The Mountain's Call. Caitlin Brennan

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      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.