She could certainly surpass any of them for enthusiasm, he thought when he met her and Alice by the castle gate. Sophia was talking, explaining some principle that Cathal couldn’t overhear. Her gloved hands were flying about as they’d done in Fergus’s room, and he could see her dark eyes sparkling even in the depths of her fur hood.
Alice, in the way of friends, listened with a combination of interest and tolerant amusement. The two of them had clearly been down this road a few times before. When Cathal approached and Sophia stopped talking, Alice turned and gave him a long look, one not as sharp as her gaze had been at first but still extensive and thoughtful.
“Madam,” said Cathal, tempted to ask what she was searching for and if she’d found it.
Adding to the impulse, he received a few more of the same glances as the three of them left the castle, and Alice’s gaze returned to Sophia after each. Whatever message passed between them was foreign to Cathal. He had the vague feeling that he might have come up to some obscure measure, in Alice’s eyes, but only just.
In truth, he couldn’t fault her. With Fergus up in the tower, he could have nothing but admiration for a friend’s concern. And, like Sophia, she made her way through the snow without complaint, both of the women following in his tracks along the path he made. It was hard work for them, hindered by skirts as well as weaker frames, and the journey between the castle and the forest was a quiet one. The crunch of feet in snow and their quick breaths fell into the empty air, and made in time a rather companionable rhythm.
Once they reached the forest, the going was easier in some ways. The trees had kept down the worst of the snowdrifts, and fallen pine needles made for an easier foothold. Cathal forged ahead still, finding buried logs and boulders before they could become a hazard, but simply walking took less effort than it had done on the way.
“It’ll be your Lent soon, will it not?” Sophia asked.
Cathal had to count the days, tapping his fingers against his thigh, before he nodded. “Aye, I suppose. Hardship for you?”
“No, not generally,” said Sophia. “If nobody’s eating meat at all, you see, I’m far less conspicuous. Toward the end, of course, there’s Passover, but…” She spread her hands, long fingers in black gloves opening as if to let go. “That’s toward the end. Time enough to think about it.”
“I always liked the day before Lent, back home,” said Alice. “They’ll parade an ox down the street, and children go from door to door for crepes.”
Sophia laughed. “You only liked not having to cook as much for yours.”
“If you’d ever had to feed a man and two huge boys every evening, you’d be just as happy,” said Alice.
“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 to see the 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 plants do require 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, particularly her in 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 are extremely solid.
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 va
nished. 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 Cathal was mostly a man. Kissing her took no more thought—allowed no 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
Sophia hadn’t been expecting the kiss, not consciously, yet from the first brush of Cathal’s lips against hers, it had felt inevitable. There was momentum here, borne from weeks of awareness. It rose within her body and mind alike, blissful heat even in the midst of winter. When Cathal’s tongue slid past her lips, she sighed into his mouth. When his hand splayed out against her back, his fingers brushing the upper swell of her buttocks, she yielded to the gentle pressure and tilted her hips forward.
He was being gentle. Even through his urgency, Sophia could tell that much. This was a man used to sword and armor, capable of deadly strength even in human form, but the arms around her, though firm, didn’t crush her, and neither the hand at her back nor the one cupping her head pressed too hard. His touch was a suggestion, an urging, but there was no force in it, and he kissed her slowly and surely, lips and tongue coaxing her response.
It didn’t take much. Sensation spread out from his hands and mouth, delicious ripples in a pond, and an overpowering wave at the front of her body, where she arched against him with only their clothing in the way. His chest was just as broad and solid as it’d looked, and every breath they took together rubbed her breasts against it, until her nipples were stiff and pushing at her gown. If not for her cloak, she realized, Cathal could have seen them clearly. The thought sent a dizzy wave through her body, even as she blushed. She wanted him to see—to know the effect he was having, even if she suspected she was making it obvious already, panting and clinging to him as she was.
His own response was obvious: the ridge that nudged at her stomach, hard against her even through their layers of clothing. The cloth concealed size and shape to a degree, and Sophia’s reading had only revealed so much. Now a certain curiosity mingled with her desire—not one she could gratify, though even approaching the thought sent that giddy feeling through her stomach again and made her sex pulse.
Settling for a more minor experiment, she ran her fingertips up the back of Cathal’s neck, tracing the line of his backbone up under his hair, then around to the spot behind his ear. Confirmation came in the involuntary flex of his arms around her, the clenching of his hands, and a sudden depth and hunger to his kiss, catching her by surprise but raising no objections. She couldn’t imagine objecting to anything. She couldn’t imagine anything but wanting.
“Sophia!”
The voice, usually welcome, fell on her ears like the yowl of a starving cat.
Sophia had time to step back, even if she nearly tripped over her gown in the process, and time to spot Alice, coming around from behind a tree with a small collection of plants in her hands. She even had a moment to pat at her wimple, as if that would help matters, and to answer in a voice that sounded vaguely normal. “Right here… Are you well?”
“Of course. But I found these, and I didn’t know whether they were the sort of thing you were looking for.” Approaching, Alice held out a selection of short branches, their leaves shiny and green despite the cold. “You should have brought a book for me. With illustrations.”
