Selected praise for Caitlin Brennan’s
White Magic series

The Mountain’s Call

Song of Unmaking

Shattered Dance

“Definitely a don’t-put-this-down page-turner!”

—New York Times bestselling author Mercedes Lackey on The Mountain’s Call

“Animal lovers and romantic fantasy aficionados alike will appreciate this…coming-of-age story and an exhilarating romantic adventure.”

—Romantic Times BOOKclub

“A riveting plot, complex characters, beautiful descriptions, and heaps of magic.”

—Romance Reviews Today on The Mountain’s Call

“Caitlin Brennan has created a masterpiece of legend and lore with her first novel. Hauntingly beautiful and extremely powerful…Take Tolkien and Lackey and mix them together and you get this new magic that is Caitlin’s own. You will stay enthralled with each page turned.”

—The Best Reviews on The Mountain’s Call

“This…second book in this magnificent romantic fantasy series…is full of more action, romance and drama than its prequel…. The battle scenes are magnificent, the characters are realistic and the storyline is pure magic; readers will eagerly await the next book in this tantalizing series.”

—The Best Reviews on Song of Unmaking

CAITLIN BRENNAN
THE MOUNTAIN’S CALL

For the Ladies

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter One

The Mountain floated over the long roll of field and forest. Even in summer its peak was white with snow. In early spring, when the grass had begun to grow green in the valleys, its summit was locked in winter.

There was a fire of magic in its heart, welling up from the deep roots of the earth. It bubbled like a spring from the white fang of the peak, and rippled in waves through the vault of heaven. The tides of time began to swirl and shift.

In the citadel on the Mountain’s knees, the master of the Schools of Peace and War woke from a stranger dream than most. He stumbled from bed, flung open the shutters and peered up at the glow of dawn on the snowbound slopes.

Every spring the power rose; every spring the Mountain’s Call went out, summoning young men to the testing. Every spring and summer they came, straggling in from the far reaches of Aurelia’s empire, coming to claim the magic that they hoped was theirs. White magic, stallion magic. Magic of time and the gods.

This year’s Call was different. How it was different, or what it portended, the master could not tell. The gods in their pastures, cropping the new green grass, would not answer when he asked. The Ladies in the high valleys, greater than gods, chose not to acknowledge him at all.

This was a mystery, that silence said. Even the master of the school must wait and see, and hope that when the answer came, it would be one that he could accept.

Valeria had been walking in a fog for days. Sometimes she wondered if she was ill. Other times, she was sure that she was losing her mind.

There was a voice in her head. It called to her with the sound of wind through pines. It whispered in the hollows of her skull. Come. Come to me.

She staggered on the path to the widow Rufo’s house. Her mother’s hand gripped her wrist and wrenched her upright.

The pain helped Valeria to focus. It was harder every day. Sometimes now she could barely see. She had to struggle to hear what people said to her. She thought she might be losing her mind altogether, except that there was a deep sense of rightness to it. She was meant to hear this call. She was meant to go—

“Valeria!” Her mother’s voice cut through the fog of confusion. She blinked half-wittedly. She was standing in the widow Rufo’s cottage. Her head just missed brushing the roofbeam.

“Valeria,” Morag said. “Start brewing the tea.”

Valeria’s hands knew what to do even when her wits were drifting away toward gods knew where. She dipped water from the barrel by the door and poured it into the kettle, then set it to boil on the hearth. The fire had burned too low. She whispered a Word. The banked logs burst into flame.

The widow Rufo’s breath rattled. Morag spread a paste of pungent herbs over the bony chest and covered it with soft cloths. Herbs just as pungent steeped in the boiling water, brewing into tea. When it was strong enough, Morag coaxed it into her sip by sip.

Valeria squatted by the fire. It was full of visions. White mountains. White clouds. The toss of a white mane, and a noble head on a proud arched neck, turning to fix her with an eye as dark as deep water. The depths of it were full of stars. Come, said the white god. Come to me.

“She’s getting worse.”

Valeria lay in the wide bed with her three younger sisters. She was the innermost, with Caia’s warmth on one side and the chill of the wall on the other. Her sisters were snoring on three different notes. They almost drowned out the murmur of their mother’s voice on the other side of the wall.

“She can barely keep her mind on her work,” Morag went on. “She started to say a birthing spell over Edwy’s burned hand this morning—thanks to Sun and Moon I caught her in time, or he’d have sprouted a crop of new fingers.”

Her father’s laughter rumbled through the wall. Morag slapped him. He grunted. “There now,” he said in his deep voice, roughened from years of bellowing orders on battlefields. “What was that for?”

“You know perfectly well what for,” Morag said sharply. “Our daughter is losing her mind.”

“If she were a boy,” Titus said, “I’d be thinking it was the Call. I saw it a time or two when I was in the legion. One of the youngest recruits would get up one fine spring morning with his eyes all strange, pick up his kit and walk out of the barracks, and no one with any sense would try to stop him. Our girl’s just about the same age as they were, and gods know she has a way with animals. Horses follow her like puppies. The way she taught the goat to dance—”

“She is not a boy,” said Morag. “This is a spring sickness. There’s magic in it, she stinks of it, but it is not—”

“What if it is?”

“It can’t be,” Morag said flatly. “Women aren’t Called. She has a good deal more magic than she knows what to do with, and it’s laid her open to some contagion off the mountains.”

Titus grunted the way he did when he was not minded to argue with his wife, but neither was he inclined to agree with her. “You’d better cure her, then, if she’s as sick as that.”

“I’ll cure her,” said Morag. Her tone was grim. “You go in the morning, husband, and talk to Aengus. She likes that son of his well enough. There’s time to make it a double wedding.”

“I’m not sure—” said Titus.

“Do it,” Morag said with a snap like a door shutting.

That was all they said that night. Valeria lay very still, trying not to touch either Caia or the wall. Caia would not be pleased at all, not after she had bragged to everyone about being the first of all four sisters to marry. She was a year younger than Valeria and the beauty of the family. Their father had not had to go begging for a husband for that one. Wellin Smith had asked for her.

Aengus’ son Donn was unlikely to refuse Titus’ eldest daughter. He had been trailing after Valeria since they were both in short tunics. He had an attractive face and decent conversation, and a little magic, which was useful in his father’s mill. He could offer his wife a good inheritance and a comfortable living, even a maid if she wanted one.

It was a good match. Valeria should be happy. Her mother would cure her of these dreams and fancies. She would marry a man she rather liked, give him children and continue with her education in herb-healing and earth magic. When the time came, she would inherit her mother’s place in the village, and be a wisewoman.

That was the life she was born to. It was better than most young women could hope for.

She was ill, that was all, as her mother had said. Because it was spring and she was coming to her sixteenth summer, and because she had listened hungrily all her life to stories of the Call and the white gods and the school on the Mountain, she had deluded herself into thinking that this bout of brain fever was something more. That was why she was dreaming in broad daylight and stumbling over her own feet, and feeling ever more strongly that she should take whatever she could carry and run away. She could not possibly be hearing the Call that had never come to a woman in all the years that it had been ringing through the planes of the aether.

Valeria slid from doubt and darkness into a dream of white horses galloping in a field under the white teeth of mountains. They were all mares with heavy bellies, and foals running beside them. The young ones were dark, black or brown, with the white of adulthood shining through.

They ran in wide sweeps across the green field. The swoops and curves made her think of a flock of birds in flight. Augurs could read omens in the passage of birds, but these white horses could shape the future. They could make it happen. They were the moon, and time was the tide.

A voice was speaking. She could not see who spoke, or tell if it was a man’s voice or a woman’s. It came up out of the earth and down from the air. “Look,” it said. “See. Understand. There is a prophecy—remember it. One will come of the pure line, true child of First Stallion and Queen Mare. That one will seal the bond of soul and spirit with a child of man. Together they shall be both the salvation and destruction of the people.”

Words welled up, a flood of questions, but there was no one to ask. She could only watch in silence.

The mares and foals circled the field in a graceful arc and leaped into the sky, spinning away like a swirl of snow. Down on the field, a single pale shape stood motionless. The solid quarters and the heavy crest marked him a stallion, even before he turned and she recognized him. She had dreamed him once already.

He was young, dappled with silver like the moon. As massive as he was, he was somewhat soft around the edges. He was beautiful and perfect but still, somehow, unfinished. Come, he said as he had before. Come to me.

She woke in the dark before dawn, with the dream slipping away before she could grasp it. She was standing in the open air. The sky was heavy with rain, but it had not yet begun to fall. She was dressed in her brothers’ hand-me-downs. They were faded and much mended, but they were warm. There was a weight on her back.

She remembered as if it had been part of her dream how she had slipped out of bed without disturbing her sisters. She had found the old legionary pack that her eldest brother Rodry had brought home on his last leave, and filled it with food and clothing, enough for a week and more. When she woke, she was filling a water bottle in the stream that ran underneath the dairy house.

Her face was turned toward the Mountain. It was too far away to see, but she could feel it. When she turned in the wrong direction, her skin itched and quivered.

The bottle was full. She thrust the stopper in and hung it from her belt. The sky was lightening just a little. She set off down the path from her father’s farm to the northward road.

Her mother was waiting where the path joined the road. Valeria’s feet would have carried her on past, but Morag stood in the way. When Valeria sidestepped, Morag was there. “No,” said her mother. “You will not.”

“I have to,” Valeria said.

“You will not,” said Morag. She gripped Valeria’s wrists and spoke a Word.

The cords of the binding spell were invisible, but they were strong. Valeria could not move her numbed lips to speak the counterspell. Spellbound and helpless, she staggered behind her mother. Every step she took away from the Mountain was a nightmare of discomfort, but she could do nothing about it. Her mother’s magic was too strong.

The root cellar smelled of earth and damp and the strings of garlic that hung from the beams. Barrels of turnips and beets and potatoes lined the walls. There was one window high up, barely big enough for a cat to climb through. The trapdoor in the ceiling was securely bolted on the other side.

It was not terribly uncomfortable, for a prison. Valeria had a feather bed to lie on. She had a firepot and a rack of lamps with more than enough oil to keep them burning. Morag had left her with the herbal and the book of earth spells, but a binding kept her from working any spell that might help her escape.

“I’ll let you out on your wedding day,” Morag had said when she shut Valeria in the cellar. “Between now and then, you will do your lessons and ponder your future, and I will see that you get over this sickness.”

“It’s not a sickness,” Valeria said through clenched teeth. “You know what it is.”

“I know what you think it is. You know it’s impossible. You are the only one of my daughters who was born with magic. You will have ample opportunity to develop and use it—but you will do it here in Imbria where you belong.”

“I don’t belong here,” Valeria said. “I belong on the Mountain.”

“You do not,” said Morag. “No woman does. And so they will tell you if you keep on trying to answer their Call. They’ll break your heart. They’ll laugh in your face and send you away. I’m sparing you that, daughter. Someday, Sun and Moon willing, you’ll learn to forgive me.”

That would never happen. Valeria had come out of her dream-ridden fog into a trammeled fury. She was awake now, and her mind was as clear as it could be.

She remembered when she had first heard the story, as vivid as if it had happened this morning. She could see the market in the bright sunlight, with its booths of vegetables and fruit, heaped greens and sides of mutton and beef and strings of fish.

A stranger lounged on the bench outside Lemmer’s wineshop. “Oh, aye,” he said in an odd rolling accent. “The horse magicians send out a Call every spring, just before the passes open in the mountains. It’s meant for boys who are almost men, or men who are still mostly boys. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen summers old. Never younger. Only rarely older. It binds them and compels them to go to the Mountain.”

Valeria was much younger then, not yet in skirts. Strangers took her for a boy, as lanky and gawky as she was. “Only boys?” she asked this stranger. “No girls?”

“Never a girl or a woman,” the traveler said. “Horse magic’s not for the Moon’s children. It belongs to the Sun.”

Valeria might have liked to argue the point, but she had another question to ask first. “What is horse magic? What does it do? Anybody can ride a horse—even a girl.”

“Anyone can sit on a horse,” the traveler said. “To master the white stallions, the firstborn children of time and the gods—that’s not for any plowboy to try.”

“Sometimes a plowboy does,” said one of the traveler’s companions. He had an even odder accent, and was very odd to look at. He was a head taller than the tallest man that Valeria had seen before, and his cheeks were thickly patterned with whorls in blue and green and red. “Sometimes even a bond-slave can try it. If he hears the Call, if he goes to the Mountain, he can be tested just as if he were a prince. He can pass the testing and be made a rider, and no one ever calls him a slave again. The stallions don’t care if a man was born low or high. They only care for the magic that’s in him.”

“But what do they do?” Valeria persisted. “What is the horse magic? Is it like charming snakes and birds, or teaching goats to dance?”

The tattooed man grinned. His teeth were filed to points. He looked alarming, but Valeria was not afraid of him. “Something like that,” he said, “and something like herding cats, and a little bit like casting the bones. Mostly it’s hard work. Can you ride a horse, child?”

If it had been anyone else, Valeria would have been outraged to be called a child, but this man was so large and so odd and so full of answers to her questions that she could not bring herself to resent it. “I can sit on anything that will let me,” she said. “I’m sure they wouldn’t call it riding, up there on the Mountain.”

The stranger laughed, a joyful shout. “Oh, they would not! But they would approve of your honesty. Maybe you’ll hear the Call, child, when you’re old enough.”

“Maybe I will,” Valeria said. Never mind that she was a girl. Magic came where it would, she already knew that. Who knew what she could be if she put her mind to it?

She would have asked many more questions, but her brothers caught her hanging about where she should not, and dragged her off home. When she could slip back again, the strangers were long gone. Others came in the years that followed and told more stories, some of which answered her spate of questions, but none stayed in her memory as those first two strangers had.

She had dreamed of white horses even before the strangers came to the market. She dreamed that they danced, and she danced with them. Sometimes they danced on the earth and sometimes in the sky. She could see the patterns that they made, how they wove together earth and water and air, and made it all one single shining thing.

She tried to ride the pony as she rode in her dreams. He did not see the point in it, and bucked her off more often than not. The big slow plow horses were more accommodating, but they were earthbound. They had no element of fire. The goats, who loved to dance, were too small for even a child to sit on.

None of them was as perfect as the white dream-horses. None of them would make her a rider. Only the white gods could do that, and only their riders could teach her.

Now, against all hope, she was Called. She was summoned to the testing. The magic was in her, even though she was a woman.

Morag’s binding rattled Valeria’s skull. Her lesser magics were all suppressed. Even the greater one, the one Morag would not acknowledge, was weakened and slow. She had to wait until night, when the sun’s singing was stilled, and humans were asleep in the quiet harmony of the stars. Then if she listened, she could hear the overlapping voices of the world. She resisted the urge to find the patterns in them, and once she had found them, to make sense of them. There was no time for that, only for the Call.

The horses were locked in the stable. The dogs were loose in the yard as they were every night. They were not as intelligent as the horses, but they were more subservient, and for her purposes more useful. They thought it a great game to tug and pull at the bolt that secured the trapdoor, until after a white-knuckled while it slid free.

She was up among them in no time at all. They fell over one another in delight, tongues flapping, tails wagging frantically. She rubbed each big shaggy head and pulled each pair of ears and thanked them from the bottom of her heart. Then she sent them back to guard duty.

