Three

“Well, how did things fall out?”

Alice had always known how to pick her time. Right now, it was first thing in the morning, just when Sophia was bent over the basin splashing cold water on her face. She grunted her first response.

“I’m sorry, I thought I was asking a human being.”

“Nobody human is as awake as you are at this hour,” said Sophia, moving aside to let her friend wash. They’d managed to get the room to themselves—and a finer room than most people gave to travelers, with bright tapestries on the walls and thick rugs on the floor—so she spoke freely while she dressed. “He said yes. But we’re staying on.”

She explained the situation to Alice in a few quick sentences, struck as she talked by how little she knew of the details. It had been late when she and Sir Cathal had reached their agreement, and Sophia had been glad enough to put off further discussion. Now, under Alice’s shrewd gaze, she wondered how much more there was to find out, and how dire the situation might truly be. Putting up her hair, she fumbled with the pins.

“Oh, come here,” said Alice, holding out her hands. As she’d done a hundred times before, she dressed Sophia’s hair with a quick efficiency that bordered on painful. “It’s as well,” she said, after an assortment of thoughtful sounds. “I didn’t much like the idea of going right back again when we’ve just got here. Best you wait until spring before you finish up, if you ask me.”

“It might well be longer,” said Sophia. “And that’s if I succeed at all.”

“Have more faith in yourself. I don’t mind anyway. This seems like a well-kept place, for all its lord’s surliness. Plenty of food, decent cooking, and no fleas. I don’t know how they manage that.”

“Hmm,” said Sophia. Now that she thought of it, she didn’t notice even one of the itchy bites that usually accompanied a stay anywhere remotely warm, and the room was quite comfortable in that regard. A fire had been roaring away in the fireplace since before she’d woken—and she hadn’t noticed anyone coming in to build it. “Magic?”

“Then more people should be sorcerers. Why don’t you do this sort of thing?”

“Because there’s no elixir that’ll let me start fires from my bed. Not that I know of. Whatever magic Sir Cathal…or his family…knows might be different.”

Alice patted Sophia on the shoulder and stepped back. “Lucky for you, I suppose, or you’d have had nothing to bargain with. Still, see if you can’t get him to teach you while you’re here. I’d dearly love never to scratch a flea bite again.”

“I can’t imagine Sir Cathal teaching anyone magic,” said Sophia, remembering the blunt speech from last night and the frank-to-the-point-of-rudeness way he’d eyed her. She felt herself flush again, wondered what he’d thought when he made his…inspection…and shook her head quickly. “Or anything else.”

“He didn’t try anything untoward, did he?” Alice asked, reading Sophia’s face carefully. “I thought you’d have told me if he had, but—”

“No. And I would have. And it wouldn’t matter. He seemed to have little time for, um, untoward, though. He didn’t seem to have much time in general.”

Knowing that, Sophia half expected Cathal to put off their meeting and his explanation. Even had he been more eager to tell her the history of Fergus’s condition than he obviously was, Sophia assumed that other matters would come first. She’d hardly finished her bread and ale an hour later, though, when he appeared—not the page she’d expected, but Cathal himself, walking up to her side so quietly that she didn’t look up from her reading until he cleared his throat.

She flinched. She also squeaked. She was halfway off the bench, eating knife protectively in one hand, when she recognized him.

Cathal’s gaze never wavered. He looked at her as if jumpy women were common facets of his day, as mayhap they were. “You’ll come to no harm here,” he said evenly, once Sophia’d had a chance to catch her breath.

“Of course,” she said. She smiled politely all the way up into that chiseled face. “Can I be of assistance, my lord?”

“You wanted the chance to examine Fergus and receive a history of his state. I’ll give you the second first. Walk with me.”

“Of course.” She closed her book and picked it up, tucking it under her arm. The weight of it was reassuring. “Where are we going?”

“Where I need to go. There are…” He waved an impatient hand. “Tasks. Always. I might as well explain on the way. It’s no secret.”

“And the examination? I’ll need my supplies—”

He turned and barked a name, which sounded a bit like Martin, only with more rising and falling around the vowels. A dark-haired boy nearby looked up and answered in Gaelic.

“Go to—” Cathal began, switching to English and glancing at Sophia.

“The stables,” she said, slipping between languages with a few seconds’ thought. “The bay mare at the far end. My instruments will be in the pack on the left. They’re glass, for the most part.”

“Aye, so take good care. Bring them to Fergus’s room,” said Cathal, with a stern look at Possibly-Martin.

“And if you’ve a surgeon or a physician, I’ll need to take blood.”

“None here over the winter.” Cathal flicked his hand again, dismissing the page. “Don’t fret yourself. I can open a vein without killing the man it belongs to, if I must.”

