When I went into my wagon early next morning to collect my armor, I found the slave girl and her baby still asleep, though Banadaspos was up by then. Vilbia lay on her side, huddled under the blankets, a pitifully thin girl with a white exhausted face. Of the baby I could see only the top of a head with a few curling wisps of black hair, cradled on her arm. The rug had slipped loose from on top of them, and I pulled it up; as I did so, I saw the marks on the girl’s bare shoulder. Scar on top of scar, and some of the slashes were new. I remembered that Facilis had said she had given birth only eight days before: she should not have been up at all, let alone beaten for slowness. I straightened the rug and went out, feeling angrier with Bodica than I had since I met her. To try to drown a strong opponent because he might prevent you getting a kingdom where you can practice your religion freely is understandable; to torture a miserable girl who only wants her baby back is unforgivable.
Eukairios arrived a little later to find us harnessing the horses, and was shocked. Although we’d concluded most of the business we’d had in Eburacum, he’d expected us to stay another day at least, to tie up any loose ends and to rest the horses. He’d bought some good parchment and drawn up a manumission document in triplicate, all ready to be signed and witnessed. But he wanted seven witnesses to make things absolutely beyond legal question, preferably mostly Roman citizens, and preferably mostly literate since I was unlettered: it was clear that now he’d have to wait until we were back in Cilurnum. However, he swallowed his disappointment quickly when I explained what had happened at the dinner party, and wrote two letters for me, one to the legate, apologizing for my insubordination and excusing myself, and the other to Siyavak with reassurances and promises of help. I sent one of the bodyguard to the commandant’s house with the first letter, and Eukairios to the Christians with the second, and the rest of us set out at once. I was apprehensive when we rode up to the gates, but we were allowed through without question. When the fortress was safely behind us, I sighed with relief and touched my horse to a canter. Eukairios and the other messenger had to gallop hard to catch up with us.
Facilis didn’t catch up with us until the middle of the morning, when we stopped for a meal at a roadside farm where we could buy some milk.
“You were in a tearing hurry to get away,” he observed, dismounting beside me. “Were you still worried that the legate wasn’t going to let you go?”
I had been worried about precisely that, of course, and he saw it and gave a bark of laughter. The slave girl Vilbia, who’d been hiding in the wagon, heard and recognized that laugh at once, and stuck her head out. “Is that you, Marcus Flavius?” she called.
“It is indeed,” he said genially. “And have you seen where we are, girl?”
She hadn’t-we’d woken her when we harnessed the horses, but she’d crawled under the bunk with the rug over her-and she jumped down from the wagon beaming delightedly. “We’ve escaped!” she exclaimed. She flung her arms about Facilis and kissed him on the cheek. “You got me out! They never even thought of looking for me in that wagon! Oh, Marcus Flavius, thank you; may the gods bless you!”
Facilis grinned and patted her on the back.
Eukairios was staring in shock: he hadn’t known that Vilbia was there. “Isn’t that…” he began.
Someone explained to him what she was doing there, and he shook his head in amazement. After a moment, he started smiling. Someone else brought Vilbia a bowl of warm milk from the farm for her breakfast, with a piece of our bread ration from Eburacum, and she went back into the wagon to be with the baby while she ate.
“You’ve left the fortress as stirred up as if you’d looted it,” Facilis told me, grabbing a piece of bread for himself and sitting down on the drystone wall of the field where we’d halted. “I was up to headquarters first thing this morning, and everyone was suspecting everyone else and cursing you. When I left, Priscus had just got your letter excusing yourself: I think if you hadn’t sent it, he’d have been annoyed enough to have you summoned back.”
“I had no wish to offend him,” I said.
“So you said in your letter. It made him slightly less offended than he would have been otherwise. Publius Verinus has been told to investigate the arson attack on you, though I don’t think he’ll get anywhere. I’ve been detailed to find out about the ritual murder in Corstopitum, and I have letters authorizing me to pursue inquiries. I just hope nobody finds out I’ve stolen my commanding officer’s wife’s slave. Me miserum! ” He took a big bite of the bread.
I nodded, taking my own piece of bread and sitting down beside him. “What will you do with her now?”
