“Alice’s, yes. Samuel—my oldest younger brother—is a baker now, in his own right, though he’s still working with his master. He was eight when she had Matti. Her first.”
“You can’t have been very old yourselves. You or her,” Cathal said.
“Seventeen,” said Sophia. “It’s not unusual, I think. Lucky, but then, she was a very pretty girl, and her father was very respectable.”
He remembered that she’d talked about unmarried women over twenty-five as a class apart from the norm in France. Now that he considered it, he supposed it might be the case everywhere; he’d never paid much attention. “My father had two centuries and more when he wed,” he said, “and my mother fifty years.”
“You swim in time,” she said with no bitterness and only a trace of envy. “We…we ration it, and if we don’t count each drop, that’s only because we can’t.”
“But you do more with it. We’ve no Alexanders, to my knowledge. No Charlemagnes. One or another of us may carve out a domain enough for himself and his offspring, the way Roman Alec did here, but there’s none of us gone further that I know of.”
“Is that so unfortunate a thing? You don’t want to bleed a country and its men so that you can put your name on a map… I see no ill in that lack,” said Sophia. “You yourself said there’s no glory in war.”
“Not glory, and not war. But building a nation—”
“On the backs of those in your way?” she asked, arching dark eyebrows.
“Were the Franks the worse for being Romans?”
“Would…” Sophia began, and then stopped. Small teeth caught the corner of her lip, and for the first time she looked away from him.
Thus did Cathal know what she was thinking, and he smiled, though not entirely with good cheer. “Would we be the worse for being English, you’re wondering? I think so. From what I hear—from what I know of Longshanks, and most especially of the men he employs—I think it, and a pity it is, for I also think it’s what’s to be. But…” He sighed. “I’m no prophet. Mayhap we’ll be better for all this, a generation to come.”
“But you fought. You’ll keep fighting.”
“Aye. And Edward’s not much of a Charlemagne, nor even Caesar, but that’s not the whole of it.” Cathal reached for the wine again. He wouldn’t have predicted the words that came out of his mouth, but they weren’t surprising: scraps of thought he’d had in the middle of the night or on cloudy afternoons now finding shape and pattern as he spoke. “If we fight, we might keep enough of us afterward. We’ll be more likely to hold on. They might let us, might grant us more concessions if they think we’re likely to be trouble otherwise.”
“Like haggling at the market,” she said, “only with lives.”
“It’s the craft of kings. And the nature of men—to find a line grown blurred and squabble over the place where it was. Or to try to make their names in such fights.”
“Not your nature?” she asked.
“A bit of it. I’m not quite human. For the rest, we’re a more hidden people. We don’t need the world to know us. We blend well when it seems convenient. By the time I knew him, my grandfather went to mass as often as I do. But when he was my age, he gave a sheep to Jupiter Capitolinus on all the old holidays. Did both for a while.”
“He must have lived a long time.”
“The old ones do,” Cathal said. “I couldn’t even swear he’s dead. He went away, told my father that Loch Arach was his now, and vanished. But if he knew about the war and lived, I think he’d have come back for us. Perhaps.”
Sophia frowned. “Perhaps?”
“He has many descendants. If a few of us can’t save ourselves now, he may not worry himself about our fate.”
“Oh,” she said, and didn’t look any happier for hearing the answer. They sat silently for a little while, the sunlit table between them and the bottle of wine shining cloudy green and red. “You said you’d have been able to fight within a few days, if the man who’d stabbed you had been normal,” Sophia finally said.
The change of subject was as welcome to Cathal as she’d clearly thought it would be. “That’s true. There’s not much that can do us lasting harm. If you took my head off or dropped the roof on me, it’d kill me outright, andmyarm wouldn’t grow back, but anything else heals clean, and it’s only ever taken me a month at worst. Scars linger for ten years or so.”
“That’s extraordinary.” She breathed the word out, leaning forward. “If we could isolate that principle—”
“Then I’d have all the physicians in the world after my blood. And I’d be willing to share some, at that, but I’ve never known it to work, lass,” he said, sorry to see the light in her eyes dwindle. “I tried when I was younger. With a friend of mine, another squire. We swore blood brotherhood, cut our arms, and bound them together, but when he broke his leg, it healed as crooked as any man’s.”
Sophia nodded. “Blood is always a chancy substance. Too many planets govern it, and they vary so greatly by the person. I wouldn’t venture on that experiment until all my others were done… That is, even if you were amenable,” she added with another embarrassed smile. “Even so, the potential is exciting. Do you become ill?”
“It’s rare. Never been the dangerous sort, not that I know of. But it happens. The dragon shape doesn’t feel it,” he added, remembering winters in his youth, “so we’ll often shift form to get away from the unpleasantness. I spent nearly a week that way one spring.”
“I do envy that,” she said, making a face, “but then, I think there would be much to envy about your people in general. Even without the long life or the healing. To be another sort of being for a little while, to have that view of the world and not always have to be yourself… Oh, but do you look at all like yourself? I can’t imagine the likeness is very great, but are there similarities?”
It might have been the wine or the conversation. It might have been her proximity or the knowledge of what waited outside. It might have been that Cathal was just tired of being responsible. He caught her wrist in one hand, not holding tight but feeling every motion as she froze in surprise, then relaxed, and never tried to pull away.
