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Briana was still Briana, even in imperial splendor. She refused to mince down the corridors and across the courtyards like a court lady. She strode out with a swish and swirl of skirts, which would probably have given her maids the vapors.
It made for a grand entrance. The dining hall was full, but the diners’ cheer seemed rather subdued. Briana’s arrival changed that. They all stood up without prompting and applauded as she made her way to the front of the room.
The high platform had a long table set up on it, with all the new riders sitting there. The nobles were seated just below and to the right of the head table—across from the riders, whose table ran along the wall to the left. Briana would have gone to the nobles’ table, but the rider-candidates came down in a mob and carried her up to join them.
They carried Valeria, too, over her vigorous protests. She could not stop them. There were too many and too determined.
When they set her on the platform, she finally got the words out. “I don’t belong here! This isn’t my year.”
“You were cheated of it last year,” Lucius said. He was the ringleader and proud of it. “We’re giving it to you now.”
One of the others pressed a cup into her hands. It looked and felt very old, a broad shallow chalice of silver engraved with intertwining figures of men on horses. The same image was carved on the arch of the great gate of the citadel. She wondered, rather distantly, which of them had come first.
There was wine in the cup. “Drink!” the rider-candidates said in chorus. “Drink! Drink! Drink!”
She looked down from the high table at the riders below. None of them had moved to stop this. Kerrec was not even looking at her. His head was bent and his hands wrapped around a cup, as if something fascinating swam inside it.
Her jaw hurt. She was clenching it. She relaxed as much as she could, and made herself stop caring what Kerrec did or thought.
She focused on Master Nikos instead. He had an expression almost of curiosity, as if he was waiting patiently to see how this game played out.
He was not angry. She saluted him with the champion’s cup and drank as deep as she could stand.
The wine went straight to her head. Instead of making her dizzy, it made her wonderfully, marvelously happy. Nothing mattered then—not Kerrec, not the riders, not anything.
She passed the cup to Briana. That met with a roar of approval.
These rider-candidates had none of the rigidity of their elders. They loved a spectacle. If that spectacle shattered the traditions of a thousand years, then so it did. This was a new world. They would make new traditions for it.
Valeria woke with the mother of headaches. She vaguely remembered leaving the hall, late and so full she could barely move, but between the hall and her bed, she had no memory at all.
Slowly she realized that not all the pounding she heard was inside her skull. Someone was beating the door down.
Briana in the servant’s room was much closer to the door—and should have been rocked out of bed by the noise. But the hammering went on and Briana made no move to stop it. Valeria staggered out of bed, cursing the arrogance of imperial princesses, and stumped scowling toward the door.
Paulus stepped back quickly at sight of her face. He had a healthy respect for her powers. She lightened her scowl somewhat, but there was no getting rid of all of it. That part was pain.
Paulus scowled back. “Master Nikos is asking for you,” he said.
She had been expecting that. Yesterday’s adventures had had nothing to do with her, but the riders would be needing someone to blame. She left Paulus standing in the doorway while she went to wash and dress.
On the way, she peered into the servant’s room. The bed had been slept in, but there was no one in it. Briana was gone.
That took a little of the edge off her temper, but not much. She had to reach inside herself for calm, and then for focus.
She needed both. Paulus did not move out of her way when she reached the door. He had a look that made her eyes narrow. “What is it?” she asked.
His face was stiff. Not that that was anything unusual—but this was a different kind of stiffness. Valeria pulled him back into the room and thrust him into the nearest chair. “Talk,” she said.
He scowled even more blackly than before. “It may be nothing,” he said. “I could be imagining it. I’m not an Augur. I was supposed to be one, but I was Called instead.”
Valeria clenched her fists to keep from shaking him. “You saw something,” she said. “When the Lady Danced.”
He nodded tightly. “Did it occur to you to wonder why, of all the hundreds of people at the testing, there was not one Augur? You’d think one would come just to watch. It’s not as if there were a tradition against it.”
“Are you saying there’s some sort of conspiracy?” Valeria demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Paulus. He said it without exasperation or excessive temper, which for him was unusual. “I saw things in the patterns of the Dance. It was like writing on a page.”
“What did it say?” Valeria was working hard to cultivate patience. Paulus was not going to come to the point until he was ready. Considering how reluctant he obviously was, she wondered if she wanted to hear it.
“I’m not sure what it said,” Paulus said. “I can tell you what I think it said. It was like a poem in a language I never properly learned. There was a stanza about the school and about change, and about how the old had to die to make room for the new. Then there was a sequence about the war. How the only way to win it was by doing nothing. Or by embracing nothingness.”
Valeria’s stomach clenched. “Embracing nothingness? Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not!” he snapped. “I don’t know why I’m even telling you this. I should be telling the Master. Except when I try, it all seems too foolish to bother him with.”