“One step at a time!” he replied. He frowned. “I don’t dare keep her in Cilurnum. It’s a small place, I’m known, people may recognize her. Comittus certainly knows her. Corstopitum’s probably a better place for her, though still a bit risky. It’s bigger, and she should be all right if I can find a safe house for her to stay inside. I’d ask your young woman to take her on that farm, but…” He stopped himself.
But he was as unsure of Pervica’s own safety as I was.
“I have a friend in Corstopitum,” said Eukairios, coming over. “He could find somewhere for her to stay.”
“Thank you!” Facilis exclaimed, surprised and pleased. “This is the ‘correspondent’ who sent you that letter about the mutiny, is it? Does he have a house of his own?”
“No, sir. But he’ll know who might be able to arrange things. Would you be prepared to”-he rubbed his fingers together significantly-“if it’s necessary?”
“If it gets the poor little bitch a safe refuge, yes.”
“My friend won’t want any money himself,” Eukairios explained, with some embarrassment. “Not when I tell him there’s a child’s life at stake. But hiding runaway slaves… well, you know how it is.”
“Hercules, Eukairios!” exclaimed Facilis, greatly amused. “Anyone would think you know how it is!”
“Eukairios,” I said, “do you have the tablets we were given yesterday?”
He nodded, becoming all at once very tense and unhappy. “Yes, my lord. I… looked at them last night. They… they contain at least one very unpleasant surprise.”
“Fetch them now,” I ordered.
He went off. Facilis looked at me suspiciously. “This is the result of the ‘plotting with strangers’ your men were so worked up about last night?”
“Yes. You have authority, you say, to pursue inquiries. I have information that might help. I cannot give it to you directly, though. I swore on fire that I would not show these tablets to the authorities, as most of the people whose names are written on them are innocent of any wrongdoing but would still suffer if their sympathies were known.”
“Whose are the names, then?”
“I have not had time to read them. It is a list of known druids, together with those who have helped them and the places they have hidden.”
“Jupiter Optimus Maximus! How on earth…” He stared at me in disbelief. “Is it from Siyavak?”
I shook my head. “When I hear from him, I hope to end the contest. This merely begins it.”
Banadaspos’ eyes lit up.
“Then how in the name of all the gods…”
Eukairios came back with the tablets. He stood holding them under one arm, looking at Facilis apprehensively. If Facilis used the list openly, the druids would probably realize where it came from, and then Eukairios and the Christians would suffer in turn.
“Very well,” Facilis said, swallowing his astonishment. “I won’t ask how you got them. I won’t ask to see them. I won’t charge anybody just because they’re on that list. I’ll simply go and visit them privately, with you, if you like, and use my authority to search for evidence. There’s no point me swearing it on fire, because I’m no Sarmatian, but I promise you solemnly not to abuse your sources, and may the gods destroy me in the worst way if I do. Does that satisfy you?”
I nodded. I didn’t trust him not to break his oath, but I did trust him to honor mine and to avoid cruelty.
“What’s the nasty surprise, then?” Facilis growled, turning to Eukairios. “Who’s on the list?”
The scribe opened the tablets and looked down them, and set his finger against one entry. When he spoke, it was in a low voice that even the rest of our party, eating their bread and drinking their milk a few feet away, could not hear. “There is the name of a man believed to be from the city of Lindum, who came to Eburacum about a year ago, and has been active among the druids there on occasions since. The name, as reported here, is Comittus son of Tasciovanus. He is described as a young man, and believed to be an army officer.”
“Hercules!” whispered Facilis; “Marha!” exclaimed Banadaspos.
“The only thing I’m not sure of is the patronymic,” said Eukairios. “ ‘Javolenus’ is, of course, a Roman family name, and would not be used for… religious purposes. Lindum as origin is, I believe, correct, and the time matches.”
“It makes sense,” whispered Facilis. “He’s had one foot in the British camp all along, his cousin got him his place, and he admires her. He always swears by the divine Mothers and Maponus and the other old gods of the Britons. It fits horribly well.”
“Do the tablets say if he follows the extreme sect?” I asked.
“No,” replied Eukairios, closing them. “That detail’s been included when it’s known-but usually our… informants… wouldn’t know that.”
