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The memory opened a pit inside my heart. There was no safe place.
“Bad fortune to be here at midnight, haunted by spirits,” said Devyn. “Best we ride on.”
Vai did not budge. “This is the mage House that was destroyed by the Wild Hunt. Crescent House, it was called.”
“To this place the Hunt came, it is true, my lord. On Hallows’ Night, they were riding with claws and teeth. Bad fortune it is, my lord, to be lingering. Please let us be moving on.” He glanced toward me as if expecting me to turn into claws and teeth, and rend him.
I hated him for fearing me. The frozen shell of the House was a grave for those trapped within, woman, man, and child. The ice had spared no one.
“I am Tara Bell’s child!” In the muffled night my voice rang like a shout. “That’s why I look like her! I’m your niece!”
He looked at Vai. “I have no niece.”
“Don’t you understand?” I cried. “Don’t you see who—?”
“Silence!” Vai’s voice snapped.
I dragged in a bitter breath, fighting a flood of anger and an ebb of despair. Of course he was right: The last thing I needed to do now was make them more suspicious by informing them that their worst fears about me were true.
Devyn clipped his horse forward.
In a softer voice Vai said, “Catherine, I’m tired of the cold, love. I’m exhausted, and I hurt. I need to know you won’t freeze to death. Please, let’s get out of here.”
The sight of the ice-caged ruins and trapped corpses had truly shaken me, but it was his effort to disguise the tremor in his voice that made me realize that will alone was carrying him. I rode out of the ghost-ridden clearing, for I knew he would not leave if I did not go.
As if our movement unleashed it, the moon began its slide westward.
Soon the road passed pasture walls built of peat. If there were fields awaiting spring planting, I did not recognize them. Everything was strange to me. My moorings had slipped the dock and I had drifted free. I was riding the road my mother and father had traveled. We had just ridden past the estate where Camjiata’s wife, the dragon dreamer Helene Condé Vahalis, had been born and raised and had died. The general had been here, too, back in the days when he was merely Captain Leonnorios Aemilius Keita.
Why had it all happened? How had the four of them met: the ambitious captain, the loyal soldier, the half-blind oracle, and the restless traveler? Was there ever a reason, a destiny, as Camjiata claimed? Or were the Romans right that the goddess Fortuna was veiled and blind and therefore capricious?
We passed stone walls and winter-seared pasture. Barking dogs gave notice of habitation. Under the brilliant light of the moon rose long houses with peaked thatching, flanked by sheds with sloped roofs. Torchlight flared ahead. As we reached the village, Vai’s magic guttered the torches one by one. The doors leading into the houses opened, and dimly seen faces peered out. Although we didn’t need light on the night of the full moon, Vai extended his right hand in a gesture meant to be dramatic, and pinched four globes of light out of the air. Devyn mumbled a prayer.
We rode down a dirt street through the center of the village. In spring the main street would be nothing but a strip of sloppy mud. There were no modern chimneys, only smoke holes, and no glass windows set in the wattled walls. To judge by the bleating of sheep, the flocks were being wintered over in the same houses the people lived in. Two thousand years ago a Roman legion pressing forward to find tin, fur, and slaves for trade had probably seen the same sights we did now.
Had my mother truly come from this barbaric place? How different Daniel must have seemed to her, with his sophisticated education and his years of travel!
Watchmen paced us through the streets, holding their blackened torches. People slipped out of their homes to follow Vai’s mage light. We halted in front of a substantial house with a high roof. An elderly man dressed in an embroidered wool gown and a calf-length sleeveless leather tunic appeared on the porch. He greeted Vai with incomprehensible words.
Devyn translated into his weirdly archaic and broken Latin. “To you, Magister, we are honored to be giving guest rights. Your magic is strong. You have captured the god’s beast and trapped her in the form of a woman. But in this village the beast cannot be staying. She bears malice toward us by wearing the face of one of our dead.”
“She is my wife,” Vai repeated. “Not a beast. We need shelter for the night. We will go on in the morning.”
“No shelter can we be giving you unless the priest pours the offerings and the god grants his blessing.”
Vai’s lips thinned. I had a feeling that he was trying to decide whether to terrify them with a frightening display of cold magic.
“It can’t hurt to go to the temple.” My teeth were beginning to chatter even with the fur blanket wrapped around me.
“Very well, love. But only because you say so.” He turned to the headman. The arrogant tilt of his chin lent curtness to his words, reminding me of when I had first met his withering disdain. “Because the hour is late and I do not engage in debate on the street, I will allow you to escort us to the temple. You personally will attend me, as befits my consequence and your hospitality. I expect a decent meal, hot drink, and fur cloaks and gloves to make up for this unwarranted insult.”
The old man was obviously unaccustomed to being spoken to in this manner, but he touched hands to his bowed head and, to my surprise, himself took the reins of Vai’s horse as would a servant. Villagers followed us in procession: women draped in long shawls, men wrapped in wool capes, children swaddled in pelts. At the outskirts of the village we passed between a row of granaries set up on stilts. Beyond the granaries a lane entered a rocky pasture. The moon’s light was so bright I could see the shape of every rock tumbled in the field, every face breathing into the frigid night.
The temple grounds were surrounded by a ditch and stockade. The procession halted in front of a plank bridge that spanned the ditch. Vai dismounted, so I did as well.
He turned to the headman. “You will accompany us.”
The man answered, and Devyn translated. “We are forbidden.”
