“Why are you crying?”
“Priamos wrote to me every week during the quarantine. Every week.” They had not seen Priamos Anbessa for seven years. Priamos was the emperor’s cousin and Sofya’s older brother, the Aksumite ambassador to Britain. Telemakos remembered him as kind and frowning, a gentle, humorous man with an unaccountably angry face. Goewin had no dearer friend.
“In the beginning he wrote every two or three days,” Goewin said. “I think there must be two hundred letters here.”
“Is he all right?”
“As of last season. There’s nothing less than three months old. Look, Telemakos, my love, he’s sent a letter to you as well.”
Telemakos could not take it because he was still reining Athena back. She reached for the letter.
“Sit on my knee then, Tena. Here, I’ll open it and you can hold it while I read.”
“Goodness, you’re training her well.”
“She’s harder work than the lion, I can tell you.”
Telemakos read slowly, shaping the words silently with his lips.
“They’re all alive!” he said joyfully.
“Well, the high king and his Comrades are alive. Listen to Constantine’s tale.”
Telemakos sat folding his letter for Athena to unfold, as Goewin pieced together for him Britain’s own story of quarantine and plague. Page after page gave up a harrowing account of the high king Constantine’s four-month self-imposed imprisonment on his island fortress in Dumnonia.
“Half of Britain is destroyed,” Goewin finished grimly, picking up another letter. “But Constantine has saved himself and his court. He did not save his wife and two young children. I do not know if I could have been so ruthless.”
“Don’t speak nonsense, Princess,” Kidane said mildly, cutting the twine around a minute wicker hamper handed him by Ferem, who waited on him. “What of the ruin of our port city Deire, when plague was there and the emperor’s soldiers were ordered to shoot flaming arrows into anyone who tried to escape?”
“I did not advise that.”
“You sanctioned it.”
“So did you, Councilor Kidane, though you may call me heartless.” Goewin spoke fiercely, defending herself.
She broke the seal on the letter she held. Grandfather opened the lid of his parcel. Ferem, who could see over Kidane’s shoulder, reached to take back the box, but Grandfather held up a hand to stay him.
“You should look at this, Goewin Dragon’s Daughter,” Kidane said quietly. “Look quickly, for I do not want to keep it here.”
She glanced up from her letter. “What is it?”
“A warning has come.”
Goewin carefully moved the pile of letters from her lap onto the floor and got to her feet. “What warning? To whom?” she asked in a low voice.
“The box is addressed to me,” Kidane said evenly, “but it is my house, of course.”
Goewin leaned over the table as Kidane pushed the parcel toward her. She picked up the box and lifted the lid. After a moment she narrowed her eyes and sneered in disturbed disgust, then suddenly slammed the lid shut. Telemakos saw all the color drain from her face as if a white person’s cheeks were a cup from which the blood could be poured out.
“This is a death threat,” Goewin whispered. “Who sent it?”
“I don’t know,” Grandfather answered with more ragged frustration in his voice than Telemakos had ever heard from him. “Who sends any of them? I don’t know.”
“What is it?” Telemakos asked, letting Athena go. She pulled herself up against Grandfather’s desk and helped herself to one of the documents lying there. She dropped it on the floor and reached for another, but no one stopped her.
Grandfather turned his face toward Telemakos with a furrow of concern drawing his brows together. Goewin followed Kidane’s gaze, her eyes wide with shock and her lips parted as though she were about to speak. Quickly she looked down at the box in her hands, then dropped it on the writing table as though it burned her fingers. Telemakos scrambled to his feet and reached for it himself, but Goewin snatched it up again.
“Do not.”
Telemakos smelled dust and faint decay.
“What is it?” he repeated. “Let me see.”
“Do not,” Grandfather echoed in sharp agreement.
Goewin’s skirts swept through one of her careful piles of parchment. Holding the box beyond Telemakos’s reach, she pounded out the front door and ran down the forecourt stair.
“Goewin!”
Telemakos left Athena among Priamos’s two hundred letters and raced after his aunt. Goewin ran across the courtyard to the kitchen wing.
“Let me see!”
Goewin threw the thing into one of the brick ovens. Telemakos, unthinking, plunged after it. Goewin pulled him out of the flames and boxed his ears so forcefully she knocked him over.
He went down hard, flailing for balance. Illusion tore away his being. My arms are bound, my hands are tied, I cannot see, I cannot see—
He could not break his fall. He took the woodpile down with him. The kitchen turned over, re-formed itself, and Telemakos saw Goewin snatch up a pair of kitchen tongs and rake coals over the little box. The wicker burst into flame; Goewin pounded the flaming parcel into ash.
Then she looked down at Telemakos. His eyes stung with smoke and fury and phantom salt.
“Forgive me, love,” Goewin whispered, kneeling by his side. “Did I hurt you?”
Grandfather’s cook was at his other side, bristling with outrage. “Get out of my kitchen!” she snapped at Goewin. “Such cockfighting ill becomes a pullet hen! Strike Telemakos Meder again and I’ll break an oil jar over your foreigner’s head. Mother of God! It is not a year since the child had his arm taken off, and you would beat him to the ground!”
Telemakos blinked fixedly, not daring to rub his burning eyes. Cook helped him to his feet and stirred the ashes.
“And what offal have you thrown on my fire?” she demanded.
“Just as you say. Offal. Worthless scrap.” Goewin shook her head as though trying to clear it. “Come, Telemakos.”
“Come back in an hour, boy, and I’ll have honey cakes fried for you,” the cook said.
“Don’t cook anything on that fire,” Goewin said, with icy command. “Sweep it out and build another. I shall send the houseboy to assist you.” She held Telemakos close against her with one arm over his shoulder and the other around his waist, her hands clasped protectively over his galloping heart. “I vow there is good reason for everything I do,” she said. Her voice was cold as frost, but her embrace was warm.