“There were plenty of books back home with illustrations, or where do you think I learned from?” Sophia headed quickly to her friend, putting distance between herself and Cathal without looking back. It was a relief to have the excuse and to have a reason for a flippant response.
Even so, Alice didn’t speak for a moment. Sophia felt those sharp blue eyes on her face, where she suspected her cheeks were still flushed, and where her lips still felt the memory of Cathal’s. Her eyes might have yet been glassy with desire too, so she kept her gaze carefully on the plants that Alice was holding out. She might have frozen to death, had she stood there naked, but she was certain she wouldn’t have felt more exposed.
Just at the moment, the cold was itself welcome. The heat in her body was subsiding, flame returning to embers, but it was still very much present. Sophia took a long breath of chilly air.
“Well?”
She blinked at Alice. “Um…”
Alice shook the handful of stems. “Are these useful, or do we leave them for…well, not wolves, I’d imagine. Deer?”
“I don’t know.” Scholarship, like the cold, was a handy path back to calm, a return to the world she knew. Sophia took the plants and was glad that her hands didn’t tremble. “These are unfamiliar to me as well, and yet I think worth at least bringing them back. I can consult my books or ask Donnag, and in any case, a thing that retains life in adversity is almost certain to be of use in our current matter.”
“If you say so,” Alice said and took the plants back. “Not that I’ll say anything against tenacity. It’s served us well so far.”
“Endurance,” said Cathal, and his voice sent a shiver through Sophia’s body. “Patience. My father would approve.”
“Well, and as he was the man we came to see,” Alice said, “that’s an excellent recommendation. I’m sure those qualities come much more easily to him—and to you—than they do to us, for all I was praising them earlier.”
“To him, perhaps. You both strike me as ladies of strong will,” said Cathal.
Sophia busied herself arranging what she’d picked, still not trusting herself to look into his face. He was the opposite of a gorgon, and she a very odd Perseus, and yet the effect was the same. She did see Alice tilt her head, though, before she replied.
“For humans, perhaps,” her friend said, polite and not openly unfriendly. “But to creatures like your family, I’m sure we’re very impulsive. And very…brief.”
“I think,” Sophia said, raising her head at last because she couldn’t kick Alice in the ankle without being obvious about it, “that perhaps we should go back. We have what we came for.”
“We do indeed,” said Alice. “And it doesn’t do to exhaust ourselves.”
* * *
“Was that completely necessary?”
Sophia had to walk back, making polite conversation the whole time, and then pull Alice into the corner beside the fireplace before she could actually ask. After so much time, a lesser woman might have found the question confusing. A different woman might have pretended to.
“If I hadn’t thought so, do you think I’d have said it?” Alice replied unflinchingly and almost immediately.
“I know what you thought. I asked in the hope that you’d think twice, vain though that hope may be.”
“Ah, well, if we’re on the subject of thinking twice…or even once…”
Heat swept over Sophia’s face, completely unrelated to the fire near at hand. She couldn’t even protest that Alice was unjust. She hadn’t thought very much when she’d been in Cathal’s arms, and certainly not of anything beyond the two of them. In truth, that had been part of the allure. “I know,” she interrupted. “And nothing happened, not truly.”
Had she been younger, or Christian, or heaven forbid, a lady, that might not have been true, even out in this near-wilderness. Looked at from a distance, what had passed between her and Cathal had been only a kiss, such as any lord might steal from a dairymaid or a farmer’s daughter—not quite the best of behavior, but easy enough to let slip past. She had
no high relations to take offense, and she doubted he had enough chivalry to feel he had to make any gestures, but thought he did have enough to keep from trying for anything more.
If she let herself feel disappointed about that, Alice would certainly have a few words on the subject.
As it was, her friend sighed and shook her head. “I’d say you should have been more thoughtless at home—or at least in France—rather than spending so much time in your books. Not that you should have been truly improper, mind, but…at least you’d have a few callouses built up, yes? Useful around men like Sir Cathal.”
“You sound like I’m thirteen or fresh from a convent. You know that isn’t so.”
“I know that smiling at a few boys down the street and then going back to your studies doesn’t count for much.” Alice put a hand on Sophia’s arm. “I know that you’ve got freedom out here, and time to use it. And I’m not saying that I wouldn’t be tempted either, if I were in your shoes. But I also know that he’s not human. If he were human, he’d still be Sir Cathal MacAlasdair, and you’d be Sophia Metzger, and you know very well what I’m getting at.”
“I know.” Sophia wrapped her arms around herself, but managed a smile and a little laugh. “Alice, it’s not as though I think I’m going to marry the man. I don’t dwell in books all the time.”
“No,” said Alice slowly, “no, I don’t think that. You neglect yourself, but you’ve never been sentimental before.”
“And I have no intention of starting now, or with him.”
“I believe you. Does he know that?”
“I…” Sophia considered the question as best she could, though it came with disconcerting memories of the look on Cathal’s face just before he kissed her, and of being warm and wanted in his arms. Sophia shook her head quickly. “I very much doubt he thinks I’m mad,” she said acerbically, “and I’m certain he knows I’d have to be to imagine that there’d ever be anything…significant between us.”
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