Lucius Javolenus Comittus. You can call me Comittus, because you’re not a Roman either. I remembered him smiling as he praised Bodica, and weeping over the Picts. I also remembered him lending me his horse, and making room for me on his couch in Dubris, and vouching for me to the legate-and arriving at River End Farm with Leimanos, overjoyed to see me still alive. And I remembered, with sudden uncomfortable vividness, his misery when the news of the cursing tablet reached Cilurnum, and his hesitant attempts, repeated attempts, to talk to me about it-attempts I, in my distress over Pervica, brushed impatiently aside.
“He is not a follower of the extreme sect,” I said. “He did not know what Bodica had done until news of it reached the whole camp, and he was distressed when he learned it.”
“I think you may be right,” said Facilis grimly, “but I think he’s got a few explanations to make to us, nonetheless.”
“I pray to all the gods that he is innocent,” said Banadaspos. He spoke softly and with passionate sincerity. But his hand was on the hilt of his dagger, and it was perfectly clear what would happen to Comittus if he were guilty.
I looked at him levelly and said, “You swore to me that you would stay quiet and do no violence until I gave you leave to strike.”
Banadaspos looked back, then let his breath out unhappily through his nose and took his hand off his dagger. He nodded.
“I think that he is innocent,” I consoled him.
We made the journey back as quickly as we could-though this was no great improvement on our time for the journey down, given the short days and the appalling weather. Eukairios and I went over the list of names and passed on to Facilis a few whom the Christians of Eburacum had considered ringleaders. He did not press us for more; he in fact seemed very relaxed, and more cheerful than he had been since I’d known him. He rode beside the wagon and talked to Vilbia, he played with the baby-whose thin cry grew stronger and louder by the day-and in the evenings he chatted with my men, making no further attempt to disguise his knowledge of our language. It emerged that he’d learned it much as I’d learned Latin, from a settled farmer on our side of the Danube whom he’d paid to teach him when he was still a private soldier, hoping to make himself useful enough to his superiors to win promotion. He genuinely was what he had told Valerius Natalis and Julius Priscus, a legionary expert on Sarmatians, and he had been advising his superior officers on us for years.
“Well, what did you expect?” he asked me, when I expressed my surprise at this. “You knew that the emperor had appointed me himself. Your three dragons were the first to be sent west, and two of them were considered particularly likely to be difficult. Naturally the emperor looked for an officer with some experience to put in charge of you. He made a mistake, and I botched the job-but he chose sensibly on credentials.”
“Why was Lord Gatalas considered likely to be difficult?” asked Banadaspos, who was with us during this discussion.
Facilis gave him a snort and a bob of the eyebrows. “Gatalas wasn’t. He never looted the villa of a governor of Asia, or drank from a centurion’s skull. Even when I decided to follow you lot to Britain, I was more worried about your own commander than either of the other two. It’s why I asked for Cilurnum.”
We arrived at Corstopitum around noon on the fourth day of the journey. When we reached the bridge, I arranged that Facilis and Eukairios would go into the city to see if they could arrange a place for Vilbia. Kasagos and his squadron would stay with the wagons and, when somewhere had been found for the girl, take them on to Cilurnum. I and my bodyguard would ride at once to River End Farm. I was very anxious to see Pervica.
I found the farm this time without difficulty. I reined in my horse at the top of the hill and sat looking for a moment. There had been snow during the night, and the fields were white and smooth; the river beyond flashed icily silver in the fitful sunlight. The farm buildings nestled in their hollow, whitened thatch above gray walls, kitchen smoke rising in a thin blue column from the back. It was a scene of such peace that my eyes stung to look at it. I’d been afraid that when I crested that hill I’d see only blackened ruins.
I dismounted, unsaddled Farna-leaving the armor on her-and saddled and mounted Wildfire instead. I thought Pervica might enjoy seeing her horse ridden, and the stallion was now well trained enough to manage about a farm, though I wouldn’t have taken him into a city, let alone a battle. I started him down the hill at a slow trot, with my bodyguard jingling after me.
