Four

The next morning during their leave-taking, Madoc discovered what Moiread had meant by that statement. His tall chestnut mare stood saddled, ready, and looking sideways at a fat, black gelding that must have been at least fifteen years old. At first Madoc wondered if they’d be taking a packhorse along, but he saw quickly enough that the beast was saddled.

When Moiread came out of the stables, he began to understand. Rhuddem was no plodding nag, but neither was she fractious nor given to nerves—Madoc had ridden her to hunting often enough. Even so, she snorted at Moiread and edged sideways. Madoc’s presence on her back and his hands on the reins kept her calm, but without them, he knew she’d have sought greener pastures.

The black horse swung its head around to eye Moiread with no affection, yet it stood and let her mount, which she did aptly enough once she’d embraced her father and her brother.

“If we don’t get killed, I expect I’ll be back in a year or so” were her parting words. “God keep you both.”

She looked like a woman until they’d ridden out of the castle gates, across the drawbridge, and down the start of the winding road, which led away from Loch Arach. Then she reached up to her neck, where a cloudy white stone hung from a silver chain, and spoke a word too quietly for Madoc to hear.

Then a young man rode beside Madoc. He seemed more youth than man, that age between eighteen and twenty that was mostly limbs and awkwardness. There was no suggestion of womanly shape beneath the plaid cloak Moiread wore.

“There,” she said. “No point confusing the villagers, aye?”

“Fair,” said Madoc, who’d been expecting a gruffer voice and more stubble on the chin, to say the least. “Will you be my squire, then?”

“It’s as good a story as not. You can call me Michael, if you need to address me. At least it starts the same.”

“It’s a clever sort of a token, that.”

He pointed, but only briefly. Rhuddem was picking her way along with more nerves than usual, and Madoc thought it best to keep both hands on the reins.

Observing as much, Moiread sighed. “That,” she said, “is one of the minor curses of my family. Even when we’re in human shape, we dinna’ smell quite human, at least not to horses. And they’re not fond of it. She’ll calm a bit as we go along.”

“But you couldn’t ride her?” Madoc guessed.

Moiread shook her head. “I could maybe stay on her back,” she said, “but it’d no’ be worth my while, save in dire straits indeed. With the younger ones, or the worse-tempered, the best I can do is stay on their back when they bolt. Maybe. Our beasts are more used to us, but even they’re nervous.” She paused, took a glance around to make sure they were alone, and then added, “And should I ever have to change form around you, don’t be on horseback if you can help it. It’s a damned rare beast who won’t panic then.”

“All beasts?”

“The beasts of the field, at any rate. Dogs are a bit better. My sister keeps terriers. And cats don’t seem to care one way or the other, or not so far as I’ve noticed.” She grinned, an expression that was no less engaging in her male disguise. “I had an old, gray moggy that followed me about when I was a girl, alike in both forms. Probably thought dragons would give him better scraps.”

“And your brother does keep falcons,” Madoc said, remembering the tour he’d taken of the mews.

Moiread laughed. “Aye. One hunter keeps company well enough with the others, mayhap? One of my uncles fancies himself a man of natural philosophy, and he spent three years writing about how our flight compared to the hawks’. Took apart their wings, as I recall, when the wee birds died.”

“What did he find?”

“Oh, you’d have to ask him for most of it, and he’s off in Turkey or the like now.” She furrowed her brow and gazed into the distance, thinking. “Different sorts of bones. Though both are hollow, which I suppose must happen by magic. Devil knows where the rest of it goes when we change. Same place the scales and all that come from, I suppose.”

Madoc nodded. “I’ve only seen your brother in his…other form…once, and that from a distance. Cathal, that was, not Douglas. And that was twenty years ago now.”

“Oh?”

“I came here with Douglas. It wasn’t of much note, I suspect, especially since your brother was breaking curses and falling in love and so forth at the time.”

“Ah. Aye,” Moiread said with a wry twist of her lips. “I wasn’t here, and the accounts I heard… Aye, Cathal rather overshadowed you, I fear. And in his telling, his Sophia was the brightest star in the firmament. I do recall a mention or two, now that you remind me.”

The clear morning air and the gray mountain walls sent Madoc’s laughter back to him. “It’s this I’ll remember,” he said, “when I start feeling prideful.”

“Ah, well,” Moiread said. “The priests do say humility becomes a man. But if it’s any consolation, we’ll often not see each other for ten or a dozen years at a stretch. Cathal and I in particular, neither of us being very settled. Or he never was.”

