CHAPTER 31

Corvus, prefect of the Quinta Gallorum, temporarily assigned to the governor’s personal guard, celebrated mid-summer’s dawn becalmed on the deck of a wide-waisted cargo sloop with a single-bellied sail that waddled through the waves as a duck through a farm pond and left all but the most sea-hardened men vomiting in their bunks.

Corvus had not thought of himself as particularly sea-hardened, but clearly was more so than those who travelled with him. He stood wide-legged on the aft deck with the steersman and the ship’s master and lifted a goblet of well-watered wine to the bleeding edge of the sun.

He had never been a priest or functionary in any of Rome’s cults, but he spoke a few words to Jupiter, who seemed the most reasonable of the gods, and then spilled some of the wine into the green-grey sea for Neptune, that they might perhaps see some wind shortly, and come safely back to shore at a place where neither tides, nor currents, nor hidden rocks, might kill them. Last, in Alexandrian, which neither the master nor the steersman understood, he spoke aloud the care of his heart to the listening spirits of those who were closest to him, as he had done at every winter and summer solstice since he first came into the legions.

The ritual calmed him, as it had always done, and made the insanity of what they were doing seem less. Taken in the right light, the venture could seem to be heroic and doubtless would be made to seem so afterwards in the senate and baths of Rome, by men who enjoyed listening to the deaths of others and considered the search for glory and displays of courage to be entirely admirable in anyone other than themselves.

Corvus gave a last sluice of wine to the water and offered the goblet, two-handed, to the steersman who drank and passed it to the master, who drank and handed it back in like manner to Corvus, so that they each shared the mid-year bounty with the gods. The wine was mellow and smelled of autumn and ripe fruit. Corvus let it rest awhile on his tongue and swallowed it with the next heave of the deck.

“Land today?” He spoke the words with exaggerated clarity.

“Nightfall.” The ship’s master was from the northlands, a giant of a man with yellow hair and a ring of blue dots tattooed in the weather-red skin round his neck. His Latin was as rudimentary as his Gaulish and both were greater than his grasp of Britannic tongues. His understanding of light craft and the seas between Hibernia, Gaul and Britannia was exceptional. He was paid a retainer that amounted to more than the annual salary for an entire tent party of legionaries and their decurion, and was worth twice as much for his ability to bring craft to land safely.

The choice of ship had not been his; unaccountably, among tribes who were notionally entirely well disposed towards Rome, there had been no ships free when the governor had needed them. If the Nordic master had not used some of his own gold to keep the crew that he wanted, they would have had no mariners either. The cargo sloop had been bought, at breathtaking expense, from the son of a man whose life Corvus had once saved. Even then, they had been begged to take it after dark so that he could say it had been stolen. Besides its crew, it carried exactly sixteen additional men, with one horse each. Corvus chose not to imagine how they were going to ride safely across country to Londinium if no-one in the pacified territories was prepared even to sell them a ship.

The blond northman nodded forward, to where the ship’s one small-boat rested in a sling. “Tonight,” he said. “Row. Dark. Horses swim behind. Not seen.” He rolled his eyes graphically. “Birds keep dry.”

The pigeons were Flavius’ special care; there were six, all homed to the flight in the fortress of the XXth whence a man on a fast horse might ride in less than half a morning to the coast. He cared for them as if they were his children and had told the northman, who seemed to consider them valid rations, that if he ate them, he would eat his testicles immediately after. At the time, it had seemed a strangely credible threat.

Corvus said, “Tonight?” and tried to think what it might take to get the governor and his men upright by nightfall and able to walk and possibly—please all the gods that every one of the horses had come through the voyage safely—to ride.

“Tonight.” The giant grinned. “Wind come soon. Boat go fast. Waves small. Governor less sick.”

They rowed at night, in the dark before the moon rose, with the oars and the breasting horses making phosphorescent fire in the sea, so that they left a fading trail that marked where they had been.

The governor was pale and smelled overly of peppermint oil, which did not entirely cover the smell of vomit. Even so, he was first to step ashore, and stood creditably straight, with his blade ready while the others turned the boat round and sent it back with the ship’s steersman rowing, to wait offshore for their signal, and Corvus and the two men he had brought with him led the horses ashore, and worked by feel in the almost-dark to find grass with which to dry them off and gave them handfuls of corn to bring the life back to their eyes and make up for the cold and the dark and the sea. They checked their legs and their flanks and found no cuts or swellings or heat and Corvus thanked Neptune openly for his gift of horses from the sea.

