The weather that winter was as capricious as the earth, snowing one day, clearing the next, then freezing solid as a block of marble overnight. Lucius’s restlessness increased along with his sense of being constantly watched, at which he kicked like a recalcitrant cart horse until the joyful silliness of Saturnalia offered a welcome respite.
Caecilius decreed a holiday for the legion and dispensed a generous ration of wine. Each household and century drew lots for Saturnalia Princeps and the winner issued orders to those above him for the rest of the day. Septimus failed in his attempt to give the army oath standing on his head, so his century threw him in the bath instead. Crispus, possessor of the first century’s lucky bean, ordered Faustus to declaim a poem about beetles. When they had begun to settle, somewhat drunkenly, to their dinner, Faustus retreated to his house before Crispus thought of something else.
Master waited upon servant at Saturnalia. Silvia and Lucius poured wine for Gwladus and Paullus and Eirian brought them the best parts of the roast goose. A good deal of wine was going into Lucius too, Faustus noted, but let that slide. Gwladus looked happier than he had seen her since her man had died, and was head to head with Paullus, giggling. There were new clothes for both, and gifts between the family. Outside, his men had gathered about his door singing loudly and untunefully.
“If they keep that up, I’m going to give you back to them,” Eirian said.
“I gave quite a good poem on the subject of soldier beetles,” Faustus said. “Impressive, I thought, for an impromptu effort. I expect they were too drunk to appreciate it.”
“Well sit over there and eat your dinner before it goes cold.” She brought him a bowl and spoon and a small table to set them on. The guests of honor were occupying the dining couches.
Eirian approved of Saturnalia. It seemed to her a fine idea to trade places now and again to keep anyone’s head from getting too big. Faustus had given her a pair of lapis eardrops set in gold, and she had made him a new cloak, deep heavy scarlet wool with a hood lined in fox fur. Faustus had bought Silvia ear drops too, and Lucius a latrunculi set with onyx counters. The only fly in their mutual wine cup was that Loarn had sent Silvia a present. It was his understanding, the note in Latin read, that her people gave gifts at this time. This one was a gold finger ring set with agate. Faustus had regarded it with horror and ordered her not to wear it, an order she had ignored. Now she was lecturing Lucius on the amount of wine in his cup and listening disapprovingly to the howling outside. It was growing louder.
“Go and see what they’re doing,” Faustus told Eirian. “If I go, they’ll have me wearing your nightshift and a blond wig.”
“I would pay to see that,” Eirian said, but she went to the door. Paullus looked relieved not to have to.
The joyful howling stilled for a moment, and someone said something to Eirian.
“Thank you, no.” She shut the door and bolted it.
The singing resumed. Now they had begun “The Commander’s Horse”, which had verses that grew increasingly scurrilous as it progressed.
“That’s no good,” someone said. “We’ve brought him a present. Sing something nice.”
A mournful voice took up a new tune.
Livia said she’d wait for me
When I left two months ago,
Now she’s drinking in Assisi
With a tribune from Brindisi
And I’m here digging ditches in the snow!
“They’ve brought you a present,” Eirian said. “It’s a pig.”
“A pig?”
“A medium-sized pig. It has a ribbon on it.”
“Where in Hades did they get a pig?”
Paullus got up from his couch and peered through the shutters at the gathering on the portico. “Stole it, I’d say.”
Lucius came to look too. “From the village? It’s not a wild one.”
“Of course it’s not. A wild one would take them apart.”
They looked out the window again. Argos snuffled the air with increasing interest and came to stand beside them, paws on the sill.
“Why don’t you want it?” Lucius asked.
Faustus didn’t bother answering that. “Just leave the door bolted. If we’re lucky they’ll get bored and try to give it to Septimus.”
“Well, I think it’s a better present than a ring,” Lucius said.
“More practical,” Gwladus said. Faustus thought she had had a good deal of wine too.
“Loarn should have sent Mother a pig.”
