blind oracle, and the restless traveler? Was there ever a reason, a destiny, as Camjiata claimed? Or were the Romans right that the goddess Fortuna was veiled and blind and therefore capricious?
We passed stone walls and winter-seared pasture. Barking dogs gave notice of habitation. Under the brilliant light of the moon rose long houses with peaked thatching, flanked by sheds with sloped roofs. Torchlight flared ahead. As we reached the village, Vai’s magic guttered the torches one by one. The doors leading into the houses opened, and dimly seen faces peered out. Although we didn’t need light on the night of the full moon, Vai extended his right hand in a gesture meant to be dramatic, and pinched four globes of light out of the air. Devyn mumbled a prayer.
We rode down a dirt street through the center of the village. In spring the main street would be nothing but a strip of sloppy mud. There were no modern chimneys, only smoke holes, and no glass windows set in the wattled walls. To judge by the bleating of sheep, the flocks were being wintered over in the same houses the people lived in. Two thousand years ago a Roman legion pressing forward to find tin, fur, and slaves for trade had probably seen the same sights we did now.
Had my mother truly come from this barbaric place? How different Daniel must have seemed to her, with his sophisticated education and his years of travel!
Watchmen paced us through the streets, holding their blackened torches. People slipped out of their homes to follow Vai’s mage light. We halted in front of a substantial house with a high roof. An elderly man dressed in an embroidered wool gown and a calf-length sleeveless leather tunic appeared on the porch. He greeted Vai with incomprehensible words.
Devyn translated into his weirdly archaic and broken Latin. “To you, Magister, we are honored to be giving guest rights. Your magic is strong. You have captured the god’s beast and trapped her in the form of a woman. But in this village the beast cannot be staying. She bears malice toward us by wearing the face of one of our dead.”
“She is my wife,” Vai repeated. “Not a beast. We need shelter for the night. We will go on in the morning.”
“No shelter can we be giving you unless the priest pours the offerings and the god grants his blessing.”
Vai’s lips thinned. I had a feeling that he was trying to decide whether to terrify them with a frightening display of cold magic.
“It can’t hurt to go to the temple.” My teeth were beginning to chatter even with the fur blanket wrapped around me.
“Very well, love. But only because you say so.” He turned to the headman. The arrogant tilt of his chin lent curtness to his words, reminding me of when I had first met his withering disdain. “Because the hour is late and I do not engage in debate on the street, I will allow you to escort us to the temple. You personally will attend me, as befits my consequence and your hospitality. I expect a decent meal, hot drink, and fur cloaks and gloves to make up for this unwarranted insult.”
The old man was obviously unaccustomed to being spoken to in this manner, but he touched hands to his bowed head and, to my surprise, himself took the reins of Vai’s horse as would a servant. Villagers followed us in procession: women draped in long shawls, men wrapped in wool capes, children swaddled in pelts. At the outskirts of the village we passed between a row of granaries set up on stilts. Beyond the granaries a lane entered a rocky pasture. The moon’s light was so bright I could see the shape of every rock tumbled in the field, every face breathing into the frigid night.
The temple grounds were surrounded by a ditch and stockade. The procession halted in front of a plank bridge that spanned the ditch. Vai dismounted, so I did as well.
He turned to the headman. “You will accompany us.”
The man answered, and Devyn translated. “We are forbidden.”
“Then we will go alone.” Vai took the reins of the horse that carried our gear and led it over the bridge. Moonlight gleamed on the skulls of cattle set in rows at the bottom of the ditch. I touched the hilt of my sword.
“Do not draw your blade in this holy place unless you are threatened,” he said softly.
“I feel threatened.”
The stockade had no gate, rather an opening framed by two stone pillars. The pillars each had three niches, and in each niche rested a human skull. Their staring silence made my skin crawl.
“Let me sneak in ahead to make sure there’s no ambush,” I whispered.
His cold fire vanished, leaving him and the horse like ashen ghosts under the moon. I wrapped myself in shadows. Beyond the gate a path sprinkled with white stones led down by stair-steps into a hollow. I crept not into a stone building as Romans would have built nor the kind of open-air sanctuary lined with pillars in which Kena’ani worshiped.
I walked into a grove of oak trees. Oaks certainly could not flourish this far north, yet here they were, fully leafed as if with summer, their canopies meeting over my head. Between the trees rose poles from which hung lamps, each one burning a sweet-smelling oil. The smoky heat breathed like summer. Had I passed back into the spirit world?
No. For they were not living trees. They were dead trunks decorated with tin and copper foliage. Wind brushed a tinkling whisper through the metal leaves.
Beside a bricked-in hearth, a man sat on a stool. A huge bronze cauldron hung over the fire. Its polished surface glimmered in the twisting light of the flames. The face of a horned man shone in the curve of the cauldron, and it watched me as with living eyes.
The man at the fire turned. He heard me, although I could sneak as quietly as any mouse. He saw me, although I concealed myself within the shadows. I knew at once who he was. I resembled him in some ways more than I did my mother, for he was darker than his children. There was mage House blood in him.
I did not know what language he spoke, yet I understood him perfectly.
“Beast, we have not invited you to enter. Trouble us no longer, you who come to haunt us wearing my dead daughter’s face. Begone. I banish you.”
“I’m not a spirit! I’m Tara Bell’s child. You are my grandfather.”
“Tara is no longer my daughter. Her home and her family she gave up to follow the Roman goddess Bellona, the lady of war. All men she foreswore except the captain who took her oath to serve him, Captain Leon. She marched south into his service. Her child you cannot be, because the Amazon soldiers bear no children.”
“She did bear a child, because I am hers and in your heart you know I am hers!”
He raised his hands as if warding off an attack. “If you speak, the god will be hearing you!”
“Who will hear who does not already know?” I cried. Would my own grandfather reject me?
“The anger of Bold Carnonos fell upon this village. The magisters of Crescent House made offering of their magic to build an empire. So the god destroyed them.”
“He’s not a god! You just call him that because you fear his power.”
He raised the knife of sacrifice. “We do not want your poison here to call his anger back on us. Begone. Begone. Begone.”
Down the avenue of oak trees, lamps flickered and began to go out one by one. Vai appeared in a nimbus of cold fire, leading the pack horse.
“I heard you shout, love.” He tossed the reins to the ground and, drawing his sword, stepped between me and the man who refused to be my grandfather. “Holy one, you cannot possibly wish to anger a magister, and you especially do not wish to anger me. Because I promise you, no magister you have ever seen or heard tell of has done what I have done. For I have defied the hunter, and stolen his own daughter out of his very nest. Of course she has fallen in love with me and chosen to become my wife. She is no threat to you or to this village. You ought to rejoice and lay a feast to celebrate her arrival, for I assure you that everything about this woman ought to make you proud to call her your kin.”
The priest lowered the knife, his gaze fixed on Vai’s cold steel, which needed only to draw blood to cut his spirit out of his flesh and send him screaming into the spirit world. “The girl has bewitched you, Magister. The god toys with you. It will end in grief and blood. I see it in the cauldron.”
“You see your own fears,” I said hoarsely. “You know what happened to your daughter on the ice, don’t you?”
His pitiless gaze seared me. “I told her to smother the child the moment she gave birth. Do you know what
