Correus excused himself early, pleading his intent to be on the road at first light, and went to sit in the guest chamber before he acquired such a case of the jumps as would make itself plain to the king. He took all the coins from his packs and stuffed most of them into the purse at his belt, and the rest into his boot with the little sheathed dagger that was already there. There was another at his belt. The jewelry, he put on – arm rings and a silver torque with carnelian in the ends under his shirt, and two pairs of gold eardrops in his purse. The hides and cook pots would have to stay. He repacked them carefully and made a lump under his spare cloak with them on the deerskin bed, in case anyone should decide to look for his company later. And then, because there was very little else to do until two hours after midnight, he sat down and counted stones in the hearth and cracks in the wooden floor.
In an hour or so traffic in the courtyard outside ceased as the king’s house took itself away to bed, and the chieftains’ ladies and their warriors made their way to their camps in the lower courts. Gradually all murmuring died away as the lesser folk lay down to sleep among the wagons.
Correus got up and moved the withy shutter of a window just enough to see the sky. He sat back down and went over in his mind again the way from the guest chambers to the narrow gate in the north wall – past the Great Hall and the house where the king’s captains slept, which tonight by mercy had only a handful of boys and walking wounded in it; past the well and the gate into the second court where the greatest of the chieftains’ ladies had their camps. There would be a guard at that gate. And then there was only a narrow open stretch between the king’s court and the outer wall. And the outer gate had only one guard – the terrain was bad for horses there, and the gate too narrow to take a chariot. Correus thought wistfully of the ponies penned in the king’s stables on the south side of the hold. But he had known as soon as he had seen Dinas Tomen that he couldn’t get them out again. He and Ygerna would go back to the Roman zone on foot or not at all.
When the moon was down and Dinas Tomen was as dark as the waters of the Styx he finally slipped the guest chamber door closed behind him and glided like a shadow across the upper court. Packs and ponies were abandoned. He had a sword and a dagger and precious little else – the hidden gold would buy him no favors from Bendigeid’s men.
There was a narrow passage, darker than the night, between the warriors’ house and a small stone smokehouse, and Correus slipped into it, praying that no sleeper in the upper court had allowed his hound to roam loose in the night. In a moment, there was a whisper like a soft murmur of the wind, and something brushed against his arm.
“Ready?” he whispered back. “Good girl.”
She was bundled in a dark cloak, and he could barely see her, only a black shape beside his. He took her hand. “Was there trouble?”
“No, I put something in the beer. My women only. I couldn’t get at the others.” She had never made that potion before. If she hadn’t added too much, it wouldn’t kill them, she thought.
“Then come on.”
They went quickly around the side of the smokehouse, and he jerked her back. There was someone coming by the well. Her hand tightened on his. They flattened themselves against the smokehouse wall. The man had a torch in his hand, and he was almost running.
“Keep still,” Correus hissed, and then he caught his breath. It was Llywarch, and his face was the face of a man who has solved a puzzle. Correus heard Ygerna’s voice, two years past, asking him if he were a demon, that not even Druids could grow fingers back, and suddenly he knew where Llywarch had seen his face before. He had seen it on Flavius in Gruffyd’s camp, and now he had remembered. The thought was across his mind and gone in a second, but he knew it for truth as he saw Llywarch running, running from wherever he had gone to think things out, to warn the king that Rhys the trader had a Roman’s face.
There was no time to think about it. Correus caught him with his fist in the pit of the stomach as Llywarch came even with the smokehouse. Llywarch doubled over, and his torch hit the ground. As they grappled with each other, the light went out. Ygerna had rolled it in the dirt and the end of her cloak.
Correus fought frantically, trying to get his knife from its sheath. It would be only seconds before Llywarch got his breath back; even if Correus could kill him a second later, one scream would be all that was needed to bring the whole of Dinas Tomen down on them. There was a guard in the gate to the lower court not fifty feet past the well, and another in the north wall a hundred yards beyond it the other way. He got his hands around Llywarch’s throat, but the older man’s hands were on his wrists and he was strong. Correus couldn’t take his hands away long enough to reach for his knife. He wondered if Ygerna had one, and if she had, if she would use it on Llywarch. It was terrifying – fighting in the dark to kill a man with his bare hands, a man who had only to scream to win. Llywarch wrenched almost away from him, and then suddenly went limp under his hands. Correus could hear Ygerna moving about behind him, and he looked around, dazed, for the unseen hand that had helped him. A soft birdcall whistled from the darkness ahead of them, and his hand felt blood on Llywarch’s back. He probed carefully and touched the shaft of an arrow. Something out there had the night-sight.
He took Llywarch by the shoulders and pulled him into the passage between the warriors’ house and the smokehouse, bumping into Ygerna as he stumbled out again over the body.
“Correus? Are you all right? I couldn’t tell which of you was which in the dark,” she whispered.
“Yes. Run!”
She tossed the doused torch next to Llywarch between the buildings and followed Correus across the last open space to the shadow of the well. He had his knife out now.
“All right. Go!”
Ygerna slipped up to the gate to make some talk with the guard until Correus could come around behind him. She had barely had time to reach the gate when there was another whistle and a frantic whisper. “Correus!”
