Cold Fire

10

Into a river whose rushing waters tumbled me over and dragged me under. Skirts tangling in my legs, I pulled upward but my hands could not break the flashing surface. I sank into my past.

I am six years old and the water closes over my nose and mouth as my mother’s strong hand slips from mine. The furious current wrenches her away.

My lungs were empty. I was drowning. The current dragged me toward a shadow that resolved into a vast maw rimmed with razor teeth. The spirit world was going to devour me.

Fingers with a grip like death fastened around my wrist. I thrashed.

“Cat! Don’t fight me!”

Bee’s voice! I went limp as she pulled. Then my mouth was above the water. I retched as air hit my lungs. The current tried to drag me back down. In panic I lunged upward through the shallows, shoving aside the body that was in my way and scrambling until solid ground met me. I collapsed, face pressed against a hot skin of stones.

“There’s thanks for you!” Bee sprawled on the rocky shore, water purling around her.

I heaved up a spew of sour-salty water. My whole body spasmed. “I thought…I was going to…lose you…just like my papa and mama…” I coughed out frantic sobs.

“There, now, Cat. There, now.” The warmth of her hand on my back soothed me.

Heat baked down on my hatless head. Wind murmured in leaves. Insects buzzed. A tremulous peace calmed my galloping heart. I hadn’t lost her. I hadn’t lost her. I hadn’t lost her.

I rose. We had floundered to shore on a rocky island trimmed with a sandbar. The sleepy horizon smelled of the sea. A wide, estuarine river flowed past, alive with a flashing presence. A feminine face with skin the blue-green of turquoise breached the surface. Eyes like stones tracked us. A slick shoulder streaked with long hair the color of twilight rolled away beneath the water.

Across the river stood tall trees leafed in summer glory. Far away, a winged creature perched on the blasted tip of a fire-scorched pine. On the far bank sat four wolves looking death in our direction. I was absolutely sure that they looked hungry and we looked delicious.

Bee tugged on my elbow. “Do you think they can swim across?”

“I wouldn’t like to stay and find out.”

The brushy sandbar on which we stood was separated from the other bank by a stagnant, muddy channel. Downstream, where the back channel met the river, the water was covered with algae. A foul substance stirred beneath that green surface in the same way heating water shrugs just before it boils.

“I guess we have to wade across that slimy-looking mud to get off this island,” I said. “Let’s get out of these winter clothes first.”

We stripped off coats, gloves, and petticoats. I peeled off my wool challis riding jacket as well, because it was so hot. We rolled up our gear into separate bundles. She still had the knit bag.

“At least you saved your sketchbook and the knife,” I said, my courage plunging. “I lost-”

Light winked on steel. Not ten paces away, my sword rocked in the wavelets along the shore. In the spirit world, it appeared as the sword it was rather than disguised as a black cane.

I pounced and swept it up. The blade flashed as if it had caught the rays of the sun, only there was no sun, nothing but a flare of gold on the horizon. The winged creature on the distant tree opened its wings and launched upward. It was not a bird of prey, as I had thought, but a winged woman, her skin as black as pitch and yet glowing as if she were a smoldering torch of power.

“Beware! Beware! A dragon is turning in her sleep!”

Did I imagine a voice, or actually hear one?

The wolves tested the river’s shallows as if they had decided they were indeed hungry enough to try to reach us.

Bee turned as she slung her bundled gear over her back. “Did you say something, Cat? Oh! Incredible! Your sword washed up!” She raised a hand to shade her eyes. “Is the sun rising?”

A line of fire limned the sky. A blast of wind shook the trees like an unseen hand wiping clean the slate on which all is written. What came behind it was sharp and painful and obliterating.

“It’s the tide of a dragon’s dream,” I cried. “Grab hold of me and don’t let go! If we’re swept away, we’ll go together.”

I threw my arms around her in an embrace so tight she grunted in protest. Across the river, the wolves plunged into the current and began swimming across.

A low bell tone shivered through the world. Its sonorous vibration splintered air from water, stone from fire, flesh from soul, here from there, now from now. The tone like a taut string passed through us as a knife slices parsnips, as a kiss unexpectedly filters through your entire being, as cold magic flows down a sword’s blade, as a choice propels you down a new path whose track you can never retrace once you have set your feet on it.

