Naturally we slowed, and someone loosed a bolt at my back, but either his heart wasn’t in it or his aim was bad, for the bolt stuck, shivering, in the hillside. Three breaths later, a sting like an insect’s bite burned my right leg, and I looked down to see a bolt caught in the folds of my skirt. With a curse, I grabbed it and flung it away, but warmth trickled down my leg.
“Up! Up!” I said, willing the gelding to climb. I looked down to see the quartet meet up with the single soldier. They conferred; then a trio started up the path behind me while the other two headed onward. Did they mean to climb to Cold Fort on another track and cut me off?
But I had made my decision and chosen my path. I had lost Rory, maybe forever. I had to reach the temple and hope I could cross into the spirit world, where they could not follow. My leg was beginning to throb. At least, I thought bitterly, I had blood already drawn to open a gate onto the other side.
My horse, as befitted the mount given to a son of the House, was superior to theirs in courage and conformation. He was magnificent, a princely horse eager to show me his mettle. We reached the ridgeline having gained on our pursuers. Wind cracked over us. The land spread away below: the yew wood; a lordly house with gardens and corrals and a stockade within which a surprising number of cattle, as small as carved playthings, crowded despite the late season when normally most would have been slaughtered.
I turned my mount toward the massive earth ramparts of the old hill fort. Pillars and a roof marked a temple within the ancient walls. As I rode along the undulating ridge slope, I spotted figures atop the ramparts, signaling. Did priests live in the temple year-round?
Behind me, the trio was closing, and on the road below, the pair had dismounted and, leaving their horses, climbed on foot. Farther away, I saw a dozen riders converging in the area from which I’d come, maybe in the hamlet where the man had gathered in his children. As if called by sorcery, six horsemen appeared in the earthwork’s narrow front gap.
Fiery Shemesh! They had reached Cold Fort before me. I saw no sign of Rory.
Only one direction was left to me, a rash run down to the west where the town of Mutuatonis sprawled by the River Ouse with a hazy cap of smoke rising from its busy hearths.
“Catherine Hassi Barahal!” A man’s voice called from the soldiers waiting at the gap.
So they would lure me in with hearty cheer and false promises before they cut my throat!
“Catherine!” the man repeated, gesturing to get my attention.
Before I plunged down the slope on my final doomed run, I hesitated. I knew that voice.
“Brigid’s luck!” interposed a stentorian tenor. “I did not believe you, brother. Yet here she is, just as her cousin said she would be!”
The men at the ramparts were not wearing the livery of Four Moons House. They wore the green-jacketed uniforms of the Tarrant militia. The officer in charge was a tall, lean Celt with a thick mustache, a clean-shaven chin, and short hair stiffened into lime-whitened spikes. Four troopers flanked him, two with hair stiffened and lightened in the same manner while two kept black hair clipped tight against their heads. The sixth man seemed slighter than the others, although equally martial in his tailored military garb. He beckoned with a wave of his hand.
“Maestressa Barahal! It is you! Come on! Come in! Beatrice told us to meet you here, to bring you in to safety.”
Blessed Tanit.
For the soldier who called me in was none other than Amadou Barry, the academy student Bee was so currently infatuated with.
27
The officer was the cousin of the Prince of Tarrant. After offering me a soldier’s cloak to drape over my shoulders, he sat me down on a bench beside a brick hearth sheltered by a slate roof. There, warming his hands at the fire, he introduced himself as Marius.
“ ‘Marius’ because,” he explained with a chuckle, “I was destined to be an officer in the Tarrant militia from the day I was born. That’s what we younger sons do: train for war, go to war, die in war, or limp home to our hearths to await our next raid. Not that we do any raiding these days. Although my neighbors have some cursed plump cattle that could do with a little exercise.”
Plump cattle made me think of Rory. Was he dead, or had he gotten away? Despite the crackling fire and a mug of mulled wine brought by one of the temple priests, I could not get warm. Negotiations had begun at the ramparts, where Amadou Barry stood in heated conversation with the furious cold mage whose face, I was glad to see, was stained with dried blood. Twelve crossbowmen stood on the earthworks above, weapons trained on the mage. The angle of the gap and the outer ridge of ramparts hid the House soldiers from my view.