it because you have to,” Kerrec said. “He said as much, you know. ‘She’ll do no worse than I did,’ he said.”

  She laughed, a sound half like a sob. “I don’t suppose you’d take my place?”

  “Not in this life,” he said. “Don’t try to coax me, either. I’ve had enough of that already.”

  The laughter left her face. “I suppose you would have,” she said. “Did they lean on you very hard?”

  “Not so much hard as persistent,” Kerrec said. “What is it with men that they would rather bow to anything male, however unwilling and unsuitable, than to a woman?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not a man.”

  “I am, and I still can’t understand.”

  “That’s because you’re a prodigy of nature—a male with the capacity for reason. In a way I wish you had given in.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I have gifts enough and magic beyond the usual, but I was never meant to rule this empire. To help, yes, and protect it with my life and soul. I’m a rider, that’s what I was born for. I’ll never be an emperor.”

  She took his hands, drawing him up and toward the table with its trays and jars and covered bowls. “Do you know how much alike we are? I have the calling to be a rider, but I belong to the empire first and always. You would have been a very good emperor, but the Mountain keeps you. I think we’re meant to be in this together.”

  “I believe we are,” he said as she sat him down and took the chair opposite. “I only wish everyone else could see.”

  “They will,” Briana said. “Some may need years and the gates of death to come to it, but they will.”

  Fifty-Five

  Valeria would have carried both saddles and bridles out of the hall herself, but a pair of servants insisted on doing it for her. She did not resist too strenuously. It was a fair trudge to Riders’ Hall.

  She had not known what to expect when she came there. Dust and cobwebs would not have surprised her, but she had underestimated the servants whom Briana had given to Kerrec. They were not only still in residence, the house was spotless and the rooms were ready for guests. Savory smells wafted from the kitchen.

  Smells of a different and to Valeria equally pleasant kind emanated from the stable. Briana’s mares were still there. So was Quintus. From the evidence, the boys were still coming for instruction—the saddles were clean but with the look of regular use, and the mares were glossy and muscled, with the soft eyes of horses who were worked well and often.

  There was another reason for that softness, too. Every one of them was in foal.

  Petra’s innocence was genuine, glowing in Valeria’s heart. Sabata tried to pretend, but he was a terrible liar—and terribly smug. Foolish humans had never guessed wha
t he did at night when each mare was in season.

  Valeria suspected that Briana had hoped for just such an outcome. If Sabata had been in the stable and not playing statue in the emperor’s hall, Valeria would have kicked him. As it was, she let him know just how presumptuous he had been. He barely wilted under her disapproval.

  “Men,” she said in disgust. The mare she had been examining agreed heartily, with flattened ears and restless heels.

  One more blow to tradition, Valeria thought. The white gods did not breed outside of their own kind.

  Clearly Sabata did not care for such niceties. These were mares, and beautiful. He had only done what any sensible stallion would do.

  “What does sense have to do with it?” Valeria wanted to know. She fed the mare a bit of honey sweet and left her to eat her dinner in peace.

  Valeria’s own dinner was waiting in the small dining room she had sometimes shared with Kerrec before they both ran off to end a war. She thought she would eat and then go back to the palace, but by the time she had worked her way through a bowl of soup brimming with bits of fish and strange delectable things in shells, she decided not to go. Briana needed her brother tonight.

  Valeria ate a little too heartily. The soup was like nothing she had tasted before. There was fresh white bread with it, and the soft herbed cheese that she was inordinately fond of, and a tart of almonds and cream and eggs and sweet spices that needed two servings to do it justice.

  She went to bed alone in the room she had slept in before. Her stomach was unpleasantly full. She had been eating soldier’s rations too long—she was out of practice.

  Her sleep was fitful, her dreams dim and formless. She was aware of the stallions on guard and Kerrec keeping vigil with his sister beside their father’s bier. Sometimes when she woke, she felt him beside her, but that was a dream. That night he belonged to his family.

  Morning came early, with bells tolling from all the temples. Valeria sprang out of her first deep sleep of the night, stumbled to the privy, and lost most of her overly ambitious supper.