We were about halfway to the farm when I heard a shout of terror to my left, and I glanced over to see a sheepskin-cloaked figure-surely Cluim-running frantically toward the farm. He jumped the wall, hurtled across the yard, and plunged into the house, still shouting. Then Pervica walked out onto the porch-even at a distance I recognized her grace, and the way she held her head. She stood there, directly before the front door, her arms crossed; as I drew nearer, I saw that her face was set in anger and a kind of proud desperation. I slowed Wildfire to a walk, then stopped him altogether at the yard gate, and sat still, looking back at Pervica in confusion.
The anger flickered, then suddenly vanished. Her face opened into a flood of an equally desperate joy. “Ariantes!” she shouted, and ran toward me.
I bent down in the saddle, unlatched the gate, and pushed it open; Pervica ran through, her arms stretched up, and I caught her, pulled her onto the saddle in front of me, and kissed her. Wildfire snorted in alarm and put his ears back, rearing, and I patted him hastily with my free hand. “It is only Pervica,” I told him. “You know her.”
“Ariantes,” she said again, holding me tight.
“Pervica,” I answered. “You are well? You are safe?”
“I’m fine,” she replied. “You’re riding Wildfire!”
“ We are riding Wildfire,” I corrected. The horse knew where he was, of course, and was eager to go back to his nice warm stall in Pervica’s barn: he danced impatiently beneath us. I clicked my tongue to him and made him trot about the yard in a circle to keep him steady, then, to show off, made him turn and circle the other way. Pervica laughed. She started to put her head against my shoulder, then pulled away again hastily.
“I can’t hug you,” she told me, smiling into my face. “You’re too scaly!”
There was an anxious shout from the doorway, and I saw Cluim again, standing in the doorway with a boar spear in one hand and my dagger in the other. Pervica waved to him. “It’s Ariantes!” she told him, and he slumped in relief and sheathed the dagger.
I suddenly understood, and stopped Wildfire. “Arshak has been here,” I said. “You thought I was him.”
Her smile vanished. She let go of me and slid to the ground, then stood there with one hand on the saddle, looking up. Her expression was unmistakably one of grief. “You both have the same kind of armor,” she admitted quietly.
I dismounted and faced her. “When did he come? Has he threatened you?”
She sighed and swept both hands over her face upward, pushing her hair back. “We can talk about it in a minute, inside,” she said. “Do your men want to stop in the back again? I’ll tell Elen and Sulina to get them something warm to drink.”
I put Wildfire in his stall, and left most of the men to build their fire; Cluim came to join them rather nervously, breaking into a grin when they made him welcome. But I asked Banadaspos to come into the house with me: I felt already that this would be something my bodyguard would have to know about.
Pervica led us into the dining room. The carpet I had given her now adorned the floor; she sat down heavily on the couch. I sat down on the floor next to her, leaning against the couch, sideways to allow space for my sword, with my arm on the cushion beside her.
“When did Arshak come?” I asked again.
“Two days ago,” she told me, very calmly.
“Was he alone, or did he bring his men with him? Did he threaten you?”
“I… no. He didn’t hurt me, and he made no threats. He came with about thirty men-his bodyguard, I suppose. He said he’d heard that I’d saved the life of his brother prince, and that you were going to marry me, and so, he said, he’d come to greet me. I think… I think he just wanted to know where I was.” Her face had closed up again.
“Then why were you so afraid, you and Cluim?”
“Nothing. Just what you said about him before. And I hadn’t realized. You’d said he was arrogant and dangerous, but I just hadn’t realized. He’s like some beautiful predatory animal, a golden eagle or a wildcat, which kills by nature. The way he smiled frightened me.”
And that was plainly true, but her face was still closed. There was something he had said or done that she did not want to tell me. “But what did he say to you?” I asked, putting my hand against her knee. The muscles tightened under my touch with a little shiver.
“Nothing.” The bolts were being shot home behind her eyes. “Nothing that bears repeating.”
I was silent a minute. “He insulted you?” I asked at last.
She gave a weak smile. “He was not polite.”
“What did he say?”
“Never mind. It’s my affair, not yours.”
“It is my affair,” I said. “If he insults you, he insults me. Please, tell me what he said to you.”
“It was only words! It was a ridiculous thing to do, to ride over from Condercum just to say a few insulting words to a woman he’d never met. People round here will only laugh at him for doing it. People don’t take it seriously.”
