Vera noticed her watching, and suddenly embarrassed to have been caught spying on a private exchange, Cnán leaped to her feet. Waving everyone to silence, she launched into her own story about Finn. She was flustered at first, stumbling over the tale, but after a few seconds, she stopped thinking about Vera and Raphael—and Percival too; how had he managed to get in her thoughts like that?—and sank into her role as bard.
It was a simple story. One that had little room for embellishment the way Yasper would have told it, and none of the romantic gravitas of Feronantus’s, but it was her story. She prided herself on her woodcraft: on her ability to read the trails; to know where water and fruit-bearing plants could be found; to move so silently through the woods that the birds never betrayed her position with warning calls to another. Yet, compared to Finn, she was a large cow, blundering through the heavy brush.
No matter how far she ranged ahead or behind the company during their journey, she invariably found sign that Finn had already been there. At first, she thought he was clumsy in how he hid his passage, and then she allowed herself to think she was actually sharp-eyed enough to notice the tiny marks of the hunter’s trail. When they had been traveling in the forests of Poland and Rus, she would find tufts of hair from the pelts he wore caught on the unruly bark of the black alders. She would find the occasional boot print—usually only a partial print, at that—on boggy ground. His marks, tiny chips cut out of tree bark high above ground, indicated the presence of water, wildlife, and possible ambush sites; over time, she deciphered them all.
“I thought I was being clever,” she admitted to the company, “but I was only learning to see the signs Finn was leaving for me. I know he understood Latin better than he ever admitted, but out in the woods, it didn’t matter. He told me everything I needed to know without saying a word.”
One day, a few weeks after they had left Legnica, she had spotted Finn near a tiny stream and had decided to shadow him. Moving as carefully as she knew how, she tried to keep the wary hunter in sight. Several times she thought she had lost him, only to have him reappear in a different direction from where she had thought he had been traveling. After a few hours of this cat-and-mouse game, she realized he knew she was behind him. He had known all along, and when he vanished again, she gave up, feeling very foolish for having indulged in such a whimsical distraction.
When she turned around, Finn jumped back. He had been standing right behind her. Grinning wildly, he had scampered off as she had chased him, only to vanish in thick woods again. “He was a ghost,” she said. “I would catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked, he was gone. The only sign that I wasn’t imagining things was how the branches shook, as if the trees were laughing at me. They knew where he was, but they would never tell me.”
They were smiling at her story, and she felt a warmth suffuse her that had little to do with the fire. She sat down quickly, suddenly very self-conscious, leaving her story somewhat unfinished. But she had said enough.
Feronantus had called this gathering a kinyen, and she suddenly recalled what that meant. This was the private mess of the fully initiated members of the order. She had stood up and spoken about one of their fallen companions as an equal, and none of them had objected on the grounds that neither she nor Finn were sworn members of the order.
They accepted her. She was part of the family now.
As the night wore on, the Shield-Brethren honored their fallen comrades. After they spoke of Finn, they remembered Roger: his perpetual scowl, the endless supply of hand axes, knives, and other sharp implements that seemed to grow on him like fruit; his steadfastness in battle, regardless of his disgruntlement at being forced to fight. They talked of Taran as well—their eternal oplo—who, even in death, still reminded them of their bad form when holding a sword, of how often they failed to close the line, and how they consistently neglected to ready themselves for their next opponent as their first was still dying. Even Istvan joined in, though his tales were intermittently interrupted by disjointed conversations held with phantoms only he could see. After awhile, the others would take these asides as opportunities to pass the arkhi or to wander off to relieve themselves, confident they would miss little of the Hungarian’s story.
Feronantus, however, listened intently to Istvan’s ramblings.
What secrets do you hope to hear? Raphael wondered, his curiosity aroused. His interest lay, partially, in having something to distract him from Percival’s confession, but their leader’s enigmatic relationship with the Hungarian had always puzzled the others. His eyes half-closed, Raphael watched Feronantus, trying to read something in the older man’s features.