Her brother’s pack was back on its hook in the toolshed. The waterskin was beside it. This time Valeria made sure she was not followed. The rats in the walls and the pigeons in the rafters assured her that her mother was asleep beside her father. Morag had committed a cardinal error of warfare, as Titus would be sure to remind her when they woke and found their daughter gone. She had underestimated the enemy.

Anger was still strong in Valeria. It ate the twinge of guilt and the impulse to stop and say goodbye to her brothers and sisters. What if she never saw them again?

What a soldier did not know, he could not betray. That was another of Titus’ maxims. Valeria left them all sleeping the sleep of the happily ignorant.

No one was waiting for her this time. The road was empty under the chilly starlight. She paused where the path turned onto the road. The warding rune on the post there was meant to keep intruders out but not—she drew a breath of relief—to keep the family in. She did not look back. In her mind’s eye she saw her father’s farmstead in its fold of the hills, with its thatched roofs and its wooden palisade and its border of trees.

She said farewell in her heart, but her eyes were fixed on the shadow on shadow that was the wall of mountains. Her feet were itching to begin the journey. The first step was the hardest, but each one after that was easier, until she was striding headlong, almost running, into the north.

Chapter Two

The horse followed Valeria for a day before she gave in to his importuning and let him carry her. He was clean and well fed and his hooves had been trimmed recently, but he refused to acknowledge that he belonged to anyone. He insisted that he had come for her. He was neither white nor a stallion, but Valeria did not care about that. His back was comfortable and his gaits were smooth. She could have paid gold and done worse.

She had defied her mother and abandoned her family, all of whom, in spite of her anger, she missed terribly. She was a fugitive, living off what she could forage and trying to stretch her few provisions for as long as she could. She barely knew where she was going or how long it would take to get there. And yet she was happy, even when the last snow of winter caught her on the road and forced her into an empty barn for a day and a night.

The bindings on her magic had slipped loose after she’d passed the runepost at the border of the farm. She could call fire to warm her and the horse. There was hay in the deserted barn, cut last year but still dry and clean. The horse ate a good deal of it, and she slept on the rest. A few half-wild hens roosted in a corner of the barn. Their eggs were small, but there were a decent number of them. With the last of the bread and dried apples from home, Valeria had a feast while the storm howled outside.

When she rode out through melting snow, the second morning after she came to the barn, she had cut her long hair short. It was practical, and she thought it might also be safer if she was out riding the roads alone, to be taken for a boy. Her head felt odd and light, and her ears were cold.

The horse pranced, glad to be free again. Valeria’s rump was not so happy. It was just beginning to recover from the effects of too much riding after too little practice.

She would need better discipline than that if she was to be a rider. She gritted her teeth and suffered through it.

Before the storm came, she had met few people on the road. Most of those were farmers going to market. She had seen an imperial courier once, galloping flat out on his spotted horse.

A troop of legionaries tramped past not long after she left the barn. She resisted the urge to hide from them. She was not a fugitive. She was Called. Her horse, bridleless and saddleless and obeying her without question, would tell anyone that. So would the road she was on, which led north to the Mountain and the white gods.

In the stories she had heard, the Called could ask for food and lodging at the imperial way stations. The day after the last of her provisions ran out, she tested it. It was that or resort to stealing.

The man in charge of the station had the same toughened-leather look as her father, and the same accent, too. Wherever a legionary came from, after twenty years in the emperor’s service he came out talking that way, usually with a voice gone raw from bellowing orders in all weathers above all manner of uproar.

He did not ask her who she was or what she was doing. As she had hoped, it was obvious. He gave her a seat at the table in the mess hall and a bed in the barracks, and showed her where she could stable the horse. When the horse was bedded down with a manger full of good hay and a pan of barley, she went to claim her own dinner.

There were only a handful of other people in the station tonight. They were all imperial couriers either resting between runs or waiting for the relay to reach them. Most of them, like the stationmaster, asked no questions. One or two watched her without being blatant about it. They all seemed to know each other. She was the only stranger.

She finished her dinner as quickly as she could, trying not to choke. She barely tasted the stew and bread and beer. She escaped before anyone could strike up a conversation.

She left before the sun came up. The cook was just taking the first loaves out of the oven when she came down from the room. He gave her a loaf so hot and fresh she could barely hold it, with a wedge of cheese thrust into a slit in the crust. The cheese had melted into the bread. She ate it in a state of bliss, and belched her appreciation.

“Gods give you good luck,” the cook said, “and a safe journey. May the testing favor you.”

She hoped she did not look too startled. “Thank—thank you,” she said.

The cook smiled and touched her forehead. “For luck,” he said. “Never had anyone Called from your village before, did you?”

She shook her head. “I’ve heard all the stories. But—”

“You give luck,” the cook said, “and take it, too. Stop at the stations. Don’t try to go it on your own. Most people respect the Call, but a few might try to steal the luck.”

“How do they—”

The cook slashed his hand across his throat. “It’s in the blood, they say. I don’t believe it—I think it’s in the soul, and killing you unmakes it. Those on the Mountain, they know for sure, but they’re not telling the likes of us.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Valeria said.

“You’ll learn,” said the cook. “Best be on your way now. It’s a long way to the Mountain, and time’s not standing still.”

“How long—”

“Three days for a courier,” the cook said. “Ten, maybe, at ordinary pace, and allowing for weather and delays. Ask at the stations if there’s a caravan heading the way you need to go. That’s safest. You might even meet others of the Called.”

A shiver ran down her spine. In her dreams she had always been alone. She had not thought about what the Call would mean. She went to a place where everyone had the same kind of magic as she did. She would not be alone any longer.

If and when they found out she was not a boy—

She would deal with that when it happened. For now she had to go to the Mountain. That was all she could think about, and all she needed to think about.

When she fetched the horse from the stable, having discovered that she could commandeer a saddle and bridle for him, she was struck with a sudden attack of cowardice. She turned him southward, back the way she had come.

The Call snapped like a noose around her neck. She almost lost her breakfast. She turned northward and saved it, but the message was clear. She was bound to this road. She had to ride it to the end.

The hunt passed her not long after the sun came up. The hounds came first, then the huntsmen. The hunt itself was a little distance behind. She had seen few nobles in her life, but these were obviously wellborn. Their horses’ caparisons were elaborate, with ornately tooled saddles and chased silver bits and stirrups. The long manes were braided with ribbons in colors that matched the riders’ coats. The riders wore enough gold to dazzle her.

They looked down their noses at the lone traveler on the side of the road. She felt grubby and common in her patched coat. Her boots were walking boots—one of the lordlings remarked on them as he rode elegantly by. The horse was still in winter coat. Even a good grooming could not make him look less shaggy.

Valeria lifted her chin and looked the riders in the eye. She was Called. And what were they?

As soon as she did it, she knew she had made a mistake. One of them, big and uncommonly fair-haired for this part of the world, raked her with a glance that sharpened suddenly. She had seen that look in the leader of a dog pack that had been going casually about its business until it caught wind of a newborn lamb. This was the same sudden gleam in the eye, the same flash of fang.

He was not hunting to eat. He was hunting for pleasure. It mattered little to him whether his prey was animal or human.

Valeria kept the horse, and herself, perfectly still. It might be too little too late, but she called up what magic she could in her rattled state, and did her best to seem as dull and unworthy as possible. Above all, she took care not to give him any further indication that she was one of the Called. If anyone would kill her for luck, this man would.

It seemed to work. The nobleman let his eyes slide away from her. The rest of them rode past without stopping or pausing, with only brief glances if they troubled with her at all.

Valeria nearly collapsed in relief. She was safe, she thought. Even so, she stayed where she was for long enough to see how, just before the road bent around a hill, they turned off into the trees. Then she waited a while longer, until she was sure she no longer heard them.

When she rode on, she stayed well away from the path through the trees, keeping to the open road. It curved again, then again, weaving through a range of wooded hills.

Gradually the hills closed in. The trees were taller, their branches laced overhead. The bright sunlight dimmed, filtering through needles of spruce and pine. There was still snow here. It had a deep cold smell under the sharp sweetness of evergreen.

The horse arched his neck and tensed his back. When a bird started out of cover, he almost went skyward with it.

Valeria soothed him with a purring trill, stroking his neck over and over. It softened a little. He went forward on tiptoe. Every now and then he expressed himself with an explosive snort.

The hunt found Valeria just where the road opened again and started to descend into a deep river valley. In the distance she saw the roofs of a town. It was a substantial place, with a wall around it and the tower of a temple rising out of it.

She heard the hounds singing. Whatever they were chasing, it was coming this way.

Best be out of its way when the hunt came through, she thought. She was not afraid—yet. She let the horse pick up a trot and then a canter, aiming toward the town.

By the time she came out on the level, the hounds were in full cry behind her. The horse had forsaken any pretense of civilization. He felt himself a hunted thing. He knew nothing but speed.

His panic was sucking her down. She fought it. The hounds were closing in. She could not see or hear the huntsmen, or the nobles on their pretty horses. They must be far behind. Or—

Just as she turned from looking back at the hounds, their masters rode out of the trees ahead. They were laughing. Their leader laughed loudest of all, mocking her stupidity. This was an ambush, and she had ridden blindly into it.

The horse had the bit in his teeth. She let the reins fall on his neck as he veered wildly away from the onrushing horsemen, and sang to the hounds.

They had the taste of blood from a doe that they had caught and torn apart under the trees. The horse was larger and sweeter. She sang away the sweetness and the temptation. She sang them to sleep.

They dropped where they ran, tumbling over one another. It happened none too soon. The horse was flagging. He was a sturdy beast, but he was not built to race.

The hunters on their slender-legged beauties were gaining fast. Her horse’s twists and evasions barely gave them pause. They ran right over the hounds.

There were too many horses to master all at once, and Valeria was tired. Her own horse stumbled just as she scraped together the strength to try another working. His legs tangled, and he somersaulted. They parted in midair.

She lay winded, wheezing for breath. Her head was spinning. Huge shapes swirled around her. Gold flashed in her eyes. Hands wrenched at her, tearing at her clothes.

She fought blindly, still struggling to breathe. The magic was beaten out of her. She kicked and clawed. Her coat was gone. Her shirt shredded in their hands.

Her breasts gave them pause, but that was all too brief. They yowled with glee. It would not have mattered if she had been a boy. A girl was much, much better.

Two of them pinned her arms. Two more pried her legs apart. The fifth, whose face she already knew too well, stood above her, tugging at his belt.

She arched and twisted. She was completely empty of rational thought. Magic—she had magic somewhere. If she could only—

The earth shrugged. The hot, hard thing that had been thrusting at her dropped away. Her wrists and ankles throbbed so badly that for a long while she was not even sure that they were free.

Someone bent over her. She surged up in pure, blind rage.

He rocked back a step, but then he braced against her. He caught her hands and held her at arm’s length.

All too slowly she understood that he was not one of the hunters. He wore no gold. His coat was plain leather. The hunters had been big men, brown-haired, with broad red faces. She would never forget any of those faces. This one was slim and dark and not much taller than she. His eyes were an odd pale color, almost silver. With his thin arched nose and long mouth, they made him look stern and cold.

She looked around dazedly. Her attackers lay like the wreck of a storm, heaped one on top of the other. Their horses stood beyond them in a neat line.

A small wind began to blow, stinging her many scratches. She turned her wrists in her rescuer’s grip. He let her go. She started to cover herself, but it was a little too late for that.

Mutely he took off his coat and held it out. She took it just as wordlessly. As plain as it was, it was beautifully made, of leather as soft as butter. The shirt he wore under it was fine linen, and clean. She caught herself admiring the width of his shoulders.

Her stomach turned over. She barely had time to toss the coat out of the way before she doubled up, retching into the grass.

She was beyond empty when she could finally stand straight again. Her head felt light, dizzy. She started to reach for the coat and staggered.

The dark man caught her before she fell. Her skin flinched at his touch, but she made it stop. His lips tightened. “Sit here,” he said, pointing to his coat where it lay on the ground.

He had a deeper voice than she had expected, speaking imperial Aurelian with an accent so pure it sounded stilted. He must be from the heart of the empire, from Aurelia itself.

She did not consciously decide to do as he told her. He let go of her, and her knees would not hold her up. She crumpled in a heap.

He turned his back on her and walked away. She stared after him in disbelief. Anger drove out a storm of tears. How could he—what did he think—

She was shaking uncontrollably. Her stomach had nothing more to cast up. If she could find the horse, she would get to him and mount somehow and escape before her rescuer came back.

The horse was dead. Maybe she had felt him die. She did not remember. He lay not far from her with his neck at an unnatural angle. Flies were already buzzing around him.

The other horses were still in their line as if tied. She supposed she should wonder at that, just as she should grieve for the horse who had served her so well. She would, later. She was in shock. She knew that dispassionately, from the training her mother had bullied into her. She needed warmth, quiet and a dose of tonic.

The sun was not too cold. It was quiet where she lay. None of her attackers had moved, but they were breathing. She could hear them. They must be asleep or unconscious.

The dark man swam into view above her as he had before. This time she simply stared at him. He carried a bundle that unfolded into a shirt as fine as his own, a pair of soft trousers, and a pair of boots. The boots were for riding.

He dressed her as if she was a child. These clothes were better than the best she had had at home. They fit much better than her brothers’ hand-me-downs.

When she was dressed, with his coat over the shirt, he filled a wooden cup from a wineskin and made her drink. She swallowed in spite of herself, and choked. The wine was so strong it made her dizzy. There was something in it. Valerian—hellebore—

She pushed the cup away. “Are you trying to poison me?”

“So,” he said. “You can talk. No, it’s not poison. It’s something to calm you.”

“Not for shock,” she said. “That makes it worse. Plain water is better. And rest. If there’s an herbalist in the town—”

“I’m sure there is,” he said. “Can you ride?”

“I can ride anything.”

That was the wine making her giddy. He arched a brow but refrained from comment. “I meant, can you ride now?”

“Anything,” she said. “Any time.”

“If you say so,” he said. He turned toward the line of horses. One of them shook its head as if he had freed it from a spell, and walked docilely toward him. It was a handsome thing as they all were, coal-black with a star. Its trappings were crimson and green.

He smoothed the mane on its neck, grimacing at the ribbons, and said to Valeria, “We’ll get you something less gaudy in Mallia.”

“You’ve been very kind,” she said. “You saved my life and more, and I’m very grateful. But now I think—”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You won’t be charged with stealing the horse. It’s due you as compensation—and not only for rape. This is one pack of hellions that won’t be terrorizing these parts again.”

She stared at him. “Again? This isn’t the first—”

“They’re notorious,” the dark man said. “And, unfortunately, too well born to be brought to account. The emperor’s justice is not as well administered here as one might hope.”

“But that means—you—I—”

“Their hunting days are over,” the dark man said. His voice was as soft as ever, but something in it made her shiver.

Valeria’s sight was blurring again. She had meant to say something more, but what it was, she could not remember.

While she groped for words, he lifted her and deposited her lightly in the saddle. He was a great deal stronger than he looked. She was almost as big as he was, and he had not shown any sign of strain.

She clung to the high ornate saddle and tried to stop her head from whirling. The horse was quiet under her. It found her weight negligible after the well-fed lordling it had been carrying, and her balance even in this state was better than his.

Her rescuer made no move to claim any of the horses for himself. He walked through the field of the fallen. Most he left where they lay, but he paused beside one. When he turned the man onto his back, Valeria recognized the face. It had hung above her just before the earth shook and flung them all down.

