Six

Mornings for Cathal, since he returned from the war, meant a trip to the western tower. He went before the rest of the household was at mass, before anyone had thought to light a fire in the castle, and while his blood let him shrug off the cold easily enough, he often had a harder time with the hunger. In a hall below Sophia’s turret, he opened a door to a square room without windows, lit only by the first rays of the rising sun through the cracks in the stone. He could have taken flint and steel to the torches on the walls—his mother and a few of his siblings could have lit them with a thought or a muttered word—but most days he didn’t bother. He wasn’t human, and dim light offered him no hardship.

At the center of the room was a five-sided table: part of his mother’s dowry, carved from a single block of ash. A map of Loch Arach and its borderlands covered the surface, burned into the wood in deep black lines.

There were no chairs around the table, or anywhere else. In this room, you stayed on your feet.

The dawn’s light bathed the map in red-gold, but it remained only sunlight when it touched the wood, not turning to the darker red that would have meant battle, nor the yellow of plague. The first signs of the day were clear.

Cathal crossed the room to a dark corner, where a small well descended into the earth below the castle. Lowering the bucket—made of ash as well—was routine now, his hands as trained to the motion as they were to drawing his sword or mending his gear. His mind, not yet fully awake, wandered, making lists of the tasks ahead, bringing up the memory of the last song the night before, and reminding him that he was only a short staircase below the room where Sophia spent most of her days.

Might she be up there already? She wouldn’t be one for mass, that was certain, and she might be wary enough to retire to the turret before the rest of the castle went to the chapel. Later, he could go up and see for himself. It would be wise to check her progress on occasion and to see what use she was making of the room he’d given her.

It would be pleasant to see her face in the rosy light of dawn, to stand alone with her in a warm room and talk as he never seemed quite able to do at meals. Everything about the great hall spoke to him too much of his role and his duties, and he could never quite break free of them long enough to think of conversation. Odd that his days had been longer on campaign, and physically as hard or worse, but he’d always been able to charm a pretty lass when he’d wanted to.

Mayhap that was the difference. He was trying to be a good host to this one, not win himself a tumble in his tent.

The succession of images that thought called to mind—women in his arms, now with Sophia’s face to accompany their full breasts and sleek thighs—made him nearly drop the rising bucket. Water slopped over his hand. Even though the water here was warmer than normal, and Cathal didn’t mind most cold, it was an unpleasant shock.

Mind to your tasks, boy, he scolded himself, in the voice of a long-dead man whose squire he’d once been. Or do you need that water poured over your head?

No, sixteen was a long time past, and even if his burdens had felt a touch lighter over the last few days, Cathal knew they were still there, a long list of tasks that didn’t leave much room for pleasure of any sort. His body was still disposed to argue the point, but he pushed those urges to the back of his mind, picked up the bucket, and brought it over to the table.

On most days, the water ran smoothly into the channels of the map, then vanished. When drought was forthcoming, it disappeared midair. Cathal had seen that happen in his boyhood. This time, the water hit the first of the carved boundaries and froze instantly.

Blizzard.

He began to swear steadily. By the time he’d emptied the rest of the bucket, he’d exhausted Gaelic and switched to English. When he reached the staircase, he’d worked his way over toward French, and he’d just started on Arabic when he heard a quiet inhalation from above.

Turning, he already knew he’d see Sophia on the stairs above him.

One hand covered her mouth, but above it, her eyes crinkled up at the edges, evidence of a hidden smile. Unbound and uncovered, her hair fell about her shoulders in a dark cloud. She’d tied it loosely back with a scrap of blue ribbon, but a great deal had escaped. Preoccupied as he was, Cathal was struck by the urge to step forward and brush the loose hair back from her face, to feel the silk of it against his fingers and then the warmth of her skin.

In his mind, he went on cursing for a few seconds.

“Trouble?” she asked.

“Blizzard,” he said, and then the only other thing that came to him. “Didn’t think you were awake.”

“I wish I wasn’t,” she said. She reached up to touch her hair, as if realizing its condition belatedly, and dropped her eyes for a moment. “Some operations must take place at dawn. I thought I’d perform them and then go back to sleep. I didn’t think I’d be seen, really…”

Now he saw that she wore a cloak, though she’d pushed the hood back onto her shoulders, making it useless for concealment.

“My good fortune, then,” he said and smiled at her.

The flush that spread across her cheeks reminded him of the dawn itself. Her lips parted slightly. “Oh,” she said, half breathing the word. For an instant, the very stairs and walls felt insubstantial, and he and Sophia might have been the only solid things in the universe.

