“Your brother booked passage for you all the way to Crane Marsh Works,” the carter added, with a curious glance at me, as if wondering why I hadn’t known. “Last night.”
“I went to my bed early,” I said, “for I was exhausted after our harrowing encounter with the brigands.”
“How many were there?” asked Big Leon.
“I was hiding my eyes,” I said, perhaps too glibly, for the comment earned me a sharp, assessing look. Big Leon then hopped down from the moving wagon and fell back to walk at the rear beside Rory, musket under his right arm while he tamped tobacco into a pipe.
“Never mind him,” said Little Leon. “You know how some folk are.”
“He walks like a soldier.”
“Him? Why, I soldiered in my youth, and you’d not guessed it, had you?”
“What, in the Iberian wars? Him, too?”
“Him, too, but we don’t talk about that. We don’t dwell on old grievances here, lass, for you know how kin might have got mixed up on opposite sides of that war. Why, I’m the son of a Atrebates mother and a Trinobantic father, a mixed marriage if there ever was one, for you know the Atrebates Celts sided with the Roman invaders while the Trinobantes Celts fought against them.”
“The Roman invasion?” I laughed. “That ended two thousand years ago, not thirteen years ago like the Iberian war.”
“Yet folk recall them just the same, whether it were Caesar or Camjiata. Hard to say who might have fought on which side, eh? So tell me about Adurnam. I hear there’s a temple there dedicated to Ma Bellona, the Mother of War, She of the bloody hand, that’s so big a thousand men can stand in the forecourt without touching one shoulder to another. Is that true?”
Behind, someone began coughing convulsively, and I whipped around to see Rory with the lit pipe in hand, doubled over, hacking. Big Leon calmly removed the pipe from Rory’s fingers and began smoking as he walked; after a bit, wiping his eyes and starting to laugh, Rory loped after.
“Yes, it’s true,” I said, turning back. “I’ve seen such an assembly with my own eyes.”
Traveling by wagon was not fast but it was steady, and both Little Leon and I liked to tell, and to hear, tales. By the afternoon of the second day, we read the signs that meant we were approaching a blast furnace and mine. The land began to fold and rise; the woods—mostly elm, oak, lime, and alder—were heavily coppiced. Charcoal stacks or their blackened remains dotted the surroundings. Smoke smeared the blue sky, and gradually a sound could be discerned, faint at first and then rising into a din matched by a miasma of fumes that made my eyes water and my nostrils prickle. A pond made by damming streams spread silvery-blue waters alongside pits and mounds of dirt and heaps of slag. The huge stone edifice of the furnace spewed smoke that covered half the sky as we approached. I covered my mouth and nose with a kerchief, eyes streaming. Rory started to cough. Both Leons tied kerchiefs over their faces.
Two young men came running.
“Here you are come, Leon! After that storm blew off the snow, we put bets on what day you’d arrive. Old Jo won! Who are these folks?”
No snow or ice remained where the furnace baked earth and air. Men pushed wheelbarrows of raw ore over a bridge of planks and dumped it into the furnace’s fiery maw. What else transpired I could not discern, because the area below was roofed with timber. A bellows wheezed. Water splashed from a wheel and rolled along a wooden sluice.
We drove past and found ourselves in a tiny hamlet consisting of a barracks, a byre, and a temple to Komo Vulcanus, He whose knowledge is hidden, whose portals were wreathed with evergreen and myrtle necklaces from the year’s end celebration. Big Leon left us without a word, entering the temple precincts as several men came to the threshold to usher him in.
Set apart from the other buildings, a pretty cottage stood backed up against an uncut copse of yew. Raised on bricks and rimmed with a porch on the side facing the furnace, the main building had no chimney at all, but it was attached via a covered paved walkway to a brick building in back whose chimney produced a healthy trail of white smoke. A man stood on the porch watching over the valley.
“Who is that up there?” I asked, not sure why my pulse began to race.
“Eh, the cold mage,” said the carter, surprised I had to ask. “Falling Star House sends a young magister out each winter when the furnace is fired up. To keep a watch.”
“To keep a watch? That sounds ominous.”
He grunted. “Och, I did not mean it so. The Houses need iron, too.”
“Don’t they forge cold steel?”
