They found Donnag seated in front of the fire, one of the privileges of her age. She cast a quick look between Sophia and Cathal, lifted her eyebrows—I hope she’s not breeding, my lord—and only then gave them the usual polite greeting.
To Cathal’s mild surprise, Sophia managed a very passable Gaelic response.
“Can I aid you in aught?” Donnag asked. At that, Sophia looked blank.
“She wants to know what we want,” Cathal said in English. “I don’t know how much you’ve picked up.”
“Not very much…helloandgoodbye,pleaseandthank you, that sort of thing.Breadandcuptoo, or so I believe, andstairs.” She smiled ruefully. “Mostly we point and gesture.”
“Aye,” he said. “I’ll teach you later. Donnag”—he switched back to Gaelic—“this is Sophia, a scholar from France. An alchemist. She’s trying to help with Fergus. Might need herbs.”
“Ah?” Donnag had tried her own skills on Fergus when Cathal and his men had first returned. That failure had stung, he knew, but she showed no resentment now. “If she can manage it, I’ll be glad to help. What does she need?”
The hour that followed was both fascinating and confusing. He’d heard scraps about plants and the celestial bodies before, but he’d never been either interested enough or obligated to pay attention. Now he listened as Sophia talked about needing plants that corresponded to the Sun and to Saturn, and found himself startled when Donnag, as often as not, nodded in all apparent comprehension.
“She says she gathers ash leaves at dawn on Sundays” was the sort of thing Cathal found himself saying, careful of his translation as he’d rarely been before. So much depended on him getting the details right, particularly when he understood very little of the whole picture. “Marigolds too. Not that you’ll find either fresh just now, but she has some dried back in her cottage.”
At such information, Sophia would look sober and thoughtful, and slowly nod, prompting a similar expression from Donnag. Language aside, they clearly understood each other very well.
“She came at a bad time. Thishappenedat an ill time.” Donnag shook her head, her brow wrinkled, and Cathal didn’t think he needed to bother with translation. Long fingers, stained with herbs and soot but still straight, plucked idly at the gray wool of her gown. “There’s more of Saturday’s plants around, I suppose. Yew, here and there, and holly.”
“I’ve seen them both,” Cathal said, and they both stared at him: Sophia, though she couldn’t understand the words, because he no longer sounded like a dutiful translator, and Donnag, who could understand him, obviously wondering why he’d felt he had to speak up, yet too mindful of his rank to ask. He coughed and changed to French. “She says yew and holly for the…correspondence to Saturn? I couldn’t pick yew out of the rest of the evergreens around here, but I’ve seen clumps of holly here and there in the forest. I can take you. When the weather clears off.”
“Would you?” Sophia gave him a quick, brilliant smile, her dark eyes meeting his and almost glowing in the firelight. “That would be lovely. Very helpful. And—”
As quickly, she was back to using him as an interpreter, discussing plans with Donnag and asking about the virtue of dried herbs as opposed to those pickled or preserved in alcohol. When the conversation ended, Cathal felt as if he’d just spent an hour with his boyhood tutors—but his youthful self would have been shocked and faintly revolted by how much he’d enjoyed the education this time.
* * *
The storm raged for five days. Even more than was usual, Castle MacAlasdair became its own world, shrinking in space around those inside its walls even as it grew in their perspective, those walls marking the boundaries of everything known and safe. Outside, the wind shrieked day and night, and the snow fell sideways half the time, spitting into the face of anyone daring to put their head out of a window.
Cathal called the guards off the battlements after the first few hours. No human enemy would attack under such conditions, and against any supernatural enough to strike, men with swords would be little use. He posted a few guards inside each of the towers, and nobody came in to slit all their throats and set fire to the castle.
