“I heard you shout, love.” He tossed the reins to the ground and, drawing his sword, stepped between me and the man who refused to be my grandfather. “Holy one, you cannot possibly wish to anger a magister, and you especially do not wish to anger me. Because I promise you, no magister you have ever seen or heard tell of has done what I have done. For I have defied the hunter, and stolen his own daughter out of his very nest. Of course she has fallen in love with me and chosen to become my wife. She is no threat to you or to this village. You ought to rejoice and lay a feast to celebrate her arrival, for I assure you that everything about this woman ought to make you proud to call her your kin.”

The priest lowered the knife, his gaze fixed on Vai’s cold steel, which needed only to draw blood to cut his spirit out of his flesh and send him screaming into the spirit world. “The girl has bewitched you, Magister. The god toys with you. It will end in grief and blood. I see it in the cauldron.”

“You see your own fears,” I said hoarsely. “You know what happened to your daughter on the ice, don’t you?”

His pitiless gaze seared me. “I told her to smother the child the moment she gave birth. Do you know what she said to me?”

My heart dropped as if into the pit of my belly. I feared to know. Yet I had to know.

The old man’s malice gleamed in a face so much like mine. “She said, ‘Do you not think I did not try to rid myself of his hateful seed? Yet nothing I did would dislodge it.’ ”

“You don’t need to listen to any more of this, Catherine. We can walk out of here now.”

My feet would not shift. My grandfather’s hate pinned me to the earth. The memory of Tara’s defiance still enraged him.

“Yet after that, the shameless whore spoke of pride! She said, ‘But then I realized that it was loyalty that made the child, because I went willingly to the hunter to save the lives of the others. Loyalty will be her birthright. Do not think I will be ashamed! I will be proud! Because loyalty will be the bright light this child will bring to the world.’ ”

The glimpse into my mother’s heart stunned me.

“I told her she would come to a bad end,” he went on in a rheumy whisper. “The hunter never stops hunting. His children belong to him only. Blood binds them forever and always.”

He shut his seamed old eyes, pressing fingers onto the closed eyelids.