My heart, my flesh, my bones, my spirit; all thrummed as if caught within the enveloping thunder of a drumbeat that boomed on and on. Within the hollow rolling sound, the space between the beats, there unfolded a long white shore of glittering sand washed by lapis-blue waters and trimmed by thick vegetation with fanned, fringed leaves and flowers so vivid in their reds and oranges and whites they were almost molten. I felt I was looking through a window onto another shore. Then, like a vase shattering into pieces, the world tipped and parted beneath me. An abyss loomed.

I did not fall because Bee did not fall. Bee was an immoveable pillar of stone.

With a howl of rage, a shape writhed out of the channel where the water had run so green. It was far larger than could possibly rest under the surface unless the channel’s depths reached all the way to Cathay. It seemed not so much to unfold as to expand as a balloon expands when air is heated inside it. It spread a net of tentacles. Its maw was rimmed with razor teeth so white they hurt my eyes. This was the creature that had meant to eat me in the river. One huge appendage lashed overhead and snapped down to crush us.

“Hold on to me!” I shouted as I slashed at it with my sword.

My blade severed the limb. The tentacle fell writhing on the stones, spraying a stinging black ichor that hissed and bubbled across the earth. More appendages lashed over us. The tide of the dream cut through the creature. Its moist hide parted like peeled fruit. Light mottled the body, slithering in and twisting out until my stomach clenched. I shut my eyes, waiting to be smashed.

The air quieted, and the world grew still. The river flowed deep and dark and wide. The trees stood green and lovely. Bee still held me. We hadn’t moved. Nothing had changed around us.

Of the monstrous creature, there was no sign. The surface of the back channel was a sheet of glassy calm. Only a single patch of green remained, riming the steep bank, and as I watched, it scuttled along the shore like a little green crab trailing a black spume behind it and missing one claw.

“The cursed wolves!” I released Bee and spun.

The current streamed undisturbed except for a large leafless branch floating past. Four white birds perched with the most amazing insouciant balance on the uppermost swaying spur of wood. One dove into the water and came up with a gleaming fish in its cruelly hooked beak. The wolves had vanished.

Bee grabbed my arm. “What happened? What was that?”

I lowered my sword. “That was the tide of a dragon’s dream. That’s what Andevai told me. Any creature caught outside a warded place is washed away and never comes back. But that didn’t happen, did it? I guess he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does!”

“Do dreams have tides?”

“Dreams can change course suddenly. Once you’re dreaming, you are pulled along without knowing how far into the ocean of dreams you’ll go. That might be like being caught in a tide.”

“I thought walking the dreams of dragons meant sleeping, and waking up to sketch my dreams. I was thinking of it in a…metaphorical way, not an actual one. I don’t like it here. And I was never bleeding, so how can I have crossed?”

“Let’s get off this island. Then we can talk.”

We splashed across the muddy flats and climbed up a sleepy bank carpeted with a bank of intensely gold flowers like chiming bells. No, the flowers were actually chiming as the wind’s caress made them bob and tinkle.

“Those flowers are making noise,” Bee said in a small voice.

She struggled up to a patch of ordinary grass and sank down. I sat beside her. It was a beautiful day. The landscape with its splendid trees and golden bank of flowers looked perfect enough to be painted. A searingly blue butterfly fluttered past. My whole body felt as heavy as a sack of sand. I could not have moved if the great general Hanniba’al and a thundering herd of elephants had borne down on us at that moment, although even had they done, I fully expected some horror would materialize out of the soil to flay them to ribbons, crack their bones to pieces, and suck out their marrow.

“Blessed Tanit,” I said in a voice that did not sound like my own, “the spirit world was nothing like this the first time I walked here.” I thought of the wolves who had pursued me and the coach as I fled Four Moons House. “Well, I guess it was. We should have listened to Rory. This is not a safe place. Merciful Ba’al. Now he’ll wait at the Buffalo and Lion wondering what became of us! Do you know what he told me after you went off with the headmaster? He said that the headmaster is a serpent. A dragon. That illusion we saw looked exactly the way I imagine a dragon would look. But the headmaster is a man.”

“Cat,” whispered Bee.

