Flakes fell from a dingy, washed-out sky, mixing with a pelting ice that sheeted the ground and made walking from the inn to the stables treacherous. She sighed and made another turn around the room, the walls seeming to close around her. And these were walls of mud and brick. How much worse would it be when the walls were stone, thirty feet high and twelve feet thick, and guarded by warriors of Scathach’s brotherhood?
Katherine eyed Callista with kind apprehension. “Naught will happen to him in a fortnight. He’s well and out of harm’s way at Addershiels. Gray will make sure of that.”
“You don’t know David. He doesn’t just seek trouble, he hunts it down.”
“We’ll send word as soon as we reach Dunsgathaic. As soon as we speak with the sisters.”
Callista knew this was the sensible course, the proper course, but she itched to be doing. Not sitting and waiting. She’d spent her life in such patient desperation and garnered nothing by it. Only after she’d taken charge and taken off had her life truly felt her own.
“What if it’s too late? What if the sisters refuse to help? What if David refuses to answer my letter?” So much for the cider’s restorative properties. Frustration banded Callista’s shoulders and pounded in her temples.
“What if there’s nothing the sisters can offer?” Katherine answered sensibly. “Bringing him to Dunsgathaic will only raise his hopes. Could you stand by while they were dashed . . . again? It’s better this way.”
“And if it were your husband in trouble and you were stuck in the middle of a snowstorm unable to do anything but watch and wait?”
Katherine turned her eyes to the flames in the hearth, hands clenched white on her cloak. Her memories were obviously painful, though at least she had the comfort of the present. Lord Duncallan was just outside with the horses. He was safe. He was whole. He was hers.
Callista had no such comfort.
“Is it like that between you and David?” Katherine asked. “Circumstances must have changed while you were at Addershiels. You weren’t so certain when we spoke last.”
“I’m still not certain, but how can I live knowing I didn’t try? That I might have had everything and gave up? That I let the dream . . . and David . . . die.”
“James and I lost five precious years because of mistakes and misunderstandings.” Katherine shivered, though Callista wasn’t sure this time it was from cold. “If you truly believe there’s a chance for David on Dunsgathaic, I’ll help you convince James to go back for him. Five years was an eternity. I can’t imagine living a lifetime without the man I love.”
As if cued from the wings, the door banged open, and Lord Duncallan shook the snow from his coat and dusted it off his dark hair. “The horses are settled.”
“Where’s MacDonald?” Katherine asked. “Lost in a drift?”
He rubbed his hands before the fire as the old woman brought him a heaping plate of stew and a mug of frothy beer. “Attending to another guest.”
“Caught out in this weather? Poor man, he must be half frozen.”
The door opened again, MacDonald stamping off his boots. “A right blow out there, but I’d say it’ll be over by dawn. Winds are shifting from the south and the snow smells warm.”
A second man followed him in, bundled in greatcoat and muffler, his hat dusted with flakes. He carried his saddlebags over his shoulder, but it was the scabbard at his side that drew Callista’s eye before she lifted her gaze to his face. He returned her stare, his lipless mouth curling into a cold, dead smile. “I almost rode past without stopping. How fortunate I didn’t.”
The snow blanketed the uplands, glittering like crystal under a high, cold sun or shining soft and blue beneath the goddess moon, frosting the bent and broken trees, shriveling and blackening their spring leaves with cold. It drifted thick and treacherous over ditches and ponds and swirled in the cutting crystalline wind. Tracks dotted the fields and forests; hare, fox, stag, and stoat. Once or twice he scented the trail of a lynx or caught a glimpse of the cat sliding gray and brown against the monochromatic landscape. He opened his mind and lifted his head in lonely song, but there was no mental touch of minds, no brush of a signum he recognized. These were not the lynx of the Sorothos, these cats wore only one shape. They would not assist him, but they would not name him
He padded silently beneath the bowed trees and slithered through the snow-weighted bracken. Caught a squirrel and ate it, the flesh hot and steaming as he pulled it from the bones. Drank in a stream so cold the water torched his throat and sat in his stomach like a rock. The day melted into night and the moon rode high through long streamers of cloud, the snow glowing blue and white as the dark curse’s flames.
He’d glimpsed no sign of Victor Corey or his men since the snow began and the roads ended. But that didn’t mean his enemies weren’t out there. Only that the wolf proved more elusive. But he could not be the wolf forever. The draught’s potency faded as the sickness increased. First it was the cramping of his muscles and a fever’s burning heat. Then it was the jaw-clamping tremors that racked him hour after endless hour, until he curled tail to nose in the shelter of a rocky outcropping and dreamt of evil words spilling like snakes from a dying Fey-blood’s mouth, waking only when dawn kissed the snow pink.
It was then that he rejoined the road, standing on a high ridge and looking down upon the muddy snow- crusted trail as it wound its way around the edge of the loch, the water an oily pewter beneath the gray sky. Behind him, three blue-veined stones stood sentinel over the valley below. The potent magic within their borders raised a ridge of fur down his back and buzzed against his brain. A chill breeze tasted of game and the sharp aromas of pine and elder and hard fern. Nothing moved below him, either east or west, but a horse’s prints left a wide, plowed trail ending in a churned muddy patch where a man had dismounted and walked into the wood to relieve himself.
A shadow passed over the snow. He looked up to see a bird high against the clouds, an eagle by the size of it. It circled and headed west. A small flock of chittering black wheeled and rippled and wheeled again, then dove for the loch.
The wind changed direction even as a horse’s soft whicker twitched the wolf’s ears. There, half hidden by a fold in the earth and a trick of the drifting snow, was a stand of four or five trees. Enough to conceal a horse and rider, a figure wrapped in a heavy woolen cloak though it was drenched from hood to hem, snow-draggled and caked with ice.
He froze as the stranger scanned the ridgeline where he hid, her scent twisting in his chest until the pain was an agony of desire and fear, relief and danger. He dare not path to her. He dare not even move, for he scented another—faint but present, like a swirl of ice across the snow.
She lifted her face to him, the hood falling from her hair. Her features were bone-white, her mouth open on a scream of warning: “Behind you!”
David leapt to the side, his paws breaking through the crust of heavy snow, his breath steaming the air. A sword, silver and glittering as ice, swept down where his head had been an instant before.
He danced away from a second strike and a third, his mind aflame with past horrors and paralyzing fear.
“Your blood is as black and tainted as your heart, St. Leger. Did the pretty little Fey-blood whore spread her legs for you? Did you take her as man or beast . . . or both? Perhaps I’ll do the same before I drive a dagger through her heart.”
David drove the past from his mind, refused its power and its pain. He would not bow to Beskin’s slimy threats. No fetters held him fast. No hostile crowds eyed him with loathing. He would not cringe and cower. He would bury his shame and his memories in the same grave as the enforcer’s body.
St. Leger sprang for the throat. Beskin parried with a slam of his sword. The snow muffled the sounds of battle while blood spattered scarlet across the white ground.
Tied hand and foot to the horse, Callista struggled with her bonds, the ropes digging into her wrists, blood leaking down over her fingers. Luckily, her extremities had gone numb hours ago. There was no pain, only a sense of impending doom with every growl and curse blowing down off the ridge, bringing with it showers of blood- speckled snow.
A swarm of crows gathered overhead, their raucous squawks and croaks scraping against her brain like nails on a slate. They must have had the same effect on Beskin’s horse. It shifted and backed and tossed its head.