The man’s breeches were tangled around his ankles. His thick red organ flapped limply. Her rescuer bent over him. There was a knife in his hand.

Valeria’s throat closed. She knew the penalty for rape. Except that this man had not quite—

She meant to say so. The words would not come. She watched without a sound as the dark man made two quick, merciless cuts. It was just like gelding a colt. He flung the offal with a gesture of such perfectly controlled fury that her jaw dropped. Before the bloody bundle could strike the ground, a crow appeared out of nowhere and caught it and carried it away.

When the man turned back toward her, his eyes were so pale they seemed to have no color at all. He lifted a shoulder just visibly.

The horse on the end of the line left the others and trotted toward him. Now that she saw it apart from the rest, she realized that it was different. Its saddle and bridle were as plain but as excellently made as the rider’s clothes. The horse was very like them in quality, a sturdy grey cob with an arched nose and an intelligent eye. It was neither as tall nor by any means as elegant as the others, but Valeria would have laid wagers that it would still be going when they had dropped with exhaustion.

The dark man mounted without touching the stirrup. With no perceptible instruction, the grey horse turned toward the town. The black followed of its own accord.

The movement of a horse under her did as much to bring Valeria back to herself as anything she could have done. Her stomach was a tight and painful knot, but she had mastered it.

She would have to decide how she felt about the dark man’s rough justice. The civilized part of her deplored it. The sane part was wondering what price he would pay for it, if the lordling’s family really was as powerful as he had said. The rest of her was dancing with bloodthirsty glee.

She fixed her eyes on him to steady herself. He had a beautiful seat on his blocky little horse. He sat upright but not at all stiff, with a deep, soft leg and a supple hip. He moved as the horse moved, as if he were a part of it.

She had never seen anyone ride like that, except in dreams. If the riders on the Mountain could teach her to ride even a fraction as well, she would call herself happy.

She tried to imitate him, a little. The effort reminded her forcefully that she had been tumbling on rocky ground and fighting off rape not long before. She persisted until the memory faded. Then there was only the horse under her and the rider in front of her and the town of Mallia drawing steadily closer.

Chapter Three

The hostages joined the caravan in Mallia. They had been riding at a punishing pace, thanks to their escort. The emperor’s guard had no love to spare for the sons of barbarian chieftains who had made war against the empire. Even if the emperor had seen fit to take them as hostages for their fathers’ good behavior, the emperor’s soldiers saw no reason to treat them as anything but enemies.

Euan Rohe had a tougher rump than most. But after far too many days on imperial remounts, with a change at every station and a bare pause to eat or piss, he was hobbling as badly as the others. He groaned in relief when he heard that they were to stop for a whole night in this little pimple of a town.

For a town this small and this close to the heart of the empire, it had a sizable garrison. There was a legion quartered here under an elderly but able commander. He inspected his temporary charges with a singular lack of expression and said to his orderly, “Clear out the west barracks. Tell the veterans to keep their opinions to themselves, or they’ll be answering to me.”

Euan felt his brows go up. There had been no need for the man to say that in the hostages’ hearing. It was a challenge of sorts, and a warning.

They had had a good number of those as they rode from the frontier. He knew better than to take them for granted. A hostage survived by staying on guard.

The west barracks made a decent prison. Its windows were high and barred, and the guards took station near the doors. It seemed excessive for half a dozen hostages, but that was the empire of Aurelia. It did everything to excess.

The hostages were determined not to cause trouble. There would be enough of that later, the One God willing. They ate what they were fed and went directly to sleep.

It was still dark when they were rousted out. The caravan was just starting to assemble. It was a merchant caravan for the most part, but some of it was even more heavily guarded than the hostages. That was the treasure transport, carrying coin and tribute to the school on the Mountain.

Euan was in no way eager to climb into the saddle. He delayed as long as he could, which was a fair while with a caravan of this size.

As he busied himself with the sixth or seventh readjustment of a bridle strap, the commander came out of the legionaries’ barracks with a pair of his countrymen. They were both much younger than he. One was a hawk-faced man who walked like a warrior, light and dangerous. The other was a boy. Or…

Euan peered. Boys could be beautiful in Aurelia, with their smooth olive skin and black curly hair. He had mistaken a few for girls in his time, and been royally embarrassed by it, too. This must be a boy. Girls in this country wore skirts and did not cut their hair. And yet…

This was interesting. He busied himself with his horse’s girth and watched under his brows. The commander and the hawk-faced man took the boy, if boy it was, to the caravan master. Euan could not hear every word they said, but it was clear the young person was being entrusted to the caravan for transport north.

The boy did not say anything while they made arrangements for him. His eyes were wide, taking in the caravan. They widened even further as he caught sight of the hostages in their ring of guards. From the look of him, he had never seen princes of the Caletanni before.

Euan rather thought the boy liked what he saw. He would probably die before he admitted it. Gavin favored him with a broad and mocking grin. The boy looked away hastily.

The negotiations were short and amicable. Whoever the hawk-faced man was, he won a degree of respect from the caravan master that even the legionary commander could not match. The boy must be a relative, from the way the caravan master treated him.

The boy broke his silence when the horses were brought out. His horse was a pretty black of a much lighter and more elegant breed than Euan’s big dray horse. He seemed to be looking for another, and not seeing it. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked the hawk-faced man.

His voice was as ambiguous as his face. If it was a boy’s, it was on the light side, but it was deep for a girl’s.

“I have other business here,” the man said. “You’ll be safe with Master Rowan. He’ll look after you as if you were his own, and take you where you want to go.”

The boy set his lips together. Euan could see how unhappy he was, but he did not whine or beg. He turned his back and mounted the black horse, then waited for the rest of them with an air of cold disdain.

The man shook his head slightly, but did not press the issue. They were either brothers or lovers, Euan thought. No one else would wage war over matters so small.

At long last the caravan began to move. Its pace was slow, dictated by the mules and the oxen. They would be on the road for days longer than strictly necessary, but none of the hostages minded overmuch. They needed time to rest and steady their minds before they reached their destination.

Their guards’ vigilance was less strict in the caravan than it had been on the way from the border. They were allowed to move somewhat among the men of the caravan, and to carry on conversations. They used the opportunity to practice their Aurelian as well as the horsemanship they had been practicing, forcibly, since the day they were sent on this journey.

The boy from Mallia had his own small tent, which was pitched every night beside the caravan master’s. One of the master’s servants saw to his needs. He ate his meals with the master or his guards. He was kept as close as a virgin daughter.

Euan loved a challenge. He scouted the ground and laid his plan. By the second day he was ready to make his move.

The night before, they had stayed in one of the imperial caravanserais. Tonight they were too far from the nearest town to cover the distance before dark. They camped along the road instead, setting up a guarded camp with earthen walls in the legionary style.

While most of the guards were busy with the earthwork, Euan saw his opening. The boy insisted on taking care of his own horse, against some opposition. Euan chose to station his horse in the line not far from the black, and to practice his newly acquired horse-tending skills.

The boy was much better at it than he was. He hardly needed to pretend to be inept. As he had hoped, his fumbling brought the boy over to lend a hand.

This was not a boy. Euan was sure of that as they worked side by side to rub the horse down and feed him his nose bag of barley. It was like a fragrance so faint he was barely aware of it. This was a young woman.

Once Euan had assured himself of that, he could not see her as a man. Her hands were too slender and her throat too smooth. Her face was too fine to be male, even young imperial male.

He kept his thoughts to himself and stood with her while the horse ate his barley, watching the last of the earthwork go up around them. “You build a city in an hour,” he said. “Then in the morning, in much less than an hour, the wall will be gone and the camp with it. It’s a very imperial thing. Even for a night you raise up a fortress.”

She slanted a glance at him. Her eyes were a fascinating color, not exactly brown, not exactly green, with flecks of gold like sunlight in a forest pool. “You speak Aurelian well,” she said.

“I work at it.”

“The way you work at your riding?”

He snorted. “We’re not born on a horse’s back and suckled on mares’ milk the way you people are.” He paused. “Am I really that bad?”

“The others are worse.”

“Probably not by much.”

The corner of her mouth turned up. “You could almost learn to ride.”

“I hope so,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing. We’re going to the Mountain, to the School of War. We’re supposed to learn to be cavalrymen.”

“I suppose if anyone can teach you, the masters there can.”

“So everyone hopes,” Euan said. He paused before he cast the dice. “My name is Euan. And yours?”

“Valens,” she said.

That was a man’s name. Euan was careful not to comment on it. “I take it you’re for the Mountain, too. School of War?”

“I’m Called,” she said.

She spoke as if he must know what she was talking about. It took him a while to understand, then to realize what, in this case, it meant. He almost said, “But surely women aren’t—”

He caught himself just in time. This was beyond interesting. It was a gift from the One God.

He would have to play it very, very carefully. He bent his head in respect, as he had heard one should, and let her see a little of his fascination. “You’re the first I’ve seen,” he said. “No wonder they’re transporting you with the treasure.”

Her lip curled. “That’s not because I’m Called. It’s because of Kerrec.”

She spoke the name as if it had a bitter taste. She had not forgiven the man for abandoning her to the caravan. That too Euan could use.

He put on an expression of wry sympathy. “Your brother?” he asked.

“Not in this life,” she said.

Ah, so, he thought. “He’s too protective, is he? Or not protective enough?”

“He’s too everything,” she said. She spun on her heel. “I’m hungry. They always feed me too much. Would you help me with it?”

“Gladly,” he said, and he meant it.

Once more her mouth curved in that enchanting half-smile. “I’ve seen what they’ve been feeding you,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to be eating soldier’s rations here.”

He shrugged. “They don’t love us. We’ve killed too many of them—won too many battles, too, even if we lost the war. We can hardly blame them for taking what revenge they can.”

“You have a great deal of forbearance,” she said. She sounded a little surprised. “I had always thought—”

He showed her all his teeth. “Oh, we’re wild enough. We take heads. We eat the hearts of heroes. That doesn’t stop us from understanding how an enemy thinks.”

“Of course not,” she said. “The better you understand, the easier it is to find ways to defeat him.”

Euan’s heart stopped. The Called were mages. He had let himself forget that quite important fact. Many mages could read patterns and predict outcomes. Mages of the Mountain could do more than that. Even one who was completely untrained and untested might be able to see too clearly for comfort.

He shook off his sudden fit of the horrors. It was a lucky shot, that was all. She showed no sign of denouncing him as a traitor to the empire.

Her dinner was certainly better than the one his kinsmen would be getting. He was not fond of the spices these people poured on everything, but the bread was fresh and good. There was meat, which he had not had in days, and it was not too badly overcooked. She left him most of that. He left her all of the greens and the boiled vegetables. “Horse feed,” he said.

That half smile of hers was a lethal weapon, if she wanted to use it that way. “I do want to be a horse mage, after all,” she said.

He saluted her with a half-gnawed bone. “I hope a cavalryman is allowed to eat like a man, then, instead of a horse.”

“You eat like a wolf,” she said. “They must be feeding you even worse than I thought.”

“It’s not what we’re used to,” he admitted.

She nodded as if in thought. There was a line between her brows. When she spoke again, it was to change the subject. “Tell me about your country.”

“In the south and west we have forests like yours,” he said. “Beyond that, past the spine of mountains, it’s a broad land of heath and crag. Rivers run there, too fast and deep to ford, and cold as snow. The wind cuts like a knife and sings like a woman keening for her lover. The bones of the earth are bare as often as not. It’s a hard country, but it raises strong men.”

“My father said there are fish in the lakes there that are as big as a man, with flesh so sweet that the gods could dine on it.”

“Your father has been there?”

“He fought there,” she said. “Does that bother you?”

“No,” he said. “War is life. A man is only a man if he’s fought well. I suppose your father did if he was in the legions. Which was his? The Valeria?”

She started as if he had stung her. Aha, he thought. So that was her proper name. She recovered quickly. “Yes. Yes, that was his legion.”

“We call them the Red Wolves,” he said. “Mothers terrify their children with the threat of them. They’re the great enemy. It was the Valeria that took us in the last battle and brought us into the empire.”

“You don’t hate them,” she said. “I’d think you would.”

“They’re a worthy opponent,” he said. “War has its balance. Someday we’ll defeat them and lead them in halters through our camps.”

“You are different than anything I expected,” she said slowly.

“Is that a good thing?” he asked.

It took her a moment to answer. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

Euan thought he might be in love. This was not his first imperial woman, by far, but it was certainly the first who had wanted everyone to think she was a man. He would have liked to see her hair before she chopped it off. He would have liked even more to see what she was like under the sexless clothes she wore.

He was sure it was love when he came back to the rest of the hostages and found them lying back, replete after a feast identical to the one he had just finished. Someone had put in a word, it seemed. He could guess who it was.

They were all in her debt, and Euan made sure they knew it. He did not tell them her secret. If they had eyes to see, then they could. Otherwise, he would enjoy the field without a rival.

Chapter Four

The dark man’s name was Kerrec. He never actually told Valeria that himself. She heard it from the commander in Mallia.

That was her first grievance. By the time he packed her off with the caravan, she had a dozen more. He seemed determined to keep her from being grateful for her rescue, and equally determined to make her dislike him intensely. He was cold, arrogant, secretive, and intolerably condescending, and he had not a speck of charm.

The worst of it was, she could not hate him. She could never hate anyone who sat a horse like that.

Only one other thing almost persuaded her not to despise him. He had told the commander in Mallia nothing of her sex, only that she had been assaulted by the infamous pack of lordlings that had been preying on travelers and the odd local. The commander, like everyone else who heard the story, had been delighted with its ending, and more than pleased to grant her whatever she needed, horse and clothes and provisions and all.

Kerrec had not betrayed her to the caravan master, either. Both the caravan master and the commander had deduced on their own that she was Called, and treated her accordingly. Whether intentionally or because he simply did not care, Kerrec had done a great deal to help her on her way.

She found his perfect opposite in the barbarian prince who rode with the caravan. She had seen sacks of meal that rode better, but he did try, especially after she offered a suggestion or two. He was the biggest man she had ever seen, though not the broadest. He was still young and a little rangy, with long legs and big square hands. His hair was as red as copper.

There was a great deal of it. He wore it in thick braids to his waist. His cheeks and chin were shaven, but he cultivated thick red mustaches. His eyes were amber and tilted upward above high cheekbones, like a wolf’s. They had a wolf’s wicked intelligence, and a spark of laughter that never quite went away.

He loved to talk. His command of Aurelian was less than perfect, but he never let that stop him. She learned a fair bit of his language that way, and taught him a fair number of new words in Aurelian.

He had all the warmth and charm that Kerrec lacked. She reminded herself frequently that he was an enemy, but she was not about to let that stop her from enjoying his company.

She decided, by the third day out from Mallia, to forget the man who had rescued her from the hunt. She was unlikely ever to see him again. She made herself useful to the caravan, helping with the horses and lending a hand wherever else seemed appropriate. Her dreams were still as likely as not to have Kerrec in them, but she could turn her back on those.

Five days out from Mallia, while the caravan prepared to cross a bridge over a deep gorge with a river rushing far below, two young men rode up behind them. One was riding a sturdy brown mule, and was a sturdy brown person himself. The other rode bareback on a horse as delicate as a gazelle. His clothes were worn to rags, but they looked as if they had been rich when they were new. Traces of embroidery still lingered at the neck and hem of the long loose robe. His mare’s bridle swung with wayworn tassels. Her bit was tarnished silver.