“Did you hear the headmaster say those two strange things right before the militia arrived? He said, ‘That explains her.’ He meant me, like he was watching me all those years in the mirrors trying to figure out what I was. Then he said by all means to take you with me, but that was after I said I was going to the labyrinth. If he knew the labyrinth would lead me to the well, and the well was a crossing into the spirit world, that would mean he wanted you to cross into the spirit world. That he knew you could cross. But your blood didn’t open the Fiddler’s Stone, so how could-”

“Cat.” Bee’s fingers clamped so hard on mine they cut off my words. Her voice was a murmur. “Don’t move except to turn your head to your right.”

A thousand pins would not have made the skin along my neck and back prickle more violently. I slowly turned my head.

A woman sat cross-legged on the bank under the canopy of a massive yew tree whose wide crown and split trunk I had, strangely, not noticed until just now. She simply sat, saying nothing, looking over the river, her hands folded peacefully in her lap. She had the look of the locals who lived in the countryside northeast of Adurnam: tightly curled black hair with a reddish cast, dark brown skin, and brown eyes, features that spoke of Celtic forebears as well as West African ones. It was her ordinariness that made me uneasy. She was dressed in the commonplace, practical summer clothing of the villages: a skirt sewn from bright cloth printed with red and orange paisleys on a butter-yellow fabric and bulky from petticoats beneath, and a high-necked blouse with a kerchief tucked around the collar. The apron she wore over all looked recently laundered, not a stain or a crease. She held a strip of fabric of the same pattern as the skirt. Folding it, she deftly bound it over her hair to create three decorative peaks in the fabric.

Perhaps I sucked in air too hard.

She turned. Her eyes widened with the same surprise I had felt a moment before.

Hers was a face that arrested the gaze. It had a familiar look to it, especially about the eyes, which were deeply lashed and finely formed. I trusted that face at once, although I knew I ought to trust nothing here.

“Greetings and peace to you, Aunt,” I said, for there is never any harm in being polite. “Is all well with you?”

Bee’s hand tightened on mine.

The woman spoke in a voice I had heard before. “No trouble, through my power as a woman. And you, bride of my grandson? I did not expect to find you so quickly.”

Bee tugged on my hand. “Run.”

“Do I know you?” I asked, for I was dumbfounded, although not struck dumb.

“Before this, one time I and you have met. I am Vai’s grandmother.”

I don’t know how many times I blinked, or how wide my mouth gaped. Bee’s tugging on my arm grew quite insistent, until I realized she intended to rip off my arm if I did not do something.

“Are you a spirit sent to confuse and tempt me?” I asked, and added hastily, “No offense intended. It’s just a question.”

The woman held out a necklace. A locket shone as if sunlight burnished it, although the silvery sky revealed no sun.

“That’s my locket! With my father’s portrait.” I pulled my arm out of Bee’s grasp.

“Cat!” Bee lunged, pinning my hand to the ground. “Don’t you dare take it!”

The locket dangled like deadly fruit from the woman’s hand. “To walk with wisdom and caution in the spirit world is wise,” she said. “This amulet Vai tucked in my hand. He gave it to me after he made an offering to the ancestors. He asked me to look for you. He thought this locket might draw me and you together.”

“Who are you?” demanded Bee.

“Do not speak your true name aloud in the bush. The creatures who live here eat names as well as blood. You can call me Fati.”

I twisted out of Bee’s grip, snatched the locket, and opened it. The image of Daniel Hassi Barahal, with his black curls and ironic smile, stared at me. When I touched the locket to my lips, I knew this was my very own locket. I had been forced to trade it to two girls in Four Moons House in exchange for their getting me out through a locked door.

“How did Vai obtain this?” I asked as I slipped it over my head.

“He did not tell me. He asked me to find you and guide you, for I know a little of the bush. Already I find you on open ground where any spirit animal may eat you.” She lifted a scolding finger. “You must stay on the path. Or on warded ground.”

“We were in Adurnam an hour ago,” said Bee. “How can he have been at your village? How could he even know we fell into the well? Cat, you need to give that locket back.”