Already he was walking. Sophia hurried toward his side, crossing the rushes and heading through the door nearest the high table. Now, a little before midmorning, the cooking smells coming from under the door weren’t as strong as the smell of burning wood. “How long has he been, er, the way he is?” she asked.

“Two months.” His accent wasn’t nearly so strong as that of other Scotsmen she’d met, even the others who spoke English, but the first word still came out twa. “Best start at the beginning. You ken the war?”

“More or less. The details…” She lifted her free hand and let it fall.

“No need of them. We were fighting the English… Aye, some ways from here,” he added at her surprised look. She’d not heard that the war had reached such a remote part of the Highlands, nor had Loch Arach the look of a village that had recently seen combat. “I was at the war then, and my sister managing all of this.”

“Your sister?”

“One of them, aye.” He glanced down at her and flashed a grim half-smile, one that admitted no questions. “She’s taken my place now, and I hers. So then. We were a ways from here on a fair desolate patch of ground, and there was a troop of the English. Not a normal part of the army, I should think. I’ll give Longshanks that much. Whatever sort of devil he may be, I’ve heard nothing like that of him.”

“Like what?”

“Ah.”

She didn’t immediately get an answer, because their journey through the kitchens had stopped in front of a man with red hair, a large beard, and an air of officious bad temper—probably a butler or a steward. He glanced from her to Cathal, blinked, and then asked a question in Gaelic. Cathal replied with what sounded like several of his own, and the conversation lasted an incomprehensible few minutes.

Sophia took a look around. Castle kitchens had never really been a part of her life. She couldn’t quite fit the modest domain of her mother and sisters, nor even the kitchens in the grander parts of town, into the same word as this sprawling, busy maze. On one side of the room, men in bloody tunics were cutting up what looked like half a pig, while a woman almost as covered with flour kneaded bread some distance away, scolding more pages as she did so. Everyone was moving. Sophia tucked her elbows closer to her sides and took a step closer to Cathal, trying to get out of the way.

Naturally, that was when he finished talking and turned toward her. For an awkward moment, her nose practically hit his chest. There was a great deal of chest, she noticed again, and it still all looked to be solid muscle. Hurriedly, she stepped back. “My apologies.”

“Think nothing of it. This way. And take a cloak.” He pulled one from a peg beside the kitchen door and tossed it to her. “You chill easily.”

“I do no such thing,” Sophia said, though she was wrapping the cloak around herself while she spoke.

“You…humans. Mortals.”

“Oh. Well.” She looked down at the cloak, which smelled like onions. “Whose is this?”

Another name, this one a bit like George. “He’ll not leave until long after we’re back. Not with dinner as it is.” They stepped outside, where the world was clear and blue and brittle. After what Cathal had said, Sophia forced herself not to gasp at the chill of it. “The men were vicious.”

It took her a moment to realize he’d stopped talking about the cold or the cloak. “The English?”

“Aye. Past what I’d expect of men, even in war. One or two of them didna’ seem quite like men at all. Their faces…shifted. There were too many shadows to them. I could say no more, not with any certainty. And their leader was a wizard. Is.”

“A wizard?” For a man not entirely human, Cathal spoke very generally. Wizard could have meant her uncle Gento, gray-bearded and ink-stained, or Merlin Ambrosius, or Sophia herself, though it embarrassed her to even make the comparison. “How do you mean?”

Cathal shrugged. “He threw fire at us. It came from a wand…one that looked to have been a bone once, though I was never close enough to look very well. I took no hurt from it, of course. I changed shape to handle the shadow-men.” He sighed, sending a cloud of steam out into the frigid air. “That impressed him.”

His voice suggested that both wizards and men made of shadow were, if not usual, at least not wholly a shock to him. “Do they have many such forces?” Sophia asked. “The English?”

“Enough magic to hold us off. Nothing quite like this. Not that I’ve seen. A moment.”

A smithy sat at the corner of the courtyard, and Cathal swung into it. Sophia followed, glad to feel the warmth of the forge but carefully keeping both her cloak and skirts out of the way. The smith himself looked up once, spoke to Cathal, and then went on speaking even as he turned back to the horseshoe he was hammering out. His apprentice, crouched before the fire with a pair of bellows, spent more time looking at Sophia—at least until the smith himself directed a growl the boy’s way.

Looking out, Sophia saw that the smithy and stables were just a few of the buildings sheltered behind the castle walls. A covered well was near the smithy itself; opposite that, another low building whose purpose she couldn’t identify; and across the way she caught the gleam of stained glass and guessed that there lay the chapel. Off in a corner, snow-covered hedges marked out a square of barren earth—a garden, when the weather allowed?

It’s like a tiny city, she thought, and the idea was unsettling. She’d known the idea of a keep, of course, but walking through the reality brought it home. If Cathal and his people had so much behind the castle walls, it was probably because they could get it nowhere else so quickly, nor be assured of their safety in the process. Out here, the castle was a lone flame in the darkness.

