Cold Fire

11

On either side of the road lay fields. Three-horned antelopes grazed on grass as green as emeralds. Fields tilled in spirals marked patterns on the ground that would, I felt sure, create beautiful images if seen from the sky. Thick-leaved vines of sweet potatoes flourished on a field of dirt mounds, the only crops I recognized. Elsewhere, huge stalks were crowned by flowers whose petals blazed with streamers like orange flame; that is, unless they were really burning. Others wept green tears. A vine strung along posts burst pods into a cloud of butterflies. Small winged creatures with faces like bats swooped down, snapping them up, until the air drifted with shimmering scraps.

Fati was gone. She might have been anywhere or anything. A stone about half the size of my fist lay on a patch of earth beside the road. I scrambled down.

“Don’t touch that!” said Bee.

But I did. The stone was waterworn to a smooth finish, deep brown in color, like sard. The veins in its surface flowed like speech against my skin. I felt I knew its voice. “Do you think the tide…turned her into this stone?”

“And you thought I was the credulous one?”

“Spirits change, just as the land does.” I touched my father’s locket, the familiar ache in my heart, the one that could never be filled. “So after all, maybe I can’t ever find my parents, not if they were caught in the tide.”

“Wouldn’t everything be caught in the tide? How could you escape it?”

“You escape it by sheltering on warded ground, like this road.” I closed my fingers over the stone and, ignoring her protest, tucked it into a pocket sewn on the inside hem of my jacket. “Although that doesn’t explain how we escaped being swept away at the river-”

“Cat.”

A sound like the rushing of river water swelled behind us. I turned. Out of the walled town, human-like creatures rose in a tide of dark wings.

Bee said, “Blessed Tanit protect us!”

A mob circled above us. Their vast wingspans half blotted out the sky. They swept down over us, claws gleaming.

“Down!” I snapped.

Bee dropped, and I straddled her back, feet braced on either side of her. My sword blazed with an icy light so bright it burned. I slashed and stabbed as they attacked. Where my blade nicked flesh, they shrieked, scattering in all directions.

“Cat, what are they?”

“Don’t move.” I shifted so my skirts belled over her. “They don’t like my sword.”

The mob resumed its circling above us. One landed out of reach of my blade.

Tall, broad-shouldered, and powerfully built, she looked much like a human. Her short black hair stuck up in spikes. Her narrow face was as translucently pale as watered-down milk, and she had the stark blue eyes we in the north called “the mark of the ice.” A line of purple-blue tattoos like falling feathers spun down the right side of her face and neck. She wore a sleeveless calf-length tunic covered with amulets sewn onto the fabric much as hunters fixed such talismans onto their clothing to protect them in the bush. Her wings certainly amazed me. But it was the third eye in the center of her forehead that riveted my attention.

“You are an eru,” I said, choosing offense over defense. “My greetings to you and your people. May we be at peace rather than at odds. I ask for guest rights, if such can be offered to peaceful strangers who have stumbled here by accident.”

She spoke in a voice like a bell. “You are well come here, Cousin. Our hearth is open to you. All we have is yours. All we are is at your service. But we have to kill the servant of the enemy. That is the law.”

“Cat,” Bee whispered from under my skirts, “I think they mean me .”

The eru cried out the same way the great bells of Adurnam cried out the alarm when the city was threatened. “It speaks! Beware!”

I shifted my sword’s angle; the eru took a step back. “She is not my enemy, and therefore she is not yours.”

More eru landed out of my reach, ranging in a circle around us. The tall ones had third eyes as bright as gems. The shorter bore marks on their foreheads like a mass of cloudy veins, and I had the oddest feeling they could see with those blinded, blinkered third eyes onto sights invisible to me. It was very disturbing. Worse, it seemed likely these eru could rip us to pieces in short order with their claws. And how could I predict what damage they could do with their magic, for weren’t eru fabled as the masters of storm and wind?

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll just go on our way.”