“Loarn shouldn’t have sent Mother anything at all,” Faustus said. But he had, and Caecilius had called the gesture “promising”.
“You know, that might be the legate’s pig,” Paullus said thoughtfully. “His cook was in the vicus yesterday picking one out.”
Faustus hoped it was.
In the morning the pig was gone – no one asked where – and Faustus’s men all turned out for morning prayers with pounding heads. Lucius should have had a hangover as well, since he had been sick in the latrine and again in the garden the night before, but with the resilience of youth, he was sunnily cheerful at breakfast. Silvia lectured him on the evils of drunkenness and was ignored.
To her further annoyance, over the course of the next months, Lucius exhibited a growth spurt that made him taller than she was. The more she tried to control him, the more rebellious he became. He won a handful of silver throwing dice with the cavalry vet and spent it in the vicus on a military dagger which he wore sheathed at his belt, daring her to forbid it.
“Leave it alone,” Faustus said. “It’s much better than his old knife if he should need it.”
“And why should he need it? Because you endanger him letting him follow your patrols?”
“I never send him on anything that’s going to be dangerous,” Faustus said. “We don’t go far in this weather and he’s always with Septimus. If he doesn’t have some outlet, he’ll do worse. He’s not an infant.”
The cold loosened its grip, and the land began to green, the verdant magical yellow green of spring on the trees and the road verges, and the pale uncurling new shoots of bracken and fern. Snowdrops and then the yellow stars of celandine pushed their way through the leaf litter in the forests. Eirian, Gwladus, and Silvia washed all the bed linens on the first warm day and hung them to dry like celebratory flags in the garden.
Caecilius marked the completion of the new arena with entertainments and an exhibition battle dedicated to Cath Mawr. His cohorts squared off against each other with wooden swords and the winning side received double pay for a month and bronze phalerae. The First Cohort acquitted itself well until Septimus, unscathed during the exhibition, attempted to imitate the troupe of professional acrobats who followed it and sprained his ankle. The cohort surgeon wrapped it and announced that he would need to stay off it for at least a month.
“You are an idiot,” Faustus told him.
“I’ll be all right by the time anything comes up,” Septimus said optimistically.
Lucius visited him in his barracks quarters with a consolatory jug of Faustus’s wine.
“Well, I made a fool of myself, didn’t I?” Septimus said, grinning. His immobilized ankle was propped on a stool. “I can get about with a crutch but that’s all.”
“Naso can take them out, can’t he?” Lucius asked. Naso was the century’s optio; second in command to Septimus.
“They’ll do well enough with him, but it’s Typhon’s own pain in the backside to me to be stuck like this. Now that the weather’s turned, the legate and the primus pilus want us out there like ants on honey cake, just to give the Silures the idea we aren’t asleep. Naso can handle the men, but your uncle won’t want you following along with us anymore. It was all right in winter, but things are likely to liven up now. I wouldn’t feel right about it.”
Lucius considered that. Faustus hadn’t actually told him he couldn’t go anymore. No doubt he would if Lucius asked. “Well anyway I can cheer them along,” he told Septimus. “When do they go out again?”
It was only a one-day patrol along the coast, and Faustus hadn’t said he couldn’t, Lucius reasoned. Not yet anyway.
“Are you sure?” Naso looked doubtful. “This is a bit further than you’ve gone with us before, isn’t it?”
“Uncle thinks it will be all right,” Lucius said. “It’s a fine day and I always ride, so I can turn back if you tell me to.” He smiled confidently and swung his horse into line beside the column. If you just did something, he had found, people usually decided that it was all right to do whatever you were already doing.
“Well, we’re glad to have you if you have the commander’s word. It’s a fine day for sure.”