She shivered, which she could have told herself was the cold, and then swallowed, which she couldn’t, and fortunately Cathal chose that moment to start walking again.

“What did he do? The…magician?”

“Made me an offer.” Cathal’s jaw tightened. “Not a bad one, by his standards. Not…” He shook his head, golden-brown hair shifting in the cold breeze. “He said they could use a creature like me. Pointed out the benefits. Then I cut his arm off.”

“That would be an answer, yes?”

“It was.”

Passing the stables, they headed for a door near the gatehouse. Cathal went a few yards without speaking, and Sophia was nerving herself to ask another question when he began again.

“The arm…crawled. It must have. But the word sounds slow, and it was quick. It’d flown some ways when I struck—they do betimes, aye, if your blow’s strong enough, and I was sore angered—and it wrapped its fingers around Fergus’s leg. The stump of the arm was still bleeding.”

Sophia put a hand over her mouth, stopping the small sound of revolted surprise that she couldn’t suppress any other way.

“The magician said something. I didn’t know the language—and I’ve Latin and Arabic both. Fergus fell down screaming. The magician said he’d melt like the snow in spring, did I not come and join him. His name, he said, was Valerius.”

“I doubt it,” Sophia said without thinking. Cathal turned toward her, eyes sharp, and she shrugged. “At least, I doubt that his mother or her priest would know it. At least it wasn’t Maximus. Or Rex, though I suppose Edward the Longshanks would have had a few things to say about that.”

Mirth stole onto Cathal’s face, not softening its lines but warming it from within. His smile was wide, and his teeth surprisingly white for a man in this country, though perhaps not for one of his blood. “I hadna’ considered that view of it.”

“I could be wrong. He could be a very well-preserved Roman. Or have a very pretentious family,” Sophia said, unable to resist a smile as she spoke.

“Aye, well, they’d have to have something amiss with them,” Cathal said, and then the warmth faded from his expression. “As it may be. I went for his head. One of his shades went for me. Gave me this.” He patted his shoulder, over the bandage. “And by the time I’d dealt with that wee bastard, his leader was gone. Vanished into the shadows, my men said.”

“And since then…” Sophia let the sentence trail off.

Cathal nodded. “As you saw.”

He opened the door and held it so she could go through. Passing him was like walking by a fire. Sophia resisted the urge to hold out her hands. Beyond, a short hall led to a winding stone staircase, just broad enough for one person to climb at a time. She followed Cathal, glad of the chance to think without speaking for a time.

Directing her thoughts required a greater effort than she was accustomed to. With Cathal walking just before her, she spent some time noticing the shift of muscles beneath plaid and tunic while he walked, the straightness of his shoulders, and the lift of his tawny head. In the dimness of the castle stairs, he stood out like a flame.

By the time they came to a landing and he opened another door, she’d collected her thoughts as much as she thought she was likely to manage. “I’ve never tried to counter a spell before,” she began in the interest of honesty. “I have read one or two passages about it, and some more notes, but I can’t say I ever paid as much attention to that as I did to other things. I’ll see what I can remember, and I have a few books with me. Does the castle have a library?”

“Aye. I can’t swear to all its contents.”

“If you’ll permit it, I’ll see if anything there can aid me.” The MacAlasdairs were a family of dragons, and at least parts of the castle seemed to run on magic. Somebody might have bothered studying it, or even writing it down. “You would have told me if the village had a magician…even a cunning man, or a witch nobody talks about?”

She hadn’t gotten her hopes up and therefore was not too disappointed when Cathal shook his head. “We’ve a midwife who knows a bit of herbs.”

“She might be helpful. I’ll need to talk with her, though that’ll be later. And I’ll need a room…not to sleep, but where I can experiment.”

“We’ve rooms enough. Especially now. The one by Fergus is empty.”

Sophia hesitated, uncertain about asking for too much, but then practicality stepped in. “A more isolated chamber would work better. There are explosions from time to time.”

“Naturally,” Cathal said. “I’ll find you a place. For the present…here,” he said and opened the door from the previous night.

Now the room was light enough for Sophia to see her bags on a table by the hearth. She could see Fergus’s face too, in more detail than she’d been able to before. He didn’t look unusual: brown hair, square jaw, pale skin. He would have blended in very well with the rest of the men in the castle, if he’d been awake and moving. Stillness, even more so than his growing dissolution, distinguished him.

“He’s young,” she said, unthinking.

“They’re all young,” said Cathal.

With nothing to say in response, Sophia turned from Fergus to the table where her supplies lay. Already she was making lists in her head: the necessary tests, the herbs she had and those she might even be able to get in the Scottish winter, and the small vials of ground metal or stone. She’d have to be careful of her resources, she thought, remembering the sense of isolation in the courtyard.

She’d have to be careful of many things.