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I walked into a grove of oak trees. Oaks certainly could not flourish this far north, yet here they were, fully leafed as if with summer, their canopies meeting over my head. Between the trees rose poles from which hung lamps, each one burning a sweet-smelling oil. The smoky heat breathed like summer. Had I passed back into the spirit world?
No. For they were not living trees. They were dead trunks decorated with tin and copper foliage. Wind brushed a tinkling whisper through the metal leaves.
Beside a bricked-in hearth, a man sat on a stool. A huge bronze cauldron hung over the fire. Its polished surface glimmered in the twisting light of the flames. The face of a horned man shone in the curve of the cauldron, and it watched me as with living eyes.
The man at the fire turned. He heard me, although I could sneak as quietly as any mouse. He saw me, although I concealed myself within the shadows. I knew at once who he was. I resembled him in some ways more than I did my mother, for he was darker than his children. There was mage House blood in him.
I did not know what language he spoke, yet I understood him perfectly.
“Beast, we have not invited you to enter. Trouble us no longer, you who come to haunt us wearing my dead daughter’s face. Begone. I banish you.”
“I’m not a spirit! I’m Tara Bell’s child. You are my grandfather.”
“Tara is no longer my daughter. Her home and her family she gave up to follow the Roman goddess Bellona, the lady of war. All men she foreswore except the captain who took her oath to serve him, Captain Leon. She marched south into his service. Her child you cannot be, because the Amazon soldiers bear no children.”
“She did bear a child, because I am hers and in your heart you know I am hers!”
He raised his hands as if warding off an attack. “If you speak, the god will be hearing you!”
“Who will hear who does not already know?” I cried. Would my own grandfather reject me?
“The anger of Bold Carnonos fell upon this village. The magisters of Crescent House made offering of their magic to build an empire. So the god destroyed them.”
“He’s not a god! You just call him that because you fear his power.”
He raised the knife of sacrifice. “We do not want your poison here to call his anger back on us. Begone. Begone. Begone.”
Down the avenue of oak trees, lamps flickered and began to go out one by one. Vai appeared in a nimbus of cold fire, leading the pack horse.
“I heard you shout, love.” He tossed the reins to the ground and, drawing his sword, stepped between me and the man who refused to be my grandfather. “Holy one, you cannot possibly wish to anger a magister, and you especially do not wish to anger me. Because I promise you, no magister you have ever seen or heard tell of has done what I have done. For I have defied the hunter, and stolen his own daughter out of his very nest. Of course she has fallen in love with me and chosen to become my wife. She is no threat to you or to this village. You ought to rejoice and lay a feast to celebrate her arrival, for I assure you that everything about this woman ought to make you proud to call her your kin.”
The priest lowered the knife, his gaze fixed on Vai’s cold steel, which needed only to draw blood to cut his spirit out of his flesh and send him screaming into the spirit world. “The girl has bewitched you, Magister. The god toys with you. It will end in grief and blood. I see it in the cauldron.”
“You see your own fears,” I said hoarsely. “You know what happened to your daughter on the ice, don’t you?”
His pitiless gaze seared me. “I told her to smother the child the moment she gave birth. Do you know what she said to me?”
My heart dropped as if into the pit of my belly. I feared to know. Yet I had to know.
The old man’s malice gleamed in a face so much like mine. “She said, ‘Do you not think I did not try to rid myself of his hateful seed? Yet nothing I did would dislodge it.’ ”
“You don’t need to listen to any more of this, Catherine. We can walk out of here now.”
My feet would not shift. My grandfather’s hate pinned me to the earth. The memory of Tara’s defiance still enraged him.
“Yet after that, the shameless whore spoke of pride! She said, ‘But then I realized that it was loyalty that made the child, because I went willingly to the hunter to save the lives of the others. Loyalty will be her birthright. Do not think I will be ashamed! I will be proud! Because loyalty will be the bright light this child will bring to the world.’ ”
The glimpse into my mother’s heart stunned me.
“I told her she would come to a bad end,” he went on in a rheumy whisper. “The hunter never stops hunting. His children belong to him only. Blood binds them forever and always.”
He shut his seamed old eyes, pressing fingers onto the closed eyelids.
“I see the Hunt in the cauldron every Hallows’ Night. I saw Tara and the Phoenician, dragged down into the river. I saw a child torn from their grasp as Tara reached for her with the only hand left to her. I saw the water choke them and kill them. ”
“Enough!” snapped Vai. “I do not fear you, holy one, although I respect your age, as it is proper for the young to respect the old. You have poisoned your own well with fear and hate.”
The priest opened his eyes. Unlike Tara and Devyn he had dark eyes, and in the firelight they seemed to gleam with a golden brown almost like mine.