The sky was bird’s-egg blue, and a breeze carried the scent of growing things on it. They made their way along the banks of the Isca River to the Sabrina coast where the estuary gleamed under the sun. It was fine sailing weather too, and the legate and primus pilus wanted multiple eyes on the channel. The tide was nearly at full, the air washed with a salty, marshy, riverine smell. Sea birds made great clouds overhead. The coastline grew jagged with rocky cliffs outcropping above the water; the track wound sometimes into woods clinging to the coastwise slope and then along bare headlands where the land fell down to the sea.
Lucius dawdled, keeping the column in sight with one eye, but mostly watching the gulls wheeling over the cliffs, and the foam of the incoming tide. The cliff edge was crumbled in places, and he kept a cautious distance from it. He could feel a pricking like some insect on the back of his neck and he slapped at it but when there was nothing there, he shrugged. It was the same feeling of being watched he had had all winter while his mother fretted over him. By now she would have discovered him gone. He would pay for this adventure, he knew, but it would have been worth it. He lagged farther behind, stopping to look at the dark heads of seals near the shore, so like human faces at that distance. His aunt, Eirian, had told him about seals that changed to men and came ashore. What would it be like to slip out of the skin you wore every day and into some other flesh?
Dreaming of seals, he didn’t see the ripple in the salt grass behind him, moving out of the cover of trees on the wooded headland, or that the column had wound out of sight. While he watched the seals, hands grasped him from behind by an arm and a leg and dragged him from the saddle. He reached for his dagger, struggling in their grip. They were pulling him toward the cliff, and he fought them furiously. One hit him across the face with a fist. He kicked at them, trying to free himself but they pulled his feet out from under him. He scratched one with his free hand, raking his nails down the scarred and tattooed cheek. He reached for the dagger again, but a hand grasped that wrist too and twisted it. There were two of them and they were stronger than he was. He could see the Sabrina far below, muddy with the tidal surge, as they wrestled him toward the edge.
Finally, they lifted him up and flung him out over the water. He had only a moment to try to twist himself in the empty air, catch at some stunted tree on the nearly vertical slope, break his fall somehow, before he landed with a force that turned his vision black and a hideous pain that he felt only for a moment, face in the foaming tide.
Above him, the horse struggled at the end of its reins while the men tried to drive it over the cliff after him, but it reared, lashed out with its hooves and broke free, going at a gallop down the track.
The men cursed and turned to the cliff edge instead. They kicked out a gap at the track’s edge with their boots and then ran. A tumble of loose stone and clods of dirt rained down on the still figure in the water below.
The column had not noticed the boy lagging behind and their marching cadence drowned the hoofbeats until the horse was nearly on them, foam-flecked and panic-driven. Naso caught its reins and swore.
“About turn! On the run!”
They went back up the track, looking for the place where the hoof prints had changed to a gallop, and saw the torn-out cliff edge.
“Mithras! Something must have spooked the horse. It’s a wonder it didn’t go over too. Do you see him?”
Naso and the watch commander peered over the edge, keeping carefully away from where the stone and sand had crumbled away.
“No.”
“Tide’s turning,” someone said. “It will have taken him with it maybe.”
“We’re going down there!” Naso said. They had to. He inspected the cliff. “There’s a track that might be for goats along the way.” He pointed to a faint precipitous path. “If we’re careful we might get down that.”
“Or go back to where the road follows the shore,” the watch commander said.
“That will take longer.” Naso shucked his lorica and helmet, and his boots. Bare feet would offer him a better grip.
Owl had been inspecting the shoreline to see what the tide would bring and if any of it would be something useful when the Roman patrol came by along the road above. She slid back into the shadow of the cliff while they went past. She had just crept out again when a man on horseback followed them, and she saw two more men hunting behind him. She was about to hide again, because the Sun People’s business was none of hers – and if they saw her, they would hunt her too – when they caught the rider and hurled him off the cliff. She stared at them while they fought the horse. When it broke free and ran, they ran too.
Owl crept cautiously closer. There was no one left on the cliff now and curiosity got the better of her. When she reached the rider, he was floating face down. She turned him over and saw he wasn’t a grown man at all, but a boy, just tall like all the Sun People. There was a bloody gash in his head that bled into the water.
