rinsing, and a bench heaped with linen towels. Our gear had been set on a table next to a folded stack of clean clothes. By the light of cold fire Vai closed the curtains while I stared at the unexpectedly luxurious surroundings, feeling as if I’d found silk in a ragged shepherd’s hovel.
“Love, come here.”
He undressed himself and then me, pinned up my braid, and coaxed me into the tub with him. As the water warmed my numb limbs, he just held me. My thoughts had hit a wall. I could only comprehend the lap of water sloshing against the side of the tub, the steady rhythm of his breathing against my back, and the pressure of my head resting along his cheek.
In the other chamber waited a spacious curtained bed with an astounding feather quilt of exquisite construction. Dressing in the linen bed robes they had laid out for us, we snuggled together under a wool blanket on a settee. We shared a tray of honeycakes, a bowl of porridge garnished with butter, and a bottle of bold red wine. A part of me was hungry, but it all tasted like sand.
He spoke at random. “I can only figure one reason they thought me a magister the moment they saw me. Most people here have the pale skin and hair of Celtic ancestry, although some like your grandfather are more obviously mixed, likely the bastard descendants of Crescent House. To their eyes I must be a magister and thus a nobleman.”
“Why would cold mages want anything in this terrible place?” I said angrily.
His lips crimped down. He pressed a hand over mine. “Love, you’re very tired. We both need to sleep. Some things are better examined in the morning.”
“I don’t even know what day it is. We don’t even know what year it is…” Days and years were not the pain clawing up out of my bruised heart. “First Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan gave me away. Now the man who is my uncle fears me and my grandfather wishes I had been smothered at birth. My mother and father are dead. My sire is a monster. And I miss Bee. I don’t even know where she and Rory are or if they’re all right.”
Tears welled out of the pit exposed by the half-remembered whisper of my mother’s voice in my heart. She had reached for me. She had cherished me despite everything.
Vai tucked us under the bedcovers and let me cry in his arms. He said nothing, and when my tears at long last dried up, I knew there was nothing he needed to say. Any man or woman can speak words and not mean them, or mean them and not have the strength to carry them through. Instead he kissed the tears from my cheeks and sighed with weary satisfaction as he settled me comfortably against him. Strange it was how his silence brought a measure of peace to my heart. We had traveled such a long way, and even farther if one measured from the first day we had met.
“Vai?” Seeking another form of comfort, I dropped kisses along the curve of his neck.
More worn out than I had guessed, he had already fallen asleep.
25
Vai’s twitching and muttering woke me. He was slipping in and out of his village patois, obviously dreaming. He was very warm, possibly feverish, trying to throw off the blankets and quilt as if they were weights he had to free himself from.
In a rough, desperate voice he said, “Ah kill ’ee.” Then, more clearly, flat with rage, “I will kill you.”
“Vai. It’s me. It’s Catherine. I’m here with you. You’re safe. We’re safe.” I stroked his hair and face until he relaxed.
He sighed, barely awake. “My sweet Catherine. You’re safe. I’ll keep you safe.”
Between one breath and the next he dropped back into sleep.
The air was pleasantly warm, heat rising from below. I slipped on the linen dressing robe and peeked out the closed curtains to see the sun almost at zenith. Gracious Melqart! We had slept a long time. Voices murmured in the passage. I opened the door. Men were in the parlor, tidying up. When they saw me they averted their gazes.
“Salvete,” I said, speaking slowly. “May we have food? Broth and porridge to start with, and a heavier meal later. Wash water, please. Also, if you can clean our clothes and gear…”
Our things were taken away and food delivered. I ate, but Vai did not wake. He tossed and turned, shivering and then sweating. I washed him down repeatedly with cool water. Once I was able to wake him for long enough to get some broth down his throat, but he fell back asleep as in a stupor. It frightened me that he had driven himself to collapse and I hadn’t noticed. To pass the day I mended his dash jacket, ate, washed my hair, and enjoyed the comfort of a furnished and heated domicile, although I kept a chair shoved under the door latch as a precaution.
Without his cold fire to light the evening, I crawled back into bed at dusk.
What woke me I did not at first know, only that I came awake groping for my sword. The hilt shivered in my hand as I drew it out of the spirit world. Vai was sprawled across half the bed, dead asleep but breathing comfortably. The door’s latch jigged down, and the door bumped against the chair. Veiled in shadow, I padded to the door.
A male voice muttered to his companions in words I understood well enough to get the gist: The mage was ill, the black-haired beast was alone and trapped in the body of a woman, so the cursed magister could be slaughtered like the pig all mages were and his possessions shared among men bold enough to take action.
A hand groped through the crack where the door gapped open, seeking to shove away the chair. I stabbed, pinning the hand to the wood.
“I never sleep. After I kill you, I’ll paint my face with your blood and come after the rest.”
I pulled the blade out.
Whimpering in fear, the men stumbled out the front door. I grabbed the linen dressing robe, tied it around myself, and went after them. By the time I reached the open door, my attackers had vanished into the night. A lamp carried by a single person approached across the snow. With sword raised, I waited. A middle-aged man halted at the bottom of the stairs. His lime-whitened, spiky hair glittered with snowflakes. In his ears shone the gold earrings of a djeli. He spoke with an educated accent as he measured me with a tale-teller’s curiosity and an icing of fear.
“My apologies if the magister was disturbed. I heard too late that ruffians were up to mischief. They will be punished.” There drifted from the village a shout, followed by a scream. “Do you wish to kill them yourself?”
Anger made it easy for me to strike. “No. Give them a year’s punishment at hard labor so they live to tell the tale of how no man can attack a magister. How are we to sleep, knowing the hospitality we were offered has been violated?”
“It is our shame that the magister was insulted. No doubt he keeps one such as you as protection.”
“One such as me? What do you mean?”
He hesitated, looking as if he were trying to decide whether it would be better to answer or to plunge his head into a cauldron of boiling oil. “I mean no offense. Your hair and eyes stamp you as being born with the mark of the Hunt. Such children are known to be unseemly wild and ungovernable, lustful and violent.”
“Are there many like me here in the north?” I demanded, much struck by this revelation. Was my sire tomcatting about every Hallows’ Night? Or was the wolf we had seen capable, like Rory, of walking in human skin?
“Not so many. Most such ill-omened children are set out in winter for the wolves to eat. I will watch here by the door through the rest of the night myself, if you will allow it.”
I let him into the passage to sit on a bench. Once back in the bedchamber I shoved the chair back up against the door and then sat under the quilt in the bed, unable to sleep for the way my blood was pounding. Set out in winter for the wolves to eat! I would just eat those cursed wolves first! Not to mention skewer every night-stalking criminal who hated cold mages.
Vai hadn’t stirred. Asleep, he was so vulnerable. I had once heard him describe to his grandmother the impossibility of a cold mage making his way in the world alone, without a mage House to protect him. Was there no safe place for us?
I meant to keep watch until he woke, but as dawn lightened night to gray, I dozed off.
