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 on The Mountain’s Call

“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 is the 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

SHATTERED DANCE

For Moon, Mickey and the rest of

the inmates of Riders’ Hall—

with laughter, song and the Great Debate:

Euan or Kerrec? Should a woman have to choose?

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 One

The ninth challenger was the strongest. He came out of the setting sun, bulking as broad as the flank of Dun Mor that loomed behind the killing ground. The potent animal reek of him washed over Euan Rohe, sharp as a bear’s den in the spring.

Euan swallowed bile. For three long days he had been fighting, at sunrise, noon and sunset. Eight warrior princes of the people lay dead at his hand.

Now this ninth and last came to contest Euan’s claim to the high kingship. He was the champion of the Mordantes, blessed by the One God with a madness of battle. Fear never touched him. Pain never slowed him.

Euan’s many bruises and countless small wounds ached and stung. His arm was bound and throbbing where the third challenger’s blade had slashed it open. He looked into those too-wide, too-eager eyes and saw death.

His lips drew back from his teeth. He laughed, though his throat was raw. The seventh challenger had come close to throttling him.

One more battle and he was high king—or dead. He shifted his feet, gliding out of the direct glare of the sun. The Mordante hunched his heavy shoulders and rocked from foot to foot. His hands clenched and unclenched.

One of those hands could have torn Euan’s head from his shoulders. Euan was not a small man, but he was built long and rangy, like a wolf of the steppe. This challenger was a bear with a man’s eyes.

There were stories, tales told on dark nights of men who walked in beast form and supped on human blood. Time was when Euan would have called them children’s tales. Then he had walked on the other side of the river and seen what imperial mages could do.

His mind was wandering dangerously close to the edge. He wrenched it back into focus.

The Mordante was still rocking, growling softly. The crowd of tribesmen blurred behind him, a wide circle of faces, winter-gaunt and hungry, thirsting for blood.

Euan’s adversary had no weapon but his massive body. Euan had a knife and a hunting spear and his roving wits. He lifted the spear in his hand, weighing it, aiming for the heart beneath the bearskin.

The Mordante lunged, blindingly fast. Euan’s spearpoint glanced off the heavy pelt. The haft twisted out of his hand.

A grip like a vise closed on his wrist, pulling him up against that hot and reeking body. He groped for his knife, but it was caught between them. The hilt dug into his belly, a small but vivid pain.

He went limp as if in surrender. The Mordante grunted laughter and locked arms around him, crushing the breath out of him.

Euan let his knees buckle and his body go boneless. He began to slide down. The Mordante clutched at him. His free hand snapped upward.

Blood sprayed from the broken nose—but Euan had not struck high or fast enough. It had not pierced through to the brain.

Still, it was a bitter blow. The Mordante dropped, blind and choking.

Euan was nearly as far gone, his ribs creaking and his sight going dark and then light. He staggered and almost went down.

Already the Mordante was stirring, drawing his legs under him, struggling to rise. His heavy hands clenched and unclenched. Euan’s death was in them, blood-red like the last light of the sun.

Euan’s knife was in his hand. He had one chance—one stroke. He was dizzy and reeling and his body was close to failing.

The Mordante lurched up. Euan dived toward him.

All his focus had narrowed to one spot on that wide and bristling chest. The bearskin had fallen away from it. He could hear the heart beating, hammering within its cage of blood and bone.

The whole world throbbed to that relentless rhythm. Euan’s blade thrust up through the wide-sprung ribs, twisting as the Mordante tried to fling himself away from it. But it was already lodged inside him.

Again it was not enough. The man was too big, his body too heavily padded with muscle. His long arms dragged Euan in once more, his hands groping for Euan’s throat, to crush the windpipe and break the neck.

Euan had no defenses left. All he could do was keep his waning grip on the knife’s hilt and let the Mordante’s own weight thrust it deeper.

The pounding went on and on. It was coming from outside now. The tribes were stamping their feet, beating on drums and shields, roaring the death chant.