“And you still aren’t?”

“I’ve not had the chance to consider it much, not for thirty years or more.” Frowning, she corrected herself, “Though I was holding the castle for the first few years of that. One of us had to stay behind, and Father’s only started feeling his age.”

“How old is he?” Madoc asked.

Moiread shrugged. “The figuring gets less important as we go on. He’d seen nigh half a century when the era turned, I know that.”

Not for the first time in his life, Madoc thought of the difference between knowing and knowing. He’d heard stories and even some verified accounts from Douglas. He’d heard of and met other long-lived folk, but they were different, less human. Moiread looked and talked like any young man off to make his fortune, right up until she referred casually to centuries going by, and Artair hadn’t…

Well, to think of it, there had been a feeling of age about the MacAlasdair sire. It simply hadn’t been age as Madoc thought of it, of which white hair and wrinkles were minor manifestations. Instead, the man had the aura of a mountain.

“Ah,” he said.

At his side, Moiread’s lips twitched. “If you’re wondering,” she said, “I’ve a little more than three hundred years. And I doubt I’ll see Father’s age. The blood thins, aye, unless we breed back with our own kind as my sister did, and as Father did not. Not with our mother… We’ve some half-siblings elsewhere, I hear, but far away.”

“I have a few of those myself,” said Madoc. “My father married again a dozen years back, and his wife has borne five living children. Pleasant enough youths.”

“They generally are,” said Moiread cheerfully.

They rode on, talking quietly and falling silent by turns, as the road took them down out of the mountains. It was a pleasant day for it: clear and bright, in the middle of spring, not warm enough to make riding uncomfortable nor yet with the cold wetness of the previous few days. Trees budded around them, with the hazel and alder sprouting long catkins like yellow-green cats’ tails, and birds called to each other, making a counterpoint to the sound of hoofbeats. It was yet too early for the heather to flower, but the plants spread green over the hillsides.

For the better part of the day, they went alone on the road. Just as Madoc had seen when he approached, leaving Loch Arach meant leaving all other human presence. The road echoed that. Well-maintained up near the keep, it became pitted and rocky shortly after they stopped at noon for cheese and bread. The horses picked their way across gingerly. A few times they had to cross fallen branches, blown down by a past storm.

“I’ll have to send messages back,” Moiread said after the second such incident. “This isna’ rightly our land, but Douglas or Father will be able to talk with Laird…” She pursed her lips. “Congilton, I think. Have some men from each clan see to the clearing, once the planting and the lambing are done.”

“Did you not come this way before?” Madoc asked.

“Aye, but I wasna’ paying much attention to the road then. Lucky thing my neck’s still whole, is it not?”

“I’m certainly glad of it.”

Despite such delays, they made decent time. By twilight, while they remained in the mountains, they’d started to see signs of human habitation once again. Forests beside the road had given way to plowed fields and flocks of sheep, and to an occasional stone or turf cottage or a larger house with a barn beside it. Men in plaids drove beasts through the fields with plows behind them or herded sheep with large dogs at their sides. They looked over at Moiread and Madoc from time to time, but took no more than a momentary interest.

As the sky darkened, Moiread gestured toward one of the larger houses that was roofed with heather and had walls of solid stone, rather than the stone-and-turf patches Madoc had seen on cottages. Smoke curled out from the center of the roof and into the red sky.

“There’s the best we’ll do for the night,” Moiread said. “We’ll likely have to share quarters wi’ the children, but hopefully not wi’ the pigs, thanks be to God.”

They were more fortunate even than that. The man who came to the gate to greet them was middle-aged, his wife likewise, and their children either married or apprenticed save for a babe small enough to sleep next to his parents’ bed. That bed was indeed in a separate room, for the house was large for its kind and solid. Madoc guessed that being so near the road was a handy way to come by extra coin.

Moiread provided coin casually, at least pretending not to notice when the man’s eyes widened. “My lords,” he said, and bowed deeply. “Shall I take your horses to the barn?”

“I’ll do it,” said Madoc, catching Moiread’s eye. She nodded. They both remembered the broken saddle band. “They’re nervous creatures, and I’m the only one who can generally see them settled for the night, more so in strange country.”

The barn held an extremely elderly donkey and a small flock of chickens. It was dark and close and smelled of its occupants, but Madoc had been in worse—had slept in worse, on journeys that had taken him far from civilized lands—and the time he spent unsaddling and brushing the horses was no hardship. It was calming, rather: familiar action even if the place and the company were both strange.

