Shattered Dance

Valeria leaned on the window frame. The moon was high, casting cold light on the Mountain’s summit. It glowed blue-white against the luminous sky.

“Has anyone ever been up there?” she asked. “All the way past the Ladies’ pastures to the top?”

Kerrec wrapped her in a warm blanket, with his arms around that, cradling the expanding curve of her belly. He kissed the place where her neck and shoulder joined and rested his chin lightly on her shoulder. His voice was soft and deep in her ear. “There’s a legend of a rider who tried it, but he either came back mad or never came back at all.”

“Why? What’s up there?”

“Ice and snow and pitiless stone, and air too thin to breathe,” he said, “and, they say, a gate of time and the gods. The Great Ones come through it into this world, and the Ladies come and go, or so it’s said. It’s beyond human understanding.”

“You believe that?”

“I can’t disprove it,” he said.

“Someday maybe someone will.”

“Not you,” he said firmly, “and not now.”

She turned in his arms. He looked like an emperor on an old coin, with his clean-carved face and narrow arched nose—not at all surprising, since those bygone emperors had been his ancestors—but lately he had learned to unbend a little. In spite of his stern words, he was almost smiling.

“Not before spring,” she conceded. She kissed him, taking her time about it.

The baby stirred between them, kicking so hard she gasped. He clutched at her. She pushed him away, half laughing and half glaring. “Stop that! I’m not dying. Neither is she.”

“Are you sure?” he said. “You looked so—”

“Shocked? She kicks like a mule.” Valeria rubbed her side where the pain was slowly fading. “Go on, go to sleep. I’ll be there in a while.”

He eyed her narrowly. “You promise? No wandering out to the stable again?”

“Not tonight,” she said. “It’s too cold.”

He snorted softly, sounding exactly like one of the stallions. Then he yawned. It was late and dawn came early, even at the end of winter. He stole one last kiss before he retreated to the warmth of their bed.

After a few moments she heard his breathing slow and deepen. She wrapped the blanket tighter.

Inside her where the stallions always were, standing in a ring of long white faces and quiet eyes, the moon was shining even more brightly than on the Mountain. Power was waking, subtle but clear, welling up like a spring from the deep heart of the earth. The world was changing again—for good or ill. She was not prophet enough to know which.

She turned away quickly from the window and the moon and dived into bed. Kerrec’s warmth was a blessing. His voice murmured sleepily and his arms closed around her, warding her against the cold.

Kerrec was gone when she woke. Breakfast waited on the table by the fire, with a Word on it to keep the porridge hot and the cream cold. Valeria would rather have gone to the dining hall, but she had to smile at the gift.

She was ravenously hungry—no more sickness in the mornings, thank the gods. She scraped the bowl clean and drank all of the tea. Then she dressed, scowling as she struggled to fasten the breeches. She was fast growing out of them.

Her stallions were waiting for her in their stable. She was not to clean stalls now by the Healer’s order—fool of a man, he persisted in thinking she was delicate. But she was still riding, and be damned to anyone who tried to stop her.

Sabata pawed the door of his stall as she walked down the aisle. The noise was deafening. Oda, ancient and wise, nibbled the remains of his breakfast. The third, Marina, whickered beneath Sabata’s thunderous pounding.

She paused to stroke Marina’s soft nose and murmur in his ear. He was older than Sabata though still rather young, taller and lighter-boned, with a quiet disposition and a gentle eye. He had been the last stallion that old Rugier trained, a Third Rider who never rose higher or wanted to—but he had had the best hands in the school.

Rugier had died after Midwinter Dance, peacefully in his sleep. The next morning Marina moved himself into the stall next to Oda’s and made it clear that Valeria was to continue his training.

That was also the morning when Valeria confessed to Master Nikos that she was expecting a child. She had planned it carefully, rehearsing the words over and over until she could recite them in her sleep. But when she went to say them, there was a great to-do over Rugier’s passing, and then there was Marina declaring his choice of a rider-candidate over all the riders in the school.

“I suppose,” Master Nikos said after they had retreated from the stable to his study, “we should be thinking of testing you for Fourth Rider. You’re young for it, but we’ve had others as young. That’s less of a scandal than a rider-candidate with three Great Ones to train and be trained by.”

“Are you sure I’m ready?” Valeria asked. “I don’t want to—”

“The stallions say you are,” Nikos said. “I would prefer to wait until after Midsummer—if you can be so patient.”

“Patience is a rider’s discipline,” Valeria said. “Besides, I suppose it’s better to wait until after the baby is born.”

For a long moment she was sure he had not heard her. His mind was ranging far ahead, planning the testing and no doubt passing on to other matters of more immediate consequence.

Then he said, “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

Valeria had been standing at attention. Her knees almost gave way. “You—how—”

“We’re not always blind,” Nikos said.

She scraped her wits together. “How long have you known?”

“Long enough to see past scandal to the inevitability of it all,” he said. “The stallions are fierce in your defense.”

“They’re stallions,” she said. “That’s what they’re for.”

Master Nikos sighed gustily. “You, madam, are more trouble than this school has seen in all its years. You are also more beloved of the stallions than any rider in memory. Sooner or later, even the most recalcitrant of us has to face the truth. You are not ours to judge. You belong to the gods.”

Valeria’s mouth was hanging open. She shut it carefully. “Do the other riders agree with you?”

“Probably not,” he said, “but sooner or later they’ll have to. We all profess to serve the gods. That service is not always as easy or simple as we might like.”

“I’m going to keep and raise this child,” she said. She made no effort to keep the defiance out of her voice. “I won’t give her up or send her out for fostering.”

Master Nikos neither laughed nor scowled. He simply said, “I would expect no less.”

He had caught Valeria completely off balance. It was a lesson, like everything else in this place. People could change. Minds could shift if they had to. Even a senior rider could accept the unacceptable, because there was no other choice.

In this early morning at the end of winter, three months after Master Nikos had proved that not everything a rider did was predictable, the stallions were fresh and eager. So were the riders who came to join Valeria in the riding hall. The patterns they transcribed in the raked sand were both deliberate and random—deliberate in that they were training exercises, random in that they were not meant to open the doors of time or fate.

Valeria could see those patterns more clearly the longer she studied in the school. She had to be careful not to lose herself in them. The baby changed her body’s balance, but it was doing something to her mind as well. Some things she could see more clearly. Others barely made sense at all.

Today she rode Sabata, then Marina, then Oda—each set of figures more complex than the last. Her knees were weak when she finished with Oda, but she made sure no one saw. The last thing she needed was a flock of clucking riders. They fussed enough as it was, as if no other woman in the history of the world had ever been in her condition.

It was only a moment’s weakness. By the time she had run up the stirrups and taken the reins, she was steady again. She could even smile at the riders who were coming in, and face the rest of the morning’s duties without thinking longingly of her bed.

This would end soon enough—though she suspected the last of it would seem interminable. She unsaddled Oda and rubbed him down, then turned him out in one of the paddocks. He broke away from her like a young thing, bucking and snorting, dancing his delight in the bright spring sun.

Chapter Three