“Believe me,” said Valeria, “there’s nothing foolish about this. What else did you see?”
“What else should I have seen?”
She took a deep breath, praying for patience. “That’s what I’m asking. You haven’t said anything we haven’t all seen, one way or another. What’s the rest of it?”
“I don’t know,” said Paulus. If he had not been so consciously dignified, he would have been squirming in his chair. “I can only tell you what I think it was. There was more about the war. Kings dying and kings being made. And the Mountain. That was the leap at the end. It said, ‘The Mountain is not what you think it is.’”
“That is cryptic,” Valeria said.
“I told you,” he said.
“What do you think it means?”
He flung up his hands. “The gods must know, because I don’t. It’s bad news for us, whatever it is. It says we think we’re safe, but we dance over the abyss. We trust ourselves and our powers, but they’re a delusion. We bury ourselves in tradition, and tradition buries us. This war isn’t on the frontier at all, though there will be battles enough there. It’s here, in our citadel. It will be our undoing, unless we wake up and give it its name.”
Valeria had gone cold inside. Augur or not, Paulus had seen the truth. He had seen the Unmaking.
“You have to tell the Master,” she said, though her throat tried to close and stop her.
“What can he do that he’s not already doing?”
“He needs to know,” Valeria said. “The threat’s not just to the emperor or his army. It’s to us. To the Mountain.”
“We don’t know that,” Paulus said. “I could be all wrong.”
“You’re afraid,” she said.
For once he did not give way to her baiting. She devoutly wished he would. She was afraid, too—deathly afraid. All he had to protect him was the fear that he was wrong. She knew he was right.
“Look,” she said, “Midsummer Dance is in three days. There will be Augurs there. If the Lady Danced the truth, the stallions will, too. The Augurs will see it and everyone will be sure.”
“And if they don’t?”
“If it’s there, they’ll see it.”
Paulus nodded. This gave him a graceful way out of his dilemma. It gave Valeria one, too—though she had far more to be afraid of than he did.
He pulled himself to his feet and smoothed his expression back into place. When it was as haughty as it usually was, he said, “We’d better go. We’re keeping the Master waiting.”
Valeria nodded. Neither of them would talk about this again—until they had to. That was understood.
She expected Paulus to bring her to the Master’s study, but he went on past it. By that time she was almost fit for human company. The worst of her fears were buried and the rest were tightly reined in. She could face the Master with, she hoped, a suitable degree of calm.
Master Nikos was waiting for her in the riding court nearest the Master’s rooms. He had been training one of the young stallions in his care and was just finishing, with a lump of sugar and a pat on the neck, when Valeria came through the arch onto the sand.
Another stallion was waiting, equipped for instruction with the heavy training headstall. His groom stood by him, holding the loops of the long soft line.
The groom took the young stallion’s bridle and led him out. Master Nikos took charge of the older stallion. He was very old, this one, so old he looked like a glass full of light.
Valeria bowed low. This one she did not know, and she had thought she knew every stallion in the citadel.
“This is Oda,” the Master said. “Mount.”
Valeria knew better than to argue. She was too curious in any case—and wary enough to pause before she mounted, to stroke the long arched nose and meet the wise dark eye. There was no threat of humiliation there. This was a test, but it was honest.
She mounted and settled lightly in the saddle. The back under her was broad and, for all its age, still strong.
Oda’s stride when he moved out on the circle at the Master’s request had a swoop and swing that made her laugh. Sabata moved like that, but he was young and still a bit uncertain. This stallion had been instructing riders for longer than Valeria or even Kerrec had been alive.
The Master stood silent in the middle of the circle. This was not his lesson, then. The stallion was teaching it.
Valeria breathed in time with those sweeping strides. She let her body flow into them, riding without rein or stirrup, legs draped softly, hands on thighs. Anger, frustration, even fear and dread of what Paulus had told her, drained away. There was only the thrust and sway of the movement, the sensation of power surging up through those broad quarters. Follow, was the lesson. Simply follow.
She had been taught this way when she first arrived in the citadel, at night and in secret, because she was not allowed the other riders’ instruction. It was familiar, so much so that she forgot the man who was standing in the circle, watching. She was alone with the stallion, who was unquestionably a Great One. He felt almost as vast in the spirit as one of the Ladies.
As if the thought had brought her, Valeria opened her eyes to find the bay Lady there with Briana on her back. They were watching as the Master was, without moving or saying a word.
The Great One’s back coiled. Every instinct screamed at Valeria to snap into a ball or at the very least to clamp on with her legs and cling frantically to the mane on the heavy arched neck. She breathed deep once and then again, for focus and calm. When Oda went up, she rode with him.
He was transcribing patterns in the air as the Lady, the day before, had transcribed them in the sand of the testing ground. These were a part of the whole, but what the whole was or what it meant, Valeria was too close to see.
