by Kate Elliott
“Catherine!” She swept back her hood to reveal herself as Kayleigh, her hair and ears covered by a wool scarf. “I beg you, Catherine. Take me with you!” Panting, she came to a halt before me. “Andevai told me… the mansa means to take me to his bed to breed… children. Please.” She wiped her brow as if to wipe away her sorrows and fears. “Don’t make me go to him. Let me escape with you.”
22
I lowered the sword but did not sheath it. “How are you come here?”
“I followed Duvai. Last night I heard him mention to Fa which way he meant to take you. Please allow me to accompany you.”
“I don’t—”
“I have provisions, two blankets, a spade, and a length of canvas and rope.”
“I have no home and no money,” I said, but I already knew how this conversation would end. I could not send her back to suffer what I had myself fled. “I don’t even know how I am going to manage.”
“You know a place to go, away from here. I know no place except the village and the estate. I’m a hard worker. I will not burden you, if you will just allow me to walk with you and show me how to go about finding work and a bed wherever it is you mean to go. Even if it means crossing the water, like the stories say you merchant people do on your ships. And two are better than one, aren’t they?” She smiled hopefully.
I sheathed my sword and began walking. “Do you know anything about my people?”
She was as tall as I was, and her stride matched mine. “Yours are the tribe who wore purple, isn’t that right? You fought a war with the Romans. You have queens instead of princes. A girl cannot be married until she spends a night in the temple sleeping with whatever man comes calling—”
“That’s not true!”
“I’ve bitten you,” she said contritely. “I did not know.”
“No, I understand you did not know. You have nothing you need apologize for. It’s one of the lies the Romans told.”
“What are your stories, then?”
What stories belonged to a person whose entire upbringing was a lie?
“There are tears in your eyes,” said Kayleigh. “Is it a sad tale, how you came to be married to my brother? It can’t be because he’s been unkind to you, for he’d never mistreat a woman. Why did your people make such a contract with the mage Houses? Have they mage bloodlines also, hidden away?”
“It’s just the cold wind,” I lied, for she obviously did not know that Andevai had been ordered to kill me. “There is nothing to tell.” Yet to walk in silence seemed awkward. I did not want to ask her to tell the stories of her people, because she might then discuss her brother, and that subject I wished desperately to avoid. “Let me tell you the story of the great general, Hanniba’al. He crossed the mountains with his army and his elephants and took the Romans by surprise.”
Kayleigh knew the art of listening, and I enjoyed telling the tale. From one tale into another, as the old saying goes. The path unrolled beneath our strides and the afternoon passed into dusk earlier than I wished. Hallows Night and Hallows Day were ending, and with the setting sun, the Wild Hunt must fade back into the spirit world. Leaving magisters free to safely ride abroad and begin their own hunt for me.
We reached a standing stone that marked a crossroads where a well-worn path headed east through the hills. Several distant smears marked villages amid clearings. The countryside hid the river.
Kayleigh approached the stone and let precious drops of ale from her leather bottle moisten the stone’s base. She scanned the landscape. “It’s almost night. There will be a shelter on the leeside of the hill. There always is, at a crossroads stone. Should we rest while it is dark?”
“No. We’ll stop and take something to eat. The moon will rise soon. We’ll have light enough for walking. Best we go as far as we can while the weather holds.” I glanced back the way we had come, and she did, too, but we saw no sign of pursuit.
We climbed a side path down to a wattle-and-daub hut. After relieving ourselves in a solidly built latrine off to one side, we retired to the hut to eat a scant meal of bread and cheese, grateful for roof and walls. We did not light a fire although it grew dark. As soon as the moon rose, we set off again.
Kayleigh’s nerves were not, it seemed, as steady as mine. She glanced back frequently. The chalk of the path ran before and behind like a beam of moonlight, part of the scaffolding of the sky drawn here on earth.
“Did you not pass Duvai, coming after us? Did he not see you?” I asked.
She turned her head away and spat on the path. Our footsteps thudded on the path in a steady rhythm, hers falling in the gaps between mine.
“While Fa yet lives, Duvai is not head of the house, but he will be. His mother is not my mother, even if we share a father. So he does not—yet—have the right to command me to do as he wishes. No more than he has the right to command Vai now that Vai is gone to the magisters.”
“So Duvai did see you and let you pass?”
Her face was hard to read in the moonlight, but her lips pressed tight. “He did not let me pass. I did what I must. He never saw me.”
“What will happen when he returns to find you have fled?” I pressed. “Will he be blamed?”
“Why should I care if he is blamed? I won’t go back for Duvai’s sake!”
“I don’t expect you to return. But if men from your village come after and find you, they’ll find me. And if Andevai comes after and finds me, then he will find you.”
“They won’t come after me. But don’t you expect Vai to search along the toll road? Isn’t that why Duvai set you on this path instead?”
“So I hope. So Duvai told me, that the magisters would expect me to flee along the toll road or the river. It seems,” I added cautiously, “that Duvai and Andevai do not get along.”