He glanced sidelong at me. “What would a lass like you know of such stories? Anyhow, the mansa of Falling Star House is a responsible man. That young fellow there will keep a watch over the valley, and if there is a fire—for you can be sure fire is the worst danger to them who work the furnace—he can put it out. Might be you could sleep in the magister’s kitchens. I can have a lad sent up to ask.”
“My thanks,” I said, scanning the sky. My eyes felt gritty, and I blinked away tears. “We’ve an hour’s light left in the day. We’ll keep walking.”
He wished us well and did not argue. Even here in wild Anderida, there were few places you might walk for an hour without coming upon a hamlet or a village where a bed might be begged and a supper paid for with copper coins. The lads insisted we take a swallow of ale before we left. Rory charmed them into opening one of the barrels right away, and I plied my most polite brusque smile, and sooner rather than later we ended up walking south on a spur of the Roman road, toward Hawkwood Furnace. Rory carried a tiny gourd filled with salted fish along with the bundle of travelers’ food Emilia had given him. In exchange for his services, I presumed.
“We might as well eat the fish now,” he said, “for I’m hungry and we’ve not eaten anything more than that stinking cheese and dry bread this morning.”
They were very strong, and the tiny bones satisfyingly crunchy. I saw him lick his fingers, each one, after savoring the salty morsels, and so I did the same.
“We’ll smell of fish forever,” I said.
“That would be nice.”
We strode along companionably into the dregs of the afternoon. At times we chattered about inconsequential things; at times we remained in charitable silence, not needing to talk.
In the way of those whom Lady Fortune favors—not that I would dream of asking for favors from a Roman goddess—we came upon a farmstead just as dusk lowered its mantle. The folk who lived there were of old Atrebates stock, black of hair, pale of skin, and short of stature. They greeted us kindly and did not remark on our height more than five or six times over the course of a country meal of millet porridge and boiled mutton. They refused to accept any coin, it going against the custom of hospitality, so I gave them stories instead. The great tales whose warp and weft weave history fell no more strangely into their ears than the ordinary goings-on in Adurnam, which lay only a few days’ walk away but which they had never heard of. We sat up late by a smoky fire in a hearth backed with an iron plate, and they listened, in their way, as intently as the djeli Lucia Kante—whatever she had been, ghost or spirit—had in hers.
In the chill mist of winter dawn, they set us on our way with a quarter of precious cheese and the last loaf of yesterday’s bread.
Some hours later, at the big furnace beside the village of Hawkwood, we turned west into the southern reaches of Anderida. The tracks were easy to follow. Often, we could mark our goal by the columns of a temple standing atop a distant hill. Every prominent hilltop had its temple enclosure or stone pillar, however humble. I did not mind walking. Stagecoaches and toll roads were too easy to watch. The weather held as we made our way from one furnace to the next, past the scars left by abandoned mines and alongside empty pastures that in spring would greet starving cattle with fresh shoots. Out here, no blizzard had struck; no snow had come down at all in the last six weeks, we were informed. The weather had held mild.
On the next night we were met wit
h pitchforks and hostility and only grudgingly allowed to sleep above a farmstead byre, with the snuffling and snorts of the livestock as our lullaby. But on the night after, we—guests! utter strangers! how exciting!—entertained a hamlet so full of fellowship that drums and fiddles were brought out for a sweaty evening of dancing. I had to warn Rory off a smitten lass, no more than fifteen, whose ardor was innocent and therefore dangerous to her and especially to us if he mistook her glowing infatuation for worldly experience. Many ales later, when one man put a hand on me in a place it was not wanted, Rory turned on the fellow with a look so like a snarl it was as if I could see behind the appearance of a man to the animal he was in the spirit world. And though my unwanted suitor had served ten years in the warband of one of the cousins of the Prince of Tarrant, who lived hereabouts, the former soldier backed up so fast that he stumbled over a bench and fell flat on his ass to the general delight of the assembly.
“I could have handled him easily enough,” I objected the next morning when we had set off again. Although the weather remained fair, my stomach felt sour and the skin around my eyes tight as a headache settled in.
“I do not doubt it.” He squinted his eyes against the rising sun and rubbed his face with the back of a hand. “But he made me angry. It was like he’d clawed me.”