“She must be sacrificed,” said the eru who had spoken before. “As a courtesy to you, if it is your wish, we will kill her and eat her at the welcoming feast, all except her head. Her head we will cast in the well to give strength to our water. Out of respect for you, our guest, we will show her this honor.”

Bee’s choked exclamation hit me in a wave of fear. I swept my blade in a slow circle, to mark each eru, ten in all. “I will take as many of you with me as I can, before I let you touch her.”

A melody like words flowed around the circle, then ceased when the first eru raised an arm. “Do you serve her, who is a servant of the enemy?”

“Why do you believe her to be your enemy?”

“Did she not come to seek a serpent’s nest? Do you not feel the enemy turning and turning again? Doesn’t this rising tide aid their servant because it forces us, who would drive her away, to hide within our wards rather than pursue her?”

“I think you are a servant of the night court,” I said, remembering the eru who had pretended to be a footman in the service of Four Moons House and what she had told me when we had stopped at Brigands’ Beacon so Andevai could make an offering. “Because servants of the night court have to answer questions with questions.”

She nodded in the manner of an opponent acknowledging a hit. “I am she who speaks for this hearth when the night court commands.”

Black wings fluttered. Out of the sky dropped a crow. No ordinary crow could cause such a reaction among fearsome eru. They took flight in a cacophony of wings until only the speaker remained. With a self-satisfied air, the crow folded its wings and cocked its head to consider me. A smear of dried blood mottled the tip of its scabrous bill. I was sure the blood was mine.

I could not resist a jabbing feint at the crow, just to make it hop back. I had feelings, too, even if Bee sometimes called me heartless.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten you,” I said as I touched the clotted wound above my right eye.

With its third eye, the speaker looked at the crow, and then at me with all three eyes. For an instant, I thought I saw a reflection in her third eye: turning wheels flashing along a road.

“The master comes,” she said. “The enemy’s servant will not escape.”

Bee had shoved her head out from under my skirts. “Look!”

She scrambled up, pointing toward the hills. At first all I noticed was eru fanning out like herders. They were shepherding antelopes toward the town walls, or corralling them within sturdy copses of shimmering trees. Beyond, a blur of fog avalanched down the distant slopes. Claws sharpened in my chest as though a foul beast had burrowed inside me and latched on to my heart.

“I don’t know what else to do, Bee,” I said as the fog grew. “You have to run for it. Take my sword. If I offer it to you freely, you can take it.” I held it out.

Sparks leaped from the blade, and where they struck her hands and arms, a shower of spitting flames poured like a sheath over her limbs. She yelped and snatched back her hand.

“Cold steel burns the servants of the enemy, so she cannot wield it,” remarked the speaker with a cruel smile. But her smile vanished as she looked past me. She knelt.

How the vehicle had bridged the distance so quickly I did not know. An elegant black coach pulled by four white horses rolled to a stop beside us. The horses had a polished sheen, like pearl. The first pair stamped, hooves striking sparks from the obsidian pavement, while the second pair waited patiently in their traces.

The coachman was a burly man wearing a perfectly ordinary wool greatcoat. He wore his short blond hair in the lime-whitened spikes traditional to Celtic warriors in the ancient days when the Romans with their land empire and the Phoenicians with their sea trade fought to a standstill, and the barbaric Celts shifted allegiance depending on what benefited them the most. Seeing me, he did not smile, but the corners of his eyes crinkled as with an inward chuckle. He tapped two fingers to his forehead in greeting.

A figure swung down from the back. I recognized the tall, broad-shouldered eru with skin the color of tar, her third eye ablaze with a sapphire brilliance, her wings a swirl of smoke. Power roiled in her like a storm about to burst free. I stepped between her and Bee as if I could fend off the brunt of the blow. My blade shone like a torch, its hilt turned to ice against my palm.

“Let it be,” said the coachman to the eru. “We are here for Tara Bell’s child, not for the other one.”

She settled back, wingtips fluttering as if a wind spun off them. I swallowed; my ears popped; the wind died.

“Greetings, Cousin,” the eru said. “The master has sent us to fetch you.”