When he came back to the house, the woman was handing around thick clay bowls, ladling their contents out of the cauldron on the hearth. “Only potage, my lords,” she said, ducking her head, “but if you bide a while, I can kill one of the hens and roast that.”

“This will be fine,” said Madoc quickly.

At home he might have asked for meat, particularly with the coin, but he didn’t know these people, nor their lord. It was best not to risk taking advantage or giving cause for complaint. The potage looked good, too—thick, with onions and turnips, and with the faint smell of meat about it. Likely they’d put a bone into the pot to boil as well.

“Aye,” said Moiread, “this is most hospitable.”

They ate, speaking in generalities of weather and spring planting, until near the end of the meal when the man added, “…and wi’ the war over, you’ll not be the last guests we have.” He glanced at Madoc, the question clear on his face, but he didn’t voice it.

“Did you have people in it?” Moiread asked as a distraction.

“My brother, God rest him.”

“I’m sorry,” said Madoc.

The man shrugged. “He fell bravely, m’lord, or so they told me. It’s a comfort. And we beat the bastards, did we no’?”

“That we did.” Moiread flashed a grin then, despite obviously trying to prevent it, and yawned. “Beg pardon. It’s been a long day riding.”

It had been. With food settling into his stomach and the fire heating his toes, Madoc felt all the hours on the road coming home to him.

Still, when he stepped into the bedroom with Moiread and the door closed behind him, he wasn’t too tired to feel the awkwardness of it.

Men traveling together nearly always shared a bed, unless they were wealthier than Madoc. Even strangers bedded down together at times, in small inns where there was little space. Ladies of rank generally didn’t share beds with men other than their husbands.

Moiread had taken off her boots, but not her illusion. She sat on the bed, examining her sword in the dim candlelight. “We made good time today,” she said, pitching her voice low enough that their hosts wouldn’t overhear. “You’ll let me know, aye, if you get to thinking we need to ride through the night or the like?”

“I will,” said Madoc, “but we shouldn’t need to. I think you’ve bought us a while before those measures are worth the cost to use.”

Moiread tested the sword’s edge with her thumb, nodded either agreement with Madoc or approval of what she felt, or both, and re-sheathed the blade. “What happens,” she asked, “if we fail?”

“Nothing certain,” he said as he’d done in all his explanations before. The line between persuasive argument and false prophecy was an important one. “I don’t see the future. I only know what the English are likely to do and guess what’s likely to happen as a result. For the first, taxes the people and the land cannot support, suspicion beyond all reason and the devil’s own torments for the lightest offense, and lords of people with anger to spare. You know how men act in defeat.”

“Aye,” said Moiread, with a twist of her mouth.

Madoc stared into the shadows, seeing again the horrible patterns that all his information and his lines of reasoning had drawn. “We’ve survived English rule, but what’s to come, unless I act… They’ll press us until we snap, and when we do, we’ll be unprepared and desperate. That fight will make the wars here seem like a market-day brawl. I don’t know how such a war will end, or if it will.” Or how many of my people might survive it.

Wales couldn’t afford to rebel the way Scotland had—not now. Perhaps not ever. All that was left to them was to defend themselves as best they could. Madoc aimed to see his country had the best shield he could manage.

Although the light was dim, Moiread’s pupils didn’t narrow as she studied his face, and she seemed able to see him quite well. After that moment’s scrutiny, she said, “I’d have my arse on horseback too, in your place. Father knows what he’s doing. Again.”

The weary affection in her voice drew a quiet laugh from Madoc.

Moiread stood and reached for her belt, then frowned. “I don’t think we need to keep watch here,” she said. “The doors and walls are thick, and I’d wake were a man to come sneaking about the house.”

“You hear well, then?”

“We all do. And if I’m no’ fresh from a battlefield, it’s not been a verra long time either.” Unbuckling the belt, she placed it and the weapons it held by the side of the bed, near at hand, then crawled under the blankets. “Christ, it’s good to lie down.”

It was, Madoc discovered when he stretched himself out beside her, but it wasn’t the same as sharing a bed with another man. Moiread’s illusion covered sight and sound well enough, but not scent. Even from a respectful distance, Madoc could smell heather from her hair, and from her body a smoky, musky scent that was not quite human but definitely female.

He was glad the day had been so long and tiring. The night would have been very long otherwise, and not at all comfortable.