“Yes, that’s just how our generous hosts would have felt toward you if you’d gone one step further with that sweet-faced lass.”
He frowned. We’d started out sluggishly, still muzzy from last night’s celebration, but I picked up the pace, and we walked for a long while in silence. The weather remained fair, if cold, but as long as we were not drenched by sleet or drowned in snow, the cold actually made it easier to walk because the ground remained firm. If my nose shone perpetually red from cold, that was a small price to pay for solid footing.
Early on, we glimpsed men in the distance, felling trees; otherwise we might have been alone in the wide world but for the quiet hamlets and farmsteads with their chimneys breathing smoke. Folk did tend to bide inside at this time of year, when the days ran short. Even dogs did not bark for long at us; as soon as we came close enough for them to clearly smell Rory, they tended to slink away with tails tucked.
We paused to take a bite to eat when the sun reached its highest point.
“We should make Mutuatonis by nightfall.” I sat on a stone field wall, feet dangling.
He leaned beside me. He wore his long dark hair in a single braid, like a woman, for these days men cropped their hair short. Perhaps it had been otherwise in other times and other places, but I had never seen a man wear his hair as long as my own was. Yet none of his admirers seemed to count it against him.
“Can you see that prominence there?” I pointed to the southwest, to a hill bulging higher than the rolling land around it. “That should be Cold Fort, if my memory of maps is correct. When we get a bit closer, we’ll know for sure. There’s a temple atop it, within the old earth ramparts. In ancient days it was a fort, maybe a barbarian prince’s royal seat.”
He wasn’t looking toward the distant hill.
“What place is that?” He indicated a manor house far to the south of us, half screened by a row of poplars. “I smell meat cooking.”
“A lord’s estate. Not a mage House, as you can see by the arrangement of chimneys.”
“Every building must have fires against the winter cold, mustn’t they?”
“Cold mages kill fire. They heat their homes in the Roman way. Furnaces on the outside heat air that flows inside below a raised floor.”
“What lord lives in that fine manor?” He wrinkled his nose. “Can we go there to beg for our supper?”
We were too far away for me to smell anything. “One of the cousins of the Prince of Tarrant, I suppose. He’d have no reason to show hospitality to the likes of us. I’m getting cold.”
I hopped down and we set out again.
“From Mutuatonis we have a choice whether to follow the old Roman road west to where it meets the toll road. Then we would turn south and pass through Newfield before reaching Adurnam. But if Four Moons House still has seekers and soldiers out looking, it will be easier to find us on the toll road. Otherwise, we can cut across the chalk hills and stay in the countryside.”
“They will expect you to return to Adurnam?”
“They must assume I will try to reach the Barahals. Although why I would want to see them ever again after they betrayed me…” It seemed my life had turned into an unending parade of betrayals, and while I could comprehend what had led someone like Kayleigh to play the part she had, it was awfully hard to find forgiveness in my heart for all those so willing to sacrifice me.
“Why go to Adurnam? We could leave the Deathlands. Go home.”
“It is your home, maybe. It isn’t mine. I don’t understand the first thing about it. What would have happened to me if Andevai had not pulled me back within the wards when that… tide… swept through? Would I have died?”
“You would have changed. Maybe that is like what you call death here. You would have become something other than what you are now.”
“What am I?” I murmured. The words made me dizzy. “Rory, do you know our father?”
“I never met him. He is not a personage you meet.”
“He must have met your mother, and my mother. In order to sire children. If it’s true we were both sired by him, he would have had to have been a cat in one form… a man in another…. You must know something more about him.”
“No. Except that one thing my mother said.”
“That he was a tomcat.”
“That he was a tomcat. And not the sort of personage you go hunting for. If he wants you, he’ll call you to him.”
“That’s really all you know? Aren’t you curious to know more?”
“No. Should I be?”
“Do I wear a spirit mantle?”
He narrowed his eyes to look at me, then closed one eye to peer at me, opened it and closed the other, and looked, then opened it and, with both eyes on my face, made a gesture of defeat. “I can smell it, but I see only your human flesh.”