Owl dragged the limp body above the tide line and knelt, inspecting it. He smelled like iron. She found the blade at his belt, took the bronze hilt gingerly between two fingers, and flung it into the water. The water could have the dagger in exchange for him. The sea would want something, and she had no use for iron.
Owl put her head against his chest. She couldn’t decide whether he was dead or not. She put him over her lap, pounded his back, and some water came out. She put her face to the back of his neck and breathed in a startling, half familiar scent, there and then gone again into the heavier scent of salt water and sea wrack. She put her fingers in her mouth and whistled a long low note.
Then there were voices on the cliff top and she saw that the Romans had come back. They were staring down at the water. Owl dragged the body farther out of their line of sight into a shallow niche in the cliff wall. The tide was on its way out, but still high enough to wash away her footprints and the furrows his feet had dug in the sand. She whistled again, a different note, repeated impatiently.
One of the Romans began to climb down the cliff. He was cautious, clinging to the stony, nearly vertical slope, feet feeling for purchase. Owl’s sisters came along the shore from the other direction, quietly as shadows.
“Help me carry him.”
Plover looked at the body distrustfully. “What is it?”
“He’s mine. Someone threw him over the cliff. The Romans are trying to find him, I think.” She pointed at the man just below the cliff top, clinging precariously to the slope.
“He stinks of iron,” Rail said.
“He had an iron knife. I threw it in the water. Help me carry him. We’re going to take him to Grandmother.”
Rail looked dubious. “She won’t let you keep him.”
“He’s likely dead,” Badger said.
“I want him,” Owl said.
They peered out from the niche in the cliff face to see the Roman part way down the slope. Another had shucked off his boots and turtle shell of iron plate and begun to follow him down.
“I’m the oldest,” Owl said stubbornly when her sisters still looked resistant.
Badger snorted. “We haven’t found anything good this tide, and a dead Sun Man is likely not what Grandmother wants.” Still, she put her hands under the boy’s shoulders.
They took him two at the shoulders and two at the feet and bore him down the sand, through a fissure in the cliff face, and then up the steep path it almost concealed until they came out above the estuary.
The home house of Owl and her sisters lay to the north of Porth Cerrig in the shadow of the old barrow of Blaidd Llwyd from which it took its name. The entrance was concealed by forest and by the natural disinclination of the Silures or any other Sun People to go anywhere near it. They brought the boy through the narrow doorway and down the stone stairs it concealed and laid him on the hearth before the Old One. The room was warm and dim and smelled of peat. A bright thin shaft of light came from an opening somewhere above, crossing the boy’s pale face and sea-soaked tunic.
Fox, Old One of Blaidd Llwyd, was in middle age, hair just beginning to go gray. She knelt beside the boy, pulled the wet pale hair away to look at the gash in his scalp, touched it lightly, then put two fingers to his throat and then to his wrist. She pressed her ear to his chest and listened.
“Alive. But barely.” She looked consideringly at Owl. “Why have you brought a Sun Man’s boy here?”
“Other Sun Men tried to kill him. Then Romans came looking for him. I think they wanted to kill him too.”
“We should have let them,” Badger said.
Owl ignored her.
“Maybe he’s theirs,” Rail said.
“I found him,” Owl said stubbornly. “He’s mine.”
“He is not an orphaned hedgehog,” the Old One told her. Owl had brought one of those home last summer. It had stayed to live in the woods by the old barrow. Fox looked at the boy for a long time. She put her face to his throat and breathed deeply. “Is that all?” she asked Owl when she sat up again.
Owl looked uncertain. “I thought… I thought he was ours.”
“Yes,” Fox said. “Very long ago, but yes. Take him and put him to bed and I will see if I can make him live.”
“Ours?” Badger was scornful. “A great Sun Man’s boy who is bigger than you are?”
