spoke:
The door opened. I glanced up as Camjiata shook his head. Aunt and Uncle left the room. Aunt Tilly’s face was streaked with tears. Rory stood in the attic looking ruffled and annoyed; behind him hovered a pair of young fire mages bouncing on their toes, as if they expected a fight.
“Why don’t you kill them?” Drake asked, and in the wrinkling of his brow and the softening of his tone I read pity. “It would be fair recompense for what they did to you.”
“Do you believe killing them will ease the pain or change anything,” I cried, “except to orphan the children who depend on them?”
“You’re so naive, Cat. That they know the one they cast out has returned to destroy them will make the triumph all the more sweet.” He glanced at the general.
“In due time, James,” said Camjiata, “in due time, we will march to your old home. But not today.”
“I have been patient.”
“So you have,” agreed the general so sincerely that I believed the general believed it.
Drake dusted his fingers together, tugging on the gloves that always concealed his hands, then turned and walked out. The general closed the door.
“This is where I sleep. You can rest here.”
He set me on a bed, and I lay down because I hadn’t the strength to stand.
Rory sat beside me and began rubbing my hands. A sort of blindness and deafness smothered me. I was a wounded animal panting in the shadows, too weak to lick my injuries.
Camjiata’s voice rumbled softly. Rory replied. They conversed in a friendly manner as Rory’s thumbs stroked back and forth along my palms until the tension eased from my hands. I surrendered to the waters of sleep, for it was better to drown than to suffer with the bloody scar that had been reopened.
Hungry wolves fed at my entrails. I ran from the Wild Hunt, but it was gaining, gaining, and my sire caught me in his icy claws. My severed head rolled down stone steps, bumping like a rubber ball used in batey. It tumbled off a cliff and plummeted into the Great Smoke. Leviathan purred.
Purred?
I woke in a dark chamber. Rory was stretched out beside me, snoring in that snuffling way he had. We were both still fully clothed. My sword, basket, and satchel rested at the foot of the bed. At the table Camjiata sat reading through a stack of dispatches by the light of an oil lamp. The light shed gold on his face, but his eyes were pools of darkness.
I sat up.
Without looking up from his reading, he spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb Rory. “There is ale and bread on the side table. A basin, if you want to wash.”
I slid off the bed. Rory did not stir, but something in his changed breathing made me think he had woken, as wild animals do at the least movement, but was pretending to be asleep to give us privacy. At the side table I washed my face in the basin, then sat opposite the general.
“Don’t you sleep?” I asked.
“Cursed little. I concentrate best on dispatches at night, when no one disturbs me. A nap or two during the day suffices. How fare you, Cat?”
“Did you expect me to embrace them?”
“I thought it best to get the meeting out of the way. I can’t say I expected your anger. Beatrice did not confide the full particulars to me.”
“So you found a way to discover the full particulars by surprising me with the meeting.”
He looked up with a wry smile. “Is that what you think of me, Cat?”
I could not fathom how I could like him, yet I did. “You want me to kill Drake. But how can I trust you? You betrayed me.”
He glanced toward the door and nudged my foot under the table to signal me that people waited outside. “I did not betray you. You walked into Taino country of your own free will.”
“That you can say that with a straight face and such sincerity is almost admirable! Everything I did was encouraged and machinated by you.”
He smiled. “I’ve got some sack. It’s an Iberian wine from the Sherez region near Gadir.”
I felt the presence of a trap, a danger I wasn’t aware of. Yet with the fall of night my sword had bloomed, even if to his eyes it still looked like a cane. The locket warmed my skin. My parents walked with me, so I nodded.
He fetched a bottle and two glasses. He poured, sipped from the glass as if to mock me for thinking he might mean to poison me, and handed it to me before pouring for himself. I shifted the glass to swirl the wine, then tasted. The liquor had a dark brown color and a strong, sweet taste that I did not like as much as rum’s.
“I wish you hadn’t given my father’s journals to the family. I’ll never get them back now.”
He pushed aside the pile of dispatches. “If you go to Gadir, you can sue in court for
My mouth had gone so dry that my voice emerged hoarse. “Daniel and Tara were married. That makes him my father.”
“Yes. According to the law, the husband of a woman is the father of her children and thus has legal rights of guardianship over them. Whom was Tara protecting?”
I glared at him. “Tara was protecting
“I find it odd she would have believed that by dying she would protect you.”
“She knew Daniel would protect me. I hope you don’t find that odd.”
“Indeed, I do not, for Daniel was exactly the sort of man who could raise another man’s child as if it were his own and never love it less for all of that.”
How he had me then! For I was seized by both overwhelming grief and passionate curiosity.
“What do you mean? What sort of man was he?”
He leaned closer, voice dropping to a murmur. “Ah, Cat, he was a better man than I am.”
I sat back. “Are you mocking me?”
“No, I am not.” I knew he meant it, although I could not have said why. “I am mocking myself. I have asked myself a thousand times since that day why she did not confide in me.”
“The Amazon’s oath she swore condemned her to death for becoming pregnant.”
“She could have told me the truth. I would have found a way. But she felt only Daniel could rescue her, as if Tara had ever needed rescuing from anything except that hells-ridden, pestilent village she was born in. That must be why she hid the pregnancy for so long, waiting for Daniel to come. Or perhaps she hoped that drill, or a battle, would cause her to miscarry and rid her of a thing she did not want.”
“Do you know, General, I start to begin to like you again, and then you say something like that. My mother and father loved me.”
“I do not dispute that they loved you. I’ve read his journals. There’s a passage I recall in particular. ‘Is some other man’s bastard worth this to you?’ So your Uncle Jonatan demanded of his brother Daniel. And Daniel writes, ‘What happened on the ice does not matter. The child will be my child. I have promised Tara that, and even if I had not, it would make no difference, for my little cat is my sweet daughter, the delight of my life.’ ”
He examined me where I sat just outside the spill of light. “Why, Cat—are you crying?”
I wiped a tear from my cheek with the back of a hand. “There’s no shame in grief. I lost my parents when I was six. I lost the love I would have had from them all the years from then to now. Think of what they lost! They lost the years they would have had to watch me grow up, to welcome more children, to treasure each other.”
They were with me still, but it wasn’t the same as if they were sitting across from me at a table in an attic room in a market town in the midst of a war.
“What happened on the ice?” he asked. “There is no journal for the crucial months, the ones during which you must have been conceived. It’s missing, leaving only the mystery of you.”
“The secret belongs to those who remain silent.”
“A phrase I have heard before, from the lips of your husband. Think of this, Cat. If your aunt and uncle had not handed you over to the cold mages, you would never have married him. Destiny is a sharp goad. Never think otherwise.”
