Four

Cathal had bled men before. Such times had been rare and unskilled: he’d spent his manhood as a knight, not a physician. Yet war was war. The aftermath of battle left more wounded men than hands to heal them, and the days and weeks after led to fever as often as not. He’d cut arrows out of flesh a time or two; he’d opened veins when that was necessary. The process was faintly familiar. He also was covering no new ground. Bleeding had been their first thought for a cure, and the cut on Fergus’s arm was only half healed.

It was still hard, and Cathal was glad of it. In the work of remembering which veins were minor, of tying them off and passing the blade of his knife through the candle flame, of making sure not to overlook any step, he could almost forget the man on whom he was working.

Conscious, Fergus had never been stoic. His profanity when injured had made priests shake their heads and brought pages and squires to listen and further their education. Later he’d go to confession and truly repent, but that never had stopped him the next time he’d taken a wound during battle or had a tooth pulled. Profanity in English, Gaelic, and French had blended, coming from his mouth at a speed and volume that would have been a miracle if not for the subject matter.

Now he lay soundlessly compliant. Picking up Fergus’s wrist, Cathal felt it as boneless as wax, even where the flesh was still solid. He swore himself before making the cut, but only inside his head.

Sophia knelt and held a small vessel—blue pottery, incongruously domestic-looking—under Fergus’s arm, catching the blood. Her hands stayed steady, her eyes focused, and her face showed no sign of distress, only concentration and thought. Men might have been surprised, had they not grown up with Cathal’s sisters—or not seen the field after a battle, when the women who followed an army often did as much to save its men as any of the physicians.

Cathal was not surprised, but still watched her: the brown-wimpled top of her bent head, the faint lines on her forehead, and the way her dark eyebrows slanted inward, then the straightness of her shoulders and her spine, one unbent line down to the floor where she knelt. Although far from angular of body, she still spoke to him of right angles and clear paths, order and calm—the opposite of the way Fergus was fading at the edges.

“Enough,” she said finally, and the sound was almost surprising.

Cathal turned to binding up the wound. He’d send word to Sithaeg that it would need further attention, but the woman should have a chance to eat first, and to sleep as much as she’d ever seemed to since the curse had taken her son. “Will we need to do this again?”

“I fear it’s likely,” Sophia said. She rose to her feet, holding the bowl carefully. “This is only a start. I’ll test it with the metals, see if he lacks any elements, and then…” She shook her head. “But I doubt you want the details. Let me then say that this is for investigation. I may yet need more blood for the healing itself, if I find a way to carry that out.”

“Very well,” Cathal said. “And I know that this is chancy. You don’t have to keep warning me.”

She had set the bowl down on the table with the rest of her things while Cathal was speaking, and she turned then to look at him, brown eyes wide and grave. “As my lord wishes,” she said, “but I think it worth remembering.”

“Be assured. My memory is very good.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said, and dropped a curtsy.

Polite, Cathal thought, careful, and still very dubious. It probably wasn’t worth pressing her. “I’ll find you a laboratory,” he said. “I’ll send word. Go wherever you wish. You might even find an escort to the village if you enjoy the cold.”

He left her with those words. Suddenly, he needed to be in that room no longer, nor torn between watching Fergus decline and looking for reassurance from a woman so clearly reluctant to give it. He sought the western tower instead.

Up there, before Cathal had been born, his father had built a turret that rose some little way above the rest of the stone, opening into a small, round chamber. In bygone days, Cathal and his siblings had played there on rainy days, seeing the world spread out below them in a taste of what flying would be like when they grew old enough to change shape. Now the furnishings were old and dusty, and little light came through the shuttered windows. All of that would be easy enough to change.

For the most part, the turret was also isolated, as Sophia had desired for her laboratory. Aside from a few guards on the battlements, most of the castle’s residents avoided the western wing since it held nothing for them. The vast majority of the time, that was also true for Cathal himself. It hadn’t been the case for his father or his siblings, but they were far away now.

When he’d been a stripling, a few years after those when he’d played in the turret, he had, like his siblings, spent days in the largest room of all those in the western wing. There strong walls and stronger magic had kept him—and the rest of Loch Arach—safe while he’d learned to master shape-shifting and to keep a mostly human mind while in the dragon’s form.

Nearby were other rooms, smaller but no less potent in their own way. Cathal had no doubt of that, yet he’d only had reason to enter two, and one only in times of peril. He’d done so after his encounter with “Valerius.” He didn’t think that Sophia’s presence merited a visit now. He could use slower methods.

Hope never really merited urgency, after all.

* * *

Even in summer, messengers rarely reached Loch Arach. Sophia’s companions had brought general news with their spices and cloth, but even that news was, at its freshest, weeks out of date. Likewise, the messages Cathal had written for the traders to pass on would perhaps reach their destinations in a month or two.