“He came down the well after us, trying to help us, Bee. I haven’t had time to tell you yet.” I surveyed the woman for signs of razor teeth or hidden tentacles. This was not the frail old grandmother whose bedside I had attended in the village of Haranwy on Hallows’ Night. Here, in the spirit world, she appeared as a younger woman in the prime of life, old enough to be the age of my mother, had my mother lived, but not so old that she had begun to bend beneath the burden of age. Vai had the same beautiful eyes. “He would have come after us into the spirit world, but because it wasn’t one of the cross-quarter days, he couldn’t cross. It’s so obvious!”

“What’s obvious?” demanded Bee.

“He went home to ask the hunters of his village to hunt for me in the spirit world.”

“His actions you understand perfectly,” said his grandmother.

“It’s what I would do, in his place,” I said.

“Very noble of you, I’m sure, Cat,” retorted Bee, “but it must be many days’ ride from Adurnam to his village, so he can’t have gotten there yet.”

“The days pass differently here. An hour here might be a week there. He would have plenty of time to go ask his kinsmen for help. I understand the locket is a talisman. But I don’t understand how you are come here, Grandmother.”

She said nothing. Heat settled over us in a sweltering mantle.

“You must be dead.” My words emerged stiffly.

Bee sat back with an exhalation.

Fati looked at me, still saying nothing.

“He must have found you when you were dying. Because the dead cross over into the spirit world, he asked you to seek me out once you got here. I never thought…” My fingers curled over the locket. “If you’re here, then my parents are here somewhere as well. I could find them.”

“Maestressa, please forgive our bad manners.” Bee shifted forward. “I hope you suffered no pain. I hope we find you at peace. I’m sorry.”

“For what are you sorry?” she said with a gentle smile. “The crossing awaits us all.”

Belatedly I lowered my gaze, as one did with elders. I absolutely believed she was who she claimed to be, although I could not explain why. “My apologies, Grandmother. You and the villagers helped me at great risk to yourselves. When I said I wasn’t sure I could trust you, when I was there in your house, I didn’t mean it to be rude.”

“Mmm. Yes. You were rude. But you were frightened, and you are young. We all make mistakes.”

“You are generous to forgive me.”

“Have I forgiven you? I choose to help Vai because he is a very good boy.”

“He wasn’t that good of a boy,” I muttered. “He was arrogant, contemptuous, and unkind.”

“Then he forgot the manners his mother and I taught him.” She bent a gaze on me that made me duck my head like a scolded child. “Do you appreciate what he has done? To come so far, against the will of the mansa, is no light choice for him.”

“I appreciate his efforts to make sure Four Moons House doesn’t recapture us. But I can’t believe the mansa would do anything to harm such a powerful young cold mage.”

“I do not believe you comprehend what he risks for you. You think you know what it means to be born into clientage, to be bound by law and custom to serve another, but you do not know.”

“We in the Kena’ani are raised to serve our households,” I retorted, not nearly as belligerently as I might have. “As I did, when my aunt and uncle gave me to Four Moons House against my will. They would have given me to whatever cold mage came to collect me. It happened to be him.”

“Do you suppose that was chance? Your destiny was chosen before you were born.”

“I don’t believe that!”

“I don’t either,” said Bee stoutly, and loyally. “Although I do have to wonder why I was cursed with this gift of dreaming.”

“You’re no help,” I muttered with a grimace at Bee.

Fati gave me a look that made me feel small and petty. “He placed three strands of his hair behind the portrait in the locket, to help you find him. A thread ties you together, because of the binding the djeli wove over you, which is a chain that reaches between worlds. Seek him in your heart, and you will know where he is. But if you have no heart to seek him, then he is the one who will search in vain.”

“Cat didn’t ask to be married to him,” said Bee. “I am sure you cherish your grandson. I’m sure he is loyal to his family. But it isn’t fair to scold her as if she had asked for a pretty bauble and then tossed it carelessly away because it didn’t match her gown. She was betrayed by my mother and father, by our entire clan. She shouldn’t be taken to task for something she never asked for.”

“It’s all right, Bee,” I said, for I couldn’t bear to see his grandmother’s expression harden into disapproval. “My apologies for my sharp tongue, Grandmother. I can’t truly understand what it means for your village to have endured clientage for so many generations. We studied law at the academy, but…well…it was words in a book. I admit I feel a more personal concern now.”

“You can be sure,” said Fati, “that Four Moons House has bound you tightly to him. And he belongs to them, just as my village does. When they wish to make use of you, they will do so.”

