Song Of Unmaking. Caitlin Brennan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Ten

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

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

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

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

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

      “It’s good to know we have a future,” Andres said.

      He was the oldest of them, and he seemed least comfortable in the uniform of a First Rider. He had been a Second Rider for twenty years and would have been content to stay at that rank for another twenty. His gift was for teaching novice riders and overseeing the Called.

      He did not know how valuable he was. That was humility, Kerrec thought. Kerrec was sadly deficient in that virtue. He had not been born to it and he had shown no aptitude for it since.

      Tonight Andres was more at ease than he had been since Nikos ordered him—on pain of dismissal—to accept his new rank. The Called were his charges, and he had come to know them all well. “They are remarkable,” he said. “There’s more raw power in them than I’ve ever seen.”