The quarter-moon rose in a veiled sky. By its light, fifteen men gathered in the dark on the sloping sand around their governor and general, wet to the thighs from the final wade ashore, wrapped tight in winter cloaks against a summer night’s cold.

Eleven of them were of the XIVth and XXth legions. They were volunteers, but only in so far as the order had been couched as a request; none of them would have considered refusing. Not all were officers. Like Alexander of Macedon, Suetonius Paulinus had made the effort to know the names and achievements of the men who served under him, and so each was of middle age, a little younger than the governor himself, and each had proved himself outstanding in valour or wit or resource either in Britannia or in Paulinus’ Mauretanian campaigns.

Only the two cavalry men were not of the governor’s direct choosing: Ursus and Flavius came at Corvus’ invitation, the one to offer support, the other because it was no longer safe to leave him behind where he could not be watched, and for his precious pigeons, which had kept dry on the row over and might yet save their lives.

Last and least of the fifteen was a local guide named Gaius who had lived so long at the fortress of the XXth legion that he had acquired an accent traceable directly to the gutters of three streets that passed between the Mons Avertina and the Tiber in Rome. It had been rumoured on board ship that the governor had promised him citizenship if the war against the tribes was won. More plausible rumour said that the man had three sons of whom he was exceeding proud and that he wanted citizenship for them more than he wanted life itself.

Suetonius Paulinus, governor of all Britannia, stood on the weed and sand of a native shore that should have been friendly, or at least not hostile. He wore leather armour, because he had no intention of dying if the small-boat sank, and his sword was built for use, not for the parade ground. The hilt was covered in boarhide, and the cross-piece, so that no part of it would catch sun or moon and reveal him. His helmet was matt with age and could have been any legionary’s. They were all the same: grim, hard men who understood exactly what it was they were required to do, and how great were the risks.

His gaze read them, and was content. He said, “From here until we reach and take Vespasian’s Bridge, we will act as if the natives are the enemy. We will ride fast, we will ride hard. We will avoid confrontation or even meeting with the tribes, but whom we meet, we kill.”

They travelled hard, but not fast.

It was said that the emperor Tiberius, in the days when he was a general in the Germanies and not yet an emperor, had once ridden two hundred and twenty miles in a single day. If it were true, he could have ridden the full breadth of Britannia in that same day, except that the roads did not exist and it would have required him to change horses at the post stations every twenty miles.

Suetonius Paulinus and his fifteen men did not have his resources. They rode on trackways and goat paths and were dependent for their directions on the lead of Gaius, who was of the northern Silures and did not know the routes well, and each man had to nurse his horse, knowing that it if foundered, he would have to find another one immediately or be left at the wayside.

They met very few natives, and all of them warriors in paint, with kill-feathers woven into their hair. None of them came close enough to engage and the risk of ambush, or of destroying the horses, was too great to follow them. A boy was killed, who did not run fast enough and did not know that Flavius, like another before him, was skilled in the use of a throwing knife. Beyond that one inglorious kill, there was nothing but hard days in the saddle, frequent turns back on themselves when a track proved impassable, and only the growing breadth of the river to tell them they were making any progress at all.

They came to the first of the deserted trading posts around noon on the fourth day of their travel. It was not an imposing place, a wharf no bigger than the jetty on Mona, lagged about with river weed and the debris of a skirmish; a length of rope swayed in the brown water, caught on the wharf’s upstream footing, a tattered piece of woven wool showing green beneath it, the remnant of a child’s cloak shed in haste or by accident in flight.

Eight merchant’s huts were lined along the river up- and down-stream of the wharf. The nearest was largest, paid for by the river tolls of those wishing to cross to the smaller jetty on the far bank, and the greater trading taxes of those who had bypassed the lower ports and sailed from the open seas through the mouth of the river and up this far.

Only one man could be spared at a time for reconnaissance. Corvus drew the white pebble from the helmet and rode down alone to look. He walked his black colt along the water’s edge. The horse was not strictly his remount, but he had come through the swim to Mona better than the mare had done and the Batavian who had ridden him was dead: Corvus did not want to come back and find the man’s soul-brother had taken his horse as were-geld.

