Excerpt: Undecided

He arrived the day after the falcon stooped to Ameline’s wrist, riding up from the northeast, following the turns of the Cladda that leapt frothy and muscular from Dovendu’s steep slopes. It was dawn when horse and rider broke level ground between the forest and the cliffs, new light gilding the looming silhouette of Dovendu’s peak in gold. Here the undisturbed snow was purple in the long shadows of bare trees, and as the horse plodded across the plateau its hooves crunched through the thin topcoat of ice, lifting clear the snowy powder beneath. The rider wore a rank fur or fleece. He sat slumped in the saddle, chin resting against his chest, shoulders hunched, rounded, like the brooding falcon’s. His mount walked with her great bay head hung so low that her creamy mane brushed the snow.
He rode up the path covered over by white, into the sleeping village in the silence of the dawn. Above the wattle huts smoke drifted from the dying embers of fires, and the goats in their pens were beginning to stir, shaking snow from thick brown fur, climbing stiffly to weary feet, breathing steam into the air. In the round huts all was quiet still, dark, unmoving. The horse wound her way between their blue shadows, their pens and empty chicken coops, their small patches of field, dead and buried beneath the snowfall. A goat raised its head to the rider and said, “Beh.” He lifted his head to look at it as they passed, and let it slump to his chest once more.
The ground rose, the huts rising one above another on the slope up to the palisade. The way was steep and tricky here, and the horse had to lift her hooves high to get her footing, measuring out slow, ponderous steps.
The gate was shut, but the men of the gatehouse were huddled inside the square stone box built out of the wall, tightly shuttered against the wind. One of them, Cai, the hunter, lifted his head at the sound of hooves crunching through the snow. Taking up the halberd that leaned against the wall, he got up from the floor where the men were huddled around the fire pit, and opened the door.
He could not have told you what he saw at that moment. There was a horse and rider, to be sure, but man and mount were giants both, black figures whose eyes burned with fire, and behind them there was something greater and more terrible yet, a beast that breathed curling smoke, and for an instant there was no chill to the air at all—there was heat as though from a hellish fire, and the stink of burning. He blinked and there was only the horse, a great creamy bay but no giant, and the man astride her, solidly built, wrapped in a thick fur that stank of smoke and the unwashed body beneath it. The man’s eyes were pale, and there was no fire in them, but a light like fear or madness. He seemed to slump, and then he seemed to bow, and he slipped from the horse’s back and fell to the snow before the gates of Castle Tirramor, where he lay as though dead.
Ameline saw it all, and woke.
The fire had banked itself in her room and the air was cold enough to freeze water, but she threw back the heavy fleeces and furs and set her bare feet to the icy floor. Dressing was a perfunctory matter, the same race against frozen fingers and toes she performed every morning. With alacrity but with care, she bundled on a silk undershift, thick stockings, wool shift, wool gown, head cloth, fleece-lined boots, fleece-lined gloves, and fur cloak, all with the pale eyes of the young man as clear in her mind as though he stood with her in the room. Her shivering had subsided somewhat when she left.
The torches in the wall sconces were meant to burn throughout the night, but they provided little heat. She moved quickly to start the blood flowing through her veins, and because she must reach Lord Iestyn before Cai or Emor the head guardsman or, Ardwyth forbid, his manservant.
Outside, the men of the gatehouse had come to gather around the fallen body of the stranger, and soon enough Emor came clattering down the wood steps from the top of the curtain wall and had the gate opened wide enough for him to slip through, the crunching of which was loud enough to rouse more than one freezing miner from his bed in the village. The bay mare snorted and pawed the snow at the presence of so many strangers, and sidled closer to her master as though to protect him, until Cai took hold of her bridle and rubbed the cream blaze on her nose, murmuring to her.
“Where’d he come from?” one of the gatesmen asked no one in particular, and none of the gatesmen answered.
“Well don’t just leave him lying there,” Emor said impatiently at last.
Tirramor’s guard was strong, but it took three men, including Cai, the biggest, to lift the stranger and carry him into the gatehouse. “Stinks like wet dog,” one of them commented, and the other two agreed. They got his gloves and boots from him and checked his fingers and toes for blackening, then looked at his weapons—a fine broadsword in a battered sheath, passed about and admired, and a dagger hidden against his left hip. They put the weapons out of his reach, and Cai volunteered to stable his mount and see to the lord of the castle.