The rider was as slim and fine-boned as the mare. His cheekbones were tattooed with blue swirls. In the center of his forehead was a complicated pattern of circles within circles in red and black and green.

Valeria had felt the two riders behind her since the night before. They were hunting, and their quarry was the same as hers. Even before she saw their faces, she knew that they were Called.

The brown man’s name was Dacius. He came from a town south of Aurelia. The other, Iliya, was from much farther away. He was a prince of Gebu in the land of spices. “A year and a day have I journeyed,” he said in his lilting Aurelian, “coming to the Mountain’s Call.”

He was a singer as well as a prince. Dacius was a tenant farmer from a noble’s estate. They had nothing in common but the Call, but that was enough.

Iliya was even more in love with the sound of his own voice than Euan was. Dacius was a listener. He had a quiet way about him that horses loved. The mule adored him, which was strikingly out of character for her hybrid species.

The caravan took them in. “Three of you at once,” the master said in deep satisfaction. “That’s more luck than we’ve had in a handful of years.”

Iliya’s smile was wide and white in his dark face. It was Dacius, rather surprisingly, who said, “That’s good, sir. We’re fair to middling useless otherwise, except as hostlers. It will be a good long time before we have any skills worth conjuring with.”

“You carry the luck,” the master said, “three times three. The gods are kind to us this season.”

Dacius shrugged. Iliya laughed. Valeria said nothing.

Everyone expected them to ride together. Iliya’s prattle covered the others’ silence. When he broke out in song, he insisted that everyone sing with him. It was a tuneful road that day, up from the bridge by a steep road with numerous switchbacks to a high plateau. They camped there on the windy level.

As usual, Valeria helped look after the horses. Iliya was busy entertaining the guards with songs and stories. Dacius helped with the earthwork that would protect the camp overnight. Even when she could not see them, she could feel them. They were like parts of her that had gone missing and come wandering back.

Euan had been keeping his distance since the riders came to the caravan. After the horses were settled, she found him tending a spit on which turned the carcass of a deer. One of his fellow hostages had shot it that morning with a bow that he had borrowed from a caravan guard. There had been a great to-do when the emperor’s guards realized what he had in his hand, which had taken all of Master Rowan’s skill to settle.

Now at evening the hostages were playing some game nearby that involved a set of knucklebones and a fair amount of either guffawing or snarling depending on how the bones fell. “Not in the mood to play tonight?” she asked Euan.

He started and spun. For an instant she saw a wolf at bay, with yellow eyes glittering and teeth bared. Then he was Euan again. “By the One God!” he said. “You scared me half out of my skin.”

“I’m sorry,” she said without too much repentance. “Why are you sulking? Is it too much for you to share a caravan with another prince?”

“I am not sulking,” he said sullenly.

“Then what are you doing?”

“Being jealous,” he said. “Those are your own kind. It’s like seeing horses in a herd.”

“They are my kind,” she admitted, “but it doesn’t feel like a herd at all. It feels strange. It makes me itch inside my skin.”

“Really?” He had brightened considerably. “You don’t want to abandon the rest of us?”

“Gods, no,” she said.

It was like standing in front of a fire to feel the warmth coming off him. He sighed deeply. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

The caravan inched its way through a tumbled landscape of ravine and forest. The towns they passed grew smaller and smaller until they dwindled away altogether. They could not see past the next hilltop. Whenever the trees opened or they reached the summit of a hill, the world was shrouded in mist and rain. Even when it was not raining, the clouds hung so low that they seemed to brush the tops of the trees.

In that perpetual damp and fog, Iliya wilted visibly. His cheerful babble stopped and his singing died away. Valeria had found it annoying while it went on, but once it stopped, she missed it.

There was no cure for his sickness but the sun. In this country, that was a rarity.

Valeria took to riding at the front of the caravan. Guards rode ahead of her, but they did not block what view there was. She could look her fill at trees, rocks and yet more trees. Dacius saw the virtue in what she was doing and rode just behind her. Iliya trailed after him, limp and green-faced. The Call was strong in all of them. They could not turn back now unless they were bound and dragged.

On the seventh day, or maybe it was the tenth, the clouds actually lifted. Valeria thought for a brief moment that she saw a patch of blue sky.

They were climbing yet another slope. For once it was not so steep that they needed to get off and walk. The pair of guards in front had gone up and over the top. Valeria’s horse picked up his pace slightly. Maybe it was the faintest hint of sky, or the minute brightening of the perpetual rain-colored light, but her heart felt lighter somehow. She was so full of the Call that she could hardly think.

As had happened too often before, the road reached the top only to plunge down at once into a deep valley. Just as Valeria paused, the clouds parted. She looked straight across to the country she had dreamed about since she was small.

It was all there. The long green valley with the river running through it. The walled fortress where the valley curved upward again toward the stony slopes. The sharp rise of the Mountain with its crown of snow. Forest surrounded the valley, but it was open and almost treeless, a gift of the gods to their dearest children.

At this distance she could see the walls of the school and the creneled bulk of towers, but little else. She needed no eyes to know what was there. The regular patches of brown and pale green around the feet of the walls were the fields and farmlands that fed the citadel. She could make out the clusters of farmhouses and the lines of hedges. The horse pastures were up behind the fortress, in high valleys protected by the Mountain itself.

The Call broke open inside her and became the whole of her. She had just enough sense left to see that Dacius had come up beside her and Iliya moved ahead of her. The pallor was gone from Iliya’s skin. He was as rapt as the rest of them. His eyes were narrowed and his face was shining as if he stared straight into the sun.

The guards had drawn aside. The way was open. They knew, thought Valeria. Those were the last words in her until she sat her hard-breathing horse in front of the gate.

She saw no guards anywhere near it. That did not mean it was unguarded. She looked up at the low round arch. The figures carved on it were so old that they were worn almost smooth. She could just make out a line of horses and riders, and a blurred shape that might be the Sun and Moon intertwined.

The gate was open, with darkness inside. It looked like a gaping mouth.

Her horse snorted softly and shook his mane. She started out of her stupor. Iliya snorted almost exactly like the horse. His mare trotted forward. Her hooves rang on the worn stones of the paving, echoing under the arch. She carried her rider inside.

Dacius’ mule was moving much more stolidly but as steadily as she ever had. They were leaving Valeria alone, with the caravan far behind, and nothing ahead but dreams and fear.

Valeria had come too far and with too much confidence to back off now. She took a deep breath and wiped her clammy palms on her breeches. The horse started forward without urging.

The wall was thick, but surely not as thick as this. She was in a tunnel with no end to it that she could see.

It was not totally dark. There were lamps, just bright enough for her to see the way. They seemed to float in the air.

On impulse she called one to her. As she had thought, it was a witch light. She asked it to burn brighter. It flared, blinding her. She damped it hastily. This place was full of magic. It turned the slightest whisper of a working into a shout.

The lamp hung just above her, burning steadily. In its light she saw the fitted stone of the tunnel’s walls and the interlocking tiles of its floor. She also saw that the tunnel bent and then divided. One way went up and one way went level.

She slid from the saddle and stood holding the black’s reins. There was no sign of the other horses and riders. The horse’s calm was not natural, but neither was this place.

She had known that there would be tests. What if this was meant just for her? What if she was barred from the school? She could convince men that she was one of them, simply by cutting her hair and wearing their clothes. Magic was not so easy to mislead.

The Call had come to her. She must be meant for the school. She could pass this test. It was a simple matter of choices.

“Don’t think,” her mother’s voice said. “Feel.”

She almost spun around to see if Morag had followed her to the Mountain. Then she caught herself. It was only memory.

It was also excellent advice. She squeezed her eyes shut and made herself breathe in a slow, steady rhythm. Each breath filled more of the world. It drove out thought and fear.

When she was empty of everything but air, she stepped forward. Her eyes were still shut. The horse walked quietly beside her.

She did not turn right or left. She went neither up nor down. She simply walked straight ahead.

Light dazzled her even through her eyelids. She heard voices and hoofbeats, and smelled horses and leather and fresh-baked bread.

She opened her eyes on a sunlit square. The gate was behind her. The clouds had parted, or maybe they had never dulled this place at all. She could feel the magic enclosed within these walls, distinct as the feel of sunlight on her skin.

Iliya was basking in the sun. Dacius looked around him with the same dazed expression she must have been wearing.

Tall grey buildings surrounded the square. People went back and forth inside it, busy with this errand or that. Not all were men. There were a few women in plain gowns like servants. One had a basket of laundry on her hip, and another stood by the fountain in the middle of the square, dipping water into an earthenware jar.

“That’s the Well of the World,” Iliya said. “It goes down to the source of all waters. It’s strong magic.”

There was so much magic in this place that Valeria could not tell if the story was true. She was too overwhelmed to argue with it.

Three men walked toward them. One was middle-aged, with the rolling walk and leathery look of the lifelong horseman. The other two were still a little soft around the edges, but they were cultivating the same weather-beaten style.

The older man greeted them in a broad country burr. “Good day to you, young gentlemen. My name is Hanno. I’m head groom in the candidates’ stable. We’ll take your horses, my boys and I, by your leave.”

None of them had the courage to object. Iliya let his beloved mare go with Hanno himself. Valeria said goodbye to the black. He had not been a friend, but he had been a good servant. She would miss him.

While the grooms took charge of the horses, another man approached them. He was dressed no better than the grooms, but his carriage was different. He walked, thought Valeria, the way Kerrec rode.

She met his glance and froze. He seemed a quiet, unassuming person, middle-aged and middle-sized, but the magic in him was so strong and so profoundly disciplined that she could not move or speak for the wonder of it.

He looked them over carefully, one by one. What he thought, Valeria could not have said. He did not seem terribly disappointed. After a while he said, “In the name of the white gods and the master of the school, I welcome you to the Mountain. You will call me Rider Andres.”

None of them had anything to say to that. He did not look as if he had expected them to. He turned his back on them and walked off at an angle across the square.

Evidently they were supposed to follow. They exchanged glances. Iliya shrugged. Dacius frowned. Valeria started walking in the man’s wake. After a pause, the others did the same.

Rider Andres led them through a narrow wooden door and up a flight of steps. The place to which he brought them was indistinguishable from a legionary barracks. It was a high, wide room with tall windows, open now to let in light and air, and a broad stone hearth at one end. Rows of bunks lined the walls. A hundred men could have slept there.

At the moment, hardly a third of the bunks were occupied. The rest were stripped to the slats.

Rider Andres led them through the barracks and up another, shorter stair to a mess hall and common room. There seemed to be a great crowd in it, but when Valeria stopped to count, there were just shy of thirty people. They were all young, and they were of all tribes and races she had heard of and a few she had not. There were no big redheaded barbarians, but that was the only nation missing.

They all stopped whatever they had been doing and snapped to attention. “Rider Andres,” they said in chorus, “sir!”

He released them with a nod. “Here are the last of you,” he said, “and not before time, either. The testing begins tomorrow.”

That seemed to take a few of them by surprise. Valeria would have liked more time to settle in, but she had to thank the gods for the reprieve. The longer she lived in a barracks, the more likely it was that someone would discover that she was not a man.

Her deception only had to survive until she passed the testing. Once she had done that, they had to accept her. She had the magic, just as they did. It would give them no choice.

Chapter Five

Rider Andres left the newcomers to sort themselves out. It seemed a logical thing for him to do. They had all come to the same Call, and they were all gifted with magic in some degree. Those who passed the testing would be part of a brotherhood as close as any that humans knew.

For tonight and until the testing was over, they were all bitter rivals. Some of them had been there for months, since shortly after the Call went out. Those had formed an uneasy alliance. Later comers had fallen into divisions of their own. The last three arrivals, by default, were yet another faction.

“If we’re lucky,” said a lanky young nobleman in silk and gold, “a quarter of us will pass into the school—and maybe one of those will become a rider. It’s not enough to be Called. That only means you have ears to hear. You have to be a great number of other things besides.”

“Such as?” said Iliya. He was his lively and garrulous self again, now he had had his moment in the sun.

“Such as a Beastmaster. A scholar. A reader of signs and omens. A dancer. One of the tests is in dancing, did you know?”

“No one knows what the tests will be,” someone said from the edge of the room. “That’s what makes them so hard. There’s no way to study, and no way to cheat.”

“Nonsense,” said the nobleman. “There have been riders in my family for generations. We all know what they test for, if not exactly how they test from year to year.”

“It’s the how that kills you,” Iliya said lightly. “I can dance. Will they ask us to sing, too?”

“Sometimes they do,” the nobleman said.

“Then I’ll be a master,” Iliya said. He beamed at them all. “Can you believe it? We’re here. We’ve come to the Mountain!”

His enthusiasm was infectious. Even the nobleman allowed himself a small, tight smile. Valeria could have kissed Iliya. There had been an ugly undercurrent in the conversation, but he had dissipated it.

Not long after the last of the Called came in, servants came with plates and bowls and platters and fed them a simple dinner. The stew was made with roots and beans and vegetables, no meat, but it was good, and filling. It came with loaves of the heavy brown bread that Valeria had smelled baking, and wedges of sharp yellow cheese. To drink with it they had a cask of ale and a tall jar of wine.

They were all encouraged to eat and drink their fill. “There will be no breakfast tomorrow,” the chief of the servants said, “and nothing to drink but water until the testing is over. Enjoy yourselves while you can. The next time you see this much food, you’ll either be eating it in the candidates’ mess or taking potluck on the road.”

A collective sigh ran through the room. Someone at the end opposite Valeria dived for the bread. As if that had been a signal, they all fell to it.

In spite of the warning, she refrained from gorging herself. She wanted strength, not a sick stomach. She drank a little wine to steady herself, but she watered it heavily.

Not every one of the Called could hold his liquor. Some did not hold their food so well, either. By the time she left, the mess hall reminded her forcibly of a soldiers’ tavern.

She was the first to leave. All the bunks were made up, including three new ones. She recognized her saddlebags at the foot of one, and Iliya’s shabby-elegant and heavily embroidered pack on the bunk above it.

She intended to sleep as long and well as she could manage, but for the moment she was still wide awake. The door to the outside was not barred, which surprised her. She had thought that the Called would be locked in until after the testing.

Something touched her awareness as she opened the door and slipped through it. It felt like a light set of wards, just enough to let a mage know that someone had gone through the door. Without even thinking, she raised her own protections. The wards withdrew, convinced that nothing was there.

She found her way by the same instinct that had disposed of the wards. This place was so full of magic that she could follow the currents of it wherever she wanted to go.

One led her to the stable where guests’ horses were kept. Her black and Iliya’s bay mare and Dacius’ mule were stalled side by side and perfectly content. Of course they would be. Here of all places, people knew how to look after horses.

She fed each of them a bit of bread that she had brought from the mess hall. They were pleased to accept tribute, although none of them was hungry.

Once she had given them their due, she sought out another current, one that led her past the rest of the horses in the stable. None of them was anything but ordinary. She had yet to see any of the white stallions. When she tried to discover where they were, she was gently but firmly turned aside. All in good time, said a voice that was not a voice. She knew somehow that it was one of the stallions.