I was not sure she would answer me. We walked some distance in silence with the wind shushing through the trees below and bending the grass and bushes that grew along slopes still visible under the moon’s light. The air tasted of winter and made my eyes hurt. My fingers, even in gloves, ached with cold.
“They did not share a mother’s womb, as Vai and I did. So there is no peace between them. That’s often how it is with people, haven’t you found?”
“I would trust my cousin with anything.”
“Would you?”
I touched the bracelet Bee had given me. “Yes. Anything.”
“Would she do the same for you?”
“Yes, she would.”
“Then you understand me. Also, you know what is said: Two bulls don’t bide quietly in the same pasture. Both Duvai and Andevai are ambitious. That makes trouble for everyone.”
“You are not ambitious? What did you hope for? I mean, before you heard about what the mansa wanted. Is there someone your elders expect you to marry?”
“There is always talk. No one in our village, but maybe some men in villages not so far away if it pleases my family and theirs. If we get permission from the mansa.”
“Do you need the mansa’s permission to marry?”
“Of course we do. The mansa’s deputies oversee the villages. There must be work for those sons and daughters of the magisters whose sorcery is too weak to harness. The seneschal and her deputies measure our third in labor and crops. Every year the newborns are brought up to be sealed into the House. Certain lads are taken away to work as grooms for the soldiers of the House. And girls…” She glanced over her shoulder, as if fearing the mansa’s soldiers might be coming up behind us on the path to take her away.
“Tell me if you get tired,” I said quietly.
“Never!”
We both laughed. This country girl was not so strange after all. We traded stories of lads and young men we had fancied. She had spoken to a soldier from the House cavalry one time, a handsome fellow with blue-black skin and a charming accent, the magicless son of a mage House based in Massilia.
“Where is that, Catherine? You seem to know such things.”
I
told her it was a port city on the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, the sea that separated Europa and Africa. I told her how the Kena’ani had plied those coasts for centuries despite the interference of the Romans.
“But the Romans built the roads and brought civilization to the north,” said Kayleigh.
“To the barbaric Celts. The refugees from the empire of Mali were already a civilized people, of course. What happened to the soldier?”
She shrugged. A village girl had to be cautious in speaking to soldiers. Bad things could happen. There was also a young man from the same village as Duvai’s mother, a day’s walk east, who was a charming fellow, one of the tawny Trinobantic Celts, a very fine fiddler with a hunter’s lineage. “He is someone I could marry,” she said, “for a young soldier in the House is usually not allowed to keep a wife, only a concubine. But Duvai’s mother resents our village because of what happened, so she will speak against any marriage between me and him.”
“What happened?”
“She left because of my father marrying my mother, as he had every right to do!”
“I might suppose a woman would be uncomfortable seeing a second wife brought in—”
“She was herself the second wife! Everyone says she was proud of her youth and beauty, and treated her elder wife with no respect at all until the poor woman lost her wits from crying so much and died. Even sweetest butter will sour when stirred by a bitter hand. When my father grew tired of her boasting and complaints, he found a more amiable wife. She took her bride price and went home. He could have stopped her, but no one wished him to, for the entire village was happy to be rid of her.”
“She left Duvai behind.”
“Boys belong with their fathers. Now she has poisoned her village against ours with her gossip and whispering.”
“Surely your hopeful suitor no longer matters, anyway, if you have left all that behind.”
She looked startled, almost missing a step; the enormity of the choice she had made was staggering. “I am rid of such troubles.”
She spat again on the path before plucking an errant strand of hair that had escaped her scarf and releasing it to the wind as if it were her past, blowing away behind us. I licked my cold-chapped lips and felt the strain of a long walk weighing down my legs. The moon had reached zenith. We had been walking at least four night hours. All told, I supposed I had been walking fourteen or more hours since dawn, although of course the daytime hours in winter were of shorter duration and the nighttime hours longer. Tiredness was making me clumsy and dull.
“Do you think we might rest?” asked Kayleigh.
“Not yet.”
With the wind rising steadily like a beast slowly curling out of slumber, we walked for at least another hour. Rounding a corner and stumping to the top of a gentle rise, we reached a crossroads stone, a squat pillar more chipped at than shaped and no taller than my head.
The wind had changed timbre and smell. It blew into our faces from the south—one might almost say out of the stone—and it might even have been said to possess the memory of warmth, something once known and mostly forgotten. This change kindled in me a strange emotion, in the way one imagines the breath of a mother on a cold, frightening night calms her restless babe. I waited until Kayleigh had poured a few offering drops at the base of the stone, and then I went forward myself and let fall the last drops from the first of the two leather bottles Duvai had given me. It was a vinegary drink, tart and bitter, but in the instant of offering, I smelled as through the stone itself a sweeter, summery scent like flowers in bloom. I blinked, wondering if the shadows of the landscape beyond the stone had altered, but after all they had not. In moonlight, I saw the path ahead of me, and the empty hills, and very, very far away and below us in elevation a tiny burr of light marking a town’s watch fire. Was it possible we might reach Lemanis, the first leg of our journey, tomorrow? Sooner than I had dared hope?
The stars lay half hidden beneath a gauze of moonlight. My eyes warmed with tears, although I did not understand why I should wish to weep.
