She actually rolled her eyes, and her lips twitched even as her gaze tracked the wolves. “You must be tired, for that’s not your cleverest jest. As if you cared one jot about your clothes, except that they not fall off and expose your shapely arse.”

“So you did notice! I thought you were asleep.” He added, with a laugh more reckless than amused, “You’ll not shake me loose. If you’re pregnant, we will face it together.”

When she caught his gaze, my child’s heart wept. Was that love in her expression? Loyalty? Exasperation? I knew so little about my mother, but right then I knew she trusted him.

“If we escape, I will return to my regiment. I honor my obligations. My oath belongs to my commander. I cannot abandon my comrades. You know you are not the only one I love.”

“I do not ask you to abandon anyone, Tara, nor to choose me above any other. I only ask you to remember the oath I make to you now.”

He stole a kiss, pressed lightly at the corner of her mouth. Briefly she caught him with an answering kiss, then she pushed him away, and he stepped back with a smile.

Her gaze tracked the wolves. “They will never stop hunting me.”

His smiling expression vanished. “My oath is this. If we get out of this, if you need me, then you need only get word to me. I will come for you, and for the child if there is one. No matter who or what hunts you.”

The men at the longboat cried out in triumph as they found it seaworthy and its equipment intact. Shouting, they called three names—Tara! Daniel! Gaius!—and I realized they did not yet know the man on the path above was dead, for they could see nothing of what had occurred in the rear guard.

With her bloody arm, my mother pulled him against her. She kissed him with the passion of the condemned. When she released him, he was so stricken by astonishment that she had taken several steps away before she realized he wasn’t following her.

“Daniel! Don’t make me regret that.”

Beneath the cruel face of the ice, he laughed, looking like the happiest man in the world.

“You would laugh at a time like this,” she said with a smile that made her look like a woman who knew how to jest in a tavern over drinks. “Let’s get out of here before those cursed wolves get down the path.”

They strode toward their companions and the boats, but she abruptly halted, dragging him to a stop. “Did you hear something?”

He looked up at the face of the ice. “Just the wolves and the wind.”

“No,” she said. “Something else.”

The wolves began to descend.

“Cat! Wake up! You’re howling.” Bee was shaking me, trying to jostle my head off a cliff.