“I do not doubt it.” He squinted his eyes against the rising sun and rubbed his face with the back of a hand. “But he made me angry. It was like he’d clawed me.”
“Yes, that’s just how our generous hosts would have felt toward you if you’d gone one step further with that sweet-faced lass.”
He frowned. We’d started out sluggishly, still muzzy from last night’s celebration, but I picked up the pace, and we walked for a long while in silence. The weather remained fair, if cold, but as long as we were not drenched by sleet or drowned in snow, the cold actually made it easier to walk because the ground remained firm. If my nose shone perpetually red from cold, that was a small price to pay for solid footing.
Early on, we glimpsed men in the distance, felling trees; otherwise we might have been alone in the wide world but for the quiet hamlets and farmsteads with their chimneys breathing smoke. Folk did tend to bide inside at this time of year, when the days ran short. Even dogs did not bark for long at us; as soon as we came close enough for them to clearly smell Rory, they tended to slink away with tails tucked.
We paused to take a bite to eat when the sun reached its highest point.
“We should make Mutuatonis by nightfall.” I sat on a stone field wall, feet dangling.
He leaned beside me. He wore his long dark hair in a single braid, like a woman, for these days men cropped their hair short. Perhaps it had been otherwise in other times and other places, but I had never seen a man wear his hair as long as my own was. Yet none of his admirers seemed to count it against him.
“Can you see that prominence there?” I pointed to the southwest, to a hill bulging higher than the rolling land around it. “That should be Cold Fort, if my memory of maps is correct. When we get a bit closer, we’ll know for sure. There’s a temple atop it, within the old earth ramparts. In ancient days it was a fort, maybe a barbarian prince’s royal seat.”
He wasn’t looking toward the distant hill.
“What place is that?” He indicated a manor house far to the south of us, half screened by a row of poplars. “I smell meat cooking.”
“A lord’s estate. Not a mage House, as you can see by the arrangement of chimneys.”
“Every building must have fires against the winter cold, mustn’t they?”
“Cold mages kill fire. They heat their homes in the Roman way. Furnaces on the outside heat air that flows inside below a raised floor.”
“What lord lives in that fine manor?” He wrinkled his nose. “Can we go there to beg for our supper?”
We were too far away for me to smell anything. “One of the cousins of the Prince of Tarrant, I suppose. He’d have no reason to show hospitality to the likes of us. I’m getting cold.”
I hopped down and we set out again.
“From Mutuatonis we have a choice whether to follow the old Roman road west to where it meets the toll road. Then we would turn south and pass through Newfield before reaching Adurnam. But if Four Moons House still has seekers and soldiers out looking, it will be easier to find us on the toll road. Otherwise, we can cut across the chalk hills and stay in the countryside.”
“They will expect you to return to Adurnam?”
“They must assume I will try to reach the Barahals. Although why I would want to see them ever again after they betrayed me…” It seemed my life had turned into an unending parade of betrayals, and while I could comprehend what had led someone like Kayleigh to play the part she had, it was awfully hard to find forgiveness in my heart for all those so willing to sacrifice me.
“Why go to Adurnam? We could leave the Deathlands. Go home.”
“It is your home, maybe. It isn’t mine. I don’t understand the first thing about it. What would have happened to me if Andevai had not pulled me back within the wards when that… tide… swept through? Would I have died?”
“You would have changed. Maybe that is like what you call death here. You would have become something other than what you are now.”
“What am I?” I murmured. The words made me dizzy. “Rory, do you know our father?”
“I never met him. He is not a personage you meet.”
“He must have met your mother, and my mother. In order to sire children. If it’s true we were both sired by him, he would have had to have been a cat in one form… a man in another…. You must know something more about him.”
“No. Except that one thing my mother said.”
“That he was a tomcat.”
“That he was a tomcat. And not the sort of personage you go hunting for. If he wants you, he’ll call you to him.”