“When you have learned to look closely at things, Badger, and can tell a rock from a turnip, you may question me,” Fox said, and Badger closed her mouth.
“I will save him if I can,” the Old One told Owl. “Then we will decide what to do with him.”
The tide was well on its way out when Naso slithered and stumbled to the bottom of the cliff. The wet sand lay stark and empty before him, and he looked despairingly in every direction.
His watch commander came down behind him, half falling the last few feet.
“The tide…” the watch commander said.
“Yes.” Naso looked for something, anything, floating on the retreating waves. He waded out and splashed up and down the shore, searching the water. Something caught his eye but it was only a piece of broken crate with shreds of cloth caught on it.
“Best we go back,” the watch commander said.
It would take another hour to make their way up the shore to where they could climb to the road again. They wouldn’t get back up the way they had come down. Naso shouted up at the column on the cliff to meet them and to wait for him. It had to be he that told the commander, he thought dismally.
Faustus saw the patrol coming through the fort gate leading Lucius’s riderless horse and his blood went cold. When they had not found him that morning, a conversation with Septimus had convinced him that Lucius, probably through outright lying, had convinced Naso to take him along. Faustus had been angry but not overly worried. Lucius would regret it when he got home, but there was no sign of action yet from the Silures, and Loarn was still courting Silvia which argued that he would not start a war until he had her in Porth Cerrig. Silvia had been even angrier than Faustus, pacing furiously from house to the First Cohort barracks and back, waiting for them to come home.
Now, the moment that Faustus saw Naso’s grim, frightened face, he knew. He walked to meet him.
“What happened?” He took the horse’s reins from the century watch commander.
“We don’t know exactly,” Naso said miserably. “He lagged behind the column—”
“Which he should not have been with.”
“He said he had your permission… Oh, Mithras, he didn’t, did he?”
“No.”
“We didn’t see him getting behind and then the horse came after us without him. Something had spooked it and we turned back.” Naso closed his eyes for a moment. “We backtracked. We saw a piece out of the cliff edge – we were along that bit where the road runs along the headland – where it looked as if the horse lost his footing. He must have thrown him. But we couldn’t find him.”
“Did he go over the cliff?” Faustus asked, his stomach churning.
“He must have but we couldn’t see him,” Naso said desperately. “I climbed down there, sir. Two of us did, but he was gone.” He swallowed. “The tide was going out.”
“Lucius!”
Faustus turned to see Silvia running toward them.
“Where is Lucius?”
Faustus caught her and took her in his arms. Paullus was behind her, and he handed him the horse’s reins. “Come in the house.” He looked back at Naso.
Naso met his eyes, face grim, waiting for whatever was going to happen to him.
“Take the century back and report to Septimus.” He wanted to blame Naso, but Naso was no more responsible than any of them, than himself, and Silvia, even Septimus who should have realized what the boy was up to.
“Where is Lucius?” Silvia cried.
Faustus walked her to the house, murmuring softly, telling the horrible story in soft words, hugging her to him while he did.
Eirian met them at the door, her face white. He told it all over again while Silvia sobbed.
“We’ll go out there,” he told her. “We’ll find him if we can.” At least he could try to give her a body to bury.
Silvia pulled away from him. “You did this! Where is my son? You let him go out with your men! You!”
“He went without my permission this time. And do you think I don’t blame myself? I should have known how restless he was and made sure my men knew not to listen to him.”
“Restless?” Silvia flung the word at him. “You made him restless, with all your talk of the army!”
“You made him restless by trying to cage him!”
“Faustus, no.” Eirian pulled at his arm.
“You took my boy from me, Faustus! I will hate you forever!”
Gwladus put her arm around Silvia. “Come, lady, and I will make you a warm drink.”
“I don’t want a drink!” Silvia sobbed. “I want my boy!” But she let Gwladus lead her away.
Eirian sank into a chair and put her face in her hands.
