“Yes. According to the law, the husband of a woman is the father of her children and thus has legal rights of guardianship over them. Whom was Tara protecting?”

I glared at him. “Tara was protecting me.”

“I find it odd she would have believed that by dying she would protect you.”

“She knew Daniel would protect me. I hope you don’t find that odd.”

“Indeed, I do not, for Daniel was exactly the sort of man who could raise another man’s child as if it were his own and never love it less for all of that.”

How he had me then! For I was seized by both overwhelming grief and passionate curiosity.

“What do you mean? What sort of man was he?”

He leaned closer, voice dropping to a murmur. “Ah, Cat, he was a better man than I am.”

I sat back. “Are you mocking me?”

“No, I am not.” I knew he meant it, although I could not have said why. “I am mocking myself. I have asked myself a thousand times since that day why she did not confide in me.”

“The Amazon’s oath she swore condemned her to death for becoming pregnant.”

“She could have told me the truth. I would have found a way. But she felt only Daniel could rescue her, as if Tara had ever needed rescuing from anything except that hells-ridden, pestilent village she was born in. That must be why she hid the pregnancy for so long, waiting for Daniel to come. Or perhaps she hoped that drill, or a battle, would cause her to miscarry and rid her of a thing she did not want.”

“Do you know, General, I start to begin to like you again, and then you say something like that. My mother and father loved me.”

“I do not dispute that they loved you. I’ve read his journals. There’s a passage I recall in particular. ‘Is some other man’s bastard worth this to you?’ So your Uncle Jonatan demanded of his brother Daniel. And Daniel writes, ‘What happened on the ice does not matter. The child will be my child. I have promised Tara that, and even if I had not, it would make no difference, for my little cat is my sweet daughter, the delight of my life.’ ”

He examined me where I sat just outside the spill of light. “Why, Cat—are you crying?”

I wiped a tear from my cheek with the back of a hand. “There’s no shame in grief. I lost my parents when I was six. I lost the love I would have had from them all the years from then to now. Think of what they lost! They lost the years they would have had to watch me grow up, to welcome more children, to treasure each other.”