Song Of Unmaking. Caitlin Brennan

scowled back. “Master Nikos is asking for you,” he said.

      She had been expecting that. Yesterday’s adventures had had nothing to do with her, but the riders would be needing someone to blame. She left Paulus standing in the doorway while she went to wash and dress.

      On the way, she peered into the servant’s room. The bed had been slept in, but there was no one in it. Briana was gone.

      That took a little of the edge off her temper, but not much. She had to reach inside herself for calm, and then for focus.

      She needed both. Paulus did not move out of her way when she reached the door. He had a look that made her eyes narrow. “What is it?” she asked.

      His face was stiff. Not that that was anything unusual—but this was a different kind of stiffness. Valeria pulled him back into the room and thrust him into the nearest chair. “Talk,” she said.

      He scowled even more blackly than before. “It may be nothing,” he said. “I could be imagining it. I’m not an Augur. I was supposed to be one, but I was Called instead.”

      Valeria clenched her fists to keep from shaking him. “You saw something,” she said. “When the Lady Danced.”

      He nodded tightly. “Did it occur to you to wonder why, of all the hundreds of people at the testing, there was not one Augur? You’d think one would come just to watch. It’s not as if there were a tradition against it.”

      “Are you saying there’s some sort of conspiracy?” Valeria demanded.

      “I don’t know,” said Paulus. He said it without exasperation or excessive temper, which for him was unusual. “I saw things in the patterns of the Dance. It was like writing on a page.”

      “What did it say?” Valeria was working hard to cultivate patience. Paulus was not going to come to the point until he was ready. Considering how reluctant he obviously was, she wondered if she wanted to hear it.

      “I’m not sure what it said,” Paulus said. “I can tell you what I think it said. It was like a poem in a language I never properly learned. There was a stanza about the school and about change, and about how the old had to die to make room for the new. Then there was a sequence about the war. How the only way to win it was by doing nothing. Or by embracing nothingness.”

      Valeria’s stomach clenched. “Embracing nothingness? Are you sure?”

      “No, I’m not!” he snapped. “I don’t know why I’m even telling you this. I should be telling the Master. Except when I try, it all seems too foolish to bother him with.”

      “Believe me,” said Valeria, “there’s nothing foolish about this. What else did you see?”

      “What else should I have seen?”

      She took a deep breath, praying for patience. “That’s what I’m asking. You haven’t said anything we haven’t all seen, one way or another. What’s the rest of it?”

      “I don’t know,” said Paulus. If he had not been so consciously dignified, he would have been squirming in his chair. “I can only tell you what I think it was. There was more about the war. Kings dying and kings being made. And the Mountain. That was the leap at the end. It said, ‘The Mountain is not what you think it is.’”

      “That is cryptic,” Valeria said.

      “I told you,” he said.

      “What do you think it means?”

      He flung up his hands. “The gods must know, because I don’t. It’s bad news for us, whatever it is. It says we think we’re safe, but we dance over the abyss. We trust ourselves and our powers, but they’re a delusion. We bury ourselves in tradition, and tradition buries us. This war isn’t on the frontier at all, though there will be battles enough there. It’s here, in our citadel. It will be our undoing, unless we wake up and give it its name.”

      Valeria had gone cold inside. Augur or not, Paulus had seen the truth. He had seen the Unmaking.

      “You have to tell the Master,” she said, though her throat tried to close and stop her.

      “What can he do that he’s not already doing?”

      “He needs to know,” Valeria said. “The threat’s not just to the emperor or his army. It’s to us. To the Mountain.”

      “We don’t know that,” Paulus said. “I could be all wrong.”

      “You’re afraid,” she said.

      For once he did not give way to her baiting. She devoutly wished he would. She was afraid, too—deathly afraid. All he had to protect him was the fear that he was wrong. She knew he was right.

      “Look,” she said, “Midsummer Dance is in three days. There will be Augurs there. If the Lady Danced the truth, the stallions will, too. The Augurs will see it and everyone will be sure.”

      “And if they don’t?”

      “If it’s there, they’ll see it.”

      Paulus nodded. This gave him a graceful way out of his dilemma. It gave Valeria one, too—though she had far more to be afraid of than he did.

      He pulled himself to his feet and smoothed his expression back into place. When it was as haughty as it usually was, he said, “We’d better go. We’re keeping the Master waiting.”

      Valeria nodded. Neither of them would talk about this again—until they had to. That was understood.

      She expected Paulus to bring her to the Master’s study, but he went on past it. By that time she was almost fit for human company. The worst of her fears were buried and the rest were tightly reined in. She could face the Master with, she hoped, a suitable degree of calm.

      Master Nikos was waiting for her in the riding court nearest the Master’s rooms. He had been training one of the young stallions in his care and was just finishing, with a lump of sugar and a pat on the neck, when Valeria came through the arch onto the sand.

      Another stallion was waiting, equipped for instruction with the heavy training headstall. His groom stood by him, holding the loops of the long soft line.

      The groom took the young stallion’s bridle and led him out. Master Nikos took charge of the older stallion. He was very old, this one, so old he looked like a glass full of light.

      Valeria bowed low. This one she did not know, and she had thought she knew every stallion in the citadel.

      “This is Oda,” the Master said. “Mount.”

      Valeria knew better than to argue. She was too curious in any case—and wary enough to pause before she mounted, to stroke the long arched nose and meet the wise dark eye. There was no threat of humiliation there. This was a test, but it was honest.

      She mounted and settled lightly in the saddle. The back under her was broad and, for all its age, still strong.

      Oda’s stride when he moved out on the circle at the Master’s request had a swoop and swing that made her laugh. Sabata moved like that, but he was young and still a bit uncertain. This stallion had been instructing riders for longer than Valeria or even Kerrec had been alive.

      The Master stood silent in the middle of the circle. This was not his lesson, then. The stallion was teaching it.

      Valeria breathed in time with those sweeping strides. She let her body flow into them, riding without rein or stirrup, legs draped softly, hands on thighs. Anger, frustration, even fear and dread of what Paulus had told her, drained away. There was only the thrust and sway of the movement, the sensation of power surging up through those broad quarters. Follow, was the lesson. Simply follow.

      She had been taught this way when she first arrived in the citadel, at night and in secret, because she was not allowed the other riders’ instruction. It was familiar, so much so that she forgot the man who