The beast shied at a flapping door-hide and again more violently at a sow that had been left in a sty without food or water and screamed when it saw Corvus coming. He opened the gateway and let her out and she charged, ears flapping, for the river bank. A scatter of ducks rose in panic, honking so that for a moment there was screaming pandemonium and Ursus brought half of Paulinus’ troop at the gallop with swords drawn thinking that Corvus was under attack

“There’s no-one here,” Corvus said. He had already checked each hut. The hearts of the fires were cold and damp, but, on a day when it was warm enough to ride in shirtsleeves, there was no mould yet on the fire stones. He said, “They’ve been gone more than two days, less than five.”

Ursus said, “Have they gone across the river, or east? They can’t have gone west; we’d have met them.”

Gaius, the Siluran guide, arrived after the first flurry of action. He had some facility as a tracker. He walked the length of the eight huts and came back to lean on the pigsty. He was taller than any of them, as the northman had been. He stooped a little, not to seem so. “The boats have gone,” he said. “Some of them likely went across, but at least three wagons travelled east along the trackway.”

“How far are we from Vespasian’s Bridge?”

“Half a day’s ride. They will be there long ahead of us.”

“And any others who have gone there.” Corvus swung himself into the saddle. “I hope the magistrates of the port are prepared for a thousand extra mouths to feed.”

The magistrates of the settlement that straggled along the northern bank of the Thamesis on either side of Vespasian’s Bridge were not well prepared. The pandemonium in the circle of huts and trading booths and the central corn exchange matched the chaos of the sow and ducks for noise and was spread over a far wider area.

It was a trading port based on a bridge, and the bridge itself was by far the most imposing piece of architecture within it. The place was barely a town: it had a tax room built of oak timbers with weighing scales and a clerk’s desk and another room built in stone for keeping records. It had two rows of stables for guest-horses and mounts for messengers who might have need to travel to Camulodunum where the centre of government lay. It had eight taverns, of varying reputation, and two brothels, one that supplied women and one that supplied everything else that might command money.

Of the hundred or so dwellings, the best were merchants’ houses, and even those were little more than huts built of wattle with thatched roofs. Cattle and sheep and pigs and goats and five-toed chickens strutted on the rooftops and pecked in the barnyards. It had hay stores and feed stores and a granary and a string of wells for when the river became swollen with spring floodwater and turned too brown to drink. It had small muddy lanes linking house to house and passage to passage and slightly wider ones linking all of these to the great northern roads that swept northwest to Verulamium and up towards Mona and northeast to Camulodunum. It had a ship, wallowing at the dock, that was being loaded with all that was precious of those who commanded it, ready to flee.

It did not have a wall.

Paulinus pulled up his group on a wooded slope set well back from the chaos. They had been seen, but not yet approached. They sat for a while, watching wagon after wagon, family after family, roll inward from the two broad trackways, and none roll outward again. There were more children than adults and more women than men. They were unarmed, unless one considered their eating knives to be armament, which only an optimist, or a desperate man, might do. Like herded sheep, they converged in increasing numbers on Vespasian’s Bridge. It arced across the river, broad enough for a wagon and a horse side by side, high enough for a sea-going vessel to pass underneath, handsome as any sculpture, a testament to the engineers of the legions who could create beauty and utility together. A man could weep for the beauty of it, and the inevitability of its loss.

Tired of the bridge and its township before the others, Corvus watched instead a haze of smoke on the eastern horizon and so was first to see the Eceni scouts.

“Enemy,” he said quietly. “East of here and north of the scrub oak with the anvil-shaped cloud behind. Fifteen that I can see and I will bet there is at least one more. Youths on foot. Knives only. War braids and kill-feathers. They are equal in numbers to us, and most are women. That won’t be an accident.”

They were seasoned men and they had fought in the west, where for every one of the enemy seen, there were a dozen unseen in the rocks and crannies of the mountains. They did not spin their horses, or shout, or stare, but talked and bantered amongst themselves and shifted their mounts a little to lessen their boredom and eased their blades in their sheaths for the practice of it until, as if by coincidence and certainly by chance, they were all facing a little more eastward and could look without seeming to at the place Corvus had described.

The scouts rose from their hiding, one by one. They stood half naked among the scrub elder and seeding thistles, wide-legged, with their knives in their belts, not deigning to unsheathe them in the presence of Rome. They were sixteen, of whom eight were women.

Once, the governors of Britannia had flogged men for suggesting that women fought in the native armies. Now, Suetonius Paulinus, fifth of the governing line, said, “They send us the flower of their youth.”

“They send them to look down on Vespasian’s Bridge, to show that the attack will come with the dawn,” said Corvus. “Their gods do not support a battle of which fair warning has not been given.”