Besides, he turned out to need guards more indoors. Close quarters heated tempers as well as bodies. The limited amount of plain food didn’t help, and the constant wailing from outside set everyone’s nerves on edge. Villagers whose small feuds had been gentled by distance now faced each other across their bread and ale in the morning, and many of them didn’t like it. Cathal and his men-at-arms separated brawlers tactfully when they could, pulled them apart forcefully when they couldn’t, and found in many cases that years of killing men hadn’t prepared them for trying to keep people from killing each other.
He used his voice and his rank most of the time, and left physical intervention to others. In man’s shape, he couldn’t shatter oak doors or snap the necks of half-ton beasts, but he was still stronger than human sinew would explain and his own temper thin enough. When the soldiers themselves fought, as proved not uncommon as the storm wore on, Cathal took a more direct hand. There he knew the measure of his strength and the need for control.
Controlwas the word to remember. He tried. His world had too little space and too many people, the sounds of constant talking and the smells of food and sweat at best. He’d lived in cities, but cities had been outside. He went to the battlements as often as he could. Even he couldn’t fly in the storm, but he walked the lengths of stone, stared out into the swirling whiteness, and forced his mind to some semblance of calm.
Tiredness was an unexpected ally. Had he been able to summon the energy for real anger from the first, his patience might have been far shorter. If he’d had more strength for transformation, the results might have been emphatic and bloody. That happened from time to time. He’d heard stories. He hadn’t been conscious of thinking about them during his days of effort before the storm, but he wondered, now that he had time to think, if they hadn’t been in his mind regardless.
He did have time to think—and after the third day, there was little he could do to exhaust himself. From nights of dreamless sleep and dragging himself out of bed, Cathal found himself waking earlier with more heart for the day ahead, even though he knew it would likely contain little to please him. The body took its recovery where and when it could. The mind had almost nothing to say about it.
Sophia’s presence did help, though. He had to look that truth in the face—that seeing her through the crowd made the mob in the great hall less overwhelming. Although his duties and the sheer number of people made conversation hard, simply knowing she was there added to his new vigor. Knowing she was working to help Fergus was some of it; some was her calm, and her ability to pull her own world around her at need, blocking out chaos and noise; some was that seeing her reminded Cathal of the wider world, and that the castle and the fifty-odd people inside were really only a small part of it.
And she was a damned good-looking woman, of course. Cathal couldn’t deny that element—but he’d wanted women before, had them before, and any improvement to his mood had been temporary at best.
Still, when he had a moment of quiet in the midst of the tempest, he watched the play of firelight on her gold skin or noticed the smooth curves of her body beneath her dress, and the next crisis was often easier to get through than he’d expected. Whatever the cause, he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth—much as Sophia’s mouth was worth looking at.
* * *
On the fourth day of the blizzard, the water in the oracle chamber poured without freezing. The sky spat on them unabated, so Cathal kept the knowledge to himself. Even he didn’t entirely trust prophecy, particularly when it was hopeful. The snow fell steadily, and the wind kept up, but on the morning of the fifth day, both seemed lighter, blows at the end of a long fight. By the evening, the snow had stopped.
Wary yet, Cathal waited until the morning to send word, but the sky was clear at dawn, and when the map showed no trouble coming, he let the villagers know that they could return to their houses, providing some of his men for escort. Sophia and Alice went too, he saw—Sophia with Donnag, Alice watchful by her side. They returned that evening with windblown hair and many small, cloth-wrapped bundles, which Sophia took directly up to her turret.
Noise dwindled to normal. Thirty people in the castle had been irksomely loud when Cathal had first arrived, but now seemed blessedly quiet. He slept, stretched, and began to go about the normal course of things—only to find himself with another guest at noon on the second day after the blizzard.
This one was an Irishman, short and lean, with a flute at his side and trinkets in a pack: good news for the ladies, but nothing that concerned Cathal at first. But the man motioned Cathal to one side, dug around in that pack, and removed a letter with a dark, unfamiliar seal. “A man at the border sent this from his lord,” the peddler said, holding up a hand to fend off any displeasure. “He paid well, but he also didn’t seem the sort to refuse, my lord.”