It was very dim and far away. With the last of his consciousness, Euan felt the knife’s blade pass through something that resisted, then gave way. The hilt throbbed in his hand, leaped out of it and then went still.

Euan spun down through endless space. Pain was a distant memory. Fear, desperation—only words. Sweet darkness surrounded him. Lovely death embraced him.

It was warm. He had not expected that. He could almost believe it had a face—a woman’s face, a smooth oval carved in ivory, with eyes neither brown nor green, flecked with gold.

He knew that face, those eyes, as if they had been his own. He reached for them, but they slipped away.

The thunder of his pulse had shaped itself into human sense. Voices were chanting over and over.

Ard Ri! Ard Ri Mor! Ard Ri! Ard Ri Mor!

They were acclaiming the high king.

The Mordante was dead. Euan had felt his heart stop. He was dead, too. Then how—or who—

A sharp and all too familiar voice filled the world. “Up now. Wake. I’m done carrying you.”

Purest white-hot hatred flung Euan back into the light. More hands than he could count lifted him up. He rode on the shoulders of his warband, his most loyal companions.

The sun had died in blood, pouring its death across the sky. The royal fires sprang up around the killing ground and along the hilltops. They would be lit from end to end of the people’s lands, leaping across the high places, declaring to all the tribes that there was a king again in Dun Mor.

Euan looked for the man who had dragged him back from the edge of death. All the faces around him were familiar and beloved, his blood brothers and his kin. He had to look far into the shadows to find the slight dark figure with its terrible weight of magic.

By the One God, he hated the man—but there was no denying that Euan owed him a debt. He had brought Euan out of the dark. Euan was awake again, alive and aware.

Euan straightened painfully. The strongest men of his warband lifted a shield and held it high. The rest reached to lift him up, but he had a little strength left.

He snatched a spear from the hand of a man who was shouting and brandishing it. All his aches and wounds cried protest. He ignored them.

A path opened before him. He sprinted along it, grounded the spear and launched himself toward the shield.

He hung in air, briefly certain that he had failed. He would fall. If he was lucky he would break his neck rather than suffer such an omen against his kingship.

His feet struck the shield with blessed solidity. It rocked under his weight but steadied. He stood high above the people, dizzy and breathless, grinning like a mad thing.

He spread his arms wide as if to embrace the world. He had done it. He had won. He was the Ard Ri, high king of all the tribes.

“Now you have what you wanted,” Gothard said. “Only remember. Glory always has a price.”

“I could not possibly forget,” Euan said.

He had danced and drunk and feasted from night into morning, then slept a little and woke to Gothard’s face staring down at him. It was not the sight he would have liked to see on his first day as Ard Ri. He would have given much never to see it at all.

But there the man was, squatting in this still unfamiliar tent. Neither the warband nor the royal guard had managed to keep him out.

Nothing in this world could, maybe. Gothard was a dead man, a sorcerer who had been destroyed and his body unmade—but he had come back through the power of his magic to walk among the living. The peculiar horror of his existence was not that he was terrible to look at or speak to, but that he seemed so mortally ordinary.

Euan sat up carefully. While he slept, he had been bathed and salved and his arm newly bandaged.

Except for Gothard’s presence, Euan felt remarkably well. His head barely ached and his wounds were no trouble. Even his badly abused throat was less raw than he might have expected.

He would have been smiling if anyone but Gothard had been watching. As it was, his frown was not quite as black as it could have been. “What do you want?” he demanded—rude, yes, but the two of them were long past any pretense of civility.

“It’s tradition, you know,” Gothard said. “When the new king first wakes, his most loyal servant admonishes him against excessive pride and bids him remember the price of glory. It’s usually a priest who does it. Aren’t you glad I came instead?”

“No,” Euan said. It was hard not to growl, the state his voice was in, but this was intentional.

“I do smell better,” Gothard pointed out. For him, that was rollicking humor. “You’re given three days to enjoy your elevation. Then the reality of it comes crashing in. I’m to remind you that these aren’t the tribes your predecessor ruled. They’ve suffered a monstrous defeat and great loss of life and strength. The winter has been brutal and the weak or wounded who did not die in battle are dead of starvation and sickness. It’s a raw, bleak spring with a grim summer ahead, while the empire strips us of what little we have left and crushes us under the heels of its legions.

