'Absolutely not! Treat me nobly or suffer the consequences!'
'She likes to make threats,' Arden said, as if he had to explain for her.
'Threats that are laughable unless you have the power to carry them out,' the druid said. And indeed, the men were laughing at her! They were treating her like a fool! Even Asa, still watching from the end, was smirking.
'Send me home so we can avert a war,' Valeria tried miserably.
'The war has started, lady, with your husband's burning. The drums and pipes have been sounded all along the Highlands ever since to bear the tale. Caratacus here invited Roman miscalculation, and your husband had only two choices in the grove: to be destroyed by ambush or, failing that, to provoke wider war. Now we wait for the right moment. You're our guarantee of safety until that moment comes.'
'Then I'll run away, long before you use me in this war of yours!'
The druid smiled and gestured at the shadows of the Great Hall, larger and blacker as the coals died. 'Where would you run? How would you find your way home? Before you go back to your old world, why don't you open your eyes to this one? Then report back to the Romans. Make them understand.'
'Understand what?'
'That for the first time in your life you're free, and thus truly alive. Give thanks, because the alternative is to be like them.' He pointed.
It was then she realized that the corner shadows were not as empty as she'd assumed them to be, that four faces were watching her, and that the four were the mournful, shut-eyed, severed heads of the Romans that had dangled from a pony, now mounted on spear points and posted in the murk of the four corners of the hall.
Valeria sat up near dawn.
As Brisa said, there was no lock at her chamber. Savia was snoring gently, overcome by exhaustion, but her mistress had been too distraught to sleep. It wasn't just her own plight that was agonizing. Her capture could paralyze her husband and destroy his career. There would never be a better time to escape. She must take advantage of their arrogance.
Stealthily, she opened her door and peered out. There were a few drunk and satiated Celts passed out in the banquet hall, but none stirred when she emerged. There was no guard to issue a challenge. Did they really think her so helpless? The Roman crept along to a side door and slipped outside, pressing herself against the wood of the Great House. She regretting leaving Savia, but the slave would only slow her down.
A light rain still fell, obscuring the moon. The only glow she saw was from a watchfire at the guardhouse near the main gate. No escape that way, and no chance of taking her mare Boudicca. Yet she remembered the horses corralled in the dell below. She ran lightly across the wet mud of the courtyard between two of the round dwellings. A dog barked to no one. She scrambled up the dike that formed the lower part of the fort wall and peered over the log palisade. The night was ink. She couldn't see the bottom of the surrounding ditch or the slope of the hill beyond. Good. No one would see her, either. She hoisted herself, balanced a moment on the rough logs while fearing a cry or arrow, and then jumped, slithering down into the ditch and its puddles. Then up the other side and down the grassy hill, breathless and exultant.
No one saw her. No one called.
She was soaked, cold, and free.
XXVII
The euphoria didn't last long.
It was past noon the next day, and Valeria was bewildered, depressed, and increasingly afraid. The forest she found herself in was still and deep, without lane or trail, trunk ranked behind trunk as densely as a phalanx. All vision was blocked. All navigation was impossible. It was too drizzly to see the sun, and her sense of direction had become muddled. Just hours after her bold escape, the Roman fugitive was thoroughly lost.
At first her flight had gone well. She'd slid to the bottom of the fortress hill, grateful that the rain shrouded her movements. Dawn had been a sullen lightening of grays that neither awakened the settlement nor silhouetted her against the trees. She'd crept past farm fields of young grain, darted through an orchard, and found horses grazing in a long-grass meadow. Squirming through a brushwood fence that scratched her face and arms, she'd managed to approach a brown mare without spooking it. Valeria's soft murmurs had gotten her close enough to reach the animal's mane, and even as the horse began to sidestep, she'd hauled herself up and on, feeling precarious but bold for riding bareback. A kick got the horse moving, and a cry from a watchboy helped urge it to run. She'd closed her eyes as they neared the brushwood boundary; the horse bunched and leaped, and they were breathlessly over, weaving through a natural park of trees as the lowing bleat of a cattle horn gave first warning.
She'd feared immediate pursuit, but there'd been no sign of one.
Maybe she'd truly outrun the drunken, snoring barbarians.
The horse had slowed after a while, its flanks heaving as it blew great clouds of vapor after its dash. Clucking to urge it forward, Valeria had angled upward along the slope of a ridge until gaining the grass-and-rock crest, trying to aim south. Then fearing pursuit along so direct a course, she'd left the ridge after two miles and ridden down into a narrow valley to cross a stream and gain another ridge on the far side. She'd angle east while making for the Wall. More ridges, across a small wood and smaller clearing, up a hill and over, down into a much larger forest, picking her way through dense trees…
Now she was lost.
It wasn't simply that she didn't know the best way home through these woods. She didn't even know how to find her way out of them. They seemed endless, like that forest where Caratacus had almost captured her before the marriage. It was summer by the calendar, cold but leafy, and the green canopy was so thick and dark that her way was a labyrinth of sylvan tunnels. Valeria was fiercely hungry; her escape had been so sudden and impulsive that she'd forgotten to bring food. She was cold because she'd fled without her cloak. She'd counted on sun that wouldn't appear and a swift route she couldn't find. Worse, she was dispirited and lonely. She hadn't enough sleep since leaving the Petriana, and was operating on fear.
Hours passed, a blur of trees and bogs and blind, tiny meadows. She came finally to a small stream winding through the forest, its steel gleam reflecting leaden sky. This brook was marshy and surrounded by dead alder, the sticklike trees drowned by dark water. It was a desolate place. Following the boggy waterway might mire her horse, so she decided to cross in hopes of finding firmer ground on the other side. She'd have to hurry because the day was waning. The thought of spending a night alone in the woods terrified her.
She started down the muddy bank, no different from a dozen others, and then stopped in confusion.
There were hoof prints in the mud, filled with water.
Valeria looked around. The woods were quiet, with no sign that other humans had ever passed here. And yet there was something familiar about this crossing, that leaning trunk, this sunken log…
Her heart sank as she realized the truth. She was riding in circles.
Valeria looked at her tracks in stupefaction, then slid from her horse to cry.
There was a boulder on the bank, and she sat miserably on that, weeping in frustration and cursing herself for not having remained on the ridges. Cursing herself for having come to Britannia at all! Clodius had been right. It was a hideous country of barbarians and swamps. Her decision to follow Marcus to Britannia had been a disaster, and her decision to find him on her own was disaster compounded. Her own girlish impulsiveness had finally doomed her. Animals would pick at her bones. And now she'd fled and left behind her closest remaining friend, Savia.
She wanted to go forward but had no idea how to find Hadrian's Wall, and wanted to retreat but had no idea how to find Arden's fort again. She wanted to sleep but was too wet and cold, and wanted to eat but had no food. Her horse looked as forlorn and soaked as she felt, and she supposed that if anyone from Rome were to see her right now, they would pass by a particularly dirty, bedraggled, drowned cat of a woman, a beggar, a leper, an orphan…
'It's easy country to get lost in, isn't it?'
Her head jerked up in surprise, alarm, and sudden outrage. Caratacus! Arden had somehow crept up on her