Faustus stood grim-faced, staring at the door that he would never see Lucius come through again. Guilt and anger and misery washed over him. They were all at fault. Everyone was at fault: Naso, Silvia, Manlius and his debts, but most at fault was himself, paterfamilias, the one who should have protected Lucius. The one who should have listened to his father’s shade when he said to get the boy out of Britain, where even the landscape was a danger. If that was what had happened.
“That horse is as surefooted as a mule,” he whispered to Eirian. “And Lucius knows not to go near the cliff edge, he knows the ground there is unstable. I should have thought of this when Loarn sent an ambush after me. They were trying to pick off officers, it was just their bad luck they got Blaesus instead of me.”
Eirian looked up at him. “If you say that to Silvia, you will drive her to him, to prove you wrong,” she said quietly. “But do your best to find him, to give her some comfort. Sometimes the sea gives them back.”
The sea returned nothing but the knife. They found it half buried in the sand at low tide, proof that what they feared had been true. But of his body, nothing, not a scrap of cloth nor a sandal strap. Eirian stood on the shore and listened to the seals crying far out in the channel. They only said, He is not with us. In the face of Silvia’s anguish Eirian wondered again how her own mother could have left her. No one had ever spoken of her to Eirian, only to each other, gossiping with the aunts who inspected her hands for suspicious signs of webbing and advised her father to keep her from the water. If she had a child herself, did she risk this pain? The seals had no answer to that either.
The legate ordered prayers for Lucius’s shade, to Jupiter and Juno, Persephone and Hades, and to Mithras god of soldiers. “He would have been one of us,” Caecilius said quietly to Faustus. “May the gods give him his command in the afterlife.”
Silvia was silent and ashen faced, moving as mechanically as a child’s clay puppet. Faustus ordered a memorial stone, and she approved it without really looking at it.
Dis Manibus
Lucius Manlius
Beloved Son
Aged thirteen years
Silvia his mother set this up
A portrait of Lucius rested above the inscription.
Faustus had it installed beside his father’s monument among the tombstones along the Venta road. Silvius Valerianus’s ashes had been buried in Narbo Martius, but Faustus had once hoped that a suitable gravestone in Britain would make him lie quietly there as well. It hadn’t. He half expected the old man to appear now, berating him, but all he heard was the unexpected sound of weeping hanging in the air.
Owl sat beside the boy’s bed. The Old One had done what she could for the blow to his head and Owl could see him breathing faintly now that everything was still. They had undressed him and put him into a clean shirt belonging to Thorn, who was taller than most. Even so it was barely large enough for him. They did not disturb the charms around his neck, a gold locket and a winged silver phallus, thinking them lucky things that might help him live.
“Gold would buy meat in the Sun People’s market,” Thorn muttered.
“And luck turns when it is stolen,” Fox said.
“He’s mine,” Owl said stubbornly. “You leave him alone.”
Now that he was clean, she bent and breathed in his scent again. You are ours, she thought. But long ago. He stirred and she put her brown hand on his pale one. He had big hands like all the Sun People. Whatever old blood was in him was so far away it was no more than an echo.
“They won’t let me keep you,” she said sadly. Now he was not much taller than Thorn, but he would grow, in the way of all adolescents, shooting up like a tree in sun. What she wanted with him, she didn’t know, but the fact that she had found him and saved him bound him to her. At least for now he was hers.
He opened his eyes slowly. The room was dim and peat-smelling. His head hurt. Even the dim light was too much at first and he shut them again. Slept again. Woke again. There was a child sitting beside him. She spoke to him, some language unintelligible, like birdsong. It was a pleasant sound. His head still hurt. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the child was still there, although he saw now that she was not really a child, but a young woman, dark-skinned and blue-eyed. She fed him broth from a bowl.
“What are you?” he asked her, and she spoke again, the same musical bird notes. He shook his head.