“My people and Arshak’s do.”
“No! Look, please! I don’t want to tell you because I don’t want you to fight him! He’s not like Cinhil; even I could tell that! In any fight with him, someone would die-and if it wasn’t you, you might still be charged with murder afterward. He did this to provoke you: don’t you see that?”
“Pervica,” I said, “this concerns my honor.”
“Oh, that’s the ultimate reason, is it? The one to which all other considerations must bow down!”
“Yes. If you do not tell me, I must go to him in Condercum and ask him what he said. His bodyguard will doubtless boast of it.”
“Oh, no! No!”
“He expects nothing less.”
“So you’ll oblige him? Just like that?”
“Yes. We are enemies now; that is beyond retrieval: we have chosen different paths, and he watched while I was drugged and taken off to die shamefully. I would prefer to settle the matter between us like Sarmatian noblemen, and I think he would prefer to do the same, rather than allow his allies to kill me by sorcery or treachery, which is why he is trying to provoke me. I met him on the road to Eburacum and I let him understand then that I would fight him whenever he wished. But whatever happens, one or the other of us will be dead before this is over. You must understand why he came here. I am his enemy, and he wished to triumph over me in you, to dishonor me. In our own country he would have burned your wagons and driven off your flocks. But here he would have to account for his actions to the authorities-so instead he insults you, which is a thing the authorities will take no notice of, but which I cannot ignore. Without honor, I am nothing at all. My men are disgraced in me, and I am powerless to command them.”
She looked down at her hands, twisting together in her lap. “Maybe we shouldn’t get married, after all,” she whispered; then, “I know we shouldn’t get married, after all.”
I took my hand off her knee. “You cannot mean that. You know that I want you, and I thought you wanted me.”
Now her face twisted as well, fighting the tears, but she still would not look at me. “It’s not what I want that matters. I thought of this earlier; I didn’t want to say it, but I must. I see it now. We shouldn’t get married.”
“Even if you refused me now,” I said, after another moment of silence, “I would still have to fight Arshak.”
“Oh, no!” She pressed her hands to her face.
“Tell me exactly what he said, please. I would rather learn it from you than from him.”
She sat still with her hands over her face. “When I saw him coming,” she said, slowly, “I ran out to meet him. I thought he was you, and by the time I realized my mistake, his men had surrounded me. Nobody threatened me, but they sat there on their horses like so many steel statues and stared at me. He… greeted me. He was very polite at first, and said what I told you, that he’d heard you were going to marry me, and he’d come to pay his respects. Then he smiled and said that it was an odd thing for a king’s nephew to be paying respects to a common herdswoman. He said that in your own country, you’d married the daughter of a scepter-holder, a lady descended from princes and great warriors, famous for her spirit; while here, he said, you Romanized, and courted a soldier’s bastard out of gratitude for the tatters of your life.” Banadaspos caught his breath, and she dropped her hands and looked up at him quickly. “Please!” she said to him. “I don’t want him to fight Arshak. There’s no point. I am a soldier’s bastard, and it was gratit-”
“It was not,” I said quickly. “I told you that before. It is not.”
She looked unhappily into my face. Her hands made a quick, abortive gesture, as though she had been about to reach toward me, and stopped herself.
“And was that all?” I asked.
She took a deep breath. “You want the part his men will repeat, don’t you? He said, ‘It was different in our own country. Ariantes was famed as a warrior there and men admired him. But he was injured in the war, and it broke his spirit. Now one leg and his courage are crippled, and he contents himself with a thing like you after loving a golden princess.’ I told him to get off my land. He didn’t go, of course, so I turned and tried to go back to the house. His men wouldn’t let me; they closed in all around me. I tried to duck under the horses, but one of them caught my arm, and his friend caught my other arm, and they both held me, facing their master. He picked up his spear, and I thought for a moment he was going to kill me. Then I realized that he wouldn’t, he wanted me alive to tell you this. I understood-of course I understood-that he only wanted to humiliate me to provoke you. He rode toward me, smiling that horrible smile, and caught my cloak pin with the tip of his spear, and then he turned aside, and his men let him through the ring and fell in behind him; the men who’d held me threw me down in the mud and followed as well. He’d pulled my cloak off my shoulders, just like that, without scratching me: he shook it off his spear as he rode off, and the horses of his followers trampled it. The pin was broken. That is what happened, and that is everything that happened.”
