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.
“At least in the bloody army they let you sleep it off after you’ve won a battle,” someone else said, yawning till his jaw cracked. “Up at bloody dawn to clean bloody stalls. I thought we signed on to be riders, not stablehands.”
Kerrec had a lecture for that, which he decided not to deliver. They were in awe of his rank, at least, and he was kind to their aching heads and churning stomachs, though he doubted any of them was aware of it. He set them simple exercises that would engage their stumbling brains and teach them—or in many cases remind them of—the beginnings of focus.
He could use a course of that himself, he reflected grimly as the rider-candidates dispersed to their afternoon lessons. He would follow them later, to judge each one and mount him accordingly on the stallion who would be his schoolmaster.
He was on his way to Petra’s stable and a lesson of his own when he crossed paths with Gunnar, who was on the same errand. Gunnar was frowning. “Bad news?” Kerrec asked him as they went on together.
“That depends,” Gunnar said. “Did you know our most troublesome pupil is riding the Dance at Midsummer?”
“Valeria?” Kerrec could not find it in him to be surprised. “How?”
“Another