Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

“ ‘Where the hand of fortune branches, Tara Bell’s child must choose.’ We stand on the road washed by the tides of war, you and I. Is it accident that has brought us here? I believe it is not. I believe our fortunes are sealed before we are born.”

He poured himself a second glass and topped up mine.

“Destiny and fortune are just words. I think you are ambitious, General. Ambition is not the same as destiny. You only want to say it is.”

He chuckled. “I like how you speak your mind, Cat. So few manage to be both honest and likable. That is one of your charms. Daniel had the same gift of speaking truth while making his listeners laugh. Do you want to know how I met them? Tara and Daniel, and Helene?”

A jolt like a blow from an axe split through my body. I managed to nod.

“I was a young captain in the army of the Numantian League. One of the princes who ruled the League had made a marriage alliance with a princely clan out of the city of Sala, one of the cities of the Wagadou Federation. The Wagadou Federation grew out of mostly Mande communities who had recently moved into the uninhabited lands northeast of the Rhenus River.”

“Those lands weren’t uninhabited. People lived there already.”

He waved a hand with a casual dismissal. “Herders and trappers, living in the most appalling conditions. Best of all, the new territory was fertile ground for cold mages.”

“Because of its proximity to the ice.”

“Yes, so I understand, although naturally I know little of cold magic. The prince sent me to Sala to escort the noblewoman he was to marry back to Numantia. Instead we found ourselves embroiled in a war against the Atrebates and their allies. The war exploded all across the far north, into the boreal forest and the Barrens. The Celts who live right up against the Barrens are called the Belgae, a barbaric people. A few mage Houses had moved into that area fifty years earlier and civilized them. So we marched north and crossed the Boreal River.”

red at him. “Tara was protecting me.”

“I find it odd she would have believed that by dying she would protect you.”

“She knew Daniel would protect me. I hope you don’t find that odd.”

“Indeed, I do not, for Daniel was exactly the sort of man who could raise another man’s child as if it were his own and never love it less for all of that.”

How he had me then! For I was seized by both overwhelming grief and passionate curiosity.

“What do you mean? What sort of man was he?”

He leaned closer, voice dropping to a murmur. “Ah, Cat, he was a better man than I am.”

I sat back. “Are you mocking me?”

“No, I am not.” I knew he meant it, although I could not have said why. “I am mocking myself. I have asked myself a thousand times since that day why she did not confide in me.”

“The Amazon’s oath she swore condemned her to death for becoming pregnant.”

“She could have told me the truth. I would have found a way. But she felt only Daniel could rescue her, as if Tara had ever needed rescuing from anything except that hells-ridden, pestilent village she was born in. That must be why she hid the pregnancy for so long, waiting for Daniel to come. Or perhaps she hoped that drill, or a battle, would cause her to miscarry and rid her of a thing she did not want.”

“Do you know, General, I start to begin to like you again, and then you say something like that. My mother and father loved me.”

“I do not dispute that they loved you. I’ve read his journals. There’s a passage I recall in particular. ‘Is some other man’s bastard worth this to you?’ So your Uncle Jonatan demanded of his brother Daniel. And Daniel writes, ‘What happened on the ice does not matter. The child will be my child. I have promised Tara that, and even if I had not, it would make no difference, for my little cat is my sweet daughter, the delight of my life.’ ”

He examined me where I sat just outside the spill of light. “Why, Cat—are you crying?”

I wiped a tear from my cheek with the back of a hand. “There’s no shame in grief. I lost my parents when I was six. I lost the love I would have had from them all the years from then to now. Think of what they lost! They lost the years they would have had to watch me grow up, to welcome more children, to treasure each other.”

They were with me still, but it wasn’t the same as if they were sitting across from me at a table in an attic room in a market town in the midst of a war.

“What happened on the ice?” he asked. “There is no journal for the crucial months, the ones during which you must have been conceived. It’s missing, leaving only the mystery of you.”

“The secret belongs to those who remain silent.”

“A phrase I have heard before, from the lips of your husband. Think of this, Cat. If your aunt and uncle had not handed you over to the cold mages, you would never have married him. Destiny is a sharp goad. Never think otherwise.”

“You think it destiny, and not just accident?”