Before I could reply, he lifted his chin, tilted his head, blinked, and brought me to a halt with a hand on my arm. “Listen.” One moment he had been a relaxed and genial companion; now he was a predator alert to danger. “Horses and men behind us. I smell iron and cold steel.”
I did not for one instant doubt him, although I could not sense anything amiss. The sky was flawless, its blue made brilliant by the clarity of the winter air. A breeze had been blowing out of the south all morning, just enough to set the tops of bushes swaying and to send fluttering kisses of movement across fields of uncut grass. Beyond the open ground rose yew woods, screened at their edge with bare-branched sapling beech and straggling bushes. Not more than a mile away rose the ridge where the ancient Celts had built Cold Fort and the Romans later raised a temple to claim the stronghold for their own gods.
“It’s best if we leave the path,” I said hoarsely.
The wind died as the words left my lips. Died was not the right word. It was as if a vast bellows had been turned inside out and sucked the wind back into the lofty caverns where the tempest is born. The temperature dropped from cold to frigid; my lips tasted the fall as though I pressed ice to my mouth.
“There’s a cold mage with them,” I said, barely able to voice the words because I could not find enough heat in my lungs. “They’re tracking us.”
I saw no sign of pursuit. They might not yet have come into view. But strangely, although the wind had utterly failed, an odd motion drew ripples across the clearing behind us.
Something was wrong with the light on the grass.
In Southbridge, Andevai had woven an illusion.
“They’re in the field,” I gasped, heart racing so hard I heard its hammering as hooves thudding on the ground. “Magic conceals them.”
I started to bolt, blindly, down the path, but Rory tugged me to a halt. “Is ther
e a crossroads?”
“I don’t know.” I was becoming frantic. They would kill me if they caught me. To force its prey into a panic is exactly what the predator desires. I had to think. “The ancient forts are built where lines of power intersect. Cold Fort lies on the highest point at the southwesternmost sweep of the ridge.”
Perhaps our stillness made our pursuers bold. Or perhaps the magister riding with them wasn’t very strong or simply became tired of holding the illusion, now that we were so close. From the field behind us, a bolt came sailing over our heads. Suddenly I saw seven horsemen pounding toward us, six in soldier’s livery carrying crossbows, with sheathed cavalry swords dangling along their flanks.
Rory said, “Into the trees. Now.” He pushed me.
Terror grew wings on my back, and I ran, wishing I was an eru with wings that might fly me into the safety of the spirit world, if you could call that place safe.
I heard a man shout, “I knew that jo-ba was lying. He’s in league with her.”
I heard the hammer release, the sing of a bolt.
A sharp sudden scream of warning.
As I reached the edge of the underbrush, I cast a look over my shoulder to see a saber-toothed cat hurtling in among the horsemen, muscles bunching as it sprang to topple the lead horseman from the saddle. Confusion reigned as the horses bucked and sidestepped, trying to get their heads out from under the reins so they could flee the deadly beast’s massive claws. Two horsemen had pulled out of the fray and were racing toward me. Branches scraped my arms as I shoved through the tangle of bushes. The fabric of my cloaks caught, dragging me to a halt, and I twisted, yanking at the cloth to free myself. Branches snapped as a rider drove his mount into the undergrowth. I plunged farther in, but once beyond the leafless fringe of deciduous trees, I entered the yew forest whose dense canopy sheltered no concealing undergrowth.
I spun as the soldier broke out of the bushes, crossbow raised as he sighted in the gloom. A bolt hissed past me; he dropped the crossbow on its leash as I untied my outer cloak. Closing, he drew his sword. I swept the cloak open and flung it over the head of his mount. Ducking to my right, I threw myself behind a tree trunk. He grappled with the cloak, cursing as the horse shook itself into a halt under a low-lying tree limb. His head slammed hard into the branch, but I was already running. My riding habit was cut for practicality, not fashion; the Barahals took their riding seriously. The fabric did not hinder me as I dashed deeper into the woods. The trees had a brooding majesty, but all I could truly discern were the possibilities these gnarled boles offered for dodging armed riders. Another was gaining on me. This young man had a fashionable coat rather than a soldier’s kit. He had a sword, and he rode well, and by the way he shouted a command over his shoulder to a soldier spurring his horse to follow, I guessed he must be the magister who had woven the illusion.