Seventeen

The way Sophia was standing in the doorway, holding out her bribe with both hands even as she kept one foot tucked behind the other, reminded Cathal of statues he’d seen: clay maidens on sunny fountains or rising from the midst of gardens. None of them had been famous art, and they’d appealed more for it, stayed longer in his mind than works of more renown.

Always she called to mind places other than icy Loch Arach, and by doing so made the castle itself easier to bear. If he’d been a philosopher, Cathal would have found a text or two in that paradox. None would have been as interesting as simply watching Sophia while she placed the pie on his desk and found her seat.

She moved purposefully, with no apparent thought of performance or allure. It shouldn’t have been intriguing, and yet Cathal felt his blood quicken—only slightly, but surely—at every step she took to close the distance between them.

When she’d settled into her chair, her wimple brushing lightly against the back of her slim neck, she turned her dark eyes to his face, and a small smile lifted her lips at the corners. “And now, naturally, I cannot think where I wish to begin.”

“Would wine help?” he asked, remembering and offering the bottle.

Sophia regarded it, tilting her head in momentary thought, and then spread her hands in an airy motion of concession. “It could hardly hurt,” she said.

She took a sip without asking about vessels, her mouth closing around the neck of the bottle in a way that made Cathal glad he’d seated himself again. He surreptitiously shifted his weight, relieving some of the pressure at his groin, as she put the wine down, shaking her head. “Unwatered. I should have expected. But…is your head for it greater because of your blood or your profession?”

“I’d wager the first. I’ve known many a knight or soldier undone by little ale, but it’s taken a great deal to put any of us”—Cathal gestured around the castle, referring to the MacAlasdairs—“in our cups.”

“That could be useful.”

“Often. Other times, no.” In the aftermath of his first battle, the seasoned men had given him the traditional remedy: wine and a woman. The former had taken off enough of the edge that he could lose himself in the lady—a Spaniard in her forties, with a comfortable disposition and red hair that owed much to ochre—and he’d rarely found it worth the trouble to go deeper down the bottle.

“It does depend on the goal, it’s true, but perhaps I should say it would almost always be fortunate from a mortal perspective.”

“Aye. Mostly. If you’re a reputable sort, there’s no need to get a man drunk.”

Her eyes widened a little, but she smiled. “And if you’re not, I’d imagine you might receive a nasty surprise if you managed it.”

“Like as not. They keep an eye on us when we’re striplings—the older ones—and that’s one of the reasons why. Youth and drink is bad enough in mortals.”

“Oh,” said Sophia, fastening on this new line of thought. “Are you always gifted? Stronger, that is, and faster than most humans? And can you always change?”

“No and yes, I think.” Cathal allowed himself a moment to watch her try to work that out, enjoying the way her lips pursed while she thought, and then explained. “Likely we’re always a bit ahead of mortals physically. The difference isn’t so vast as all that—a sturdy village boy could put up a decent fight when I was young enough for that sort of thing—but I don’t remember ever being quite the same. But we don’t take the dragon form until later. I think I was thirteen. My voice had changed already, I know that.”

She laughed. “It’s difficult to imagine you that young or that awkward. But that would have been generations ago, yes?”

“A few. We age as men do for the first twenty years or so, thank God.”

“Your mothers do, I would suspect. The thought of raising a two-year-old for ten years…” She shrank back in her chair, holding her hands up in front of her face. “I doubt there’d be any survivors.”

“You know it well?”

“My brothers. And Alice’s sons. Her mother died on the passage over, you see, and her sisters had their own families to think of, so I helped with what I could. They’re good boys, all of them, although none of them would want me to say that these days.” Sophia laughed again, but it was quieter than a moment before, and there was a brief wistful look in her eyes.

Normally Cathal wouldn’t have thought of her in connection with children, or of any woman whose acquaintance with him had been similar. With him, mortals generally slotted into categories. He inwardly stripped them down to the roles they filled—soldier or shepherd or whore—and such family and other complications as they might have were of passing interest at best. In his life, he’d only encountered a few exceptions.

Evidently Sophia was going to be one of them. He could picture her with children, could see how she’d be good with them—not the Madonna, nor the village women with their babies, but turning her interest and her patience in that direction.

She must have cared a great deal for the boys she was talking about, he thought as he looked at her, and cared still.

“They’re apprentices now?” he asked.

“Alice’s, yes. Samuel—my oldest younger brother—is a baker now, in his own right, though he’s still working with his master. He was eight when she had Matti. Her first.”

“You can’t have been very old yourselves. You or her,” Cathal said.

“Seventeen,” said Sophia. “It’s not unusual, I think. Lucky, but then, she was a very pretty girl, and her father was very respectable.”

He remembered that she’d talked about unmarried women over twenty-five as a class apart from the norm in France. Now that he considered it, he supposed it might be the case everywhere; he’d never paid much attention. “My father had two centuries and more when he wed,” he said, “and my mother fifty years.”

