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 rei vindicatio, the right to regain possession of something you already own. If you can stand up in court and swear that Daniel Hassi Barahal sired you and thus you are his next of kin.”
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 me.”
“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.”
“You think it destiny, and not just accident?”
“ ‘Where the hand of fortune branches, Tara Bell’s child must choose.’ We stand on the road washed by the tides of war, you and I. Is it accident that has brought us here? I believe it is not. I believe our fortunes are sealed before we are born.”
He poured himself a second glass and topped up mine.
“Destiny and fortune are just words. I think you are ambitious, General. Ambition is not the same as destiny. You only want to say it is.”
He chuckled. “I like how you speak your mind, Cat. So few manage to be both honest and likable. That is one of your charms. Daniel had the same gift of speaking truth while making his listeners laugh. Do you want to know how I met them? Tara and Daniel, and Helene?”
A jolt like a blow from an axe split through my body. I managed to nod.
“I was a young captain in the army of the Numantian League. One of the princes who ruled the League had made a marriage alliance with a princely clan out of the city of Sala, one of the cities of the Wagadou Federation. The Wagadou Federation grew out of mostly Mande communities who had recently moved into the uninhabited lands northeast of the Rhenus River.”
“Those lands weren’t uninhabited. People lived there already.”
He waved a hand with a casual dismissal. “Herders and trappers, living in the most appalling conditions. Best of all, the new territory was fertile ground for cold mages.”
“Because of its proximity to the ice.”
“Yes, so I understand, although naturally I know little of cold magic. The prince sent me to Sala to escort the noblewoman he was to marry back to Numantia. Instead we found ourselves embroiled in a war against the Atrebates and their allies. The war exploded all across the far north, into the boreal forest and the Barrens. The Celts who live right up against the Barrens are called the Belgae, a barbaric people. A few mage Houses had moved into that area fifty years earlier and civilized them. So we marched north and crossed the Boreal River.”