Then she cleared her throat. “Your friend—Fergus—his cure will have to do with the sun and with Saturn. Solidity. The translation of spirit into matter. The spell’s impeding that. There are elements missing in him or deficient…an amputation, if you will.”

“Poetic enough,” said Cathal, grimacing. Once again he wished “Valerius” near enough at hand to throttle. “You can restore such things?”

“Someone can,” she said, straightening her back as she spoke, “and I’m the one who’s here. I have a few notions about how to begin.”

“Good.” And it was, though the change of subject had been a fairly effective cold bath—and that, in turn, reminded him of the map’s prediction. Tasks settled back on his shoulders like hawks made of lead. “I must go. I beg your pardon.”

* * *

Part of the difficulty was that the weather then suggested no such thing as a blizzard. The sky was clear, that bright and almost brittle blue that happened in high places during the winter; the air was still and, for February in Scotland, warm. If Cathal hadn’t seen the map, he wouldn’t have thought Loch Arach in any danger of calamity.

Nobody else in the castle had seen the map, or indeed the room where it lay. Prophecy didn’t figure largely in their lives—except for some of the guards, most of them had little to do with magic in general—and although his father must have warned the folk of the castle and village about similar peril, Cathal was damned if he could remember how. He wasn’t sure he’d paid enough attention to learn the process in the first place.

Approaching Niall, his steward, he therefore felt like an utter fool.

“There’s a blizzard coming,” he said, having always preferred to jump the fence rather than go around. “Likely a bad one. How are the stores?”

Then he waited for questions or disagreement, watched the old man—half my age, he always had to remind himself now, his brain as likely as any mortal’s to be swayed by gray hair and a bent back—for skepticism, and got none. What Niall actually did was make a clicking sound with his tongue, expressing general disapproval to the universe regarding this sort of messing about, and then start in on his usual list: so many cords of wood, less grain than he’d have liked, and so on.

Cathal listened carefully, forcing the figures into a mind still unused to remembering such things or relating them to the lives in his care, but all the time slightly amazed, even though he realized he shouldn’t be. Niall had been his father’s steward for forty years, and his predecessors had doubtless passed on certain bits of knowledge along with the books of accounts, little tidbits like Oh, and the lord knows the future now and again. Prophecy firsthand wasn’t part of Niall’s life. Secondhand, it was just another fact of Loch Arach, like keeping horses away from the MacAlasdairs.

Such a calm reaction should have been reassuring, and yet—

—and yet there was a whole world here that Cathal barely knew, and his experience was almost all from outside.

“I’ll go hunting today,” he said when he’d forced a picture from the tallies: not as much food or fuel as he’d have liked, particularly if the storm lasted, and he’d no notion of how long that would be. “And I’ll bring back wood as well. Send messengers to the village. Tell the folk they’re welcome up here and to prepare if they’ll stay in their homes.”

“Aye,” said Niall. “Three days hence?”

“Aye,” said Cathal, a startled echo. Yes, the map had always showed three days in the future, never more and rarely fewer. He knew that. He hadn’t expected that knowledge from Niall.

He didn’t, it seemed, expect half of the things he should.

As the day progressed, Cathal found that feeling growing stronger and stronger. The stable hands and smiths, the folk of the castle, even his guards reacted much as Niall had. Some showed their displeasure more, some were surprised, and a few even looked doubtful for a second or two, but everyone accepted the news. Even Father Lachlann, whose place in the Church would have let him voice doubts to Loch Arach’s temporary lord, spoke no word of contradiction or even question.

They all assumed Cathal knew whereof he spoke. He did, so that trust should have been at worst a pleasant surprise, but it merely bore down on him like the walls themselves until he could escape into the air and then the forest.

Hunting offered relief, as it always did. The cold air streaking past him cleared his mind; the challenge of sighting and diving occupied him; and the dragon’s shape was largely a creature of instinct and impulse. The human side of him remained, but it was easy to let it lie dormant for a time, to give over doubts and let the ever-turning wheel of thought give way to a creature at once of the moment and of centuries. All would settle itself in enough time. Meanwhile, there were clear skies above and prey below.

As usual when he wasn’t hunting for himself, he touched the stag as lightly as possible, breaking its neck with one swift blow and keeping claws and teeth out of the matter. The folk of the castle all knew what Cathal was. Still, none but the men who’d fought with him had been close when he was in dragon form. Most pretended not to see. Artair had believed in making that easy for them, and Cathal agreed with his father on that score.

For similar reasons, he always landed, on his return from the hunt, in a small clearing just outside the castle walls. From there he would transform and carry in his quarry if it was manageable, or send out some of the men if he’d brought down an elk or a boar. Nobody asked how it had happened, and he always looked human by the time he saw anyone.

He was human, barely, when Sophia stepped out from between the trees.