“Where are they now?” Cathal asked, turning back to glance at her in surprise.
“Yaakov’s dead…a fever, five years back. The boys are apprenticed.”
“And I gave her big eyes,” said Sophia, shaking her head in pretended remorse, “and begged her until she said she’d come with me to strange, cold lands, so that I would have company and my family could sleep nights.”
“I wanted toseethe strange, cold lands,” said Alice. “At the time, at least. I wanted to hear new songs and new stories, and see castles and cities in this part of the world. And I wouldn’t have let you go alone in any case, you who forget to sleep when you’ve got your head in a book.”
“That… Well, yes,” Sophia said, surrendering the point. “Oh! Is this the place?”
They’d come into a small clearing where the trees were largely evergreen and the shrubs around them grew thickly, many still green even in early February. “If I remember right,” Cathal said and then nodded as he spotted the bright-red berries of a holly bush under one of the trees. “Aye.”
“Why, I think I can find a number of useful plants here. If there’s time, of course—and if you don’t mind. Ordinarily I’d say that you could return to the castle, but I doubt either of us could find the way back from here.”
“I don’t mind,” said Cathal. “Glad to be outside the walls.”
“All the same,” said Alice, “there’s little sense us staying out here until our fingers fall off. We may as well split up. I think I know enough of what you’d want, Sophia, and Sir Cathal—”
“Holly, at least. Do I have to do anything when I pick it?” he asked.
Sophia shook her head. “Some plantsdorequire special care in their harvesting…mistletoe, mandrake, a few roses…but I shouldn’t think we’d find any here and now, and I can’t foresee needing any such soon.”
“Good. Stay within sight of the clearing. I think there’s naught out here now to hurt you.” There were wolves enough, largely a threat to the dead, and in the winter a few might be desperate enough to attack a living human, but none would come within a good distance of Cathal even in human form, and he would hear anything approaching. “Scream if you need to.”
“Be sure that we will,” said Sophia.
At first, they split the clearing equally, but when Cathal moved from one tree to another, he caught Sophia’s scent: herbs, strong soap, and ink, overlaying human female, particularlyherin a way that humans didn’t have words for. He looked sideways and saw her no more than an arm’s length away, carefully breaking small branches off one of the evergreen trees.
“Yew?” he asked, remembering her earlier conversation with Donnag.
“Pine.” Sophia didn’t turn her head, and her hands never left off their motion, just as they hadn’t in the laboratory. But her voice was friendly now, and she went on. “It’s not specific to either of the experiments I’m doing at the moment, but it’s good for cleansing, and that’s necessary enough. I’ll need to purify the room a few times as I go along. Also, if there are women in the village or the castle who want to have children, I can make a potion with the cones or the nuts, or show Donnag how, but perhaps she knows already.”
“I wouldn’t have any idea,” said Cathal. “Our rites use pine, though I never looked very closely at it. Father or Agnes would hand me what was needed, and I’d take their word. But I doubt Donnag knows about those. I didn’t know it was the same for mortals.”
“I’d imagine some variation…that you’re better innately at translating will or divine power through your flesh.” Sophia broke off a final branch and straightened up. “Or that it’s easier for you, rather. Regardless, the same principles would apply, I’d think. You are also things of the world, made by the same creator, yes?”
“Yes,” said Cathal. The work had disarranged Sophia’s cloak, and when she straightened, a breeze blew her gown and kirtle against her body, clearly outlining her full breasts and the flare of slim waist to rounded hip. He felt very much a thing of the world just then. “At least I think so.”
“You think so?”
He shrugged. “The oldest ones belonged everywhere or nowhere. So they say.” The stories were old ones, but new to Sophia, and as long as she was watching him with wide eyes and parted lips, Cathal was glad to keep talking. “Gods, if not your god…or Father Lachlann’s. Or the Fair Folk, maybe, as they call them around here. They could be in this world or others, as they chose. Not so solid.”
Unshocked, wondering, Sophia stepped forward, looking at him as if for some evidence of divine glow. “You look quite solid to me,” she said, smiling a little.
Right now, my lady, parts of me areextremelysolid.
Cathal bit back the reply and cleared his throat. “It’s been generations. We get more mortal with each. And I’m young,” he said.
“So you mentioned,” she said, and then shook her head a little. “But you’re…both, you mean to say. Beings of this world and not.”
“Aye. It also varies among us. Some think of themselves differently. Mostly, I’m a man.”
“Yes,” she said, too quickly, and then caught her breath. “I mean…” If she’d had anything further to say, it vanished. Her lips moved as she stared up at him, but words died before they could emerge.
There were only a few inches between them now. Her lips were full and dark red, her eyes shining, and Cathalwasmostly a man. Kissing her took no more thought—allowedno more thought—than drawing his next breath.
Sophia didn’t so much step into his arms as flow there, smooth, sure, and quiet. As her hands settled on his shoulders, her lips parted under his and she tilted her face upward, not merely yielding but eager. She was warmth, she was softness, and Cathal hadn’t realized until that moment just how strongly he’d craved both. Heedless of the snow, the possible spectators, or anything else in the world, he wrapped his arms around Sophia and pulled her against him, thinking only of the moment and of making it last.
Thirteen
