Lucian knew the moment he saw Jory’s face that something was wrong. Because Jory was alone on the Lumateran side of the stream and Lucian knew the lad would never leave her. He was half in love with her himself.
“Where is she, Jory?” he asked, his voice harsh. He had decided just hours before to surprise Phaedra and ride down the valley to collect her earlier than usual. It was about time they went to the capital, he told Yata. They’d all go together and stay with Isaboe and Finnikin, and he’d properly introduce Phaedra to his queen. As his wife.
Jory jumped to his feet, holding his hand up as if to ward Lucian away.
“It’s plague, Lucian.”
“What?”
“Not the whole camp. They think they may have contained it. To one cave. But I don’t want you to come near me in case I’ve got it.”
The boy was wild-eyed. Full of fear, but not for himself.
“Talk to me, Jory,” Lucian said, walking to the lad. “Don’t be frightened. Just talk.”
“Stay away, Lucian. I beg of you.”
“Where’s my wife, Jory? Where’s Phaedra?”
Jory seemed confused. Dazed. He pointed back to the camp across the stream, then his arm dropped with a fatigue of spirit.
“When we arrived this morning, it was all so normal,” Jory said, “and I stopped a moment, you know. I didn’t mean to, but I stopped a moment to speak to Kasabian because I try so hard with him, Lucian. Phaedra had gone into Angry Cora’s cave and later, when I went to enter, Phaedra yelled at me. ‘Stop, Jory,’ she said. ‘We think it’s plague. Call Matteo, who has seen plague himself.’ ”
Jory shuddered.
“Rafuel or Matteo or whoever he wants to be, he went to the cave but didn’t go inside. I saw him from the entrance, Lucian. I saw his face. I thought his heart had stopped beating. He ordered the camp leaders and Harker and Kasabian and everyone away. ‘Plague,’ he shouted. ‘Plague.’
“Harker had to be held back. ‘You can’t keep me away from my women,’ he shouted. But Rafuel picked up a sword and said that the next person to pass him would die with a sword through his heart. ‘Plague is plague,’ he said. Everyone was ordered back to their caves. Rafuel told Donashe that the women had to be isolated. ‘They can’t just stay there in the middle of us all and spread their stinking disease.’ He was like a madman, Rafuel was. Phaedra came to the entrance and said that she would take the women farther down the stream and that perhaps in that way, they’d contain it. And I called out to her, Lucian. Truly I did. I said, ‘Phaedra, you’ve not been there long. You can stay with us because it can’t catch you that fast. Not if you haven’t touched them.’ But she wouldn’t come, Lucian. She said that if she returned with me and brought plague to the mountain and to the children, she would never forgive herself and nor would you, Lucian.”
Jory looked back to the Charynite camp again, as if willing Phaedra to walk through the trees.
“So now they’re downstream and Phaedra said that each day she’ll write a message outside a cave wall up high with an ochre stick, the writing big and bold.”
“Write what?” Lucian asked, horrified. But he didn’t need to hear the answer.
Phaedra would write the numbers of the dead.
Despite Jory’s pleas to keep away, Lucian crossed the stream and approached Rafuel, who was standing in a huddle with the rest of the camp dwellers. Lucian grabbed him, shaking him hard.
“How many of them are there?” he asked.
“Six.”
“Take me to her.”
“And what?” Rafuel spat. “Get yourself killed? Have you ever seen plague, Mont? I doubt that, in your cozy Osterian hills. If I take you to her cave, Lumatere will be annihilated within weeks. I was there six years ago. I lived through the last plague we had.”
Rafuel turned to the others. “I say this to you all. The first man or woman who travels past me to that cave downstream will catch an arrow to the heart. The first man or woman who does not report a sign will catch an arrow to the heart.”
“Are you camp leader all of a sudden, Matteo?” Lucian demanded.
Donashe stepped forward. “We stand by Matteo’s threat,” he said.
Rafuel stared at Lucian. “If you cross the stream again, then you’re a bigger fool than I thought you were, Mont.”
Lucian stayed with Jory on the Lumateran side of the stream for days. When he saw Yael coming down the mountain on the third day, he called out to his cousin to stay away. Although he strongly suspected that he and Jory were not in danger, he couldn’t take the chance. The only good news was that none of the cave dwellers had reported symptoms, although there were those who, according to Rafuel, reported anything from a sneeze to an itch.
But on the fourth day, the true horror began. Downstream from where the women had moved, two markings on the outer wall of one of the caves appeared. Two dead. Lucian held his vigil with Jory. Across the stream he saw Harker and Kasabian and the husband of the lazy girl Ginny, waiting. Two days later, Rafuel reported two more markings on the cave walls. On the seventh day, Rafuel traveled to the caves with his body wrapped and every part of him covered but his eyes. Lucian and the world of the valley prayed, dreading the news. And later that afternoon, they all saw the flames from a distance.
“Not good,” Kasabian muttered. “Not good.”