She did her best to remember the nature and placement of each leap—not easy when she was caught up in them. It was easier if she let her memory of the Lady’s Dance run in the back of her mind. They fit together.
The last leap ended in the center of the circle, directly in front of the Master. He kept rider’s discipline, with his back straight and his face still, but he looked tired and old.
She had never thought of him as old before, even with his grey hair and his lined face. “Is it going to be as bad as that?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “The emperor’s Dance isn’t over. You salvaged a future, but there’s no telling whether that future will be worse than the one you turned us away from. And now…”
“And now it gets stranger,” Briana said when he did not finish. She ran her hand down the Lady’s neck. “I wasn’t expecting this.”
“None of us was,” the Master said. “Even the Augurs are at a loss. We’ve always had at least some glimmer of what is to come—but now we’re stepping blindly into the dark.”
Valeria bit her tongue before she said, “Not the dark. The Unmaking.” That was what the Unmaking did. It swept away all that was or had been or ever would be.
“It’s the end of something,” Briana said to the Master through the fog of Valeria’s maundering. “So many changes. Do you feel them bubbling up under your feet?”
“I feel them,” Master Nikos said. “I wish to the gods I did not.”
Valeria swung down from Oda’s back. She wanted, suddenly, to be done with this. “What is it, then? What did you call me here to do?”
“To prove something,” the Master said. “I still am not sure…” He caught Oda’s eye and stopped. The stallion’s ears had flattened briefly. It was a warning, and one he was well trained to listen to.
He let his breath out sharply. “As you will,” he said to the stallion. Then to Valeria he said, “You will ride the Dance. Oda will carry you. He insists on it.”
Valeria felt her heart stop, then start again, hammering hard. “The Dance? The Midsummer Dance? But—”
“Yes,” he said, and his voice was testy. “In the ordinary way of things, you would be years from earning any such honor. But the stallions have made their will known. You must ride, and Oda must carry you. No matter how dangerous that may be, they are adamant.”
“‘Even the Master is their servant,’” Valeria recited.
He leveled a glare at her. “This is not a game, child.”
“No?” said Valeria with a flash of sudden temper. “Aren’t we playthings for the gods?”
“I would hope we may be more than that,” Briana said.
The air that had been crackling between Valeria and the Master went somewhat more safely quiet. Briana nodded to herself. “Good. We can’t have you fighting. We need you—all of you—more than ever.”
Master Nikos cleared his throat. “This is a difficult thing. What we’re seeing here, and foreseeing, and dreading, is that our life, our art and magic, will never be the same again.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Briana asked. “For years, you’ve cut yourself off from everything but your own art and knowledge and concerns. Time was when the names of the Master and the First Riders were as well known as the emperor’s own. Now hardly anyone could name you, let alone the others—and few of those who know can be said to care. You are the empire’s heart, and yet not only has the empire all but forgotten you, you yourselves have forgotten what you are supposed to be.” She met his shock with a hard, clear stare. “In the old days, riders from the Mountain would follow the emperor to war. They fought beside him and Danced the outcome of his battles, and often won them for him—or died in the trying. The emperor has sworn that this year, this war, will break the back of the barbarian horde. Where were you when he called for his mages? What were you doing when his armies marched to the border?”
“Lady,” Master Nikos said in a soft, still voice, “we have fought our own kind of battle on your father’s behalf, and taken losses that will be years in the mending. If you command us to send riders to the war, we will obey. But we have precious little strength to spare.”
Briana offered no apology, but her gaze softened somewhat. “If I had such authority, I would bid you continue to heal, but be prepared to open your gates and bring down your walls.”
“All signs do seem to point in that direction,” Master Nikos said. He sounded as exhausted as he looked. “We’ll do what we can, lady.”
“That’s all anyone can ask of you,” Briana said.
Master Nikos was clearly not happy to have been read so harsh a lesson by a woman a third his age, but it had made him stop and think. After a while he said, “We’ll perform the Dance as the gods will it. Then may they help us all.”
Fourteen
There was no inquisition of riders, either to settle the question of the Lady’s testing and choosing or to protest the word that came down from the Master’s study. Valeria was to ride the Midsummer Dance on a stallion who had withdrawn to the high pastures before Kerrec came to the Mountain. That gave the Dance the Master, the four First Riders, two Second Riders, and one rider-candidate.
The news reached Kerrec after he left the schoolroom, late in the morning after the testing. He had thirty-one new pupils, some older than he, and they were not the easiest he had ever had. He was mildly surprised not to see a thirty-second, but his sister had been keeping out of sight since the testing.
That was a small mercy. Thirty-one men and boys had discovered that there was no reprieve from either testing or studies. Those who had come from the legions were even less inclined to suffer in silence than spoiled lords’ sons or haughty journeyman mages. “It’s just like the bloody army,” one of them had grumbled when they straggled into the schoolroom.