The current she followed was leading toward something much more mortal. The stable door opened on a narrow street. At the end of that she turned left into another square than the one she had seen when she first entered the school. This one was empty in the evening light, although she could sense the presence of people behind the blank walls and narrow windows. Behind one of those walls, she found the people she was looking for.

The hostages reacted variously to her arrival. Donn snarled and went back to his mug of ale. Gavin and Conory grinned and saluted her. The others were asleep in beds much more luxurious than she had been given.

“He’s in the jakes,” Gavin said before she could ask. He raised his voice in a roar. “Euan! Euan Rohe! Wipe your arse and come out of there. You’ve got company.”

“No need for that,” she said. Her ears were still ringing from Gavin’s bellow. “I only wanted to see that you were here, and that you were well. And to apologize for—”

“The magic had you,” Conory said. “We know.” He filled a mug sloppily and held it out. “Here. It’s almost decent, for imperial horse-piss.”

Valeria drank a sip to be polite, but then she excused herself. This was not a night to spend drinking with the Caletanni. She needed her head in one piece for whatever would happen in the morning.

She took a different and somewhat roundabout way back. The sun was setting and the shadows were long. The school was much larger than she would have thought, as large as the town of Mallia, where she had joined the caravan. Now and then she saw people intent on errands of their own, but none of them spoke to her. They all seemed to be servants, or else everyone here wore the same plain clothes. She had yet to see anyone but Andres whom she would have recognized as a rider.

Euan caught up with her on the edge of the square with the fountain, directly inside the gate. She felt him before she saw or heard him. It was like a storm coming, a presence so strong that it almost frightened her. He had no magic except the power to lead men, but that was enough.

She could have escaped before he found her. She stopped instead and waited beside the fountain, while the sunset stained the sky with blood and gold.

Her eyes were full of it when she lowered them to meet his. He seemed taken aback. The magic must be running strong in her, for him to see it.

He was too proud to say anything about it. Instead he said, “You didn’t stay.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be out.”

“Neither am I,” he said with a hint of his usual humor. “Our test is to stay put until called for.”

“I’m sure they won’t cast you out for failing it.”

She saw the gleam of teeth under the red mustache. It was hard sometimes to tell whether he was smiling or snarling. At the moment it seemed to be a bit of both. “No, they’re saddled with us until the emperor tells them to let us go.”

“I didn’t know they answered to him,” she said.

“Sometimes they do.” He seemed to realize he was looming over her. He sat on the fountain’s rim, not too close to her. “Now tell me why you really came to find me.”

“That was why. And,” she added, “because I couldn’t sleep, and it was an excuse to go prowling.”

That was certainly a smile. “Now that I can believe. What will you do when you’re a rider? The discipline’s hard, I hear. It’s like being a priest.”

“Riders ride,” she said. “That’s what they are.”

“Any time they want?”

“Often enough,” she said.

“Well then,” said Euan, “when you pass all the tests, promise you’ll come once in a while to rescue me. I’m no kind of rider. They’ll have me hauling manure to make me useful.”

“When I pass the tests,” she said. The evening air was chill, but that was not why she shivered. “If you have any luck to offer, I’ll take it.”

“I make my own luck,” said Euan. “I’ve plenty to spare.” He smiled a remarkably sweet smile. “Take it with you, as much as you need. Go and sleep. Dream of victory. Be the bear and the bull and the stallion. Be strong.”

If he only knew, she thought. She had a powerful, almost overwhelming urge to kiss him.

That would have been a very unwise thing to do. She hoped her departure did not look too much like flight.

Chapter Six

As the first light of dawn touched the summit of the Mountain, the Called stood in a line in the inner court of the school. They were all perfectly silent except for the chattering of teeth.

They had been awakened in the dark by the ringing of a bell. Except for the clothes they had worn to sleep in, everything that each of them owned was gone.

The few who, like Valeria, had slept fully dressed were lucky. Some of the rest were naked, and most wore only a shirt. They had to get up and march where Rider Andres led, just as they were. Then they had to stand in the courtyard, shuddering in the early-morning cold. It might be summer in gentler countries, but winter still lingered in the mountains.

Daylight grew slowly. Valeria watched the Mountain brighten. It seemed to hang above the wall in front of her, luminously white against a cloudless sky.

The Call had gone silent. She felt strange without it, like an empty cup waiting to be filled.

Somewhat after full light but before the sun climbed over the wall, she heard the measured beat of hooves on stone. A double row of riders on shining white horses came riding in beneath the arch opposite the Mountain, just as she had heard in all the stories.

Her throat closed. Her eyes were stinging with tears. She had waited so long and traveled so far and given up so much, all for this.

The riders halted facing the line of the Called and spread in their own line. There were eight of them, dressed alike in boots and breeches and coats of a familiar style and plainness. She was wearing much the same, in the same drab brown color.

Their horses were smaller than they had been in her dreams. Apart from the white gleam of their coats and the magic of their existence, they were stocky and thickset and rather plain. Anywhere but here, she would have called them sturdy grey cobs with arched noses and—

Oh, no, she thought. No. That could not—

Two of the riders moved ahead of the rest. One was an older man, almost as grey as his horse. The other, in the circumstances, did not surprise her at all.

He did not alarm her, either, but that must be shock. She was looking at the end of her hopes. Of all the people in the world who could have appeared to test her, it would have to be the one man outside her family who knew what she was.

Kerrec looked just as chilly and arrogant in this place as he had in Mallia, but here at least he fit. His grey cob greeted her with a dark ironic glance and a flicker of humor that almost tricked a smile out of her. The stallion had taken a wicked delight in pretending to be a common horse. Even she had fallen for the deception, although that, he confessed with a slant of the ear, had not been easy to accomplish.

She supposed she should feel flattered. This was one of the white gods, and he had let her know that her magic was strong enough to stretch his powers a little.

The older man was speaking. Valeria made herself listen. She was not likely to be here much longer, but until Kerrec saw and recognized her, she could pretend that she was still a candidate for the testing.

“I am Master Nikos,” the man said. “This is First Rider Kerrec. Those behind us are riders of the school, with whom you will become familiar as the testing progresses. Our stallions you will come to know when you are ready. This who condescends to carry me is Icarra. Petra carries First Rider Kerrec.”

Valeria bowed to the stallions with the feminine names. Those were the names of their mothers, which they kept as a matter of honor. There would be more to each name, the name of a First Sire, but that, too, she supposed, would come to light when she was ready.

As she straightened from her bow, she saw that a few others had done the same. Iliya was one, Dacius another. Most of the Called still stood at attention. The nobleman, whose shirt was silk and whose legs were as white and thin as a bird’s, was actually sneering. He did not bow to anyone, his attitude said.

Petra had his eye on that one. The nobleman did not seem to care. Did he even know?

He must. He was Called.

Master Nikos went on in his dry precise voice. “I see that some of you understand the proprieties of the school. Let it be your first lesson, then. Men have no rank here and no station but what they earn through the stallions. Whatever you were before you passed our gate, forget. Here you are newborn. Everyone is older and wiser and loftier than you. Loftiest of all are the stallions. If you came here in the delusion that you would master them, wake now. No man is a stallion’s master. He may be companion, he may be partner—but master, never.”

Valeria saw how they were all, men and stallions, noticing who listened and who did not. She noticed for herself how many of the Called did not seem aware that the stallions were part of the testing. They must be too scared or cocky or confused to see it.

“We will divide you now,” Master Nikos said, “eight by eight. Eight is the number of the Dance. In eights you will work and ride and, when time permits, play. Be assured that when your eight is broken, as others fail the testing or withdraw voluntarily, those who pass will continue. No one of you will suffer for the failure of the others.”

“There will be time to play?” someone asked.

“This is only the first testing,” the Master answered. “It is the shortest and simplest of all, and the least dangerous. The consequence of failure is dismissal, but no worse. Your whole life here, if you pass the next three days, will be testing, and some of it will be deadly. Even I am still tested.” His eyes swept their faces. “You may always choose to leave. If any of you chooses now, you will be escorted back to barracks, your belongings returned to you and a horse given you if you brought none. You are free to go.”

There was a silence. No one moved. Valeria thought about it. Every moment that passed brought her closer to betrayal. She could walk out now and no one be the wiser.

She could not do it. The Mountain held her. The stallions watched, studying her. None of them had cried out against her, although they all knew perfectly well that she was female.

Master Nikos nodded as if pleased. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

He beckoned. Three of the riders came out of the line. Kerrec made the fourth. They rode up and down the rank of the Called.

The stallions did the choosing. It was subtle, almost imperceptible, how the horse paused an instant before the rider tapped the candidate’s shoulder.

Petra halted in front of Valeria. She looked up into Kerrec’s expressionless face. There was no sign of recognition in it. His hand fell on her shoulder.

He did not name her female and impostor. He said nothing at all. She jerked forward to stand with the others whom Petra had selected. Iliya and Dacius were there, and to her disgust, the arrogant nobleman. He seemed to think that a First Rider was no less than his rank deserved.

Four more came out of the line to stand with them. When they were all together, Kerrec dismounted with quick grace. “Name yourselves,” he said.

The nobleman was first on the left. He opened his mouth for what was clearly a lengthy proceeding, but Kerrec cut him off. “You may lay claim to one name,” he said. “Choose it well. If you pass the tests, it will be the one by which you are known forever after.”

The nobleman looked as if he had bitten into a lemon. “Only one name? But I am—”

“You are no one,” said Kerrec. “Choose.”

“Paulus,” the nobleman said sullenly. “I’ll be Paulus.”

“Good,” said Kerrec. His eye was already resting on the next.

The four whom Valeria did not know were called Marcus, Embry, Cullen, and Batu. The first three were ordinary enough, black-haired and olive-skinned people of Aurelia. Marcus had a quickness about him that made her think he had a temper, and Cullen had a surprising crop of freckles—a mark of barbarian blood, like his short, upturned nose and square jaw. Batu was something else altogether. He was as black as a ripe olive, with a broad, blunt face and hair in a hundred oiled plaits wound close around his skull. He had come even farther than Iliya to answer the Call, from a country where horses were all but unheard of.

She was the last of the line, and the most reluctant to speak. She could not believe that Kerrec did not recognize her, but when his eye fell on her, it was as blank as before. “Valens,” she said. “My name is Valens.”

He nodded briskly as he had to everyone else. “Now you know each other,” he said. “Come with me.”

The other eights had already left the courtyard. So had the remaining riders and their stallions. Kerrec left Petra behind and brought his charges into a dormitory much smaller than the barracks in which they had been staying. With its wood-paneled walls and mullioned windows, it might have been a room in an inn. The beds were hard and plain, but they were beds rather than bunks, four on one side of the room and four on the other. On each lay a saddlebag or a pack, a set of clothes and a pair of boots.

Valeria’s saddlebags lay on the bed farthest from the door, as if someone knew that she had been out wandering last night. Its advantage was that it was closest to the hearth. Iliya’s was next to it and Batu’s across from it.

“Put on these clothes,” Kerrec said, “and rest if you can. There’s a room yonder for the shy or the incontinent. In an hour I’ll come to fetch you for the first test.”

Valeria almost thought that his glance had fallen on her when he spoke of the inner room. It was a bathroom, she discovered, with a large wooden tub and something Valeria had heard of but never seen, a water privy.

She could have spent the whole hour playing with the water that ran from pipes, not only cold but, to her lasting delight, hot. But there were others waiting and a test coming. She settled for a quick scrub of face and hands before she stripped off her travel-worn clothes and put on the new ones. The coat and breeches were dark grey instead of brown, but they were otherwise identical to the riders’. The boots were riding boots, and they fit well. There were a belt and a cap, which she put on. The cap was embroidered with a silver horsehead.

She went out to face the rest, feeling awkward and shakily proud. Most of them were already dressed, except for one or two who professed to be as shy as she was. She wondered a little wildly if any of them was protecting the same secret.

It was odd to see them all dressed alike. Nothing could make Batu look less exotic, but Iliya seemed almost ordinary without his ragged robes. Except for the clan marks on his cheeks and forehead, he was enough like the rest of them to be barely noticeable.

None of them had much to say. The reality of the testing was coming down on them all. Some lay down and tried to rest as Kerrec had commanded. Iliya paced like a tiger in a cage until Marcus growled at him, then he sat on the floor and tried visibly not to twitch. Cullen amused himself with plaiting ropes of sunlight and shade. He had so much magic in him that he left a faintly luminous trail when he moved.

Valeria did not dare lie down. If she did, she would fall asleep, and she needed to be wide awake when Kerrec came back. She sat on the bed and tucked up her feet and reached for the quiet place inside her, where her magic was.

It was elusive. When she did find it, it was full of white horses. They were standing in a circle all around her, staring at her.

It was quiet, in its way. It was also deeply disconcerting. Her magic was hers and no one else’s. Her mother had taught her that, and she believed it. What business had these horses, even if they were gods, to trespass in it?

The horses did not see fit to answer. They were studying her.

“Still?” she asked them.

They did not answer that, either. She was going to have to live with their silent scrutiny, whether she liked it or not. She could only hope that they came to a decision about her sooner rather than later.

Chapter Seven

When the hour was up, it was not Kerrec who came to fetch them but a young man somewhat older than they. His grey coat was edged with a thin band of lighter grey, and the badge on his cap showed a horse dancing against the rays of the sun. He named himself a cadet captain, and let them know that he was four years past his Calling.

He led them briskly through a confusing variety of halls, corridors, courtyards and alleyways to a square of grass surrounded by the inevitable grey stone walls. Kerrec was waiting there, and grooms with horses.

One of the Called behind Valeria groaned. He had voiced the disappointment they all felt. These were not white stallions but common bays and chestnuts. To add insult to injury, as Paulus observed in a clearly audible mutter, they were all either mares or geldings.

“These mounts are lent to us by the School of War,” Kerrec said after they had formed their line in front of him. “They will administer the simplest of the tests. Each of you will choose a horse, then groom, saddle and bridle him. Stand then and wait on further orders.”

Some of the Called were relaxing and smiling. Valeria was much too suspicious for that. She had seen a white shape in the shadow of the portico, and felt Petra’s eyes on her and the rest. This test was not what it seemed.

There were twice as many horses as candidates. Paulus went straight to the tallest, whose coat was like a gold coin and whose mane was a fall of white water. He was even showier than the hunters’ horses outside of Mallia. He was also sickle-hocked and camped out behind, and that lovely big eye was as dull as dirt.

The others were slower to choose. Embry hesitated between a pretty sorrel and a plainer but steadier-looking bay. He chose the bay, with a glance at Paulus that told Valeria he had seen the point of the test.

Valeria made herself stop watching the others and make a decision for herself. Iliya had taken the ugliest of the horses, a hammerheaded brown mare whose eye was large and kind. She was well built except for the head, with a deep girth and sturdy legs. Valeria might have taken her if Iliya had not got there first.

The rest of the horses varied in size and looks, but for the most part they were alike in quality. As she debated the merits of one and then another, she could not help noticing that Batu stood apart from the others with a look almost of terror on his face.

She slipped from the line and went to stand beside him. “You haven’t seen much of horses, have you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “The Call when it came was a terrible shock. I should never have listened to it, but it gave me no choice. Do you think, if I leave now, it will let me go?”

“Don’t leave,” she said. “It wanted you. It must have felt you were right for it, even if horses are strange to you. Is there any one here that makes you feel righter than the others?”