Rafuel returned, and Lucian crossed the stream with Jory, to join Kasabian and Harker. He could see that Rafuel’s face was ashen, his eyes everywhere but on the men who stood before him.
“Matteo?” Kasabian asked. “Speak, Matteo.”
And the moment Rafuel’s eyes met Lucian’s, he knew.
“All of them?” Harker asked, his voice broken. Rafuel nodded. He looked around to where a crowd was gathering.
“But not Phaedra?” Lucian said.
“All of them, Mont.”
Lucian shook his head, not wanting to believe.
“I want to see her,” he said, pushing past Rafuel.
“You can’t. The corpse of a plague victim carries disease. I had to burn them.”
Jory grabbed Lucian, trying to drag him back.
“Mont, don’t risk our lives,” Donashe ordered.
The cries of fear and grief stopped Lucian.
“You had no right to do that,” he accused Rafuel. “She was my wife. You had no right.”
“I had every right in the world, Mont,” Rafuel shouted. “What were you going to do? Bury her in the ground. We don’t honor our dead in such a way.”
“She was my wife!”
“She didn’t belong to you anymore,” Rafuel said. “She didn’t belong to her father. She belonged to this valley, and I had every right in the world. These people are frightened. They’ve lost Phaedra, and they believe your queen will exile us for fear of spreading the plague.”
“I want to see my wife,” Harker said. “I want to see my daughter! Take me to them!”
Rafuel went to walk away. “You know that’s not possible.”
Harker leaped on Rafuel, beating him with a rage beyond anything Lucian had seen among these people. It took four men to drag him from Rafuel and they tied his hands and legs. “You had no right to take them from me,” Harker moaned. “No right. I want to see my Florenza. I want to see my Jorja.”
In the mountains when Lucian and Jory returned, the Monts were waiting for them. Yael and his wife were there, overjoyed to see their son alive and well.
“Where’s Phaedra?” Tesadora asked, and Lucian saw tears in the eyes of a woman he had believed would weep for no one.
“Lucian!” Japhra and Constance and the novices grabbed at the fleece of his coat as he walked toward his cottage. “Where is she, Lucian?”
He continued walking, leaving behind their cries.
Later, Yata and Tesadora came with supper and they ate it quietly.
“Foolish girl,” Tesadora said. “Foolish girl.”
Foolish man, Lucian thought, who took a year to realize he loved his wife and never said the words to her.
“Tomorrow you go to Alonso,” Yata said quietly. “Her father needs to know.”
As Lucian set off the next day, Jory and Yael were waiting for him outside Pitts’s cottage.
“We thought we’d come with you, Lucian. To keep you company, cousin,” Jory said, and Lucian thought how young he looked. Still a boy.
They traveled all day on horseback in silence. As they passed the caves where Phaedra died, he saw the four bold red lines marking the four out of six deaths. He wondered who died last with her. He hoped it was Cora. They would have been a comfort to each other in the end. He wondered if she had thought of him. If she’d realized that Lucian had grown to love her and that he had planned a bonding ceremony among the Monts unlike the one in Alonso, through which she had wept. He wondered if she imagined that Lotte and the fool Orly would build a shrine for her in his paddock and that Yata had the entrance of her house adorned with the shroud of grieving, refusing to accept visitors. And that Alda had her sons leave a posy of mountain wildflowers on the Charyn side of the stream and that Lucian had slept in her cot with her shawl clutched in his hands, the scent of her consuming his small cottage.
In Alonso they identified themselves at the gates and were escorted to the provincaro’s house, where Lucian met Sol of Alonso. The provincaro would have read the sorrow on their faces. Lucian knew the moment the man understood what they were doing there, but he spoke the words out loud regardless.
Phaedra was dead.
And for the second time in days, he saw the grief of a father for his daughter and he heard the fury spat at him as every man in the room tried to hold Sol of Alonso down.
“You were supposed to protect her! On your mountain! Your father pledged! Your father pledged he’d take care of my Phaedra! He pledged!”
Lucian realized the truth with bitterness. She had lied to the provincaro. Had led him to believe she was still living happily in the Mountains with her Mont husband since their bonding ceremony in Alonso. Did she not say that in her letters home each month? She had lied to all of them. Her father would never have refused to take his daughter back into his home. It had been Lucian’s ignorance that had allowed him to believe that only a Lumateran father would not forsake his daughter.
And as they left the province walls, he heard the wails, the crying from the people grieving their beloved last born.
Phaedra of Alonso is dead.
When they arrived back at the valley, Lucian was numb. He didn’t stop but kept on riding past Kasabian, who was on his hands and knees in the vegetable patch he had lovingly restored with his sister, Cora, after the Mont lads had destroyed it. Before Lucian or Yael could stop him, Jory dismounted and walked to the man and knelt in the earth beside him. Lucian watched his young kinsman reach out and embrace Kasabian, and for the first time since his father’s death, Lucian wept.