by Kate Elliott
By the time I had settled on a night’s stay at the County Members, with its gracious hearth and a small but respectable upstairs room for which I bespoke all four beds, I realized Rory was also his father’s son in one regard at least. In a quiet town where no excitement beckons in the depths of the winter season, he had attracted an audience of appreciative females. Cursed man! He was still smiling at the women who had trailed into the common room in his wake. Clearly he was going to be a terrible nuisance. They tittered and whispered among themselves but fortunately did not follow us up the narrow stairs. I pushed Rory into our room, untied my cloak, removed my gloves, and shoved them into his arms. Then I shut the door in his face before turning to face the innkeeper.
She chuckled, her rosy face crinkling with laugh lines. “A rare handful, that one. I know the type. Who’s the elder between you?”
The question startled me, but I am nothing if not quick to find my feet. “He is, of course, but I have always had to act the role, ever since our parents—” Here I broke off, not sure if we had decided our parents were alive or quite dead. Best to keep it as close to the truth as possible. “We have the same father but different mothers. There has been trouble.”
“Ah. Folk do say it is better to be quarreling than lonesome, but two women in the same house are like pepper and honey in the same pot.”
“Yes, indeed. I was wondering if you know where we could find clothing for him.”
“My cousin lost her eldest son just a year back. She kept his things. It’s respectable clothing that might fit him. Although it’ll be nothing as elegant as what you must be accustomed to,” she added as she looked over my fine cloak.
“We would be grateful for anything, and will pay what it is worth,” I assured her.
“Will you come downstairs so I can enter you in my ledger?”
I cast a glance at the door, a serviceable slab of wood showing the wear of years; it had been patched around the latch, as if rough handling some time in the past had broken the latch and needed repair. Like everything else, it was scrupulously clean. As the innkeeper descended the stairs, I paused to listen, but all I heard was Rory prowling in the confines of his cage.
When I reached the common room, the innkeeper was just sending one of her daughters out to the cousin for the clothes.
“I’m sure we can find something for you, too, dear,” she said as she sat at a table and opened her ledger. “A clean shift, perhaps. It will be easy enough to clean your outer clothes with a brush so you can be ready to travel in the morning, although I am not sure how you can do so having lost your conveyance. The warden is out on a complaint in the countryside. Sheep stealing, of all things! That hasn’t happened for years! He’ll be back in a day or two and you can make your report then.”
I flushed as it belatedly, and too late, occurred to me that our tale of woe would bring keener attention to our persons. All because of Roderic and his cursed nakedness!
“We can’t wait so long. We’ve got to be on our way in the morning. But a clean shift and a bath”—I sighed, not playacting at all—“would be glorious.”
“Poor thing,” she said in a kindly way that would have made my heart cringe if I had not in fact been a poor thing, running for my life even if the robbery was itself a lie. Yet was it? Hadn’t Aunt and Uncle, and Four Moons House, stolen my life from me? “It would be little enough trouble to heat up some water for you, maestra. And for the young man, too, although I must warn you I intend to keep my daughters away from him.”
“Well you should! I make no defense for his flirting ways!”
We laughed companionably as she paged through the ledger. The large bound volume had been in use for some time, as the earlier pages were yellowing and filled with names. She reached a half-finished page; the most recent date recorded, 4 November 1838, had a single line written beneath: Captain of Diarisso, with four men at arms. The Diarisso lineage had founded Four Moons House. It was not a common name.
“Are soldiers staying here?” I asked as casually as I could, looking around so as to spot them before they spotted me.
She shot me a startled glance, and she also looked toward the door, then back at me. “My dear, no. They are since gone, of course. Lord Owen doesn’t like to have House cavalry riding about roads he oversees, does he? But even a lord cannot say no to the magisters for fear they will call in a cold spell just when the fruit trees are budding and the wheat sprouting. As long as the cold mages can hold the threat of famine over the rest of us, the princes have to do what they say, do they not? Now, maestra, if you’ll just give me your names so I can record it here.”