When he got to the gate she was standing over the body, and Correus, whose own night-sight was growing better, looked for the whistler. A small form crouched on the rampart top.
“He’s dead!” Ygerna’s whisper was frightened now as Correus unbarred the narrow gate and pushed her through it. Even more terrifying than killing a man with her own hands was having something out of the blackness do it instead.
“Run,” a new voice said in her ear. “Run, Lady.”
XVI Idyll
Ygerna ran. Stumbling, with Correus’s hand in hers, they followed the little dark man who could see in the night. They had three hours at the most before the hunt would be on for them. Less, if anyone found either of the bodies before dawn. Then the Silures would be baying like wolves on their trail.
As soon as they were out of plain sight of Dinas Tomen, they slackened their pace a little. The mountainside was treacherous, steep and rocky and worn with the runoff of many snows. A good place to break an ankle – and then they could just sit down and wait for her uncle to find them.
The shadow ahead gave a faint owl hoot, and another answered from the darkness. They must be the “something” Correus had brought with him, Ygerna decided.
“Did you bring the cloth?” he whispered.
She reached inside her shirt and pulled out a torn piece of wool. “I wore it under my gown all day.”
“Good.” He pulled another piece of cloth from his own shirt and gave them to the dark shape that popped up beside them. The sidhe-man put them to one side carefully and rubbed something that smelled vile on their hands and the soles of their boots, making them lift one foot and then the other.
“Likely the king will hunt you on four feet,” the dark man said. “We will give his hounds something to worry them.” He picked up the pieces of cloth, and the owl hooted again ahead of them. “Go now.”
They followed the sound, and another small dark shape flitted along the ground before them, leading them back on their own tracks for a way and then turning shar
ply north’. Ygerna didn’t stop to wonder why north, when the governor’s army lay to the south, or what hold Correus had on the People of the Hills. She just ran where they led her until her breath was ragged and her leg muscles ached. They slowed to a complete walk at last, on an uphill track into a wood, and she caught a gasping breath and staggered on. She could hear Correus’s heavy, labored breath beside her. He was probably stronger than she was, used to twenty-mile marches in full gear; but the jaunty, swinging pace of the legions was different from headlong flight into a night full of terrors. She thought wistfully of horses, but the People of the Hills were not a horse people. And horses were hard to move silently when the countryside itself was alive and hunting them.
There were two shadows ahead of them now, and the sky was beginning to lighten a little. One of the shadows drifted away, and in a while another joined them. How much longer, she wondered, until they would have to stop, but she didn’t ask; she just walked achingly, one blistered foot in front of the other, while the sky paled around them.
Their path brightened suddenly as the sun lifted a blazing head above the mountain crests to their right. The hazel wood around them was the greenish gold of sunlight in new leaves. The wood rose up the hillside before them, while a stream bubbled away past it. One of the sidhe-men spoke softly to the other and turned back the way they had come, a silent figure in a wolf-skin kilt padding softly through last year’s leaves, until she lost sight of him in the dawn haze.
The other pointed to the hill ahead. “Beyond the scrub there, there is a cave. There will be food. Go to earth in that until we come back.”
Correus nodded wearily. “How long?”
“Until we have wrecked the trail,” the sidhe-man said, “and have seen what the king is doing.” He shrugged. “How long is long?”
“We will wait,” Correus said. He felt Ygerna sway a little on her feet and put a steadying arm around her.
She shook her head and forced herself to stand straight. “May the Goddess guard your path, Man of the Hills and kinsman of my grandmother. I will remember the debt.”
The sidhe-man touched his palm to his forehead to her and was gone. She took Correus’s hand again, and they pushed their way through the scrub at the base of the hill.
The cave smelled of foxes and was littered with bones, but someone had taken a young tree branch and swept the refuse into a corner. The air was dank, probably with seepage from whatever source fed the stream outside. It would be very close to its source, this high in the mountains. But the damp made the air cool and was not unwelcome. The day would be hot.
There was a cloth bundle just inside the door. They looked wearily at each other for a moment, weaving on their feet, and sat down with their backs to the cave wall and unwrapped the bundle. There was bread inside, flat barley cake, and some strips of dried meat, and they tore at it ravenously.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry,” Ygerna said, wiping the crumbs from her mouth. She began to yawn. “Or so sleepy. Correus, can we sleep now?”
“We’ll have to,” Correus said heavily. His arms and legs felt like lead. If they didn’t sleep, they’d never make it.
Ygerna put her cloak under her head and curled up on the cool dirt. “Where…” she said, but she was asleep before she could say more. She was wearing a man’s shirt and breeches, and she had pulled her hair back into one braid, the way the men did when they wanted it out of their way. There was a knife in her belt. With her face buried in the cloak she looked like the young warriors, just over the edge of their manhood, who were the fighting garrison left in Dinas Tomen. So young, Correus thought, unsure whether he meant Ygerna or the boys who would be out with the king’s hounds and hunting for them even now. Old enough to kill, though. He lay down beside Ygerna, with his head on his cloak, feeling as the fox must have felt, lying low in this den with a hunt on its trail.