“You ordered him to leave your land, even though you were alone and surrounded by his men?” asked Banadaspos. “And when he threatened you with his spear, you faced him in silence?”
Pervica glanced at him impatiently and nodded. Banadaspos smiled fiercely. He would report it to the rest of the men, I knew, and they would all be pleased that Pervica had the kind of courage they expected of their commander’s lady.
I sat in silence for a minute. There were two sides to this. One was what Arshak had meant by the visit. That was perfectly clear, and would be settled between us. The other was what Pervica had thought and felt because of it, and of that I was deeply uncertain.
“Banadaspos,” I said-in Latin, as a courtesy to Pervica-“go and explain to the bodyguard what happened; tell them that the dishonor will be revenged.”
He stood. He was stiff with excitement and apprehension. “Do we ride for Condercum now?” he asked.
“Gods, no! The horses are tired. His whole dragon is there, and I could not guarantee the security of the rest of you once the duel is over. Besides, do you think the Romans will allow us to fight? We will go back to Cilurnum tonight, send messengers, and make the arrangements.”
He nodded, bowed, and jingled out. I turned to Pervica. “Why do you say we should not marry?” I asked her. “Because you think that if we are not going to marry, there is no cause for me to revenge the insult to you? Or for some other reason?”
She bit her lip. “There are other reasons.”
“We are of different nations, whose customs and ways of life are very far apart. My life is threatened, and by that, yours is as well. I am the slave of my honor, which must always be the chief consideration, to which all others bow down. Those reasons?”
“No!” She looked intently into my face again. “No, I think I guessed all that before. I won’t say I understood it, but I think I could see it was there. No, it’s because so much of what Arshak said was true. You were born a prince in Sarmatia-not just one of the provincial nobility, a member of the equestrian order, but one of the really great families, the senatorial aristocracy of your own people, the consulars. I hadn’t understood it before. I’d been thinking of you as though you were just the prefect of a wing of cavalry, which was a rank above me but not out of reach. But I realized it when I met Arshak. There’s no equality between us, and a marriage without equality is dangerous-particularly to the lesser partner.”
“It is a very long ride from here to the Danube, and further to cross it,” I answered sharply. “Here I am only a cavalry commander. And anyway, it is not the same among us as among the Romans-we have no ‘provincial nobility’ and no ‘consulars,’ only scepter-holders, nobles, and commoners. You own flocks and have dependants, so by our own reckoning you are noble. For a scepter-holder to marry a member of the lesser nobility is no disgrace to anyone. Arshak said what he did to insult you, nothing more. And here near Corstopitum, some people must take another view of the whole matter. Here they must think, ‘Pervica is a landowner, a beautiful young widow with a prosperous farm and a position in the region. She can choose to marry anyone she pleases. What does she want with an illiterate barbarian who’s happier in a barn than in a house, and expects her to sleep in a wagon?’ ”
She flushed. People-probably Quintilius-had obviously not just thought it, they’d said it, and to her. “There is another reason!” she said, breathlessly, and I saw that the other had made her uncomfortable but that this was the real heart of it. “I don’t want you to remember your first wife, and then look at me and feel ashamed.”
“I would not.”
She shook her head. “I know you loved her. I knew that even before I knew your name or who you were. And I’m sure she was all that Arshak said she was. I thought I wouldn’t mind coming second to her, but I see now that it’s a mistake, you would mind, and I could not bear that. I will not be a rag tied to your tail, a disgrace-not even for you. The gap’s too big. In time you’d grow to hate me.”
“No.”
“I think you would.”
“Pervica.” I reached up and caught both her hands, forcing her to look at me. “I would not.”
Her eyes were full of tears, but her mouth was set in determination. The hands in mine did not twist, but they did not hold.