My heart stuttered, but I calmed myself. Cautious and watchful I must become.
“Catriona,” I said, choosing the local version of my name, “and Roderic Bara—” I bit my tongue.
“Barr?” she asked, nib poised above the ledger.
“Barr,” I agreed as she carefully wrote the name two lines below, and then went back and filled in a new date: 10 December 1838.
“Not that I can complain about the custom, even from House soldiers,” she went on, “for you see how little traffic we get in this season. The mines are closed down for winter, although the forges are now lit, but none of them will travel until spring. Crops and cattle are long since taken to market. Folk do not travel this time of year. You were fortunate to escape traveling in that terrible blizzard. Those soldiers came galloping in on its wings and were forced to bide here four entire days, although they were so very well behaved I’d like to meet their mothers. You’d think a cold mage had raised such a storm, wouldn’t you?”
December tenth.
Five weeks had passed while I argued with Andevai, told stories to the djeli, and slept in the spirit world. Four Moons House could easily have reached Adurnam and taken Bee. But could they have forced her to marry Andevai without a legal ruling that I was dead? Might they try to force her to marry a different magister with a legal ruling that my marriage was fraudulent? Uncle would fight in court, although it was most likely he and the family had fled the city the night I’d been taken.
Two girls bustled past with heads ducked low, making for the stairs. One held a bundle of clothing in her arms; the other was biting her lower lip and trying not to giggle.
“Where are you going with those?” demanded the innkeeper without rising.
The girls halted, blushing. “These are for—”
“I know who they are for. And you, missy, are not taking them upstairs.”
“I’ll take them up,” I said, for anything would be better than trying to carry on a conversation with the innkeeper while that date pounded in my head. “If a bath—”
“It will have to be in the kitchen out back,” said the innkeeper, “which is where we keep our tub, but we’ve a screen to give you privacy. Nothing fancy.”
I smiled at the girls as well as I could manage and scooped up the clothes. “My thanks, maestra. Just let me know when all is ready.”
“And what don’t fit,” the innkeeper called after me, “I can tailor to measure.”
The girls giggled.
I took the steps two at a time, rapped once to give him warning before flinging open the door and charging in. The room was exceedingly narrow, more of a long corridor from door to window, with two beds lined along one wall, a side table between them, and two along the other. Decently swaddled in the cloaks, he lounged on the bed to the right of the door. Warmth drifted up from the hearths and stoves below. I dumped the clothing on the bed opposite and began shaking it out. It was quite serviceable, nothing in the height of fashion: loose trousers in the Celtic style, a town jacket with a hint of dash but well made enough to weather many years’ wearing. This was not garb for heavy labor but for town work; perhaps the deceased had helped serve drinks at the inn.
I walked to the window. “We have eleven days to reach Adurnam before the solstice,” I said, walking back to him. “If I recall Uncle’s maps correctly, it must be about one hund
red miles from Lemanis to Adurnam as the crow flies.” I returned to the window to look out over the inn yard. “We can’t afford to hire horses. I’m not sure we can walk so far in ten days.”
“You’re pacing,” he said with another yawn.
“What are we to do?”
“I say we eat, for I’m powerfully hungry.” He snagged cloth, hoisted it, and swung out his bare legs to pull on—
“You can’t wear those! Those are women’s drawers.”
“They’re soft. They feel good.” Without the least idea of modesty, he wiggled out buck naked from under the cloaks and pulled on the drawers over slim hips. “I like them.”
“You don’t wear women’s clothing.”
“Why not?”
“You’re impossible!” I separated men’s garments: drawers, stockings, trousers, shirt, waistcoat, and the jacket in a dreary brown fabric that was nothing a fine blade like Andevai would ever be caught dead in. “It seems impossible that five entire weeks have passed while I told a few stories!”
He fingered the man’s drawers. “I don’t like these. They’re not as soft.”