“Unless I free myself.”

“Do you think it is so easy to free yourself??”

I glanced at Bee, and held my tongue.

Fati raised her eyebrows as if she knew we had secrets we weren’t sharing. “Anyway, girls, enough talking. We must seek a path or a warded place.” She rose, brushed off her skirts, and walked away from the river.

Bee and I exchanged a glance.

“I like her!” whispered Bee.

“The hunters will cross at Imbolc,” Fati called over her shoulder. “My grandson plans to be with them.”

“How romantical!” said Bee as we hurried after her. “I wish some man would rescue me!”

“Isn’t that what Legate Amadou Barry was trying to do? During the riot? Rescue you?”

“He was trying to capture and cage me,” she snapped.

And wasn’t that what Andevai would end up doing, if he brought me back to Four Moons House? Uneasiness rose in my heart, like a chain being reeled in. The world seemed made of cages. Walking gave me something to do instead of think about chained marriages and forbidding mage Houses and a voice commanding me to come now. We strode through a grassy landscape, skirting thickets of flowering bushes. Tiny translucent unicorns flitted between the blooms, wings flashing like thinnest glass.

Bee ventured closer. “How pretty!”

They coalesced into a swarm and stung at her. Stumbling away, she batted at the cloud as a haze of scintillant wings engulfed her. I swept my sword back and forth through them until they scattered to settle on the bushes, snorting, with teeth bared.

“Ah!” she said, pressing a hand to her face. “They attacked me!”

Fati said, “Let me see your chin.”

After a pause, Bee lowered her hand. Several bumps swelled redly, but otherwise she appeared unharmed. “Nasty creatures!”

A few took to the air, and I brandished my sword, and they retreated.

“Stay beside me,” said Fati.

We walked on. In places, the ground bottomed into swales, thick with white-barked aspens, their round leaves flashing like mirrors. Butterflies and dragonflies winked where pools of water had given birth to thickets of reeds and flowering lilies. Overhead, a pair of crows paced us.

“Do all the dead bide in the spirit world?” I asked. “Could I really find my parents?”

Fati had a long stride. “See this grass around us? You might say it comes from a seed, but a seed alone is nothing. It needs water and soil, and it needs the desire to grow. Without these, no grass can become grass. No thing is only one thing unchanging. Right now I walk in the body in which I walked on the other side. This form remains mine only until the tide of the spirit world reaches me. Then I will change, as all things change. So I cannot know what form your parents have taken, or how they have changed.”

“Vai said that those who are caught in the tide of a dragon’s dream never come back.”

“How can you come back if you have not departed?” A smile softened her mouth. “Vai is a very clever and a very obedient and a very hard-working boy, but I am sorry to tell you, Cat, that he does not know everything he thinks he does.”

Bee laughed.

I said, “But if all the dead people come here after they die, then where are they all?”

“A fish sees the eagle only as a shadow within the water, but the eagle sees the fish for what it is.”

I scratched my bruised chin. “You’re saying we can’t look at things here in the spirit world and assume that what we think we see means what we think we see is what we think it is.”

“Cat, that made no sense at all,” said Bee.

“It made perfect sense! Think of the headmaster! We think we see a man, but maybe he’s the eagle and we’re the fish who only see the eagle’s shadow. Grandmother, do you know anything about dragons?”

“I know a story, a long story. I am no djelimuso to tell it with the proper introductory remarks and blessings. It is the story about how my ancestors the Koumbi Mande came north across the desert out of the Mali Empire to escape the salt plague. So it happens, after many trials, the remnant reached the city of Qart Hadast and did not know where to go next.”

Bee looked at me, and we didn’t mention that Qart Hadast was the city the Barahal family had originally come from, the city the Romans called Carthage.

“The mansa’s sister Kolonkan was a powerful sorceress. She stood on the shore of the sea with one foot on the sand and one in the water. She saw beneath the waves smoking mountains which the Romans call Vulcan’s Peaks. In the very fire of one of those peaks, a female dragon had coiled in its nest and laid its eggs, and now she slept. Into the creature’s dreams, Kolonkan walked. ‘Maa, please advise me,’ called Kolonkan. ‘Where shall my people go?’ The serpent answered, ‘One of the daughters you will bear will serve me, and your people will go north, to the ice.’”