Such a wave of despair washed through me that my strength failed. I stared at the two creatures I had first met in the guise of a humble coachman and a humble footman. Bee grasped my hand. Hers was cold.

I spoke in pleading whine I did not like but could not help. “We just want to go home.”

The splendor of her third eye sparked rays of light along the surface of the black road. “The master has summoned you.”

“Help her return to the other side, and I’ll give you no trouble,” I said desperately.

The coachman’s lips curved in a wry, weary smile.

“You will give us no trouble regardless, Cousin,” said the eru, not in anger but in sorrow. “You are bound, as we are bound. Get in the coach. Both you and the serpent. We have a long way to travel. The master is not patient.”

“Indeed, he is not,” said the coachman with a glance skyward as the crow flew. “We outraced the storm of his anger. Now it is time for you to take shelter.”

Over the hills boiled a black wrath of clouds. In the cloud’s heart, lightning writhed like so many coiling incandescent snakes. Its power hummed in my bones and my blood like a fever. The crow sped toward the storm as if to welcome it.

A horn wept from the walls as the herding eru chased down the last of their charges, and the kneeling eru broke free and fled.

My knees were turning to jelly. “Blessed Tanit. If we run, that storm will destroy us. If we go with them, you’ll be killed.”

“One thing at a time,” said Bee with astonishing calm as her hand tightened on mine. “Right now, our best chance is the coach.”

The eru opened the door and swung down the steps with the ease of practice. I sheathed my sword, climbed in, and sank onto the forward seat, into the same place I had sat when I traveled in this coach with Andevai.

Bee sat down opposite, her knees shoved against mine. “Don’t give up hope, Cat.”

The door closed. With a crack of the whip and a shout of “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!” the coachman got the horses moving. We turned in a sweep, and the coach lurched as the eru jumped on behind. We picked up speed. No coach in the mortal world ever ran so smoothly and so fast.

A blast of wind shook the coach. The shaking and shuddering pitched us off our seats. The coach bounced up, thudded down, pitched halfway over, righted itself. Like a ship caught in a typhoon, it rolled and yawed. We clung to each other as the gale roared around us with a howl so loud I saw Bee’s lips moving but could not hear a single word, nothing except the frightful mocking caws of a murder of crows flocking around us as if their flight were the wind.

Unseen claws squeezed my heart. If I did not obey, the master would crush me.

Terror, like grief, can make you numb. But when the first edge passes, as the storm gusts on and the coach settles, it can also make you angry. For who wishes to be subject to terror?

We struggled up to sit. After the battering we had taken, I was grateful the cushions were so soft. We caught our breaths.

“That puts Papa’s temper tantrums into perspective, does it not?” said Bee with a gaunt smile.

I looked at the two doors, the one to my right which we sat up against, and the other door, closed and shuttered, by which Andevai had sat on the first journey we had made together. He had warned me never to open the other door, but when he had said that, he had meant the door to my right, the one we had just used to enter the coach.

I grinned. “This coach is a passageway between the worlds. One door leads into the spirit world. But that one leads back to our world. We’ll jump out and run for it.”

I scooted over to the other door. Sliding my sword half out of its sheath, I sliced a stinging, shallow cut in my right hand. I grasped the latch, smeared blood on it, and pushed down.

The latch bit me.

I yelped, jerking back my arm. Three tiny puncture wounds in the back of my hand prickled red with my blood. The latch glowered, having acquired a dour, brassy gremlin face as wide as my hand and as thin as a finger. Incisors sparked as if tipped with diamond. A thread of a tongue licked along the brass, and my blood vanished.

Bee slid her knife from the knit bag and, with all her considerable strength, chopped where the latch was attached to the door. The blade thunked, and bounced off. The force of the blow redounded back up her arm. She cried out, dropping the knife as she doubled over.

“We’ll see about that!” I cried, fully drawing my sword.

The nasty little gremlin latch-face winced.

The coach slammed to a stop so abruptly I was thrown back against the seat and Bee thrown forward, narrowly missing my unsheathed blade and banging her knees. The coach rocked violently. The door to the spirit world was flung open to reveal the coachman.