“The ones you have on are meant for me to wear, you disgusting beast. I’m going to turn my back, and you’re going to take off my drawers and dress properly. Five weeks! How can it happen?” I walked back to the window. Through the open gates of the inn yard, I could see a slice of the main street and the gate, empty of traffic as dusk strangled the winter day.
How should he know why time flowed differently there from here? He was a saber-toothed cat, by all that was holy! A spirit man, the villagers would have said, walking out of his beast’s body and into this one as a man. His mother was a cat, and his father was, evidently, a cat.
I tried to imagine having a saber-toothed cat as a sire, a spirit animal who had walked into this world as a man and had congress with my mother. Did I really believe it, with no evidence except Rory’s word and the cats coming to protect me?
Trembling, I leaned my head against the dense whorls of glass, feeling the cold seep through. The eru had called me “cousin.” She had seen the spirit world knit into my bones when even the mansa, despite his immense power, had not guessed. But the djeliw had known.
What had Daniel Hassi Barahal known? Was my bastard parentage why he had handed me over to the Barahals to sacrifice in Bee’s place? I considered the story Bee and I had been told. He had fallen in love with an Amazon from Camjiata’s army. They’d fled together to make a new life but had tragically drowned in the Rhenus River, leaving behind an orphaned daughter.
Was any of it true?
“Why are you crying?” Roderic’s gentle tone, with a slight scratch like the lick of a cat’s tongue, opened the vein of my grief. I began to sob. He came up behind me, suitably dressed at last, rested hands on my shoulders, and stood quietly until the river ran dry.
“You still stink,” he said as I wiped my eyes.
“Let’s go down,” I said as I turned to face him. “And… thank you.”
He touched his nose to my cheek, not quite a kiss, but the gesture heartened me. I had kin. I wasn’t alone. And furthermore, the mansa’s soldiers and seekers would be looking for a solitary woman, not one traveling with a man.
Good hot soup and thick ale followed by a hot bath, however humble the tub, and the pleasure of clean drawers and shift did much to strengthen my resolve. When I returned to the common room, I discovered Roderic seated on a bench with his long legs outstretched and a mug of ale in one hand as he embellished the tale of our altercation with brigands with the delight of a born liar. No longer was it a half dozen brigands but thirteen or twenty, hard to count in the muddy light of a cloudy dawn. Certainly his audience had swelled from the innkeeper’s infatuated daughters to an appreciative crowd, including the very Emilia we had met by the well, a ruddy-faced girl with red-gold hair.
As the tale unfolded, I realized he was retelling in altered form one of the episodes from Daniel Hassi Barahal’s journal I’d related to Lucia Kante.
“There’s been trouble with roaming bands of young men these last two years,” interposed the cousin of the innkeeper. She wore a scarf in muted tones wrapped over her gray hair. I wondered if she had come over to see how Roderic filled out her dead son’s clothes. Was she, too, grieving for what she had lost? “Lemanis’s council and Lord Owen have sent pleas in plenty to the Cantiacorum prince, but in his proclamation he blames radicals for stirring them up. He says he can do nothing until we police our own. Last year, Falling Stars House sent soldiers to sweep through the Levels, rounding up outlaws and villains. Some of our lads joined up just for the summer. We thought our boy would be home after Hallows, but he never did come back.”
“My condolences on your loss, maestra,” I said politely.
Someone in the back muttered an imprecation, and people shook their heads with a frown.
“Ach, nay, lass,” she replied, touching an amulet that hung from a cord around her neck. “He’s not passed. The House captain liked his measure and how he sat a horse, so they took him into the company. We hope for some good to come of the connection. He’s not been allowed to visit home yet, but he sent money and a steer for his sister’s wedding.”
“He said he’d send for me,” said Emilia tartly, “but I’ve not heard one word since he rode off all high and proud. I suppose he’s too good for the likes of us now.”
“The lad will do what’s right,” said the innkeeper sternly.
