3
Brennan looked out the window again, watching as the red-haired man traversed the length of the yard while kicking up the snow that dusted the paving stones.
“Excuse me.” He flashed one of his spectacular smiles and went out. We heard him go up the back steps and open the back door. Gray light gleamed through the paned windows. The peculiar hut glittered as if polished gems lay hidden in its layers. A crow still perched atop the center pole. Brennan intercepted the stranger with a friendly gesture and a smile.
“At least,” said Bee in a low voice, “the awful news was delivered by the handsomest man I’ve ever met.”
“Bee!”
“How do you suppose he got the appellation Du? Brennan Touré Du. Du means ‘black-haired.’ Yet he’s enchantingly fair-haired.”
I clucked my tongue to show I was not so susceptible, even though I was. “He’s positively ancient. Over thirty, anyway. That’s even older than your handsome admirer Legate Amadou Barry. Or have you forgotten him?”
She fixed me with the smoldering gaze that caused young men to fall catastrophically in love with her, professors to quake, shopkeepers to hasten forward to serve her, and young women our age to wish they could be like her, so proud and queenly. Then she dabbed away a tear. “Please! Amadou Barry offered me an intolerable insult! As if I had asked for it!”
“You’re not to blame for the proposal Amadou Barry made to you, Bee.”
“I know.” She blushed and looked away as if ashamed. “But before that I told him things I shouldn’t have, because I thought he genuinely loved me. I thought I could trust him.”
I frowned as I leaned on the table, pinning her gaze with my own. “Bee, you were alone and frightened and scared. You did nothing wrong. And I’m sure he was very persuasive. Until that unpleasant moment when he offered to make you his mistress.”
“As if it were the best thing I could ever hope for!” She made stabbing motions with the knife. “This! For him!”
“Sadly, men are the least of our problems right now.” I grabbed Rory’s ankle. “What do you know about Hallows’ Night? Murdered victims? The face of the ice? The Wild Hunt?”
His penetrating gold gaze was as opaque as a cat’s. “I know I’m hungry.”
“Do you not know, or are you not telling?”
“Hallows’ Night? Murders? The face of the ice? I don’t know what those things are.”
Because he looked exactly like a young man, it was easy to forget what he truly was and that he didn’t belong here. “Fair enough. I believe you. What do you know about the Wild Hunt?”
“I eat flesh. The Wild Hunt drinks blood. Even my mother trembles, for when the horn sounds, she would make us all hide. But everyone knows no one can truly hide, not if yours is the scent they pursue. I never saw them in all my life, but I have heard the hunt pass by while I cowered.”
Bee weighed the knife in her left hand as she considered the parsnips. “We thought we need only escape the combined forces of the mage Houses and the local prince. Now I’m warned I was born all unknowingly with a terrible gift of dreaming that will result in my being dismembered.”
“That knife is so sharp I can taste its edge.” Rory rolled up to his feet as Bee glared at the hapless parsnips. “Upset people shouldn’t wave knives around.”
“I didn’t ask you!”
He rubbed his eyes with the back of a wrist, the gesture very like that of a big cat, lazy and graceful and a trifle out of sorts. “They never do ask me, although they ought to,” he said with a contemptuous sniff. He stepped out into the passage.
“It’s just hard to imagine he really is a saber-toothed cat,” whispered Bee.
“I heard that!”
“Then don’t eavesdrop!” Bee called after him.
He padded up the main stairs toward the front entryway.
I went to the door, but the low passageway was empty, so I crossed back to the table. “That was certainly a disturbing story, but you must admit, Bee, we don’t know if it is true. Maybe Brennan was trying to frighten us into cooperating with them.”
She shook her head as she set a parsnip onto the cutting board. “Then he’d do better to ask why he and his comrades first met you while you were traveling in the company of a cold mage, when everyone knows cold mages are the enemies of Camjiata. Maybe he thinks we came here to spy on the radicals for the mage Houses.”
“It would be just as easy to say that Camjiata and the Hassi Barahal house set me to spy on the mages.”
“I wish that’s what Papa and Mama had meant to do with you. Sent you to spy on Four Moons House, I mean. I could forgive them for that.” She pulled a hand over her thick black curls and pulled them back as if to tie them in a tail, a gesture I knew meant she was troubled and nervous. “What I find so puzzling is why the general would walk into the city of Adurnam. He knows the ruling prince here is his sworn enemy. Doesn’t he fear he’ll be recaptured? How does he hope to get out of here without being caught?”