“Out,” he said.

It wasn’t that he looked angry. He didn’t look angry. It was just that I was suddenly sure he could yank both my arms out of their sockets if I did not obey. Not that he would want to, or would enjoy the act, but that he could.

Bee’s face was a grimace of pain as she tried to uncurl her fingers. “My hand! My arm!”

“Out.”

We got out. I sheathed my sword as we huddled together at the side of the road. Bee had left the knife behind in the coach but made no attempt to dart back inside to grab it. She could not open or close her left hand. The knit bag sagged at her hip. He got in, and we heard him talking and a soft buzzing voice in reply, but no words I knew, nothing I could understand.

The eru strolled over. Her two ordinary eyes gazed at me; her third eye narrowed, as at a nastily ugly sight, on Bee.

“I’m not sorry we’re trying to save my cousin’s life,” I said.

“He is slow to anger,” she said in a reflective tone. “But one thing will do it: assaulting his coach or his horses.”

“I thought the coach and horses must belong to the master,” I said.

“No more than he does. No less than he does. No more than my wings belong to the master, and no less than they belong to me.”

He hopped out and regarded us for such a long time with such a steady stare whose emotions I could not possibly guess at-not anger, not sympathy, not rage, not pity-that Bee began to snivel, as if she had at last reached the end of her rope.

He said, “The door into the mortal world is locked.”

“What do you expect from us?” I burst out. “You can’t expect us to lie down and give up.”

He said, “Go sit on warded ground. I’ll make tea.”

He indicated a fire pit ringed by a low inner wall of bricks and an outer circle of marble benches. A fire burned. A lofty tree with red bark and white flowers shaded one side of the pit; there was also a granite pillar and a stone bowl from whose center burbled clear water. Bee and I sat side by side on a bench as the coachman brought over a kettle, filled it at the bowl, and set it across an iron grating over the flames. He carried two full buckets to water his horses. The eru flew ahead, scouting. Passed through the storm, we had reached the hills.

“It’s a triangle,” said Bee.

“What is?” I asked, watching the ease with which the eru flew, her smoky wings skimming the air. I had first seen her in the guise of a male human footman, booted and coated for winter, and it was not so easy to shake that image from my mind to see her as female.

“The tree, the spring, and the pillar form an equilateral triangle,” said Bee. “I wonder if the form creates the ward.”

“I think there has to be a tree, a stone, and water,” I said, remembering the djelimuso Lucia Kante’s fire. I had sheltered there, argued with Andevai, and met Rory. I had told her stories from my father’s journals, the price I had to pay so she would tell me how to leave the spirit world.

Bee massaged her left hand with her right. “Did you see that sneering face on the latch?”

“The one that bit me? Of course I did!”

Around us lay open forest, trees spaced apart and grass and bushes grown thickly in the gaps. Four big animals trotted into view and settled onto their haunches to leer at us. They looked something like what a dog and a cat and a pig would look like if smashed together, with coarse short hair and hind legs shorter than their forelegs. They had the teeth of carnivores and the gazes worn by the coldhearted who have nothing better to do than plot the ruin of all they see. When the coachman looked at them, they ambled out of sight, but I had a feeling they were hiding in a tangle of undergrowth, waiting hungrily.

Bee pulled her sketchbook out of her bag and paged through it.

I identified the faces of young men, studies from life, some shaded to fine detail and others a few deft lines that caught an essence. “Maester Lewis. That good-looking Keita lad whose family left for New Jenne. Here’s that laughing bootblack Uncle Jonatan scolded you for flirting with.”

She turned another page without replying.

I went on, unable to bear her silence. “Now we’re at summer solstice, when the Barry family arrived at the academy. My! Isn’t Legate Amadou Barry pretty? To think all those months we thought him a student at the academy, when instead he was a Roman spy. Do you suppose he was spying only on us? Or are there other pupils from disreputable families worth investigating?”

“I’m not the only one who has endured an unpleasant romantic interlude, Cat. I won’t hesitate to remind you of yours if you don’t stop teasing me about mine.”