“You are high king of the people, and that’s a great thing—but it’s also a heavy burden. Even if they were victorious, you would still bear all their ills as well as their triumphs. Now in defeat, it’s all on your shoulders. You bear the brunt and you carry the blame.”

Euan’s shoulders sagged as if they were indeed loaded down with all the horrors of a disastrous war and its even grimmer aftermath. But he was no mage’s toy, whatever Gothard might hope to make of him. He shook off the spell with a snap of contempt. “You don’t think I know all that? This is mine and always has been. I was meant for it.”

“Surely,” said Gothard, “but are you prepared for the bad as well as the good?”

“I’ve ridden out two great defeats,” Euan said. “There will be no third. You are going to help me make sure of that.”

Gothard’s brows arched. “A new plan, my lord?”

“Maybe.” Euan rose carefully from his blankets. “Maybe the same one, with refinements. We don’t need to destroy the imperial armies if we destroy its leaders. We’ve known that from the beginning.”

“But war is so much more glorious than conspiracy and assassination.” Gothard’s tone was mocking but his eyes were deadly earnest. “Will the tribes understand, do you think?”

“The people won’t be going to war again for a long time,” Euan said. “It’s not a choice between glory and practicality. There’s no glory left.”

“You want revenge.”

“Don’t you?”

Gothard’s smile showed an edge of fang. “What do you have in mind?”

“Come to me after the kingmaking is over,” Euan said. “It’s time to strike the deathblow against the empire. We’ve failed twice. Third time will end it—one way or the other.”

The gleam of Gothard’s eyes told Euan his words had struck home. Gothard was half an imperial. The late emperor had sired him on a concubine, and by that accident of birth denied him the right to claim the throne—a fact for which Gothard hated his father with intensity that had nothing sane about it.

Gothard had raised the powers that destroyed the emperor and almost taken the rest of the world with him. If he had his way, his sister who was soon to be crowned empress and his brother who was something else altogether would be worse than dead—Unmade, so that nothing was left of them, not even a memory.

Gothard said no word of that, nor had Euan expected him to. He turned on Euan instead and said, “You’d die and abandon the people?”

“I’ll go down with them,” Euan said, “if that’s how it has to be.”

“Maybe you are meant to be king,” Gothard said.

“If I had been king sooner, we would not have lost the war.” Euan could feel the anger rising, old now and deep but as strong as ever. He throttled it down. There was no profit in wasting it on Gothard, who was his ally—however unwelcome.

He forced a smile. It was more of a rictus grin, but it would have to do. “Still. Now I am the Ard Ri. Maybe I’ll do better than the one who went before me. Maybe I’ll do worse. But I’ll do the best I can for my people. That, I’m sworn to.”

It was not so far off from the oath he had taken while the last challenger’s body was still warm, when he was lifted up in front of the people and invested with the mantle and the spear and the heavy golden torque. But now, in front of his most hated ally, he spoke from the heart. He felt the earth shift under his feet, rocking and then going still, as it was said to do when a man of power swore a great oath.

He meant every word. He would live and die by it. Life and soul were bound to it.

That was as it should be. He left the tent that he had won and the ally the One God had imposed upon him, and stepped out into the cold bright morning, the first morning of his high kingship.

Chapter Two

The Mountain slept, locked deep in winter’s snow. Far beneath the ice and cold and the cracking of frozen stone, the fire of its magic burned low.

It would wake soon and send forth the Call, and young men—and maybe women—would come from the whole of Aurelia to answer it. But tonight it was asleep. One might almost imagine that it was a mortal place and its powers mortal powers, and gods who wore the shape of white horses did not graze its high pastures.

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

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

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

“Why? What’s up there?”

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

“You believe that?”

“I can’t disprove it,” he said.

“Someday maybe someone will.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re not always blind,” Nikos said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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