“Until the House soldiers run afoul of radicals and he finds himself staring down a musket held by one of his own kinsmen!”
“That’s enough, Emilia!” said an older man standing in the back. With an expression that betrayed how ill used she felt, she stepped back as he went on. “Lads will make promises to lasses. You know how it is. Drink, duel, and dally. And a bit of livestock raiding when they’re bored. I don’t suppose you lost any cattle, did you, Maester Barr?”
This lame joke forced a few chuckles.
“Only the horse,” replied Roderic. As his grin widened, I was sure he was about to say something that would annoy and embarrass me. “And a very fine and handsome horse it was, to be sure. A glossy creature, more brown than bay, and exceedingly well groomed and ornamented.”
He was laughing at me with his cursed eyes as my cheeks went up in flames, although I was sure I did not know why.
“That reminds me of a song,” said Emilia.
The women laughed; the men groaned. But the fire was blazing and the night was long, and folk will want entertainment after the tedium of a day’s work. Emilia’s song detailed the amorous adventures of a water horse who fell in love—if love was the right word—with a series of young women who passed beside the lake in which the creature dwelled and from which he emerged in the form of a good-looking young man of exactly the right sort to catch a young woman’s fancy. She had a clear voice and a pleasing timbre, and every local knew the chorus, whose euphemisms about mounting and galloping embarrassed me. We did not sing these sorts of songs in the Barahal house. Rory caught right on and sang the chorus as if born to it.
In the laughter and pounding of tables that followed, I said, to no one in particular, “I thought kelpies drowned and then devoured their victims!” The words, innocently spoken, only caused the gathered folk to laugh even harder until I am sure my face was as red as if burned.
I retreated to the bartender’s domain as Emilia—like Bee, she enjoyed being the center of attention—began another song, this one mournful and dreary and containing numerous references to summer rain, sodden flowers, and dead lovers. The bartender was a young man who smiled sympathetically as I rested against the bar. He slid a mug of ale down to me, and I sipped, savoring the brew. Two men with distinctly foreign features approached the bar and asked for a drink. They spoke, haltingly, the formal Latin of the schoolbook, hard for locals to understand here in the north where three languages had been thrown into the same pot and stirred. They were obviously not southerners like t
he woman Kehinde whom I had met with Chartji; she’d been from Massilia, and whatever other languages she might speak, she’d spoken Latin with the flawless casualness of the native speaker. So had the trolls, now that I thought about it. Only Brennan had used the local cant.
“Salvete,” I said to the men as I set down my mug. Greetings.
“Salve,” replied the elder. The younger made a gesture of greeting, cupped hand touched to chest, but said nothing and kept his gaze lowered.
“You are come a long way,” I said politely, for they both had long straight black hair not unlike my own and complexions something like Rory’s, but with features so distinctive that I wondered where on Earth they had come from. They were not from around here.
“A long way,” agreed the elder. He seemed about to say more but stopped. From his expression, I thought it likely he was stymied by the language.
“You are from Africa,” I said to encourage him.
He shook his head. “From Africa, no. From Africa, we are not.”
“From beyond the Pale? In the east?”
“This I know not, this pale. My apologies, maestra.”
The younger addressed words to the elder in a language I did not recognize. Some of the words rang familiarly, but its cadence had a music of its own, entirely new to my ears.
The elder shook his head again, then turned to receive two mugs of ale from the barkeep. With a smiling nod to seal the end of our conversation, he took himself and his young companion away. I shifted to watch their progress and caught a glimpse through the crowd of a table half hidden by the big brick hearth in the corner of the room closest to the blazing fire. A clean-shaven and rather light-skinned young man sat there, hands on the table and a cap held in slim fingers; he had Avarian eyes, slant-folded, and an oval face with broad cheekbones. After a moment I realized, with a start, that he was a woman, older than I had first thought, with black hair cropped short and an old scar on her left cheek, and in all ways dressed exactly as a man.