“They don’t fear that the magistrates and people will rally a defence?”

“Do you see one happening?”

They did not. Fighting men know the sounds of panic and they were issuing now from the port at Vespasian’s Bridge. Where before had been chaos was now clear panic.

On the bridge, the bottleneck became a logjam and carts broke their axles rather than back up or give way. Figures climbed over them and round them and fell into the water and were ignored by the others who thought that safety lay south.

On the river, the ship loading at the wharf was flooded, suddenly, with men and their families who abandoned the need to preserve their family silver and fought each other instead for room on the gangplank and then on the deck. The whistle of the master shrieked loud enough to be heard on the hillside. The men it summoned were armed.

Paulinus leaned on the front arch of his saddle. He ran his tongue round his upper teeth thoughtfully and the fifteen men around him found other things to watch, rather than catch his eye and so his attention. Twice in his past, once in Mauretania and before that in Parthia, Paulinus had faced a decision and had given the men with him the opportunity to vote on their action. Those who chose wrongly were allowed to fall on their swords before the rest moved on. The ones who hesitated had been staked out and left to die at their leisure.

The governor drew his horse to one side. “Plebius?”

From the beginning, Plebius had ridden at his general’s right hand. A one-eyed duplicarius of the Second cohort of the XIVth, he had a natural head for numbers and was obsessively conscientious. By default, he had become the quartermaster of their small troop, and carried the coins and gold they needed for bribes and payment. Wooden-faced, he pushed his horse beyond the hearing of his peers and listened while the governor explained what he wanted.

Given his orders, Plebius nodded and searched his packs and emptied what he found into the bowl of his helmet. Metal chimed heavily on metal.

Suetonius Paulinus swung his horse on its quarters and faced the semicircle of men he had chosen to accompany him and whose opinions he professed to respect. His face was never expressive, but his eyes, for the most part, on most days, spoke from his soul. Now, in the cold wind that soughed up from the river, they were flat and watchful.

He said, “You will each take one denarius and one as from the helmet.”

The helmet passed round. Corvus was last. The as was a copper teardrop against the dull iron. He resisted the temptation to bite it and feel the texture of the metal. The denarius was silver and too obviously foiled to be worth the biting. A young, thin Augustus stared moodily east from its one surface. On the other side, a younger, thinner bull stood haltered and garlanded, awaiting the sacrifice. Corvus closed his hand over it; the bull-god had never been his.

The governor said, “Two choices: we can stay and rally a defence in the township in an effort to preserve the bridge which is our best route to the south coast; or we can leave now, and ride hard for the coast and take ship and return in due course with the legions to face the Eceni war host en masse. Each of these has points to recommend it; I will not labour them. You will hold out your right hand containing a coin. When I request it, you will open your hand to reveal what is hidden. The silver coin votes to stay and defend the bridge. The copper votes to return to the ship and meet the legions wherever we may. Is anyone unclear as to which coin denotes which choice?”

They were not. A man may die cleanly who falls on his sword; every one of them had faced a worse death daily in battle. Each made his choice alone, as a soldier, as an officer of the legions, as a veteran with twenty years of fighting experience, as a man prepared to live and die by the quality of his tactical judgement.

Corvus had made his decision before he saw the scouts; the volume of smoke on the wind told him as much as he needed to know of the size of the advancing war host and the speed with which the port of Vespasian’s Bridge would be crushed. He placed his two hands together and when he drew them apart the lighter, smaller, brighter, younger coin was in the right, so light as to barely be there.

He looked around. The rest sat easy on their horses and held out their closed fists so that the governor was ringed by brown skin laced with battle scars. Only Gaius, the scout, looked uncertain. He could not have missed out on the story of Suetonius Paulinus and the doomed officers of Parthia, but he did not have the years of service to tell him that the only possible answer he could give was the one that military sense dictated. To survive, he had to make the decision as if he led a legion, or a full army; only then would he command Paulinus’ respect. What killed men, what caused them to forfeit their honour and their lives in the governor’s eyes was sycophancy, or an attempt to buy an ovation from the senate at the expense of winning the war.

They waited, because Gaius could not decide. The veins on his temples beat blue and matt with sweat. His skin was as yellow as his hair. He made a decision and unmade it and for that alone he faced death, and knew it. A watery sun shone on them, making the day hot. In the flowering elder behind, a thrush called. The scouts of the Eceni sat in the long grass and seeded nettles through which they had crawled forward and watched with interest.