“Ah!” said Kayleigh.
I turned at her gasp.
Riders approached us on the path, hooves and harness muffled. She grabbed my arm, wrenching me sideways, and at first I thought she was trying to pull us out of sight, so I went with the drag of her weight. Then she kicked out my legs from under me, and not expecting this assault, I crumpled as the riders closed. She threw herself on top of me as I thrashed and shoved and got my left hand free. I punched her hard enough that she grunted, and with a burst of furious terror, I heaved her off me and scrambled to my feet as the rider in front pounded up and resolved into Andevai.
His mouth set in a grim line, he drew a sword. Its cold-steel blade gleamed where moonlight kissed it. His mouth was set in a grim line. The wind died, and the air grew so cold so fast I shuddered convulsively. I fumbled at the twisted mess of my garments and belt, knocking my bundle of provisions aside as I groped for my sword’s hilt.
“Are you all right, Kayleigh?” he demanded.
She struggled up and limped over to him. “Of course. Did you have any trouble following me?”
“None at all.” He clasped one of her hands, then let her go, still looking at me as if he expected me to vanish. “You laid a bright trail.”
His companion, wearing the livery of a House servant, pulled up a length behind him, mounted and leading another horse. He was no villager.
“You betrayed me,” I said hoarsely as I grasped the hilt.
Kayleigh looked at me across the gap between us. “I bear you no ill will. It’s only that he is my brother, son of the same mother, and I would do anything for him.”
“You would go willingly to the mansa’s bed?” I cried with all the scorn I could muster. “To bear the mansa’s bastard children who may be taken away at any moment to be raised in the House and not by you?”
“If I must, and if it will aid Vai, then I will do that,” she said with no tremor in her voice.
I could not fault her loyalty.
All I could do was draw my sword.
Because I expected him to come at me on the horse, using weight and height against me, I glanced to either side, trying to gauge where the land was most rugged, where I had the most chance to bolt while the horse would have trouble following in the half-light. As if he guessed my intent, he dismounted and strode forward so quickly I scarcely managed to wrestle the bundle from my back and fling it at him. He danced aside as the bundle sailed past him to smack on the dirt. I skipped back to place the stone between me and him.
He attacked.
He thrust. I parried. He cut; I caught his blade on mine, the steel singing where it met. Twisting away, I slashed back; he ducked left out from under the blade, which sliced across his right shoulder deep enough to catch in fabric, penetrate flesh, and cut free.
With a harsh curse, he stepped back to catch his balance. I grinned, too wildly, I am sure, for in a battle for one’s life, one learns to treasure each reprieve and indeed each breath. The standing stone covered my back, but being at my back, it also limited my movement. I leaped sideways, onto the path, and he charged after me.
I was lighter and quicker and my technique was cleaner, heritage of a childhood spent training with the sword, but he was bigger and stronger, and he had reach. All he needed was reach. Cold steel in the hands of a cold mage needs only to draw blood in mortal flesh to cut spirit from body. How easily he could kill me!
Because I was left-handed, I backed around, keeping the stone to my right shoulder. While he had the grace of a man who knows how to dance, he did not have my fine-tuned control or, evidently, my ability to read in his body his next move. I made sure the stone got in his way more than it got in mine. I thrust, prodded, and slashed; he parried too easily, for I was already tired, and he had ridden while I had walked and was therefore fresher. If I ran, he would catch me. All I could do was fight for my life.
I shifted preparatory to a more desperat
e attack, but he fell back to test his right shoulder where my blade had cut. A thread of blood seeped through. I’d taken first blood, much good it would do me: Cold steel in my hand did not sever spirit from flesh with first blood. Yet because he was right-handed, the injury might give me an opening. I measured his stance for an opening.
“Look out!” shouted Kayleigh.
Blessed Tanit, I was wearying fast. The old trick caught me: I glanced toward her. His blade flashed forward. Instinct carried me; I slammed right, my shoulder meeting stone, trapping me. My blade shivered against his, my strength not enough to hold him off as he pressed forward. He halted as our hilts caught, so close I could have kissed his lips, which were slightly parted with intense concentration as he stared into my face. My trembling arms and exhausted body were about to fail me.
“Blessed Tanit,” I murmured, “accept your daughter’s spirit with love.”
His expression changed, flooding with an emotion I could not name.
“No,” he said, not to me. He jerked back, pulling his sword out from the tangle between us. Giving way. Giving up.
Somehow in the breath of his retreat, the edge of his cold steel caught under my chin and parted my skin as gently as a summer’s breeze parts the petals of a blooming rose with the merest flutter as it passes.
Such a weakness of limb and heart assailed me that I sagged against the stone.
He gasped, eyes widening with an expression I could not possibly interpret or comprehend as he leaped out of range.
Languid, I raised my right hand and with its back brushed my glove against the curve of my jaw. When I lowered the glove, a moist line glittered on the smooth leather.
“Catherine,” he cried. “Your blood!”
“Am I not falling dead quickly enough?” I cried. A spark of such fury roused me that I was determined to drive him back until I stuck him through and pierced his selfish, vain heart.