“How can a dragon nest in a volcano?” Bee said. “Wouldn’t the molten fire destroy eggs?”

“My apologies, Grandmother,” I said hastily, poking Bee. “We are listening.”

“Mmm.” Fati was clearly a woman not accustomed to being interrupted. “The tale goes on. That is the only mention I know of a creature the Romans would call a dragon or serpent.”

We walked a while in silence. Grass swished along our legs. Insects buzzed sleepily without massing in a swarm to afflict us. The cursed crows floated above. A jumble of shapes like boulders came into view on the horizon.

“Grandmother,” I asked at length. “Do you know who my sire is?”

She looked me up and down. “Why would I know that?”

“You can’t tell somehow, because you’re an ancestor now?”

She chuckled. “I have no such power. I am newly born into this place. I know nothing more than what I knew before. I would tell you if I knew. A child ought to know its sire. For if you do not know what ropes hold you, then you might as well be a tethered goat. So it seems you and your cousin have undertaken a journey to discover the heart of your own selves.”

“I would like to know what it means to walk the dreams of dragons,” said Bee with a look a mule might give its handler. “Did this sorceress Kolonkan’s daughter walk the dreams of dragons? Is that what the story meant?”

“Mmm. This is knowledge that is not mine.”

“Not yours to share? Or you just don’t know?”

“Bee!” I said in an undertone, pinching her arm. “It’s rude to interrupt an elder.”

“I’m the one fated to be dismembered and my head thrown into a well! I assure you, Aunt, I do not mean to be rude.”

“Mmm, yes, you are drenched in nyama.”

“What is that? Energy? Heat? Light? Magic?”

“It is the foundation stone. It is a thread. It is that which can be shaped. A potter molds nyama like clay. A blacksmith forges nyama into steel. A hunter must know how to protect himself from the dangerous nyama released when he kills an animal, by adding it to his own. Cold mages manipulate nyama. How any of them do this I do not know, for I do not know their secrets.”

“Cat told me she once met a djeli who called nyama the handle of power. Is that like an axe handle? If you can grip it, then you can wield the axe’s blade?”

“I would not say so. But those who can shape nyama can shape and change the world.”

Bee nodded. “With the right connections to power and a strong will, you can shape and change the world! Like Camjiata did, and means to again.”

“Bee!” I whispered, “we’re supposed to listen to elders, not interrupt them!”

“How are we supposed to learn if we don’t ask questions?” cried Bee.

“We are here,” said Fati.

Slump-shouldered sandstone towers rose before us, marking the four corners of a walled town. The eroded walls looked much as a seashore castle built of sand looks after a wave runs over it: melting ruins soon to be obliterated. No dogs barked. No wagons rolled or voices called. Not even the wind moaned. If anything lived in the dusty, deserted ruins, I could not hear it.

A road as black and slick as obsidian speared away from the half-collapsed main gate. As straight as a Roman military road, it cut through uninhabited countryside toward distant hills. A shadow raced toward us from those hills.

“The tide comes,” said Fati. “Get up on the road, for it is warded ground. Hurry.”

I grabbed Bee’s hand and ran, even though I was suddenly sure that the instant I touched the pavement something terrible and irrevocable would happen. Yet I had to get there. Perhaps that desire was part of the compulsion that had driven me to the well.

“Aunt, hurry!” called Bee over her shoulder.

“Onto warded ground I cannot cross,” said Fati. “You must go forward alone. This is your journey. My path is different.”

The knife of darkness cut over us just as we stumbled up onto the road. Bee flung her arms around me. Fati stood in daylight, surrounded by grass. With me in shadow and her in the bright, I could see clearly how my husband resembled her in the planes of his face, the glow of his complexion, and the clarity of his eyes. A vibration rumbled like drums in the earth. A towering wall of fire washed toward us, scorching the grass to ashes. Fati smiled, lifting her hands in greeting.

“Blessed Tanit!” I breathed. “Grandmother!”

Flames obliterated the scene. The town walls rang like a struck bell as the ripple of fire boomed out around the stone.

The tide passed. Pale daylight, like dawn, rose on a world utterly changed.

Fati was gone.