“You swim in time,” she said with no bitterness and only a trace of envy. “We…we ration it, and if we don’t count each drop, that’s only because we can’t.”

“But you do more with it. We’ve no Alexanders, to my knowledge. No Charlemagnes. One or another of us may carve out a domain enough for himself and his offspring, the way Roman Alec did here, but there’s none of us gone further that I know of.”

“Is that so unfortunate a thing? You don’t want to bleed a country and its men so that you can put your name on a map… I see no ill in that lack,” said Sophia. “You yourself said there’s no glory in war.”

“Not glory, and not war. But building a nation—”

“On the backs of those in your way?” she asked, arching dark eyebrows.

“Were the Franks the worse for being Romans?”

“Would…” Sophia began, and then stopped. Small teeth caught the corner of her lip, and for the first time she looked away from him.

Thus did Cathal know what she was thinking, and he smiled, though not entirely with good cheer. “Would we be the worse for being English, you’re wondering? I think so. From what I hear—from what I know of Longshanks, and most especially of the men he employs—I think it, and a pity it is, for I also think it’s what’s to be. But…” He sighed. “I’m no prophet. Mayhap we’ll be better for all this, a generation to come.”

“But you fought. You’ll keep fighting.”

“Aye. And Edward’s not much of a Charlemagne, nor even Caesar, but that’s not the whole of it.” Cathal reached for the wine again. He wouldn’t have predicted the words that came out of his mouth, but they weren’t surprising: scraps of thought he’d had in the middle of the night or on cloudy afternoons now finding shape and pattern as he spoke. “If we fight, we might keep enough of us afterward. We’ll be more likely to hold on. They might let us, might grant us more concessions if they think we’re likely to be trouble otherwise.”

“Like haggling at the market,” she said, “only with lives.”

“It’s the craft of kings. And the nature of men—to find a line grown blurred and squabble over the place where it was. Or to try to make their names in such fights.”

“Not your nature?” she asked.

“A bit of it. I’m not quite human. For the rest, we’re a more hidden people. We don’t need the world to know us. We blend well when it seems convenient. By the time I knew him, my grandfather went to mass as often as I do. But when he was my age, he gave a sheep to Jupiter Capitolinus on all the old holidays. Did both for a while.”

“He must have lived a long time.”

“The old ones do,” Cathal said. “I couldn’t even swear he’s dead. He went away, told my father that Loch Arach was his now, and vanished. But if he knew about the war and lived, I think he’d have come back for us. Perhaps.”

Sophia frowned. “Perhaps?”

“He has many descendants. If a few of us can’t save ourselves now, he may not worry himself about our fate.”

“Oh,” she said, and didn’t look any happier for hearing the answer. They sat silently for a little while, the sunlit table between them and the bottle of wine shining cloudy green and red. “You said you’d have been able to fight within a few days, if the man who’d stabbed you had been normal,” Sophia finally said.

The change of subject was as welcome to Cathal as she’d clearly thought it would be. “That’s true. There’s not much that can do us lasting harm. If you took my head off or dropped the roof on me, it’d kill me outright, and my arm wouldn’t grow back, but anything else heals clean, and it’s only ever taken me a month at worst. Scars linger for ten years or so.”

“That’s extraordinary.” She breathed the word out, leaning forward. “If we could isolate that principle—”

“Then I’d have all the physicians in the world after my blood. And I’d be willing to share some, at that, but I’ve never known it to work, lass,” he said, sorry to see the light in her eyes dwindle. “I tried when I was younger. With a friend of mine, another squire. We swore blood brotherhood, cut our arms, and bound them together, but when he broke his leg, it healed as crooked as any man’s.”

Sophia nodded. “Blood is always a chancy substance. Too many planets govern it, and they vary so greatly by the person. I wouldn’t venture on that experiment until all my others were done… That is, even if you were amenable,” she added with another embarrassed smile. “Even so, the potential is exciting. Do you become ill?”

“It’s rare. Never been the dangerous sort, not that I know of. But it happens. The dragon shape doesn’t feel it,” he added, remembering winters in his youth, “so we’ll often shift form to get away from the unpleasantness. I spent nearly a week that way one spring.”

“I do envy that,” she said, making a face, “but then, I think there would be much to envy about your people in general. Even without the long life or the healing. To be another sort of being for a little while, to have that view of the world and not always have to be yourself… Oh, but do you look at all like yourself? I can’t imagine the likeness is very great, but are there similarities?”

It might have been the wine or the conversation. It might have been her proximity or the knowledge of what waited outside. It might have been that Cathal was just tired of being responsible. He caught her wrist in one hand, not holding tight but feeling every motion as she froze in surprise, then relaxed, and never tried to pull away.

“Come with me,” he said. “I’ll show you.”