The man looked first at her and then higher, up the trail, to the wolves. Both had muzzles smeared with viscera, as if they’d been eating. With the loaded crossbow, he rose to stand beside her. She was tall, big-boned, and confident in her strength even in the face of snarling death. He was a little shorter, with a build meant to be stocky but made lean by privation.
I recognized them. His youthful, smiling face adorned the portrait in my locket: Daniel Hassi Barahal, the man who considered himself my father. I had never seen any likeness of Tara Bell, but despite the dark red hair and blue eyes, she looked so like me that I knew she had to be my mother.
“If it’s necessary to hold a last rear guard to get the boat out, you and the others must leave me.” She spoke as a shopping woman with many more errands ahead might remark that the family could afford fish for supper but not beef.
“I think it unlikely we shall do so.” I admired the warmth of his laugh. He had deep lines at his eyes, the mark of a man who would rather joke than scowl. “Who will mend our clothes if we don’t have you to do it for us?”
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?