* * *
He woke after noon and sat up to shake the sleep and muscle cramps away. Ygerna was still curled around the pillow of her cloak, and he moved quietly to let her sleep. She had two gold torques around her neck, he saw now, and gold in her ears. There were ridges under her sleeves that were probably jewelry, also. The scabbard at her belt was leather with a pierced silver casing over the tip. Like Correus, she had taken all the wealth she could wear – it had been all they could take.
He went outside to the stream and got a drink of water – carefully. The woods were still, but he wasn’t sure where they were or, more importantly, where the king’s men were. When he came back, Ygerna was awake, and he pointed the way to the stream.
“Go quickly.”
She came back, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
“Feel better?”
“I feel like a horse that’s been ridden.” She sat down stiffly.
“Me, too. That will wear off, though. Are your feet all right?”
“I’ve got blisters, I think.” She began to pull her boots off.
“Damn.” If her feet got infected, she’d be nearly crippled until they healed. Correus felt in the pouch at his belt. There was a small clay pot of salve among the coins, worth more than the money now. He pulled his shirt free of his belt and began to tear a strip off the hem. “Give me your foot.” She put it out obediently, and he smeared salve on the heel where the blisters were broken open and the skin was rubbed raw. Her feet were little and narrow, like her hands, but the soles felt tough. She might be better off barefoot, he thought, if the ground wasn’t rocky. “Leave your boots off until we have to move again,” he told her, “and let the air dry those blisters. We’ll put some bandages around them before you put the boots on again.”
“That feels better. I would never have thought to bring salve.” She stretched her feet out on her cloak to keep the dirt out of the salve. “Correus, where are we going?”
He put the salve away. “Back to Isca, but the long way. Nighthawk’s people tell me most of Bendigeid’s war band is between us and the Roman zone. By tonight they’ll all be looking for us, too. We can’t just run for it.”
“How did you get the sidhe-folk to help? They helped the king.”
“The king lied to them, and they don’t like it. Also, the Sidhe of Llanmelin owes me a life-price.”
“Why? Correus, who is Rhys, and why does my uncle let him run tame in his camp?”
He owed her that much, he thought. His spying days were over, and he was doubly marked now – for himself and for Flavius’s kinsman. “Rhys only exists when Centurion Julianus doesn’t,” he said slowly.
Ygerna looked at him. “Rhys is a spy.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I always thought you were,” Ygerna said. “Though I can see why you couldn’t say so.”
He waited for her to turn away from him. But Ygerna sat watching him thoughtfully.
“You are thinking I will hate you for that,” she said.
“Yes.”
There was a curious feel to this talk, lying low like foxes in the cave. They were bound to each other now, until they got back to Isca or were killed. It made them honest.
“Your spy saved me from poison in my food some night. I put a fair amount of value on my hide,” she said wryly. “Do you think me so ungrateful?”
“I think you’re a Silure.”
“Am I? After two years in your Eagle camps, Correus? Am I really? I have thought a lot about it, especially in Dinas Tomen.” She looked sad. “I don’t know what I am, but I don’t think it’s a Silure anymore.”
Neither fish nor fowl. How often had he felt the same way? Slave-born, patrician-adopted, fitting comfortably in neither place, at home only in the army. They sat looking at each other, the royal woman in boy’s clothes, dark hair braided back from a dirt-streaked face; the centurion of the Eagles in checkered trousers and a dirty shirt. Two sheep in wolves’ clothing, he thought suddenly, and felt like laughing. He held out both hands to her, and she came to him and leaned against his shoulder.
* * *
Nighthawk came back for them at dusk. He squatted down in the dirt and began to draw out a trail.
“The king is looking mainly in the south,” he said to Correus, “but the hunt is up this way as well. They passed by you not far from here,”
“We know,” Ygerna said. “We heard them.” Baying hounds and distant voices, moving to the north, she thought. Moving between them and the Roman lines along the Wye.
“We can get to here before sunup.” The sidhe-man made a mark in the dirt and then drew in the sun’s course to show them the direction. “It’s only a cave, like this, but best not to lair in the same hole twice.”
“Why not the houses of Ty Isaf?” Ygerna said. The sidhes were secret places; a fugitive could lie hidden there for weeks and not be found, if he wasn’t afraid of the Dark Folk.
“The Sidhe of Ty Isaf is empty,” Nighthawk said. “The king has found our arrows in Dinas Tomen, and he is hunting the People of the Hills as well as you. And he is half-blood to us. He will find what he hunts. The children of Ty Isaf are gone away because of it.” He gave Ygerna a long look. “That was for you, Lady.”
“I know,” Ygerna said. “I am sorry. We will go where you tell us.”
They followed him out into the twilight.
Nighthawk and his brothers led them in relays, and they followed unquestioningly now, sometimes by daylight but more often by darkness, doubling back so often that on cloudy nights they lost all sense of where they went. Sometimes their guides would give them landmarks to go by and then vanish for hours or even days. Then they would reappear to show them a new trail or a place to hide while the hunt swept by. The king pursued them with a tenacity born of desperation, and Nighthawk told them that Bendigeid had even called in his war band from its fighting to track them.
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