His hand gripped my wrist with an iron strength. I was so blindsided that I knew this time I had idiotically let down my guard, and this time nothing would stop him from plunging his sword into my heart and ridding himself of me.
Forgive me, Bee.
Steel hadn’t yet pierced me. I tried to pull my wrist out of his grasp but only slid partway before he fixed his fingers through mine and held on like a madman clinging to his delusions. He hauled me backward. I stumbled clumsily with the grass hissing around us, and we tumbled in under the overhanging branches of the oak and fell to the dirt onto our hindquarters. A shivering bell, barely audible, rang. The air seemed to vibrate as a string might vibrate, plucked by a bard’s hand.
My heart, my flesh, my bones, my spirit—all these thrummed as though caught within the vibrating string, within the almost inaudible thunder of a distant drumbeat that rolled on and on.
And then the air quieted and the world fell still. I was sitting on my backside, panting, with my left hand in a fist against the earth and Andevai holding my right hand, our fingers twined intimately together.
He released me at once, shaking free as if the touch of my skin hurt his, and scrambled to his feet. To check on the horse. Who was fine, perfectly fine, grazing at a fine stubble of grass over on the hearth side of the fine old oak. I could not catch my breath.
“Are you still there?” called the djeli. “Or were you caught in the tide of the dragon’s dream?”
A rising clamor drifted from beyond the canopy: Birds.
Like a woman who carried four times my years in her bones, I creaked to my feet and took one slow step and a second. I grasped hold of a low-hanging branch to steady myself as I looked over what had once been the levels with a summer forest whose foliage was mostly familiar to my eyes. As in a trance, I pushed through the leaves and beyond them to get an unobstructed view.
The world had changed. A wide, flat, open landscape spread away to the horizon. This was no place I had ever seen. A lazy river spread so wide it might as well have been a shallow sea, its many channels weaving a net through solitary islets and green carpets of reed. Scattered across higher ground rose slim-trunked trees crowned with swords as leaves and trees alight with flame-red flowers. Everywhere flocked birds in such number and painted with such bright colors that the sound and sight rendered me mute with wonder.
“Come back to warded ground,” said Andevai. I had not even noticed him walk up beside me. When I glanced back, the tree I had thought was an oak looked entirely different, with a huge trunk and stubby branches more like roots, covered with clusters of white flowers.
“It’s the same tree,” he said, noticing my startled gaze. “If you stay out here, you may be caught in another tide. Now perhaps you do not wonder why it is dangerous to hunt in the spirit world. Besides the beasts and monsters, I mean.”
“What happens to those who are caught in the tide?” I asked as I stared at the fluttering, rippling landscape of birds and river and dawn sky drenched with rosy gold but without a sun.
“They never come back.”
“Why didn’t you leave me out there, then?”
An icy, contemptuous look was the only answer he gave me. He turned and walked away, under the shadow of the tree.
24
Dazed, I followed him under the canopy. I kept walking, out to the open brick hearth, and I sat down on the stone bench as heavily as if I’d been kicked. The tree, the dun, and the well—not to mention the seven big cats—looked exactly as they had before, untouched by the tide that had altered the world beyond. The fire burned steadily, and as I stared at it, aware of Andevai moving about under the oak tree engaged in what activity I could not guess and did not want to know, the observation belatedly occurred to me that the fire was not consuming the wood along whose lengths the flames licked.
I understood nothing: not this place, not my companions, not my life.
I hate tears.
Tears had not brought back my parents, not the tears I had wept when I was six nor the ones shed occasionally as I grew up an orphan reading my father’s journals and so desperately missing him and what he could have given me had he only been there in person, he and my voiceless mother, the Amazon warrior who no one ever spoke of.
Tears flowed unbidden now. I pressed a fist into my belly just below the curve of my ribs to stop myself from sobbing out loud. The djeli put her fiddle to her chin and tuned the strings. Was she indifferent to my crying or simply polite enough to give me what privacy she could by pretending not to notice me?
“Catherine? Are you weeping?” He strode out from under the tree.
The sable cat leaped up on the rock beside me and sat on sleek haunches as it yawned widely. This display of fearsome teeth and muscular bulk brought Andevai up short. He muttered a crisp, ferocious curse.
Gracious Melqart! The man had bothered to change his clothes out of the practical but rustic country garb he had previously been wearing and back into the fashionable clothing worn by men born to wealth and style. Wrinkles marred the perfection of dash jacket and sleek trousers, and his boots were wiped clean but still smudged. Seeing him revert to the form in which I had first beheld him dried my tears better than any sympathetic words could have. How on earth had he managed to change clothes with that injured arm? The man was clearly insanely devoted to looking fashionable.
The cat leaned against me. Much the same size and height as me, it possessed the warmth of a living soul. Its presence gave me comfort, not least because I knew perfectly well, as did Andevai, that it could rip him open. I scratched the back of its neck, and it rumbled a purr.
“That beast is wild, not domesticated,” he said in a choked voice. “It could turn on you at any moment, however much it seems sympathetic to your situation just now.”
“It rather reminds me of you, then,” I retorted without wiping my tear-streaked face. “It was kind of you to forebear to murder me just now, when I was unprepared to defend myself. I appreciate it. But I can’t know when you will change your mind. When you will hear the mansa’s command echoing in your thoughts. When you will think of your village, for which I am sure I do not blame you for wanting to spare them whatever punishment you can. I would do so myself, had I kinfolk who care for me as yours clearly do for you.”
“You are mocking me.”
“Am I? Why do you think so?” The tears were drying. I withdrew my hand from the big cat’s nape. “Or is it only that you expect mockery, having become accustomed to it in Four Moons House, where, I am given to understand, they despise you for being the son of slaves and yet envy you for the rare and unexpected potency you carry in your person. I think that when small-minded people envy and despise, then they will mock, thinking it their only weapon. I am not, I hope, a small-minded person. I will not mock you. I’ll tell you straight to your face that I don’t trust you and can’t trust you, and that despite my concern for the generous and upright people in the village who decided it was better to aid me and keep their faces clean before the ancestors than to betray me and truckle favor with the mansa, I intend to stay alive. I intend you shall never have”—wasn’t it better never to use her name, especially in the spirit world?—“the other one. After the winter solstice passes, the other one makes her majority and can no longer be coerced into marriage. Perhaps then I might be allowed to live, since there will be no particular reason to benefit from my death. Do you think that is remotely possible?”