Pigeons were quicker. Pigeons also needed a permanent target and, like all other animals the MacAlasdairs didn’t breed themselves, were unreliable around them at best and often ungovernable. As her children had reached maturity and gone out into the world, Cathal’s mother had called on her knowledge and the inhuman side of her own bloodline and had established an alternate method.

On the very top of the western tower, in the middle of a ring of silver-etched runes, Cathal knelt and lit three blue candles. He watched as the flame on each expanded and melded with the candle itself, until three creatures stood before him, each a half-solid blue manikin the height of his ankle. Blank white eyes opened and featureless faces turned toward him, ready for his command.

Cathal drew three letters from the pouch at his belt and handed the first to one of the spirits. “Douglas MacAlasdair.”

Douglas would be with Robert the Bruce most likely, far away, discussing a surrender that still made Cathal’s lip curl when he thought of it. Last time they’d spoken, Douglas had thought the Bruce was playing a deeper game than he showed, and Cathal had often had reason to trust his older brother’s judgment. Better Douglas as an ally in such matters than him; even the thought made his skin itch.

“Moiread MacAlasdair, wherever she is.” If William Wallace and John De Soules were still at large, as Bayard had said they were the night before, then Moiread would not be returning soon. She’d been eager to fight. Cathal had joked that she’d have stabbed him herself, had she waited too many months longer. She’d also believed far more strongly than Cathal had and hoped a great deal more.

In the fall of Stirling Castle, Cathal himself had seen only the last convulsion of a slow death, a final blind struggle against a wound that allowed for no more recovery than a slit throat or an opened gut. Before Falkirk, when Philip of France had turned his back, winning had begun to look to Cathal like a child’s dream.

He had been wrong before. That didn’t look like the case this time.

One spirit waited, the other two having vanished to whatever road they walked. The spirits didn’t reach their destinations instantly: sending messages this way took a few days most of the time, weeks when Cathal had been in the Holy Land, and it didn’t work at all if one party was on the water. (“Probably something to do with the elements,” Agnes had said. “They’re creatures of air. Fire or earth would likely stop them too, but why would we spend a week there?”)

Cathal passed the remaining letter over. “Artair MacAlasdair.”

His father was likely preparing his own forces to come back, perhaps negotiating with Longshanks and the Bruce, always with a set face and a shrug when anyone pressed him, though they might do so in a manner which would have had Cathal drawing his sword long since. Endurance was Artair’s watchword—it showed in the castle he’d rebuilt, in the wives he’d outlived and the various children he’d sired—and patience another.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, he’d said often as Cathal had raged against a slight or confinement when young. In the days of the war, when he and Moiread had raged against the English or despaired at setbacks, his father had added to the saying: and neither did it so fall.

Perhaps that was easier to say when one had almost seen it. Still, Cathal had remembered the words bitterly over the last few months, thinking of them over and over as he watched Fergus decline.

Rejecting Valerius’s offer had been a matter of honor—and probably of wisdom, as sorcerers who waved thighbones around probably made poor allies and worse employers—and Cathal didn’t regret it. Nor would he have regretted trying to kill Valerius if he’d done so. He’d killed scores of men through the years, with practicality heated by the passion of battle, nothing more or less.

He’d struck out of rage and offended pride. He knew that. He’d known it in the instant he’d swung his sword. His first thought had been that the wizard would pay for making such an offer, and more for even thinking he’d accept.

Cathal thought he’d meant to kill the man quickly, just the same. He prayed that he had, in the stunted and half-formed prayers of which he remained capable. And he wondered every day if he was deceiving himself on that score. He was glad he hadn’t seen his father’s face when he’d told Artair about the curse, even if it had held as little emotion as his voice had. Cathal wondered often enough about that, too.

Straightening up, walking to the edge of the battlements, he found a new element introducing itself into his speculation: what Artair would think of his newest guests.

Guest, really.

Alice was a pleasant lass—in a sharp-tongued way wherein she clearly neither liked nor trusted Cathal, and which was really rather to her credit—but she didn’t enter his thoughts the way Sophia did, nor did her presence lighten them.

In Fergus’s room, doing nothing more yet than a surgeon’s everyday work, Sophia had made him think of figures on stained-glass windows. She was gold and darkness in his mind, the shades of fire on a winter’s night.

Be wary, he told himself. Don’t justify her warnings; expect no miracles.

He grew tired of not expecting.

The western tower was sturdy, the sky blue and inviting, and his day’s immediate duties were behind him. Cathal straightened his spine, gulped in clear, cold air, and leapt off the tower.

Even now, the moment of free falling was exhilaration and terror, the back of his mind insisting that he could die here even as the rest of him knew otherwise. Then the transformation took over. Suddenly there were wings unfolding from his shoulders—much larger, scaled shoulders now—and air beneath them, bearing him up and taking him away.