In silence thick as curdled whey, Gaius thrust his right arm forward into the ring.

“Reveal yourselves.”

Corvus felt his arm turn of its own accord, and his fingers uncoil. Ursus was on his right. He saw the spark of copper on the grubby palm of the man’s hand before he saw his own. The wolfskin had been left behind. He wondered, idly, if that might make them both unlucky.

Flavius, on his left, opened his palm a fraction later. He, too, held copper.

Around, fourteen men held copper tears on their palms. The fifteenth, bearing silver, was Gaius.

The governor’s head turned slowly, as an owl’s does, without blinking. “You think Vespasian’s Bridge can be fortified?” he asked.

Gaius was not a coward. “I think the people can be rallied.” His voice was commendably strong.

“Get off your horse.”

He did so.

“Kneel.”

He did so.

“I promised you citizenship and now I grant it. You are Gaius Fortunatus, citizen of Rome and auxiliary officer of the legions in the rank of decurion. Your pay is one sestertius per day. You have been paid in advance. You will earn it.”

The man blinked in the poor light. “How?”

“By rallying a defence amongst the people of Vespasian’s Bridge. How else? You will go there now and hold it or die in its defence. If I hear you have fled, I will have you named traitor throughout the empire and your family will pay for it. Am I clear?”

“You are.”

There are worse ways to die and citizenship passed through the male line unless it was revoked. Gaius turned to look down at the place in which he would die and it seemed to Corvus that the smile that flowered on his face was genuine. He saluted up to the sun and across the river’s water and spoke to them in a tongue that had not the least trace of the Tiber in its accent.

They watched him ride down. The Eceni stood at his passing, as if they had some idea of what had taken place.

The governor turned first, and sought out Flavius, who had care of the pigeons, and the centurion of the XXth who acted as his scribe and dictated a brief message to be sent to Agricola, and Galenius of the XIVth who commanded at Mona.

Flavius’ care of the birds was of a man with a new horse. He held them gently between careful palms and made sure the message carriers on their legs were firm and would not chafe. He spoke to them in words no-one else could hear so that they bobbed at him, bright-eyed and ready.

He threw them up high, and they were waiting for the lift he gave them and spread their wings and cracked the air and rose and flew straight, one after the other, until four of the six were gone.

The governor saluted them, as he would have done a legate leading a legion to a distant battle. “If the dreamers set falcons on them, I will have them all crucified.”

They rode west, fast. No-one felt the need to point out that their guide had just been sent to his death; they were all good trackers in their way, and could retrace any path they had taken once. The Eceni scouts put up a war cry as they left, a long ululating howl that echoed from one to the other to the other and lasted long after they were out of sight.

Later, as the sun reached over their heads and sank towards the west and the sea that they were seeking, Paulinus pulled his horse back alongside Corvus’ black colt.

“You understand the native tongues better than most. What was it he said to the sun and the river before he rode down to Vespasian’s Bridge?”

“Gaius? He was speaking in the tongue of their ancestors. He commended his life and that of his three sons to Lugh of the Shining Spear, god of the sun. In the days when the gods were young, Lugh felt the thirst of eternal fire and came to earth to quench it. He drank the Great River dry and then laid his head down to sleep. Nemain and Manannan together sent rain and the river swelled to flooding, but would not touch the god. It curved round, to leave him sleeping and dry.”

“And so the river is sacred? And the place where it bends, where Vespasian built his bridge, especially so?”

“It is. They would never have built a bridge there. And they do not name it after a Roman general. In the native tongue it is named after the god who first made it sacred. In the tongue of the ancestors, it is Lugdunum.”

The single standing elder by the jetty on Mona was in full flower. A cascade of creamy white frothed and bobbed on the breeze that rose from the sea.

Graine picked a half-head and teased out single flowers and ate them, dusting the pollen on her tunic so that green became green-gold in smudges. Shuffling forward, she dangled her legs over the edge of the oak and felt the biggest of the waves slide up to kiss the soles of her feet. The tide was at its highest, covering what was left of the debris of battle. A warrior walked with a hound whelp at heel along the tideline. Watching them, Graine found she missed Stone for the first time since she had left him to take care of her mother.

She watched a shadow lengthen and slide across the rocks at the base of the jetty and made a bet with herself as to which of three people it might belong to, which meant she could not turn round early to look.

“May I join you?”