He started to shake his head again, but then he stood still. His eyes narrowed. “That one,” he said, pointing with his chin at a stocky dun. “That feels…” His eyes widened. “She says—she says come here, don’t be a fool, don’t I know enough to listen when someone is talking to me?”

Valeria laughed. “Then you had better go, hadn’t you?”

He hesitated. “But I still don’t know—”

“She’ll tell you,” Valeria said.

The mare shook her head and stamped. Her impatience was obvious. Batu let go of his uncertainty just long enough to obey her.

The mare would look after him. Valeria turned back to her own testing. She was the last to choose. The others were already busy with brushes and curries and hoof picks.

She would do well to take her own advice. One horse on the end, another mare, looked as if she had been waiting patiently for the silly child to notice her. She was a bay with a star, stocky and cobby. If she had been grey, Valeria would have taken her for one of the white gods.

We are not all greys. The voice was as clear as if it had spoken aloud. There was a depth to it, a resonance, that shivered in Valeria’s bones.

Horses never stooped to words if they could avoid it. The fact that the mare had done so was significant. Valeria bowed to her in apology and deep respect. She could feel Petra’s approval on her back like a ray of sun. This was his mother, and she had chosen to be included with the common horses. It was unheard of for the Ladies to do such a thing, but they did as it best pleased them.

The mares had distinct preferences in grooming and deportment. Valeria knew better than to argue with them. When the mare’s coat was gleaming and her mane and tail were brushed to silk, the groom who had held her brought a saddle and a bridle. She was even more particular about those.

If this had not been a test and therefore deadly serious, Valeria would have been enjoying herself. She even had time while grooming and saddling to watch the drama at the other end of the line, where Paulus was discovering that he really, truly was not an imperial duke here.

He had stood for some time, holding the golden horse’s lead, until he realized that none of the grooms would respond to his glances, his lifts of the chin, or even his snaps of the fingers. The one assigned to his horse had brought a grooming box and left it. Eventually it dawned on him that he was expected to groom his horse himself.

He drew himself up in high dudgeon. Before the words could burst out of him, he caught Kerrec’s pale cold eye. Something there punctured his bladder to wonderful effect.

Valeria was dangerously close to approving of Kerrec just then. Paulus struggled almost as badly as Batu, but he struggled in silence. Batu, she noticed, was listening to his mare, and while he was awkward and often fumbled, he did not do badly at all. Paulus paid no attention to his horse’s commentary, such as it was. The horse truly was not very bright.

At last they were all done. The horses were groomed and saddled, with the would-be riders waiting beside them. Kerrec walked down the line, pausing to tighten a girth here and tuck in a strap there. When he came to Paulus, he arched a brow at the groom. The man came in visible relief and, deftly and with dispatch, untacked and then retacked the horse.

Paulus’ face went red and then white. When the groom handed the reins back to him with the bridle now properly adjusted and the saddle placed where it belonged, he held them in fingers that shook with spasms of pure rage.

Batu did not have to suffer a similar ignominy. Apart from a slight adjustment of the girth, Kerrec found nothing to question. The dun mare flicked a noncommittal ear. She was a good teacher and she knew it.

Valeria was the last to be inspected. She held her breath. Her stomach was tight.

Kerrec slid his finger under the girth and along the panel of the saddle. He tugged lightly at the crupper, which won him a warning slide of the ear from the mare. When he reached for the bridle, she showed him a judicious gleam of teeth.

He bowed to her and stepped back. Valeria found that gratifying, though it would have been more so if he had shown any sign of temper.

He seemed already to have forgotten her. “Now of course we will ride,” he said. “One by one and on my order, you will do exactly as I say. Is that understood?”

Several had been ready to leap into the saddle and gallop off. They subsided somewhat sheepishly.

“Valens,” said Kerrec. “Mount and stand.”

Valeria started. She had been expecting to be called last as before. Naturally he had seen how she relaxed for what she expected to be a long wait, and had done what any self-respecting drill sergeant would do.

She scrambled herself together. He was tapping his foot, marking the moments of the delay. Even so, she took another half-dozen foot-taps to take a deep breath, center herself, and get in position to mount properly. The bay mare stood immobile except for the flick of an ear at some sound too faint for Valeria to hear.

Valeria mounted with as little fuss as possible, settled herself in the saddle, and waited. As usual Kerrec gave no sign of what he was thinking. “Walk,” he said.

The test was simple to the level of insult. Walk, trot and canter around the grassy square in both directions. Turn and halt, proceed, turn and halt again. Dismount, stand, bow to the First Rider. Return to the line and watch each of the others undergo the same stupefyingly simple test.

Iliya, who was third to ride, was already bored with watching Valeria and Marcus. When he was asked to canter on, he accelerated to a gallop and then, just as his horse would have crashed into the wall, sat her down hard, pivoted her around the corner, and sent her off again in a sedate canter. His grin was wide and full of delighted mischief.

“Halt,” said Kerrec. He did not raise his voice, but the small hairs rose on Valeria’s neck.

The hammerheaded mare stopped as if she had struck the wall after all. Iliya nearly catapulted over her head.

“Dismount,” said that cool, dispassionate voice. Iliya slid down with none of his usual grace. His knees nearly buckled. He caught at the saddle to steady himself.

“Return to your place,” Kerrec said.

Iliya’s face had gone green. He slunk back to his place in the line.

After that no one tried to brighten up the drab test with a display of horsemanship. Even Paulus followed instructions to the letter.

He was the last. When he had gone back to his place, Kerrec sent them to the stables to unsaddle, stall, and feed their horses. They were all on their guard now, knowing that every move was watched. It made them clumsy, which made them stumble. To add to the confusion, the horses responded to the riders’ tension with tension of their own.

Marcus tripped over a handcart full of hay that Cullen had left in the stable aisle, and fell sprawling. Cullen burst out laughing. Marcus went for his throat.

Cullen reeled backwards. His hands flailed.

Almost too late, Valeria recognized the gesture. She flung herself flat.

Embry was not so fortunate. He had paused in forking hay into his horse’s stall to watch the fight. The bolt of mage-fire caught him in the chest.

Valeria tried from the floor to turn it aside. So did Iliya from the stall across from Embry. They were both too slow.

Embry burned from the inside out. He was dead before his charred corpse struck the floor.

Marcus rolled away from Cullen. Cullen stood up slowly. His face, which had seemed so open and friendly, was stark white. The freckles stood out in it like flecks of ash.

“Someone fetch the First Rider,” Paulus said. His voice was shaking. “Quickly!”

Valeria was ready to go, though she did not know if her legs would hold her up. The backlash of the mage-killing had left her with a blinding headache. When she tried to get up, she promptly doubled over in a fit of the dry heaves.

Someone held her up. She knew it was Batu, although she was too blind and sick to see him.

Kerrec’s voice was like a cool cloth on her forehead. That was strange, because his words were peremptory. “All of you. Out.”

Batu heaved her over his shoulder and carried her out. She lacked the energy to fight. By the time she came into the open air, she could see again, although the edges of things had an odd, blurred luminescence.

Batu set her down on the grass of the court. Dacius was doing the same for a thoroughly wilted Iliya. Paulus stood somewhat apart from them, as if they carried a contagion.

It was a long while before Kerrec came out of the stable. Two burly grooms followed. One led Cullen, the other Marcus. Their hands were bound, and there were horses’ halters around their necks.

Dacius’ breath hissed. Iliya and Batu did not know what the collars meant. Paulus obviously did. So did Valeria.

She watched with the same sick fascination as when Kerrec executed justice on the man who tried to rape her. Just as she had then, she was powerless to move or say a word.

Master Nikos rode into the court through one of the side gates. A pair of riders followed him. Their stallions were snow-white with age and heavy with muscle. They walked like wrestlers into a ring, light and poised but massively powerful.

The Master halted. The riders flanked him.

There was no trial. There were no defenses spoken. Only the Master spoke, and his speech was brief.

“Discipline,” he said, “is the first and foremost and only rule of our order. It must be so. There can be no other way.”

He raised his hand. The grooms led the two captives to the center of the court and unbound their hands.

They did not move. Valeria saw that they could not. The binding on them was stronger than any rope or chain. It was magic, so powerful it made her head hum.

The riders rode from behind the Master. As they moved off to the right and the left, the stallions began a slow and cadenced dance with their backs to the condemned. The steps of it drew power from the earth. It came slow at first, in a trickle, but gradually it grew stronger.

The two on foot, the one who had killed and the one whose loss of discipline had caused the other to kill, began to sway. Their faces were blank, but their eyes would haunt Valeria until she died.

The end was blindingly swift and blessedly merciful. The stallions left the ground in a surge of breathless power. For an instant they hovered at head-height. Then, swift as striking snakes, their hind legs lashed out.

Both skulls burst in a spray of blood. Not a drop of it touched those shining white hides. The stallions came lightly to earth again, dancing in place. The bodies fell twitching, but the souls were gone.

The stallions slowed to a halt and wheeled on their haunches to face the stunned and speechless survivors.

“Remember,” said Master Nikos.

Chapter Eight

“And they said this test wasn’t deadly.” Iliya had stopped trying to vomit up his stomach, since there was nothing in it to begin with.

They had been sent back to the stable to finish what they had begun. Embry’s body was gone. The only sign of it was a faint scorched mark on the stone paving of the aisle. The horses were still somewhat skittish, all but the bay Lady who had selected Valeria for the testing. It was done, her manner said. There was no undoing it. Hay was here, and grain would come if the human would stop retching and fetch it.

Her hardheaded common sense steadied Valeria. The testing would not end because two fools and an innocent had died.

“This is war,” Batu said. “That was justice of the battlefield.”

“It was barbaric,” Dacius said. He had been even quieter than usual since Embry died, but something in him seemed to have let go. He flung down the cleaning rag with his saddle half-done. “This is supposed to be the School of Peace. What do they do in the School of War? Kill a recruit every morning and drink his blood for breakfast?”

“Take dancing lessons,” Iliya said, hanging upside down from the opening to the hayloft. “Learn to play the flute.” He dropped, somersaulting, to land somewhat shakily on his feet. “Don’t you see? It’s all turned around. War is peace. Peace is war. And if you let go and kill something—” He made a noise stomach-wrenchingly like the sound of a hoof shattering bone. “Off with your head!”

“How can you laugh?” Dacius demanded. “Did the mage-bolt addle your brain?”

“That depends on whether I have a brain to addle.” Iliya snatched the broom out of Batu’s hands and began to sweep the aisle. He swept the scorched spot over and over and—

Batu caught the broom handle above and below his hands, stilling it. Iliya looked up into the broad dark face. “We’re all going to fail,” he said.

“We are not.” The words had burst out of Valeria. As soon as they were spoken, she wished they had not been. Everyone was staring at her.

She gritted her teeth and went on. “Do you know what I think? I think we’re the strongest. The best mages, or we could be the best.”

“How do you calculate that?” Paulus asked in his mincing courtier’s accent.

“Cullen had no self-control,” she answered, “but he was strong enough to kill. Marcus was trying to strangle him with more than hands. Embry thought he could stop a mage-bolt.”

“It’s far more likely we’re the idiots’ division,” Paulus said with a twist of the lip. “Three of us died for nothing before the first day was half over. Does any of you begin to guess how much more difficult the rest of the testing will be? We couldn’t even keep the eight together for a day.”

His logic was all too convincing, but Valeria could not make herself believe it. “The strongest can be the weakest. It’s a paradox of magic.”

“I know that,” he said. “Which school of mages were you Called from? Beastmasters?”

“Apprentice mages can be Called?” That she had not known. “Were you—”

“I was to go to the Augurs’ College,” Paulus said as if she should be awed. “So were you a Beastmaster?”

“No,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. He shrugged, almost a shudder. “It doesn’t matter, does it? We’ll all leave as Cullen did—in a sack.”

She had been thinking of him as older than the others. He carried himself as if he were a man fully grown, afflicted with the company of children. She realized now that he was terribly scared, and that he was no older than she.

It did not make her like him any better. It did soften her tone slightly as she said, “Stop that. If this magic is discipline, then part of discipline is teaching ourselves to carry on past fear.”

“I’m not afraid!”

“Don’t lie to yourself,” Dacius said. “We’re all afraid. We thought we’d learn to ride horses, work a few magics and after a little while we’d be in the Court of the Dance, weaving the threads of time. It wasn’t going to be terribly hard. The worst pain we’d suffer would be bruises to our backsides when we fell off a horse.”

“That’s absurd,” Paulus snapped. “I never thought it would be easy. You commoners, you hear the pretty stories and think it’s as simple as a song. It’s the greatest power there is.”

“I heard,” said Batu, “that no one who wants it can have it. Wanting taints it. Power corrupts.”

“You have to want the magic,” Valeria said, “and the horses. That’s a fire in the belly. A rider can’t rule, that’s the law. He serves and protects. He’s no one’s master.”

“You recite your lessons well,” Paulus said. “The truth is what you saw out there. It’s death to lose control. That’s what it comes to. Discipline or death.”

“Then we had better be disciplined,” said Valeria.

Dinner was as much water as any of them could drink. It was pure and cold, like melted snow.

“Water of the fountain,” Paulus said as he tasted it. For the first time he sounded capable of something other than scorn.

Valeria could taste the heart of the Mountain in that water, fire under ice. It satisfied her hunger so well that she did not even think of food.

Sleep struck her abruptly as she got up from the table. She staggered up the short flight of stairs and into the sleeping room. She was just awake enough to kick off her boots before she fell into bed.

The dream was waiting for her. It was full of white horses as always, but for the first time since the Call came, there were riders on their backs.

She recognized the place from a hundred stories. It was a high-ceilinged hall somewhat larger than the open court in which Marcus and Cullen had died. Tall windows let in white light. At the end, framed by a vaulted arch, the Mountain gleamed through the tallest and widest window that Valeria had ever imagined, with glass so pure that not a bubble marred its surface.

The floor of the hall was raked white sand. Pillars of marble and gold rimmed it, holding up a succession of galleries. Three rose on either side. In the lowest gallery opposite the Mountain, in a box by themselves, three Augurs stood in their white robes and conical caps. A secretary sat just behind them with tablets and stylus.

Under the Mountain was a single gallery. Draperies hung from it, crimson and gold. In the back of it was the banner of imperial Aurelia, golden sun and silver moon interlaced under a crown of stars, gleaming against a crimson field. On either side of it hung two others. One was luminous blue, with a silver stallion dancing against the unmistakable conical shape of the Mountain. The other was the golden sunburst on crimson of the imperial house.

This was the Hall of the Dance, where the white gods danced the patterns of fate and time. In her dream they were entering as they had come to the place of the testing, eight of them in a double line, walking in that slow and elevated cadence which was distinct to their kind.

She recognized the riders’ faces. Master Nikos led one line, First Rider Kerrec the other. Rider Andres rode behind the Master. She would learn the others’ names as the testing went on. They would be her partners and companions when—if—she passed the testing.

Someone was sitting in the royal box under the gleam of the Mountain. She expected to see the emperor as he was depicted on his coins, a stern hawk-faced man with a close-clipped beard. Instead it was a young woman with a face as cleanly carved as an image in ivory. She was dressed very plainly in a rider’s coat and breeches, and her hair was in a single plait behind her. The elaborate golden throne on which she sat seemed gaudy and common against that unflawed simplicity.

