“You can’t. It’s too late.”
I knew my father. Had Mael fought his way through to me in the hall . . . if he had stood before Aeddan and challenged him there and then, Virico might have considered such a claim. But it was a lifetime too late for that now. My father would not go back on a pledge—one made in front of the whole of the Four Tribes—and he would not change his mind. He would not suffer his chiefs to call him weak. Or cowardly. He had suffered enough of that in the days after the Romans had returned him from capture. How, his freemen had asked, had the king not taken his own life rather than suffer the shame of Roman captivity? How had he come back to Durovernum alive when his own daughter had died in battle?
It had taken Virico Lugotorix years to regain the respect of the chiefs.
He would not risk it now. Not on my account.
“And I’ll never be a warrior now,” I said slowly, feeling the weight of each word.
Mael shot me a sharp glance.
“Don’t.” I held up a warning hand. “If my father had made me choose, if he’d even bothered to give me a choice, know this: I would have given up my sword for you, Maelgwyn Ironhand. You. Not your brother.”
“Well, it’s too late for that now, isn’t it?” The bitterness returned to his voice. “If we had gone to your father this morning, none of this would have happened.”
“How could I have known, Mael?” I almost shouted. “I am the one left with nothing, and you’re jealous of cold steel!”
A wave of misery swept over us both, and we stood there, staring at each other with helpless regret and longing. How had everything gone so wrong so quickly? It should have been a night of celebration for me. But my proud moment lay shattered and strewn at my feet.
“We’ll go,” I said. “We’ll leave tonight and go west. There are tribes who would be happy to have us, and we can be together.”
“No.” Mael’s fists clenched, white-knuckled, at his sides. “I’m not running like a coward. This is my home, your tribe, and Aeddan has no right to take that away from us.” He strode to the door, slapping aside the leather curtain to let in a gust of dark rain.
“Mael!” I ran after him, grabbing him by the arm. “Where are you going?”
“To find him. He will set this right.” Mael shook free of my grip. He hitched up his swords and tugged his cloak hood over his head. “And if he doesn’t, I’ll kill him.”
“I’d have killed him myself if it would have solved anything! Mael!” I called. “Mael!”
But he was already gone, vanished like a shadow into the stormbound night. What he left behind was a hollow space in my chest that began to fill with a hot, heavy anger. I would be the master of my own fate. Me and the goddess Morrigan. No one else—and certainly no man. Mael and Aeddan could fight over me until they were both bloody. My father could deny me my blade. But they couldn’t force me from my warrior’s path unless I let them. Sorcha never would have let anyone choose her fate for her.
“Go then,” I said, my voice loud in the emptiness of the room. “I won’t be here when you get back.”
IV
WHEN MY FATHER WAS A BOY, he’d traveled far to foster with a fierce warrior tribe across the narrow Eirish Sea in the west. That was where he’d met my mother, herself no older than I was when I first met Mael. Years later, when Virico was a man grown, he’d returned to woo her.
She’d waited, knowing he would.
I wasn’t about to wait around for Maelgwyn to return for me.
Not in Durovernum.
I couldn’t possibly stay the night somewhere Aeddan or my father could find me. Instead, I picked up my sword in its doe-skin scabbard and stuffed it inside the bedroll I slung over my shoulder. There was one place I could spend the night—the one place Mael alone knew to look for me, whenever his foolish pride and rage left him.
He should have said something, I thought bitterly.
You didn’t.
The thought stopped me in my tracks. No. I didn’t. I hadn’t.
When the moment came for me to stand up to my father, I’d just stood there dumbly.
Target practice.
Well. No more. Now I would be a moving target.
I threw on my cloak and slung the strap of the bedroll across my torso. With one last glance over my shoulder at my house—a place I suspected I might never see again—I pushed through the doorway and out into the night. I could hear the distant sounds of the revelers gathered in my father’s great hall, still celebrating my vile betrothal, but beyond that, the bustling town of Durovernum was a place of shadows and fog. The rain had abated, and a silvery mist began collecting in the ditches. The gates of the town would be shut and locked, the walls guarded for the night, but that didn’t matter to me. I slipped between the chieftains’ roundhouses, past the smithy and the stables, to the place where I knew the earthworks were piled up close enough to the top of the town wall that I could climb over. I’d taken that route so many times with Mael that I could probably have followed it blindfolded.