“I would not,” I told her again. “Listen, I have lived in two worlds, the one across the Danube and the one here; I was once a prince of the Iazyges, and I am now the commander of a unit of cavalry for the Romans. But there is a part of me that is neither of those things. I know, because I have balanced on it, shifting from one to the other. It has neither rank nor wealth nor title nor honors. All those things are gifts of either world, and have changed; it has not, and so it could choose a path in a land where all was unknown. That is the part of me that loves you. And because it owes nothing to either world, it cannot compare one with the other, or cheapen your great worth falsely beside the value of Tirgatao-whom, it is true, I loved dearly. Love is not like water in a bucket, which is full or poured out; it is like a river, which will flow where it can find a channel, and if it is blocked in one place, strives to find another pathway for itself, a new person to love. I will have no less love for you because I loved her first. I would not hate you, Pervica. I could not.”
Her mouth crumpled, and the hands clenched suddenly on mine. Then she flung her arms around me, dropping onto her knees beside me, and cried against my shoulder, scales and all.
She stopped crying soon and let me kiss her and hold her for a little while-and then she wiped her eyes, and sniffed, and sat back on her heels. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“So, we will be married, after all,” I replied, wanting it to be perfectly clear and agreed.
“Yes,” she sniffed, smiling ruefully.
“Good.” I smiled back.
“Yes,” she repeated, then added, “if you are still alive on the wedding day.”
I wanted to encourage her, so I told her most of what had happened in Eburacum, leaving out only a few details about the Christians. As I spoke I felt my own hopes rising. The balance was shifting. Before, my enemies had struck at me from under a cloak of secrecy, like the invisible warriors of the tales, and I had been helpless to strike back. But now I had a list of names and an ally with authority to investigate them-and I had great hopes of getting more from Siyavak. Stripped of their invisibility, it was they who would be helpless.
“Opposition to the conspiracy has been growing here, too,” Pervica told me eagerly. “I spoke to Matugenus, the druid I told you about. He was afraid to do anything at first-he thought that all the supporters of the old religion would damn him as a Romanizer and a heretic-but in the end he decided that trying to use the gods to commit murder was blasphemous, and that he would oppose it even if he died for it. He erased your name from the tablet and we left it on the altar of the Mothers. Ever since then, people from all around have been finding excuses to call. It’s partly curiosity, but also partly to show their sympathy for me. They even have some sympathy for you. Nobody liked that carpenter who was killed, but people have been outraged that he was murdered to put a curse on the man who saved us from the Picts. Matugenus has called for a convocation of druids such as there hasn’t been in the North for years, and he’s beginning to think that he can count on substantial support. Apparently many of the more moderate druids have been unhappy with the position of the extreme sect for some time, but they’d all been too unsure of themselves to say so until now. At times I’ve thought I could feel our strength spreading out through the countryside like fire spreading in tinder.” She smiled shakily, and added, “It helps that you’re still alive. Cunedda had cursed you; Matugenus revoked the curse. The gods obviously listened to Matugenus, not Cunedda. Ariantes, how good a fighter is Arshak?”
I shrugged. “Very good. Particularly with the spear. You have seen that. I would say that my horse is better trained, though: he has not the patience to put an animal through a maneuver again and again. It will be an equal contest, and the outcome is in the hands of God. Marha has favored me up till now. I will try to arrange the meeting with him for ten or twelve days from now, which I hope will give me time to resolve some of the other aspects of this. But you must not stay here if there is such a long delay. He is an impatient man, and will be ashamed that he restrained himself out of fear of the authorities: he might very well come back here, determined to injure you this time. You should stay in Cilurnum, you and Elen and Cluim and his sister. I could rent you a house.”
“What about my sheep? And the farm?”
“Is there so much that needs doing at this time of year that a neighbor could not do it for you? You said you had two other tenant families living elsewhere on the estate in their own houses. Could they not see to the sheep for ten days or so?”
She leaned wearily against me. “Very well, then. Yes, I’ll come.”
It took her a little while to arrange for others to tend the sheep and cattle, and for her and the three servants to collect their things and pack them in the farm cart. It was dusk when we set out for Cilurnum. Pervica stopped the cart on top of the hill and looked back at the farm, dark now in its hollow under the scudding clouds. I knew she was wondering if she would ever see it again. But she said nothing, and looked back at me with a rueful smile before shaking the reins and starting on.