Highland Dragon Warrior

by Isabel Cooper

  The word felt strange in her mouth. It didn’t quite want to attach itself to Cathal, particularly when he smiled. “That’s a way of seeing it, perchance,” he said, speaking as if he was turning the idea over in his mind, inspecting the shine and the facets of it. “It’s been centuries since Loch Arach had a new hand at the reins. Those here tell me everything they think to, but…they’ll not know everything I don’t know, aye? No more than I do.”

  “That’s always what catches me,” Sophia said. “I learned from a few teachers, and that was all right as long as I could just imitate them every step. But then, when my situation was different from the ones we’d practiced, I didn’t know to ask, and they hadn’t thought to tell me. And then with experiments, there’s so much not to know, especially at first. You have to…to”—she gestured, trying to grasp the words—“hunt down ignorance before you can address it.”

  Cathal nodded. Sophia realized that she perhaps hadn’t said the most helpful thing she could have and was about to apologize when he asked, “And what happens when you don’t catch your prey in time?”

  “Well, I lost my eyebrows once.”

  He stared at her, then laughed—quickly, but deep in his chest—and the laughter shook some tension from him. “They grew back bonny enough. Shall I take that as an omen, sorceress?”

  “I’ve never been very good at divination,” Sophia said, shaking her head and smiling. Then, more soberly, “But it’s always been my principle that…that you do the best you can, you secure what you can, and then you do the work you’re called to do, and you can’t fret about more than that. I do fret, too much, but I try not to.”

  “And then you end up in Scotland, looking for dragon scales.”

  “Essentially, yes,” Sophia said, and turned her hands outward. “I don’t know if the principle is the same for what you’re doing. I’ve never been nobility, obviously, and I’ve never been in charge of anyone, let alone a castle. I don’t know how widely the theory applies. But war can’t be a very certain thing, can it?”

  “No. It’s just over more quickly,” said Cathal, again in the thoughtful manner he’d had before, his voice distant even as his eyes met hers with a focus that made the ground feel slightly unstable beneath her feet. It wasn’t lust this time; she wasn’t sure what it was. Then it was gone. “You should go in,” he said. “You’re mortal. It’s cold.”

  “I… Yes, it is,” Sophia said.

  She hadn’t noticed that for a while.

  Eight

  For three days, Cathal had little time to think. He hunted, or he helped to butcher and salt his prey. He met with Niall to go over lists of supplies, or he approved his chamberlain’s notion of what rooms in the castle they might open for any villagers who wished shelter. It occurred to Cathal that such duties sat more lightly on him since he’d talked to Sophia, and that the lift to his spirits after their conversation was longer than hunting usually gave him. He noted it, had neither leisure nor energy to worry about what it might mean, and so was simply glad of the benefits.

  The world was full of things he didn’t understand. When they worked to his advantage, he rarely found it helped to question them.

  He didn’t see Sophia herself very much. She kept to her turret, emerging once in a while for meals. As Cathal mostly grabbed bread and meat while on the way to one appointment or another, it was rare that he even met her eyes across the table. The one evening when they dined together for any length of time, words did come more easily between them than in the past. They talked trivially about preparations and the weather in France, then touched briefly on Cathal’s time in Spain.

  As with his mood, he noticed that he spoke more freely with her, marked the fact, and put it aside. He would have time to consider it later.

  But when the villagers began to arrive, he was glad to see Donnag among them. Middle-aged, nearly as tall as Cathal himself, and little more than skin over bones, Donnag had served Loch Arach as midwife and herbalist for forty years, or so Cathal’s father had said. Any plant she didn’t know didn’t exist for about fifty miles.

  Of course, she didn’t speak French or even much English, certainly not the sort that Sophia would understand. They’d need a translator. Out of everyone in the castle or the village, Cathal knew the most languages. Father Lachlann might have been able to interpret under other circumstances, but given both Sophia and the task at hand, he seemed a bad choice.

