She actually rolled her eyes, and her lips twitched even as her gaze tracked the wolves. “You must be tired, for that’s not your cleverest jest. As if you cared one jot about your clothes, except that they not fall off and expose your shapely arse.”
“So you did notice! I thought you were asleep.” He added, with a laugh more reckless than amused, “You’ll not shake me loose. If you’re pregnant, we will face it together.”
When she caught his gaze, my child’s heart wept. Was that love in her expression? Loyalty? Exasperation? I knew so little about my mother, but right then I knew she trusted him.
“If we escape, I will return to my regiment. I honor my obligations. My oath belongs to my commander. I cannot abandon my comrades. You know you are not the only one I love.”
“I do not ask you to abandon anyone, Tara, nor to choose me above any other. I only ask you to remember the oath I make to you now.”
He stole a kiss, pressed lightly at the corner of her mouth. Briefly she caught him with an answering kiss, then she pushed him away, and he stepped back with a smile.
Her gaze tracked the wolves. “They will never stop hunting me.”
His smiling expression vanished. “My oath is this. If we get out of this, if you need me, then you need only get word to me. I will come for you, and for the child if there is one. No matter who or what hunts you.”
The men at the longboat cried out in triumph as they found it seaworthy and its equipment intact. Shouting, they called three names—Tara! Daniel! Gaius!—and I realized they did not yet know the man on the path above was dead, for they could see nothing of what had occurred in the rear guard.
With her bloody arm, my mother pulled him against her. She kissed him with the passion of the condemned. When she released him, he was so stricken by astonishment that she had taken several steps away before she realized he wasn’t following her.
“Daniel! Don’t make me regret that.”
Beneath the cruel face of the ice, he laughed, looking like the happiest man in the world.
“You would laugh at a time like this,” she said with a smile that made her look like a woman who knew how to jest in a tavern over drinks. “Let’s get out of here before those cursed wolves get down the path.”
They strode toward their companions and the boats, but she abruptly halted, dragging him to a stop. “Did you hear something?”
He looked up at the face of the ice. “Just the wolves and the wind.”
“No,” she said. “Something else.”
The wolves began to descend.
“Cat! Wake up! You’re howling.” Bee was shaking me, trying to jostle my head off a cliff.
“Ouch! Let go, you beast!” Then I remembered everything. I sat up just as we jolted on such a bump that I was slammed into the side of a wagon. “Ow!”
Bee and I were crammed into the bed of the wagon with Vai’s chest, the Taino basket, and a dozen crates heaped with glistening oysters. The crates jostled with each jounce.
A man looked around from the driver’s seat. He was a white-haired, light-skinned elder with a pipe in his mouth and his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal sun-weathered forearms corded with muscle. “The lass wakes! I thought sure she was drunk as a lord and would sleep it off ’til teatime. Especially with that howling. Thought it was dire wolves, didn’t I? Or a pack of women cast off for their unsightly looks and scolding tongues!” He cackled at his own jest.
Fiery Shemesh! What nightmare was this?
“Bee, where are we?” I whispered as I rubbed my bruised shoulder. “Where is the dragon?”
“The dragon cast us out on land,” she whispered back.
The road was a cart track, two ruts cutting through damp earth. Mud slopped with each turn of the wheels, but we were high and dry. The two oxen pulling the wagon had the stolid pace of animals who can walk all day without stopping. Around us lay green hills ablaze with spring flowers. I shivered, for although the wagoner was content in his shirtsleeves, it seemed deathly cold.
Rory was sitting up next to the driver, wearing one of Vai’s best dash jackets, the fabric red, gold, and orange squares limned by black. He took a puff on the pipe and coughed violently.
The old man chortled again. “You smoke like a woman, lad! No doubt comes of being forced to attend on your sister and cousin all these months, as you say. I’ll teach you to be a man.”
The sight of Rory wearing the dash jacket distracted me. “Bee! How could you let Rory wear that particular jacket? That’s the one Vai wore the morning after we…”
Her foot poked me to silence. “How could I have remembered that!”
“He’s already got a smudge on the elbow!”