Only after Valeria had examined her thoroughly did she find the emperor. He stood behind the throne with his hand on the young woman’s shoulder, dressed in rider’s clothes as well. He was younger than Valeria had imagined, and less stern. His hair was still black, although his beard was iron-grey. His eyes were warm, smiling into hers. Magic sang in him like the notes of a harp.

He reminded Valeria of Kerrec. It was certainly not his warmth or the smile in his eyes—grey eyes, not as pale as Kerrec’s, but still unusual in this dark-eyed country. Take off the beard and the smile and thirty years, and there was the First Rider to the life.

Could it be…

The emperor had one living son, and he was half-barbarian, which Kerrec certainly was not. Another, legitimate son, the heir, had died years ago, leaving his sister to take his place. Kerrec must be related in some convoluted degree, like every noble and half the commoners in Aurelia.

In the shadows behind the emperor, a man was standing. Valeria could not quite make out his face. He was taller and wider in the shoulders than the emperor, but somehow he seemed stunted. Something was wrong with him, something that crept out toward the emperor and surrounded him with a flicker of darkness and a flash of sudden scarlet.

In the hall below them, the riders began the Dance. She could almost understand the patterns. They were following the skeins of destiny, tracing them in the raked earth of the floor. The air hummed subtly, and the light began to bend. Time was shifting, flowing. The stallions swam through it like fish through water. The riders both guided and were guided by them. The magic ruled them even as they ruled it.

With no sense of transition, she had become part of the Dance. The stallion she had dreamed before, the young one with the faint dappling, carried her through the movements.

She simply sat on his back. When the time came, she would guide him, but in this dream he was her teacher. There was a deep rightness in it. This, she was made for.

When the bell rang before dawn, she was awake and refreshed. The others woke groaning or cursing and dragged themselves out. There was no breakfast, not even water, but Valeria did not miss it. The water of the fountain was still in her. Batu, she noticed, seemed at ease. The others were pale and hollow-eyed.

They had their orders from the night before. There were horses to feed, stalls to clean. When they were done, they had to find their way to a certain room within the school. It was middling large and middling high, and filled with desks and benches. Each desk held a stack of wax tablets and a cup of sharpened styli.

The rest of the eights were there already. None of them had lost a single member, let alone three. They drew away from the latecomers, whispering among themselves.

Valeria exchanged glances with the others. She lifted her chin. So did Paulus. The other three followed their lead. They marched boldly down to the front of the room and took the seats that had been left for them there, separated somewhat from the rest.

Valeria ran a finger over the tablet in front of her. It was a smooth slab of wood coated with wax, blank and ready to be written on.

She had not expected to find herself in a schoolroom, even though this place was called a school. All the schooling, she had thought, would be in the stable and on the riding field. It was odd to think of book-learning here.

She looked up from the tablet to find Kerrec at the lectern. He had come in so quietly that she had not even heard him. Neither had any of the others, she noticed. The buzz of conversation was rising to a roar.

He cleared his throat. The silence was instant and complete. “Today we test knowledge,” he said. “If any of you is unable to read or write, go now with Rider Andres. You will be tested elsewhere.”

“And failed?” asked Paulus.

There were a few gasps at his daring. Kerrec answered as coolly as ever. “No one fails for simple lack of skill.”

“Then what do we fail for?”

“Lack of understanding,” said Kerrec. He looked away from Paulus, dismissing him.

One by one, a dozen of the Called rose, clattering among the benches, and made their way toward Rider Andres. Batu was not one of them, which surprised Valeria somewhat. Iliya was. He glanced back before he passed through the door. He was openly scared, but he grinned through it and saluted them.

When the last of them was gone, Kerrec scanned the faces of those who were left. Then, like any other schoolmaster, he said crisply, “Tablet. Stylus.”

Valeria’s schoolmaster had been her mother. Kerrec might be stern, but Morag had been formidable. She would have asked far more difficult questions than his. “What is the school? When and by whom was it founded? Who are the white gods?”

But as with the test of riding the day before, Valeria began to sense that there was something hiding beneath the childlike simplicity. There was a pattern in the questions.

She looked down at the lines of her brief answers. The School is the academy of horse magic. It was founded in the year that Aurelia was founded, by the first emperor. The white gods are the firstborn children of time and fate.

The flow of questions went on. She filled one tablet, both sides, and went on to the next. Her hand was writing without troubling her mind overmuch. He was not asking anything that she did not know. As the questions advanced, they needed more time and longer answers. She wrote well and quickly, and was finished, mostly, long before he asked the next question.

While she waited, her stylus began to wander of its own accord. She watched without trying to stop it.

It was tracing the pattern of the Dance that she had seen in her dream. Somehow it seemed to relate to the questions Kerrec was asking, although she could not see exactly how.

It was a maze, she realized as it grew on the tablet. Within an oval boundary, paths crossed and recrossed on their way to an open center.

As she stared at it, she glimpsed flickers of memory or dream. She saw the emperor’s face and the face of the woman on the throne, and behind them another man. He had been a shadow in her vision before, but now she saw him clearly.

There was a distinct likeness among them, although the stranger was taller and his face was blunter, and his hair was gold-shot brown rather than glossy black. That must be the bastard son, the half-barbarian. On another path, which crossed theirs repeatedly, she saw Euan Rohe and the hostages of the Caletanni.

Those paths were dark where they crossed. On one she saw the emperor dead, on another a figure that she recognized with a shock as Kerrec lay broken on a stone table. On yet a third, Euan Rohe hung from a gallows, his naked body pierced with a hundred wounds.

She wrenched her mind away from those horrors, back toward the rim of the maze. The young stallion stood there as if he had been waiting for her to notice him. His white calm soothed her.

“What is this?”

Valeria started so violently that the stylus leaped from her hand and fell with a clatter. The sound of it seemed deafening, but none of the Called looked up. They were all scribbling studiously.

Kerrec bent over her. He had the tablet in his hand, the one with the maze. “Come with me,” he said.

When she stood up, that did attract attention. Kerrec’s glare quelled even the boldest of them. Somehow, while she was lost in her maundering, another rider had come to stand at the lectern. “Explain,” he said, “how one fits a saddle properly to a broader back.”

Valeria could have answered that if she had not so obviously failed the test by losing interest in the questions. She tried to hold her head up as she followed Kerrec through the door behind the lectern.

The door led to a narrow hallway and then to a small room that must be a study. It had a worktable and a pair of stools and an ancient and visibly comfortable chair. Books and scrolls and tablets lay on every available shelf and surface. Its single window looked out into the court where Cullen and Marcus had died.

Master Nikos was sitting at the worktable, frowning at what looked like a book of accounts. He looked up in some surprise at their arrival.

“Your pardon,” Kerrec said, “but this couldn’t wait.” He set the tablet in front of the Master.

Master Nikos studied it for some time. Kerrec stood at ease like a soldier. Valeria tried to imitate him, but her knees kept wanting to collapse under her.

This was it. This was the end. She would be revealed as a female and sent away in disgrace.

After a terribly long while, Master Nikos looked up. His frown had changed, although Valeria could not have explained exactly how. “Where did you see this?” he asked.

His voice was mild, almost gentle. Valeria answered as steadily as she could. “I dreamed it,” she said, and belatedly added, “sir.”

His lips twitched very slightly. “Did you? When?”

“Last night, sir,” she said.

His brows went up. “Indeed. Tell me. When you drew this, could you see anything other than the lines on the tablet?”

“Faces, you mean?” She nodded. She was not relaxing, but she was less terrified than she had been. This was not going the way of any punishment she had ever had. “I saw people. And horses—stallions.”

“Tell me,” he said.

She did the best she could. The Master and the rider listened without comment. Once she had put it in words, it sounded weak and foolish.

“That’s all I can remember,” she said at the end of it. “It’s the water, isn’t it? It gives dreams.”

“You recognize the water?” Master Nikos asked.

“We all do,” she said. “It tastes the way the Mountain feels.”

“Feels?” the Master echoed her.

Her cheeks had gone hot. “I know I’m not saying it well. Words don’t seem to fit. I can’t—”

“No,” said the Master. “You can’t.” He glanced at Kerrec. “This one broke through faster than any I’ve seen. Even you took somewhat longer.”

Kerrec astounded her with a smile that made him look remarkably human. Of course it was not aimed at her. “I was still floundering when Petra kicked me into the wall and knocked some sense into my head.”

“Broke your arm, too, as I recall,” the Master said.

“Oh, no,” said Kerrec. “That was pure stupidity. I tripped over my own feet and snapped my wrist.” He rubbed it, flexing the hand as if it still remembered pain, and shook his head. “I was a terrible combination—both clever and arrogant. Petra dealt with me as I deserved.”

“They will do that,” said Master Nikos. “So, what of this one?”

Kerrec froze into his grim and familiar self again. “This is the one the Lady chose.”

Master Nikos’ brows went up. “Ah, so. Well then. We won’t waste time with any more of the lesser testing. Is any of the others fit to partner him?”

Kerrec frowned in thought. “Not really, no. There is one, but he needs every one of the minor tests. Unless…”

“Yes?” the Master prompted when he did not go on.

“Unless we ask the Lady.”

“You know what they think of all our testing.”

Kerrec almost broke into another smile. “Humans are idiots. That’s a given. Will you ask her or shall I?”

“I’ll ask,” the Master said. “You go.”

Kerrec bowed. He barely glanced at Valeria. “Come,” he said.

Chapter Nine

Valeria was glad to be out of the Master’s study, but in the hallway she stopped short. Kerrec was nearly to the stair before he realized that she was not trotting obediently behind him. He halted and turned.

“Listen,” she said. “Do what he said. Don’t waste time. I’ve failed. Just let me go. I’ll slip out quietly and not bother anyone.”

Kerrec seemed honestly surprised. “What makes you think you’ve failed?”

“Haven’t I? I was woolgathering when I was supposed to be answering questions. Isn’t discipline paramount? Didn’t men die yesterday because they had none?”

Kerrec drew in a breath. He was probably praying for patience. “Come with me,” he said. “This isn’t a thing to be shouted down hallways.”

She could hardly argue with that. He turned again, and she followed him down the stair. The courtyard was occupied by a group of riders on white stallions, but they were absorbed in their exercises.

Kerrec stopped under the colonnade. Over his shoulder she could see the horses transcribing patterns that seemed random but struck her with a deep resonance. Every dance, even the most casual, was keyed to the rhythm of the world.

She had to tear herself away from the pattern and focus on Kerrec. Even he was different. He was brimming with magic. It gleamed along his edges and coiled in his eyes.

He was a master of the art. His discipline was impeccable. His mastery…

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

She had not meant to say it aloud. She braced for his reprimand, but he barely even frowned. “There is no greater beauty,” he said, “and you can see it. Do you really believe you’ve failed?”

“You pulled me out of the testing,” she said.

“Because you were done with it.” He fixed her with a steady silver stare. “You passed. You saw through to the pattern. The rest will be plagued with simplicity until they either do the same or fail. You have no need for that. There is one thing we must still determine, and one last test which you’ll share with the rest of the Called. Otherwise there’s nothing to discover.”

She bit her lip. There was another thing, but he knew it already. If he was not going to mention it, then she certainly was not about to.

“What—” she said. She brought her voice under control. “What do you need to determine?”

“One thing,” he said. “Come.”

Valeria stood under the gallery in the Hall of the Dance. The bay Lady was with her. A groom had brought the mare after Kerrec left Valeria there with a simple order: “Stand and watch.”

The Lady was neither saddled nor bridled. She was there as Valeria was, to watch. She was also standing guard, though against what, she did not see fit to tell Valeria.

As endless as that day had seemed, it was still short of noon. The morning exercises went on in the hall as they did in the riding courts. Somewhat to Valeria’s surprise, the horses in the hall when she came were not the oldest and most powerful of the stallions but the young ones, still dark or dappled, who were just learning the ways of the Dance.

They worked in fours and eights. Sometimes there were a dozen in the hall, more often eight. While Valeria stood beside the Lady, watching and wondering what she was supposed to see, four left and four came in. Kerrec rode one of them.

Kerrec was even more beautiful on horseback than she remembered. Here in the heart of his magic, he had no need to hide what he was. He could show himself for a master.

On foot he was infuriating. She could not decide whether to hate him or simply despise him. As she stood in the hall, she decided that she was in love.

The others rode well, and it was lovely to watch them. Kerrec was perceptibly better.

Out of nowhere in particular, Valeria remembered one of the questions that Kerrec had asked shortly before she stopped listening. “What are the levels of mastery within the school?”

She could see the tablet in front of her and the stylus digging into the wax, writing the answers.

First, mastery of animals. That was the simplest, and came in childhood. The Called were always masters of beasts, although few of the order of Beastmasters were actually Called. When the Called came to the school, if they passed the testing, they learned the first of the arts, the art of riding horses.

Second, mastery of men. Through the power of the stallions they learned to rule and guide. They could be princes and kings if their law allowed it, but the stallions cared nothing for such things. Men who cared too much were released from the school. Hunger for power had no place on the Mountain.

Third, mastery of the elements. Earth and air, fire and water, yielded to them as beasts and men had. The stallions were like a burning glass, concentrating their power. They were great mages, those riders who rose so high.

Fourth and highest, mastery of time and the Dance. Few riders ever reached this eminence. Master Nikos was one. Kerrec was another. These, in union with the stallions, could walk in the past and foresee the future. Tradition had it that once in a great while, in the cusp of destiny, one of them could shift the tides of time and make them run according to his will.

Valeria watched the young stallions move in their simple patterns. They were not raising great powers. They were students as she was, and only a few of them would come to the great Dance.

They were dancing a pattern that almost made sense. It had the emperor in it, and the young woman who must be the emperor’s heir, and the taller, fairer young man who looked both like and unlike them. Valeria glimpsed another face, which at first she thought was Euan Rohe’s, but this was older and harsher. It was his father’s, maybe.

The landscape of her vision was dark, lit with fire. A stone loomed against the stars, standing alone on a barren hilltop. Robed figures gathered in a circle around it. She smelled blood, strong and cloying, and the sweet stink of death.

A tattered thing flapped in the wind, wound around the top of the stone. It was a banner, a legionary standard with its device of sun and moon. Then she realized that there was something inside it. A man’s body was wrapped in the standard. His hands and feet were spiked to the stone. Blood dripped slowly, glistening in starlight.

Sunlight stabbed her skull. The Hall of the Dance was full of it. The bay Lady stood between her and the darkness.

The young stallions were still dancing, but Valeria could not stomach any more of it. Although she had been told to stand and watch, she had done as much of that as she could. She needed the sky, and the unclouded daylight.

The Lady knelt. Valeria dragged her leg over the broad back. The bay mare rose in a smooth motion and carried her out.

Valeria lay on the grass. The sky went on forever. She heard the mare grazing close by, and felt the rhythmic beat of hooves on the earth as in each court, the stallions danced.

That rhythm ruled the world. The stars sang it. It sent the moon through its phases. The sun rose and set within it.

It was as powerful as anything that was, and yet it was unspeakably fragile. In an instant it could shatter, falling into darkness and silence.

“Something wants to destroy you,” she said to Kerrec.

She did not particularly care where he was. He could hear her, she knew that.

As it happened, he was sitting on the grass beside her, almost under the bay mare’s belly. “We’ve always had enemies,” he said.

“I know. I’ve heard stories. The Red Magicians. The cult of the Nameless. Half the nobles in the court of any given reign.”