  It would have to be Cathal translating. He’d make time in his duties because Fergus’s condition demanded it. Far from being another imposition, the thought of interpreting for the women made him smile. Dwelling on that, like the translation itself, would have to wait.

  Waiting came to an end almost precisely three days from the morning when Cathal had first seen the blizzard approaching. The snow was already falling from a lead-colored sky as he performed the morning rites. By the time he entered the great hall, the wind outside was beginning to moan; by noon, it was howling. The shutters held firm, though, and fires blazed in the hall and the kitchen, adding their warmth to the heat of many people in a room.

  Now, he thought, there was nothing for it but waiting and response. A crisis would arise, or not, and he’d know the shape of it then and how to act accordingly. As Sophia had hinted, the feeling was not unlike battle.

  He saw Sophia in the hall, seated in a corner with Alice by her side and a book on her lap. Cathal thought that he recognized the book as one his mother had brought with her many years ago. Magic, and indeed reading, had never called to him like they had to Agnes. He’d looked through the library as best he could after the incident with Valerius, but he’d found nothing that seemed useful.

  Perhaps it’d be different for Sophia.

  He crossed the room as, off in another corner, a man began to play a lyre. The instrument was old but well-tended, and the bard was skilled enough, for all that he doubtless lived by farming. It was an old tune, one that even Cathal remembered from his childhood. His mother had never been musical, but his father—his father had hummed whenever he walked.

  By the time Cathal reached Sophia, he was smiling in reminiscence, and perhaps that was why Alice gave him a less-wary curtsy than usual.

  “Your pardon, ladies,” he said and bowed. “The midwife’s about. I’ll make the introductions…unless you’ve met already.”

  Sophia shook her head. “No, she was busy when we made it to the village,” she said and began to rise, tucking the book under her arm. “Alice?”

  “Duty calls, I know. I’ll find you later,” the blond woman replied and drifted over toward the music.

  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…hello and goodbye, please and thank you, that sort of thing. Bread and cup too, or so I believe, and stairs.” 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 oblig
ated 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. This happened at 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.

  Control was 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.”

  “No,” said Cathal. He knew already whom the letter would be from, and the messenger dwindled into a vague shape and a vaguer sound. Cathal walked away and climbed the stairs to his solar, only opening the seal once he was alone. I
f Valerius had included any magic with his message, it would be well for Cathal not to be around people.

  There was no magic. There was very little: only a few words.

  Have you reconsidered yet? Time grows. Your friend shrinks.

  V.

  Nine

  Sophia didn’t hear anything until the door opened.

  Looking back, she wasn’t surprised. True, Cathal was a large man and had no reason to walk quietly, but she’d always been able to shut out the world. It had been a source of Words in her youth, when she’d immersed herself in a book and let stew boil over, or stared out the window contemplating a new theory while seven-year-old Aaron spread blue dye liberally over his hands and clothing. She’d grown into the habit rather than out of it.

  The last of her ingredients was just achieving coagulation. She could watch the faintly orange liquid in the beaker become solid, but she had to be standing by with the rest of the assembled mixture, now dark and murky in its golden chalice. The final step wouldn’t be a split-second matter, but a minute one way or another could flaw the whole experiment.

  And so, when the door creaked open behind her, she didn’t take her eyes from her apparatus. “I’m fine, Alice. I’ll come and eat after this,” she said, her voice edged. She’d told Alice that morning of her likely schedule. Her friend usually had a better memory for such things, and more consideration when they were happening.

  “What’s ‘this’?” Cathal asked, sounding far from calm himself. “And how much longer will you take at it?”

  She did turn then—just her head and just long enough to see him standing in the doorway with his arms over his chest and glaring at her, the apparatus, or both.

  A second later, she spun back to look at the beakers. The break in her concentration had done no harm, but the demand rankled—and she disliked how quickly she’d turned to see him. She hissed through her teeth. “Not an hour more, if it goes well. My attention will be vital to ensuring that it does.”