Ameline had never liked Merrion, and she liked him even less at night, wrapped in a thick rug and stretched out before his master’s door like a dog. Neither willing to wake him nor to step across him, she waited until her presence brought him out of sleep and his dark, clever eyes squinted up at her, wet in the light of the torches. “Housekeeper,” he murmured. The title of her job here, instead of her name or the polite ‘mistress’, always brought a curl of distaste to her lips. It was not necessarily insulting, but she felt he meant to remind her, noble-born, of the inferiority of her station to his.
“Wake your master,” she told him, impatient with the sitting up and the yawning and the rubbing sleep from his eyes, the entire pretense of delay.
“It’s not yet dawn,” he informed her, once he had stood and smoothed his clothing to his satisfaction, “and your presence is his bedchamber—”
“We are in the shadow of the mountain, as you would notice if you ever stepped outside,” she interrupted, “and I have no need to enter my lord’s bedchamber, as it is your job to wake him. Tell him Ameline wishes to speak to him. Tell him someone has come.”
“Who has come?” Merrion demanded with a gleam in his eyes, taking a step forward as though to rush to the courtyard—as far out of doors as Merrion ever went—to see for himself, but as Ameline leaned forward with a small fist poised to rap on the door, he sidled back in front of her.
“Ardwyth save me from a woman’s imagination,” he said, but he slipped through the door, closing it in her face.
Ameline remained where she was momentarily, biting into a thumbnail beneath one of her gloves, before deciding that she had no intention of waiting for Merrion to tell her that really, his lord was most perturbed by this early call to fussing over strangers at the gates (undoubtedly a lost merchant from one of the caravans), but that he would be along in a moment. He would, one way or another; Iestyn knew as well as she did there were no caravans on Tirramor lands this month. She trailed her hand along the cold stones as she walked, counting Eria’s door, Tegan’s, Sythera’s, as fine wood grain passed beneath her fingertips.
Down a tight winding of stone steps, through the kitchen where the great hearth still glowed with embers—the warmest room in the castle—and into the great hall, where she met Cai, a man she had to tilt her head back to see. Cai drew up short at the sight of her and half-bowed before remembering she wasn’t to be bowed to. He put a fist to his lips instead.
“Cai,” Ameline said, embarrassed.
He smiled underneath his dark whiskers, then went to business. “Man at the gates. Pale-haired, looks like an Uruth.”
“He’s unconscious?”
Cai tilted his dark head. “You knew?”
“Dreams.” She waved them away. “Take me to see him?”
He walked her across the courtyard, slowly—she sank knee-deep into the snow. The sky was paling as light crept slowly around the southeast face of Dovendu, and she could hear the sleepy calls of goats and sheep in the village. The gatehouse blazed with light between the cracks in the shutters. She stepped inside to a roomful of men, small, clever, dark-featured Arkishmen, quick and strong with their furs and their weapons, gathered around the body that lay still as death before the fire pit in the center of the room.
Cai was tall, but in one glance Ameline knew that the stranger, on his feet, would have at least a head in height over Tirramor’s lead huntsman. Stretched out on his back, he nearly traversed the length of the floor. They had covered him with his cloak, a reeking, matted fur, and his face in the firelight was young, gaunt, dirty and unshaven. She looked at the proud, straight length of his nose, the solid jaw and strong chin coupled with hollow cheeks, and knew this man had half-starved on whatever road had brought him here. Cleaned, his hair might be golden. His eyes were closed, his broad lips slightly parted.
The watching Arkishmen were silent as she approached the Uruth stranger and knelt at his side. She put a hand on his chest and felt it rise and fall.
His eyes opened slowly, and stared at her without expression. They were blue, she saw—blue with a flecking of yellow, or amber.
“Tell me your name,” she said gently.
His eyes seemed to flicker. He licked his lips. “Hareth.”
The name curled like fire from his throat. His voice was a dry rasp.
“My name is Ameline.” She bent forward to put her mouth close to his ear—one or two gatesmen shifted on their feet, but none moved to stop her—and said softly, “I know you’re a stranger in this country, maybe even an enemy. Maybe you’ve come to us as a scout to some advancing force. But I want you to know that I dreamed your coming here, Hareth. You’re safe. This is where you belong. So stay, and I’ll look after you.”
She settled in to wait beside him, watched the man watching her watching him. His eyes never left her face. She kept her gaze fast with his until the door to the gatehouse opened in a blast of icy air, and Merrion’s voice beckoned her to Iestyn in the castle.

She was young, he thought, and she was beautiful. An Arkishwoman to the core—small and pale and fey, quick-eyed, dark-eyed. Her hand on his chest had been like a child’s, a slight, warm weight above the beating of his heart. Her upswept hair, black and glossy like a raven’s wing.
She had spoken his name, Hareth, and given it back to him without fire, in a voice that was light like air and deep like water. She had given him her name, too, Ameline, and he wanted to keep it, at least for a little while. Ameline, Ameline, Ameline. He chanted it in his mind to hear the music of it, formed it silently with his lips and tongue to taste the shape of it. Was it as she said, that he belonged here? Had he come to a place he could belong?
No. Not even here, not even within these walls where she lived. There were no walls that could keep the creature from him, only water.
Stay, she had told him, and he could not obey her, his lady, his Ameline.
He wished she would return.
A dog bayed in the village, and he shuddered.