Song Of Unmaking

Euan was still numb. He was doing what needed to be done, but he felt nothing. The women wailing, the men chanting death songs, left him cold.

Tomorrow they would lay the king in his barrow. Tonight the feasting grew raucous, with the clansmen draining barrels of ale as if it had been water. Euan had had a cup or two, but he had barely tasted it.

He left the high table and the emptiness of the royal seat to wander through the hall. Down past the hearth, some of the young men were dancing. It was a war dance, with stamping feet and flashing blades—perfectly suited to his mood.

He seized a blade from a willing hand and leaped into the dance. His blood thundered in his ears. He stamped, slashed, spun.

He came face to face with his image, armed as he was, laughing as he met blade with blade. The others drew back, clapping and beating time with their feet. To that rough and potent music, the two of them fought the battle through to the final crossing of blades.

Euan was breathing hard. Sweat ran down his back and sides. He dropped his sword and roared. “Conory! By the One—you’re alive!”

“Hell wouldn’t have me,” his cousin said in mock regret.

They stood grinning at one another. Conory looked so like Euan that he had, more than once, claimed Euan’s name and place—a useful skill for eluding nursemaids and imperial guards. Euan seized him by the shoulders and shook him. “Damn your eyes, man. Where have you been? Dun Carrig came in yesterday.”

“And so did I,” said Conory. “Damn your eyes. I was right in front of you.”

“Then I’m a blind man,” Euan said, “and you are a reprobate. I mourned you all for dead.”

“Not likely,” said another voice he knew well.

He squinted in the firelight. “Cyllan? You, too?”

“And Donal and Cieran and Strahan,” said Conory.

They were all there, drawing in from the edges of the circle—the friends of his youth, his fellow hostages, his old warband. Only one was missing, and that one Euan himself had cast out while they were still in the empire.

The numbness left him. In its place was a most peculiar mingling of grief and gladness. It felt like ice breaking in the rivers and spring storms roaring down on the frozen moors.

It was dangerous because it was so strong. It was a marvel, a miracle—a sign. It made him laugh from the depths of his belly, down below the sorrow.

With his warband around him, he had his balance. He could look at the world and see it clearly. He felt as if he had lost an arm but then found it again. He was finally whole.

Now he could claim the kingship. He swept them with him, back into another dance, a spring dance, half war and half exuberant mating.

As he danced, he saw in his head the Dance of the white stallions in Aurelia. The patterns they traced were almost the same as those his feet were beating out on the floor of this hall—his father’s hall. His hall.

He could shape time and fate, too. Why not? He was king. Now that he had his warband again, out of all hope and expectation, the rest would follow.

They raised the old king’s barrow down below the dun, in the dark valley where the kings of the Calletani had lain since they first came to this country. Far down the valley, the oldest barrows had grown into the earth, covered over with grass and heather. Here at the valley’s head, almost out into the light, the new barrow rose up, its lines as raw and harsh as grief.

The priests made the sacrifice, the bodies of nine battle captives and nine fair women. The women died quietly, like the good handmaidens they were meant to be. The men screamed and fought and called down curses.

Their death was slow and hard, a death of tiny cuts and minute scraps of skin peeled off slowly, one by one. Multiplied nine times, it opened the way for the king’s spirit, freeing it to seek oblivion in the One.

It was a long ritual, and not easy to watch. Euan, with his warband around him like a well-loved cloak, endured it as they all did, to honor the king.

Niall lay on his bier, covered with a blood-red mantle—the cloak of an imperial general. His shrunken body barely lifted the pall.

His weapons were laid beside him and his shield was at his feet. They would go into the barrow with him, along with a great store of gold and precious things. The standards of the two legions were among them, and enough imperial gold to ransom a king.

There was no ransom that would bring a man back from the dead. Euan felt the grief rising to choke him. For once he let it. Today it could rule him as it would. Tomorrow he had to be king.

When the rite was finished and the bodies of the captives had stopped twitching, the king went at last into his barrow. No living man went with him. The men who carried him down, and after him the bodies of his escort, stayed in the barrow when their task was done. Each had a knife for his own throat, or else he would die when the air ran out, buried under earth and stone.

Euan lent his hand to the sealing of the tomb. The stones were heavy. He was glad of the pain and the grueling effort. They cleansed him in spirit as well as body.

It was dark when they finished. The stars were fiercely bright. The ground crackled with frost. It crunched underfoot as the whole long column of them, clan upon clan, walked away from the valley and the barrow.

No one spoke or sang. That was their last tribute, that gift of silence.

The sun rose with a blaring of trumpets and a thunder of drums. The long dark night was over. Mourning would go on for the women, but for the men it was a new day.

Today they would make a king. In other times or other clans there would be a great contest, a battle among all presumptive heirs. Whoever won the battle could call himself king.

When Euan Rohe came out of his room after a sleepless night, the warbands of all the clans were waiting in the hall, watchful and silent. Here and there, someone twitched, thinking maybe to raise the challenge—but the men around him cuffed him into submission.

Euan’s own warband stood like a guard of honor. Cyllan and Strahan had bruises and satisfied expressions. The others looked merely satisfied.

Euan would beat the story out of them later. His eyes took in the mass of faces.

They were taking him in, too, and rightly. He had been away for years, living among imperials, learning their ways and their language and their arts of war and peace. Maybe his own people could no longer trust him. Maybe he had changed too much to rule them as they needed to be ruled.

He had to answer that—the sooner, the better. He sprang up onto the nearest table and stamped his foot. The sound of boot-heel on hollow planks boomed through the hall. He raised his voice to its strongest pitch. “Calletani!”

That brought them all up short. He raked his eyes across them, noting who flinched and who looked down and who met him eyes-on. When he had them all, he spoke more softly. “Well, tribesmen. You know who I am. If you stay with me, you’ll learn what I am. I’ll fight your champions if I have to, and kill them if that’s what it takes. I’d rather not. If we’re going to take down the empire, we need every man. It’s imperial blood we should be thirsting for—not the blood of our own.”

The sound that rose in response to that made a shiver run down his spine. It began as a growl and rose to a roar. It was pure lust for blood—imperial blood, blood of the enemy who had barred the gates of the south since the people first came out of the dawn lands.

That gate would fall. That was Euan’s oath and his promise.

They raised him up in the hall of his fathers, lifting him high on an imperial shield. The chieftain of Dun Gralloch clasped the heavy gold torque about his neck, and the lord of Dun Carrig weighted his arms with gold.

He stood at that dizzy height, supported on the shoulders of his warband, with his head brushing the beams, and allowed himself to savor the moment. It would not last long. The One knew, there was trouble enough waiting.

But not today. Today, he would let the sun shine. Today, he was king.

Ten

Iliya won his wager—almost. By the first day of the testing, sixteen eights of the Called had come in, less one. They had had to open one of the long-unused dormitories, and all the First and Second Riders were called on to oversee the testing of each eight and the final, anomalous seven.

There had never been anything like it. They were all male—that was a relief to the older riders—but they were not all boys or very young men. Some were older than Kerrec. One was a master of the sea magic. Several were journeymen of various magical orders, and some of those were close to mastery.

“The gods are in an antic humor,” Master Nikos said the night before the testing began.

He had invited the First Riders to dinner in his rooms. That was tradition, but this year the celebration was overlaid with grief. A year ago, three of the four had been Second Riders. Their predecessors had died in the Dance of the emperor’s jubilee.

Tonight they had saluted the dead, then resolutely put the memory aside. This was a time for thinking of the future, not the past.