She lost the bet. “Of course.” She edged sideways just enough to be polite and Luain mac Calma, Elder dreamer of Mona, hitched up his tunic and came to sit beside her, dangling his long, lean legs over the edge and into the water.

“Who did you think I was?”

“Hawk. Or maybe Bellos, except you were not quite as quiet as either of them. So then I thought maybe Efnís had come back from Hibernia. If I had been asked, I would have said him.”

“He is back. I could get him for you if you want.”

“Not especially. Have you come to watch the legions leave? They have been striking camp since the tide turned. Maybe Manannan sent the big tide to scare them off.”

“I think it has more to do with the governor’s messenger pigeon that evaded the cliff falcons and returned to its roost at mid-morning.” Mac Calma made a hammock of his fingers and hooked it over the back of his head, stretching his arms. His shoulder joints cracked, scaring some wading birds out on the strand. “Your mother’s war host has set alight to the east and south,” he said. “I think the destruction of Mona is no longer the governor’s first care.”

The day became suddenly cold. Graine pulled her knees to her chest and her tunic to her toes. Wrapping her arms round her shins, she said, “Is Mother…?”

“Healed? Her healing has begun, yes.”

He left room for her to ask a question. Graine discovered a wedge of dirt between her toes and rubbed at it with her forefinger. “Did you make the falcons leave the pigeons?” she asked.

It was not the question he had wanted. He sighed and shook his head. “No. We couldn’t do that. But we offered them two of the laying pullets to feed their young and they did not hunt on the day it came through. The gods may grant what we ask, but sometimes we must act as our wisdom dictates and hope that is enough.” Mac Calma’s voice had not changed that Graine could notice, but they were no longer talking of falcons and Roman pigeons. He said, “Bellos tells me you have been dreaming.”

Graine said, “Not proper dreams. There was no purpose to them. I didn’t know I was dreaming. I couldn’t ask anything except of the hares.” There had been two hares in her dream. They had each given an opposite answer. She had not told Bellos that, or the nature of her question.

“Thank you.” Mac Calma lay back and hooked his hands behind his head.

Graine said, “Will the people come back here to Mona now the legions have gone?”

“I think so. We might see what happens in the south first.”

“Will there be another battle?”

“I hope not. The legions will win if there is.” Mac Calma turned his head to look at her. Graine realized, with shock, that he was exhausted, as if he had fought the battle already, and alone. She had never seen him less than resilient, and always good-humoured.

He saw her look and smiled, wryly, in the way Valerius did when he was uncomfortable. He took a breath to say something and changed his mind and said instead, “Graine, will you go to your mother? I think it will make a difference to what happens when they come to fight the legions.”

“Because I am the wild piece on the board of the Warrior’s Dance?” She hated that. She had no idea what to do about it.

“I’m afraid so, yes. But only in part. The rest is because the Boudica needs you to be whole. And because you need her to be whole and each of you needs the other to find that wholeness. Mona has done all it can for you; you can dream a little and you can reach into the fire; it’s as much as anyone might have asked for when you came.”

It was not what Graine wanted to hear. Her eyes burned. Because anger was better than yet more grief, particularly in this company, she said caustically, “And I can fight. Hawk has taught me. Don’t forget that.”

He had taught her every morning for nine mornings while they watched the legions gather and plan their final assault, and plan, and plan, and never yet launch it. She was better than she had been, but she would never be more than a liability on a battlefield.

She watched Luain mac Calma make very certain that there was no condescension on his face or in his voice when he said, “Yes, and you can fight.”

He reached into his belt pouch and brought out a small silver brooch, shaped like a hare. The design was not new; the lines were carved on beams in the great-house and stretched back for thirteen generations: she had counted them once. She thought the brooch itself might be new, or at least had not yet been worn by anyone.

He said, “If I gave you this, and promised that it would join you to Mona as long as there is a Mona to which you may be joined, would you leave here and take it with you and go to your mother, wherever she is? Your honour guard will go with you, and Bellos, too, I think, and perhaps Efnís, if he feels he is not needed here—Why are you smiling?”

Graine stood, shaking her head. The thought of Hawk and Dubornos and Gunovar as her honour guard was either hilarious, or very sad. She did not wish to think too closely which.

She would have gone anyway, without the silver or the two wounded dreamers, but she took the hare as he offered it, and pinned it to her tunic high on her left shoulder. It ran there, as the hares had done in her dream, and still did not give her an answer.