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He had the haughty pride magisters were famous for, the curl of lip, the spark of cold fire in the eye. He wore the fine clothes whose weave and tailoring were apparent even at thirty paces and carried a sword hammered out of cold steel in his right hand. Seeing me, he glanced over his shoulder, looking for his companions.
“That’s right,” I shouted at him. “We’ve played you for a fool. You think your cold magic is so powerful, but you’re blind. A lowborn slave wields more power than you will ever handle or know. How it must burn!”
Young men can be very predictable. If Andevai had endured such a difficult time in Four Moons House despite his ability and the benefit the mage House gained from it, then his age mates within the House, the aspiring magisters born to that status, must truly envy and despise him for what he possessed that they lacked.
With a grimace on his dark face, he spurred the horse straight at me.
I actually started to laugh, and that only made him more angry, and more blind.
The beast plunged where my cloak gave way, stumbling to its knees into the hole. He lost his seat and slid over the side, grasping desperately at the saddle. I loosed a prayer heavenward: Blessed Tanit, do not harm the innocent beast. Then I lunged forward. I whacked the magister on the head, and as his body went limp, I dragged him free, wrenching his leg out of the stirrup. Grasping the reins, I hauled the horse out of the hole and led it a few paces, but its gait was smooth. It was spooked but uninjured. I mounted just as an actual soldier burst onto the scene. The magister moaned, crying out, and I urged my fine steed forward, past the ruins and into the woods on an overgrown track. This was a cursed good horse, strong and willing.
“Go after her! There’s a reward if you bring back her thrice-cursed corpse.”
A whistle shrilled, and answering whistles rose from the wood.
I had a choice between two paths. I sent my steed down the leftward track, which soon opened into a decent trail. We went flying along past a farmstead and, not long after, a compound of a half dozen round houses fenced by a round palisade. A pair of children, standing outside, shrieked and called after me; they had brown faces, heads wrapped against the cold. A man, much lighter, appeared in the low doorway of one of the houses. He raised a hand as though to hail me; then I saw his gaze fix behind me. As I passed, he ran to grab the children.
A wagon track offered a wider route. I turned right, heading for Cold Fort. The woods fell away into cleared fields, and another lordly house rose away to the right like a dollhouse. Beyond the cultivated lands rose the ridge, with at least two lighter scratches on the slope marking paths chewed through the turf to reveal chalk soil below. Away to the right, a road intersected this track. On it, heading my way, galloped four riders. The sight struck my breath right out of me as brutally as a sword cut to my chest. I crooned to the horse, asking for more speed, more heart. He opened up stride like a warrior, and we reached the intersection before them and hit the path up the slope.
Naturally we slowed, and someone loosed a bolt at my back, but either his heart wasn’t in it or his aim was bad, for the bolt stuck, shivering, in the hillside. Three breaths later, a sting like an insect’s bite burned my right leg, and I looked down to see a bolt caught in the folds of my skirt. With a curse, I grabbed it and flung it away, but warmth trickled down my leg.
“Up! Up!” I said, willing the gelding to climb. I looked down to see the quartet meet up with the single soldier. They conferred; then a trio started up the path behind me while the other two headed onward. Did they mean to climb to Cold Fort on another track and cut me off?
But I had made my decision and chosen my path. I had lost Rory, maybe forever. I had to reach the temple and hope I could cross into the spirit world, where they could not follow. My leg was beginning to throb. At least, I thought bitterly, I had blood already drawn to open a gate onto the other side.
My horse, as befitted the mount given to a son of the House, was superior to theirs in courage and conformation. He was magnificent, a princely horse eager to show me his mettle. We reached the ridgeline having gained on our pursuers. Wind cracked over us. The land spread away below: the yew wood; a lordly house with gardens and corrals and a stockade within which a surprising number of cattle, as small as carved playthings, crowded despite the late season when normally most would have been slaughtered.
I turned my mount toward the massive earth ramparts of the old hill fort. Pillars and a roof marked a temple within the ancient walls. As I rode along the undulating ridge slope, I spotted figures atop the ramparts, signaling. Did priests live in the temple year-round?
Behind me, the trio was closing, and on the road below, the pair had dismounted and, leaving their horses, climbed on foot. Farther away, I saw a dozen riders converging in the area from which I’d come, maybe in the hamlet where the man had gathered in his children. As if called by sorcery, six horsemen appeared in the earthwork’s narrow front gap.
Fiery Shemesh! They had reached Cold Fort before me. I saw no sign of Rory.
Only one direction was left to me, a rash run down to the west where the town of Mutuatonis sprawled by the River Ouse with a hazy cap of smoke rising from its busy hearths.
“Catherine Hassi Barahal!” A man’s voice called from the soldiers waiting at the gap.
So they would lure me in with hearty cheer and false promises before they cut my throat!
“Catherine!” the man repeated, gesturing to get my attention.
Before I plunged down the slope on my final doomed run, I hesitated. I knew that voice.
“Brigid’s luck!” interposed a stentorian tenor. “I did not believe you, brother. Yet here she is, just as her cousin said she would be!”
The men at the ramparts were not wearing the livery of Four Moons House. They wore the green-jacketed uniforms of the Tarrant militia. The officer in charge was a tall, lean Celt with a thick mustache, a clean-shaven chin, and short hair stiffened into lime-whitened spikes. Four troopers flanked him, two with hair stiffened and lightened in the same manner while two kept black hair clipped tight against their heads. The sixth man seemed slighter than the others, although equally martial in his tailored military garb. He beckoned with a wave of his hand.
“Maestressa Barahal! It is you! Come on! Come in! Beatrice told us to meet you here, to bring you in to safety.”
Blessed Tanit.
For the soldier who called me in was none other than Amadou Barry, the academy student Bee was so currently infatuated with.
27
The officer was the cousin of the Prince of Tarrant. After offering me a soldier’s cloak to drape over my shoulders, he sat me down on a bench beside a brick hearth sheltered by a slate roof. There, warming his hands at the fire, he introduced himself as Marius.
“ ‘Marius’ because,” he explained with a chuckle, “I was destined to be an officer in the Tarrant militia from the day I was born. That’s what we younger sons do: train for war, go to war, die in war, or limp home to our hearths to await our next raid. Not that we do any raiding these days. Although my neighbors have some cursed plump cattle that could do with a little exercise.”