He snorted. “More than half in this reign. We’re superannuated, they declare. Our powers have eroded, if they ever actually existed. We’re a worthless collection of mountebanks on fat white ponies.”

She sat up and stared at him. “They actually say that?”

“That and worse,” he said. “I don’t suppose you were ever tested for the Augurs’ College.”

“That would be Paulus,” she said.

“Of course it would be,” said Kerrec. As usual, she could not tell what he was thinking. He masked himself too well.

She could see why he might, if he was seeing and feeling such things as she had since she came here. She was only a child, untrained and hopelessly confused. It must be overwhelming to be a master.

He stood and reached down, pulling her to her feet. The earth was unsteady under her, but his hand was strong. As soon as she could stand on her own, he let her go. “Your testing is done until tomorrow,” he said. “Apart from your duties in the stable, your time is yours to do with as you please.”

“What if I want to go back with the others?”

“You could do that,” he said. “It’s not necessary.”

“I think it might be,” she said.

He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “As you please,” he said.

But she did not leave quite yet. “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.

“You know we did.”

She hardly knew what she knew, but she nodded. “Is it that overwhelming for you? Or is it worse?”

He offered no answer. She had not expected one. That, like so much else in this place, was for her to discover.

The rest of the Called were still in the schoolroom answering questions of deliberately infuriating simplicity. Valeria slipped in as quietly as she could, found a desk and a set of blank tablets, and let herself drown in words.

They were only words. She made sure of that. She had had enough magic to last her for a while.

Chapter Ten

The School of War occupied the northeastern corner of the fortress. It had its own gates and its own staff of guards and servants, even its own stables. There were no white gods there, only ordinary horses, and precious few stallions.

The hostages had been delighted to discover that once they were admitted to the school, they were no longer treated like battle captives. They were students like all the others. They shared a room in the dormitory, with as much freedom to come and go as any of the offspring of imperial nobles and rich merchants for whom this place was an entry into officers’ rank in the emperor’s armies.

“Remember,” Euan Rohe had told his kinsmen before they came here. “They want to civilize us, which means carve us into puppets. Let them teach us everything that we can learn—the better to use it against them when the Great War comes.”

They were good men, his kinsmen. Every one was a member of his own warband, sworn to him by oaths of blood and stone. The arrogant imperials had made no effort to select princes of opposing tribes, or even to discover what enmities there might be among their enemies. That, the One God willing, would be their undoing.

The lessons so far were ghastly enough. It was beneath a prince’s dignity to play the slave to a stable full of hairy, farting beasts, but if the war demanded it, then he would do it. The riding was painful but slightly less insulting. As for the handful of hours each morning in a box of a room with tablet and stylus, learning to read and write the imperial language…

“We didn’t come here for that,” Gavin said in disgust. “These scratchings on wax stain our souls.”

“They help our cause,” Euan said. “They’re not the runes that only priests can touch and live. These will gain us knowledge we might never have had otherwise. They give us power.”

“They give us corruption,” Gavin muttered, but under Euan’s glare he subsided. He submitted to instruction, and learned his letters, although he flatly refused to form them into his name. He knew better than to snare his soul.

Euan did not tell these loyal kinsmen that he already knew how to read. His father had insisted that he be taught. The old man was wise when he was sober, and he could see farther than most.

Letters, for a while, would be Euan’s secret. He pretended to struggle as the others did, and watched and waited.

He did not have to wait long. The message came through one of the grooms, a pallid young creature with a perpetually startled expression. He looked flat astonished now, but he spoke the words he had been given without a slip or a stammer.

“Tomorrow as the sun touches noon,” was Euan’s answer. “Outside the walls. Follow the trail I set.”

The boy bowed. He did not argue, as the recipient of the message almost certainly would.

He would come to the summons. He would not be able to help himself.

Euan Rohe walked openly out of the School of War, testing for once and for all the limits of his position there. No one gave him a second glance. He stood outside the high grey walls and took a long breath. It was not free air, but it was as close as he would come until this game was over.

Hunter’s instincts came back quickly in spite of more than a year in cities or under imperial guard. Euan took in the lie of the land, chose his track, and set about leaving a trail that another hunter could follow.

The place that Euan found was pleasant, a clearing in the forest that robed the Mountain’s knees. The great stands of trees were almost bare of undergrowth, but the clearing was carpeted with grass and flowers.

When he first came there, he had thought the flowers much thicker than they were. Then as he walked onto the grass, all the white blossoms took flight. They were butterflies.

He sat in the midst of them and sipped water from the bottle he had brought with him. It was still cold from the stream farther down the Mountain. He had a bit of bread in his bag, and cheese and dried apples, but he was not hungry yet.

The one he waited for arrived just after the sun touched the point of noon. He made no secret of his passage through the trees. That was deliberate, and might be construed as an insult.

Euan stayed where he was, propped on his elbow in the grass, with the water bottle in his hand. The other man rode on horseback. His mount was white, but it was not one of the gods from the school. Euan was interested to discover that he could tell the difference.

The man on the horse was small and dark and sharp-featured for a Caletanni, but he was too tall and fair to be an imperial. He looked like what he was, half-blood, with his brown hair and freckled skin. He wore his hair in a long plait, which was considered quite daring in the imperial city, but he went clean-shaven. He was not daring enough to affect the full fashion.

“Prince,” Euan greeted him.

“Prince,” he replied, swinging down off the horse with grace that few Caletanni could match. He tied up the reins and left the beast to graze, and came to stand over Euan.

“Good of you to come alone,” Euan said. “Or is there an army on the other side of the hill?”

“No army,” said the prince from Aurelia. He had a suitably imperial name, but the one he claimed in front of Euan was Gothard. “There is a company of guards not far from here. Do I need to summon them?”

“Not yet,” said Euan. He gestured expansively. “Come, sit. Be free of my hall.”

Gothard was not amused. “None of this is yours,” he said, “even after you’ve won the war. Remember the bargain. Aurelia’s throne belongs to me.”

Euan smiled his most exasperating smile. “I won’t forget,” he said.

Gothard made no secret of his doubts, but he refrained from putting them into words. He said instead, “So. You’re in the school. How goes it? Have you found a rider yet?”

“Maybe,” said Euan. “It’s only the third day since I came here. Do all your caravans march at a snail’s pace?”

“Only when time is of the essence,” Gothard said sourly. “Gods. You should have been there a month ago. Tomorrow is the Midsummer Dance. It’s a bare three months until the Great Dance.”

Euan did not comment on the pagan oath. It was a habit, one could suppose, from living with imperials. “I’m well aware of the time,” he said. His voice shifted to the half-chant of an imperial schoolboy’s recitation. “We have to be in Aurelia on the autumn equinox, when the emperor celebrates his feast of renewal, four eights of years on the throne of this empire. The white gods will leave the Mountain for that, as they have not done in a hundred years, and dance in the court of the palace. That will open the gates of time and allow us—the One God willing—to impose our will on what will be. Then the emperor will die and his heir be disposed of, and a new reign will come to Aurelia.”

“If it can be so simple and so tidy,” said Gothard, clearly annoyed by the mockery, “we’ll thank every god there is, whether he be One or many.”

“I’ll do my part,” Euan said with studied patience. “I’ll find the rider who can be persuaded—one way or another—to subvert the Dance. You have enough to do. You’ve no need to fret over that.”

“None of it is worth a clipped farthing if you fail.”

“There now,” drawled Euan. “I wouldn’t say that. If we can’t control the Dance once it’s away from the Mountain’s power, we can certainly corrupt it. We’ll have our war, one way or the other.”

“There will be war,” said Gothard, “but who will win it? The Dance can determine that—but only a rider can rule the Dance.”

“It will be done,” Euan said. “And then you will have your part to do, and so will others. In the end, we’ll win the war.”

“I envy you your surety,” Gothard said.

Euan smiled sunnily. “I’m a raving barbarian and you’re an effete imperial. Of course I’m a blind optimist. You’ll be my voice of reason, my wise philosopher.”

Truly Gothard had no humor. He was fast reaching the limits of his temper. Euan waited to see if he would say something ill-advised, but instead he froze.

Euan heard it a moment after he did. A hoof chinked softly against rock. A bit jingled even more softly.

Gothard’s grey horse had been standing still, head down and hind foot cocked, asleep. At the sound of another horse’s passing, he threw up his head.

Gothard drew a complex symbol in the air. Euan saw the shape of it limned in dark light. His skin prickled.

Two riders rode into the clearing. They were mounted on white gods. Through the veil of Gothard’s sorcery, the creatures’ coats glowed like clouds over the moon. The men were shadows encasing a core of light.

Euan sat perfectly still. Gothard’s horse stood like a marble image. Only Gothard seemed at ease. He was alert but calm. Euan had understood that Gothard was a fair journeyman of one of the innumerable schools of imperial magic, but this was a little more than journeyman’s work.

The riders never saw them. One of the horses might have cast a glance in their direction, but if it did, it did not sound the alarm. They rode on through the clearing and away.

The sun had shifted visibly when at last Gothard let go the spell. He sagged briefly and swayed, then thrust himself upright. He had to draw a deep breath before he could speak. “It’s safe,” he said. “You can move.”

Euan stretched until his bones cracked, then rotated his head on his neck. His muscles were locked tight. He released them one by one, a slow dance that Gothard watched with undisguised fascination.

Euan let his dance stretch out somewhat longer than it strictly needed. When he was as supple as he could hope to be, he was on his feet. “You’re a better sorcerer than I thought,” he said. “I salute you.” He followed the word with the action, the salute of a warrior to a champion.

Gothard accepted it with little enough grace. Euan left him there, sitting next to his motionless horse, and slipped away into the shelter of the trees.

Chapter Eleven

The last test of the Called fell three days before Midsummer. It was the only public test. Those who passed could regard it as an initiation into the life of a rider. Those who failed had the right to vanish into the crowd and be mercifully and formally forgotten.

A great number of people were gathered in the largest of the riding courts, seated in tiers above the floor of raked sand. All the riders were there, and all the candidates who had passed this test in their own day. Students from the School of War, guests and servants filled all the rest of the benches.

Some of the Called had family there. One whole flock of peacocks belonged to Paulus. Valeria saw how pale he was and felt almost sorry for him. She at least did not have to fail in front of a legion of brothers and uncles and cousins.

That gave her an unexpected pang. Her family would never see her here, or know whether she succeeded or failed. Whatever happened, she had left them. She could never go back.

All of the Called waited together in the western entrance to the court. The eights were intact except for Valeria’s, but she suspected that certain decisions had been made. Some of the Called had a drawn and haunted look. Others seemed dulled somehow, as if the magic had drained out of them.

Only a few still had a light in them. Some actually shone brighter. Iliya was one. So was Batu. And, she saw with some incredulity, Paulus.

She could not see herself, to know what the others must see. She felt strong. She had slept last night without dreams, and been awake when the bell rang at dawn. Now at full morning she was ready for whatever was to come.

Supper last night had been water from the fountain and nothing else. There had been no breakfast, but she was not hungry at all. She was dizzy and sated with the air she breathed.

She smiled at Batu who stood next to her. He smiled shakily back. “Luck,” he said.

“Luck,” she replied.

The hum and buzz of the crowd went suddenly quiet. As before, Valeria felt them before she saw them. The stallions were coming.

This time no one rode them. They were saddled and bridled, walking beside their grooms.

Her heart began to beat hard. There was not a sound in that place except the soft thud of hooves on sand, and now and then a stallion’s snort or the jingle of bit or bridle as he shook his head at a fly.

There were eight of them, as always. She had not seen these eight before. They were massive, their coats snow-white. These were old stallions, how old she was almost afraid to imagine. Their eyes were dark and unfathomably wise. The tides of time ran in them. With every step, they trod out the pattern of destiny.

She had an overwhelming desire to fling herself flat at their feet. All that kept her upright was the realization that if she did that, she would not be able to get up again. She stood with the rest of the Called, wobble-kneed but erect, and waited to be told what to do.

Kerrec had appeared while the stallions arranged themselves in a half circle in the center of the court. He called the candidates together in eights, with the broken eight last.

The test was as deceptively simple as all the rest. Each man was to select a horse, mount and ride.

“Ride how?” asked a gangling boy from the second eight.

“That is the test,” Kerrec said.

By now they knew better than to ask him to explain. They exchanged glances. Some rolled their eyes. Others were praying, or maybe incanting spells.

Valeria did not envy the first rider in the slightest. He selected himself, shrugged rather desperately and left his fellows and walked out onto the sand.

The crowd’s silence deepened. The stallions stood unmoving. They did not fidget as ordinary horses would. Their stillness was monumental, rooted in the earth under their feet.

The young man stood in front of them. His head turned from side to side. He was blind, Valeria thought. He could not see what he was supposed to see.

When he moved, his steps were slow. His fists clenched and unclenched. He wavered between two nearly identical white shapes. They looked like brothers, with the same arched nose and little lean ears.

His choice was visibly random. He seized the rein from the groom and flung himself into the saddle.

The stallion did not move a muscle. At first the rider heaved a sigh of relief, but when he asked the stallion to advance, his answer was the same total stillness as before.

A titter ran through the crowd. The rider flushed. His body tensed. Just as he would have dug heels into the broad white sides, the stallion erupted.

The rider went off in the first leap. He landed well, rolling out of reach of the battering hooves. The crowd applauded that, but he did not stay for the accolade. He was gone as he was allowed to do, vanished and forgotten.

The second rider could not choose at all. He turned and fled. The third chose reasonably well, mounted gracefully, and plodded a lifeless circle before he conceded defeat.

Valeria had lost count before any of the would-be riders managed a ride worth noticing. The crowd had been by turns amazed and amused, but even devoted followers of the art were glazing over.

Then a candidate mounted and rode—really rode.

He was a wiry little creature with the pinched face of a starveling child, but he was light and quick on his feet. In the saddle he blossomed. The stallion danced for him, a stately pavane that won a murmur of approval from the benches.

Valeria noticed an important thing. It was the stallion, not the rider, who danced. The rider had the sense to sit perfectly still and not interfere. His expression lingered in Valeria’s memory. He was half terrified and half exalted.

Three more received the gift of the dance, out of three eights. The winnowing was fast and merciless. No one died, but one broke an arm and another left with a bloodied nose.

Then there were the five of them, the broken eight, who were either the best or the worst of them all. The entrance that had been so crowded seemed echoing and empty. The four who had passed the testing so far had drawn to one side, watching with a combination of smugness that their ordeal was done and sympathy for those who had still to undergo it.

People were whispering in the crowd, telling one another why this eight was missing three. Their attention had sharpened.

Paulus went first. He had the most to lose and the least patience to spare. He walked straight toward the tallest of the stallions, but halfway there, he veered aside. When he halted, he was face-to-face with the least lovely of them, a comically long-nosed, long-eared creature with a mottled pink muzzle and a spreading pink stain around one eye.

Paulus’ lip curled. At the same time his hand crept out and came to rest on the heavy crested neck. A small sigh escaped him, as if something inside him had let go. He mounted as punctiliously as always. The stallion shook his mane and pawed once, then gathered himself and rose in an extravagant and breathtakingly beautiful leap.

Valeria felt the lightness, the sheer joy of that dance. It was perfectly startling and perfectly wonderful. Paulus rode it in terror and delight, until he had to laugh or burst into pieces.

The rest of them rode on that lightness. Batu, then Iliya added their own steps to the dance.

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