She went away and he closed his eyes and when he opened them there were seven of them standing around the bed. They were small, no taller than nine-year-olds, with tribal marks like vines circling their arms and faces. A woman with blue beads knotted into her graying hair bent over him and touched his forehead. “Who are you?” she asked him.
This one spoke the Silures’ language, which he understood somewhat. He thought about it. “I don’t know.” That seemed wrong. Surely he knew who he was. He thought some more. “Where am I?” he asked her.
“This is the sidhe of Blaidd Llwyd,” she said. “I am the Old One of Blaidd Llwyd. My name is Fox. What is yours?”
He thought. That should have come easily. He knew his name, surely. There was only a gray, misty space where his name should have been. “What is the sidhe of Blaidd Llwyd?” he asked.
“It is our house. Are you Roman? Our daughter says she thinks you spoke to her in their tongue.”
He tried the language that came easiest to him. Latin. Yes, he could speak Latin. He said so. His head began to throb, and he winced.
“You fell from a cliff,” Fox said. “Do you remember that?”
Did he? A moment of falling, terror, something else – anger, maybe.
“Do you remember the horse?”
He shook his head. Had there been a horse? He thought there had.
“Sleep then. Sleep and likely it will come.”
A babble of voices surrounded her in the bird note language he couldn’t understand. She said something sharp, and they quieted. He closed his eyes again.
Badger glared at Owl when Fox had driven them all from the chamber. “What if he’s a Roman? A Roman is worse even than the Silures.”
“A lot of the Sun People speak the Romans’ language,” Owl said. “And so do some of ours.”
“He is not one of ours!”
“A long time ago,” Owl said. “The Old One said so.”
Badger sniffed. “That one of his kind raped a woman of our kind does not make him ours.”
“The amulets around his neck look Roman,” Thorn said. “I have seen things like the silver one on dead ones. I will have to throw away that shirt.”
“Owl is too fine for sidhe-men,” Plover said primly. “She wants a man from the Sun People to keep for a pet.”
“Shut your mouth.” Owl balled her hands into fists.
“I think he’s a Roman,” Rail said.
“Someone was trying to kill him,” Owl said. “They threw him off the cliff.”
“Stop and think why that might be,” Thorn said. “And whether they will come looking for him here.”
“He’s mine,” Owl said. “They gave him away and I found him.”
He opened his eyes carefully. The things he had forgotten were always just out of reach when he snatched at them. Maybe memory would come if he left it alone. He could feel it on the edge of his mind. When it didn’t, he concentrated instead on looking about him at the chamber where they had taken him. The walls were stone and a faint draft told him that there was an air vent somewhere above them. It was chilly but not cold. He lay comfortably under a woolen blanket, and there was a wolfskin on the packed earth floor. The light in the room came from rushlights set into niches in the walls, only a few of them so the air had a twilight quality.
He got up shakily to use the pot they had brought for him and looked wistfully at the empty bowl by the bed. When he lay back down on it, the herbs in the thin mattress gave off a cloud of scent.
Fox, the Old One, came into the chamber and held out the clothes he had worn. “We have washed these for you, and done what we could with the boots. The sea water has spoiled them somewhat.”
He sat up and stripped off what he was wearing. Thorn’s shirt was tight in the shoulders and pinched him when he slept. He put his own tunic on gratefully. “You are kind.” The British came more easily to his tongue now. Someone had told him to learn it. He tried to remember who, and the pain flared up. He winced.
“Let me see your head.”
He bent his neck while she inspected his scalp. Her hands were light fingered, gentle, probing carefully. She smelled of peat smoke and the salve she rubbed into his hair.
“Do not think on it,” she said quietly. “Rest and it will come. Rest. You are safe here with us.”
Who was he safe from? He tried to remember that too and nothing came but a flashing memory of hands on his wrists and ankles. He thought someone had pulled him off a horse. “Are they looking for me?” he asked, suddenly frightened.
“We don’t know,” Fox said. “If they are, they will not find you here.”