Lazaro mutters to himself, but sends one of his men to the back of the line with an older mare and a pair of worn riding boots. Adan dismounts and helps me up onto her back, then ties my horse’s reins to his own. They trot side by side. It is all I can do not to reach out and take Adan’s hand.
“Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you?” Adan says.
“I didn’t know if you were alive,” I say. “My father laid a death sentence on you before the vizier seized control, and that man Lazaro is looking for you.”
“I have more men than he,” Adan says. “And better trained. Though I do ask myself what you’re doing following him into Catalunya.”
“Sofia,” I say. “He’s bringing these horses to her uncle in Roussillon. She’s there with them.”
We ride in silence for several minutes. The air is full of the steady grate of hooves on loose stone.
“So that’s where they’ve been keeping her,” Adan says.
“You couldn’t find her?” My last memory of her, bleeding and wild-eyed, unfurls before me again.
“I’m sorry.” Adan leans over in the saddle and grips my wrist. “I tracked them as far as the Pyrenees, but I didn’t know how deep they’d gone. It isn’t friendly territory for Jews, even those with their own war bands.”
Silence laps over us again. The sleet falls steadily, but my horse’s heat steams away some of the cold.
“What will you do when you find her?” Adan asks after a time. “I don’t suppose her grandmother and brothers will usher you into her arms.”
“No,” I say. “I had only figured out the part where I lived to come this far.”
“You were always terrible at strategy.” I can hear the boyish smirk in Adan’s words.
“I’m out of practice,” I say.
“When this is done, I’m tutoring you.”
A piece of my youth flexes in my chest. Maybe it is the feel of a horse beneath me again, the way my body remembers and responds to its sway, keeps me righted. Maybe it is that I am riding closer to Sofia, and the invisible cord between us is tightening, transmitting the vibration of our hearts. Or maybe it is that my friend is at my side again, speaking to me as a man, and he has always carried some piece of me wherever he goes.
After another run-in on the road, with common thieves this time, Lazaro decides to keep Adan and his men on. Lazaro suggests the party will travel faster if they leave Miguel, Mencia, and me to find our own way while they go on to Roussillon, but Adan won’t hear it. And so we deliver the mapmaker and his wife to Organa, where we buy furs for the journey higher into the Pyrenees.
As we prepare to go, Miguel hurries to push a folded square of vellum into Adan’s hand. “A map of Roussillon,” he says. “In case you find some difficulty leaving.”
While we ride, Lazaro’s men talk of the vats of mulled wine awaiting us at Filipe’s castle, venison on spits, the sweet crackle of pine logs on the hearths in the great hall. The mountain road slopes sharply. It whips around corners and narrows so we must ride single file. On the fourth day of our trek, we wake to a fine glaze of frost stiffening our blankets and the mat of fallen leaves where we made our bed the night before. The clouds hang low and chill in a fog across the road. And then, on the twelfth day, the men at the front of the line shout that they’ve sighted the timber barricades circling Filipe’s thatch-roof fortress.
“I can’t go in,” I say to Adan under my breath. My horse jerks her head, picking up on the fear seeping from my body. “Lamia, Sofia’s brothers—”
“Hang back.” Adan reins in my horse.
We slow until the last of Adan’s men pass us. “Ride on,” Adan tells them. “I’ll catch up.”
We veer into the trees, Adan leading my horse, and wend our way deeper until we come to a dense thicket. Adan wraps me in skins and furs, pushes a knife into my hand.
“Stay here,” he says. “I’ll see what I can find and bring you word.” He hurries to his horse. Its hoofbeats disappear into the silence.
I shiver under the skins and chafe my arms for warmth. Cold burns in the fissure where Sofia’s brothers broke my leg nearly two years past. I am afraid to warm myself by walking, in case I should become lost in the woods and Adan come back to find the thicket empty. I sit and rock instead.
After a time, the pale gray light I can detect through my left eye recedes into darkness, and the very air I breathe burns like swallowing live coals. Fat snowflakes filter through the canopy of trees. Wolves keen high in the woods above me, answered by their mates somewhere deeper in the vales below. A small creature cries out, an unearthly strangled noise, almost human. I pile leaves and pine needles in a nest and burrow beneath them like an animal, hoping they will hide my scent.
“I am come for her.” I speak aloud to God, as though He might be hovering in the frozen air, sitting impassive at the edge of the thicket. Here in the vast, rough expanse of mountain range that holds my beloved in its teeth, it is easy to imagine Him a different, more savage being than the God of my childhood.
The wolves’ voices melt together in one long howl. It sounds as though the earth itself is moaning, and I shiver again as the thought of Lamia passes before me. Lamia, roving the hills below, calling up all the wild and pale-toothed things of the earth against me. The wind her skirts, churning the dead leaves to fall anew.
“I am come for her,” I repeat, and it makes me feel more human to hear the words falling back to my ear, muted by the soft snow. I curl into the leaves and try to imagine they are Sofia’s body pressed close, the backs of her knees tucked against mine, her hair soft on my face, safe.
The squeak of boots on snow starts me awake. I freeze, rigid and alert beneath the layers of leaves and animal skins. I tighten my grip on the knife.
“Ishaq?” Adan calls quietly. “Where are you?”
I push myself up. “Here.”
“Ishaq.” Adan hurries to me and crouches at my side. “Are you well?”
“Cold,” I say. My teeth knock against each other.
“I’ll build a fire,” he says. He clears an empty space on the ground and digs a trench around it. I hear him snapping branches and the
Warm, red light flares in my good eye, and I think for a moment I can even make out the shadow of Adan’s body as he moves between me and the flames. Waves of heat push the cold from my face and hands. Adan sits beside me and wraps us together in the same bearskin so we can share warmth. We wait in silence for our bodies to stop shaking.
“I saw her,” he says.
My heart jolts. “Is she… ? Have they… ?”
“They’ve married her to Henri du Ceret, one of her uncle’s knights.”
I feel as though someone has sprinkled salt on my heart. The fire pops and sizzles as snowflakes turn to vapor in its flames.
“She served our meal, but she wouldn’t speak to any of us,” Adan says.
I swallow. “And Lamia?”
“She was there, at the seat nearest the fire,” Adan says. “She seemed… I don’t know, sick, diminished. Not at all as you described her. They had her wrapped in furs, and she was coughing so hard, she could barely hold the wine cup to her lips. They say some sickness has entered her lungs.”
The shock of his words saps all the feeling from my limbs. I had imagined Lamia ever as she was, clear-eyed and cruel in her command of man and earth. I know if I were righteous, I would ask God to show mercy, true mercy, even to this, my enemy. But in truth the only feeling I can muster is relief. So she is not afoot beneath the moon, in communion with the wolves and winds. She is flesh and blood after all, and I am glad of it.
Adan clears his throat. “There’s more.”
“What more?” I ask.
“They say Sofia has two children.”
“Children?” I hear myself say, although it sounds as if someone else is speaking those words from the far side of the thicket.
“Twins,” Adan says. “A boy and a girl, a little over a year old.”
The earth moves too fast, and my body is spinning opposite its turn. I see Sofia laid out on the bed, under some other man. I shove the knife Adan gave me down to its hilt in the mossy soil.
“Ishaq.” Adan repeats the words slowly. “Over a year old.”
I force myself calm enough to figure what he means. I count the months.
