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.
1 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."
Plump cattle made me think of Rory. Was he dead, or had he gotten away? Despite the crackling fire and a mug of mulled wine brought by one of the temple priests, I could not get warm. Negotiations had begun at the ramparts, where Amadou Barry stood in heated conversation with the furious cold mage whose lace, I was glad to see, was stained with dried blood. Twelve crossbowmen stood on the earthworks above, weapons trained on the mage. The angle of the gap and the outer ridge of ramparts hid the House soldiers from my view.
"Amadou will set him right," said Lord Marius, following my gaze. "There is not much a magister dares do to us in such cir-cumslances, although I dare say he might try. But we Outnumber his forces. My lads are certainly better trained and more experienced."
"He's carrying cold steel. He could kill Maester Amadou or any of you by only drawing blood." As he might already have dispatched Rory.
"I suppose he could. But would he? There's your question. A runaway bride-if that is indeed what you are-is scarcely worth angering the Prince of Tarrant, much less… Well, never mind that. The princes and the Houses have learned to cooperate when they must and leave each other alone the rest of the time. Is that the husband you're running away from?"
"No!" Heat scalded my cheeks; yet for what possible reason need I blush?
"Good fortune for you, then. He looks a singularly unattractive fellow."
The parlay broke off as the cold mage gestured angrily with a gesture so obscene I covered my mouth with a hand as I gasped. Lord Marius chuckled. Maester Amadou shrugged with a careless ease I admired and turned his back on the magister and his cold-steel blade.
As he walked back toward us, I said in a low voice, "I thought Maester Amadou was a student at the academy."
Lord Marius was a laugher. Everything seemed a joke to him. "Amadou Barry is older than he looks. I very much doubt he is what you may have thought him to be."
"Then what is he?"
"Och, lass, that's not my tale to tell, is it?"
He rose, and I did likewise, shaking out my rumpled and dirtied skirts. A priest brought another mug of warmed wine, and Amadou poured a few drops on the altar before coming over to join us. He sat. We sat. I stared sidelong at him, seeking signs of age in his face. I had thought him a year or two older than Bee and I, a polite, naive, spoiled, and privileged son of
bankers recently arrived from resettled Eko on the coast of West Africa; I had thought he and his younger twin sisters were attending the academy because it was fashionable for wealthy, well-connected families to send their young people there for an education.
"Was it even true, that story?" I blurted out before I knew I meant to speak. "About your family fleeing ghouls in Eko, and how you and your sisters were put into the water on a boat while your parents and cousins-"
Shame blooded me as his expression changed.
Of course it was true. No one could mistake that look of fractured grief.
Then he smoothed it over with the ease of practice. "Yes, it's true, but it was thirteen years ago. I was barely fourteen. My three sisters and I, and our mother's sister, were the only ones to escape that terrible day. We endured a long voyage, with a Phoenician shipmaster and crew, I should note, fine sailors all, and came to family in the north. Poor shy Fadia was shipped off to marry this beast here"-Marius laughed as at an old family joke-"leaving me and the little girls with our father's people."
"My apologies. I spoke as the alligator bites." I spoke because of my own grief and fear, I thought, but I did not say that aloud.
He smiled in a conciliating way that irritated me.
"But if you were not a student at the academy, then why were you there?" I snapped.
"If I had some other motive for being there, you will excuse me, maestressa, for not divulging that motive to you now, as it has nothing to do with our present situation. Let me just tell you that your cousin Beatrice told me you were in danger and that you would come riding up to the temple of Taranis Jupiter, Maa Ngala"-Lord of All-"on the fifteenth of December."
"How could she possibly know? I've not been in communication with her!"
"Have you not? She seemed so very sure that I assumed you had sent her a message. When she described the temple, I recognized it as Cold Fort. Thus we are here." He drank his wine, and one of the priests hurried over to fill his cup. "Do you mean to say you sent her no message?"
He had the look of a man trained to coax out secrets by the expert application of casual questions.