The unyielding rigidity of her tone convinced me to change the subject. “Here’s Cold Fort. With Amadou Barry standing at the gates-?not that I mean anything by mentioning him! Is this from the dream that made you ask him to look for me there?”

“Yes. Last summer I began to realize that sometimes I would dream an ordinary event, like people meeting at a shop or a fruit seller’s wagon overturned at an intersection. Later I would encounter the very thing. Or hear it had happened, like when Banker Pisilco was rude to a troll at the Merchant’s Exchange and the troll had to be restrained from killing him by its companions.”

“I can see that might be disturbing,” I said cautiously. “I wish you had told me.”

She wasn’t really listening. “I don’t think walking the dreams of dragons is divination, seeing into the future.”

“That’s what the mansa thinks it is,” I said.

“I think it’s a way to find things. So the question is, what I am trying to find?” Her expression reminded me of the brooding of clouds before a storm. “Did it ever occur to you, Cat, to wonder why we act the way we do?”

“I often wonder why you act the way you do!”

She rolled her eyes, and I was cheered by her brief smile. “You know what I mean. Why should I obey the strictures we’ve always been told must fence in our lives? We must learn the skills appropriate to Hassi Barahal women. We must marry to oblige the family. We must serve the house by bearing children and by carrying out all orders given by the elders. Travel to a new city and spy on a princely household? Very well. Take a position as a governess or factotum and serve the clan that way? Shiffa and Evved are as deep in the family business as my parents are. My parents threw you away to save me because they were told to do so.”

I swallowed a lump in my throat. Bad enough that Uncle Jonatan had betrayed me by handing me over to Four Moons House, but for my beloved Aunt Tilly to have gone along with it was a knife in my heart I could never shake loose.

“I can’t expect to be like my mother,” she went on. “She married where the family told her to marry, to a man she does not love and never expected to love. She has never complained, although she does not always approve of what Papa does and says. For the sake of the clan she gave birth to three daughters-”

“She loves you!”

“Yes, she loves me, and Hanan, and Astraea. And despite everything, she loves you, Cat. That’s why it’s so unpardonable that she betrayed you. But she serves as she was brought up to serve. I can’t. The dreams that bind my life have changed everything for me.”

I took her hand in mine. I had nothing to say. There was nothing to say.

“So I ask again. Why should I feel bound to strictures that won’t protect me from being torn to pieces by the Wild Hunt and having my head thrown in a well?”

“Bee, that’s such a horrible thought. Why are you blushing like that?”

The rosy glamour creeping into her cheeks brightened. “In ancient days, Kena’ani girls like us could offer their first night to the goddess, at Her temple.”

“Which, if you recall, is why the Romans called us whores.”

“I don’t care what lies the cursed Romans told! The point is, those girls could give their first night to whomever they wanted. So why shouldn’t I take Amadou Barry as a lover?”

“Bee!”

She skewered me with her gaze. “I might be dead tomorrow!” Her fingers brushed across an infatuated portrait of Amadou Barry: the tight curls of his cropped hair, his pretty eyes, the single gold earring, the gracious smile on his lips. “Don’t you wonder, Cat? I saw you kiss him.”

“I did not kiss Amadou Barry! He’s very pretty, but not what I look for in a man. And after the way he spoke to you, I’m surprised you still think of him-”

“You know who I mean! I saw you kiss the cold mage!”

I hated blushing. “Of course I wonder! But if I were to…bed Andevai, then I’d belong to Four Moons House. I’d be trapped.”

“He seems very loyal to you. Likely to treat you kindly. You would live well.”

“In a gilded cage? Can you even imagine Rory at Four Moons House? Oh, Bee, I had so hoped we would find shelter with the radicals. I was shocked to my heart when Camjiata showed up and said those troubling things. Honestly, Bee, didn’t you find it creepy that his wife had seen you and me in her dreams?”

“Once I would have.” She closed the sketchbook. “Not now. If we can escape from these two, maybe we can track down your sire and he can help us get out of the spirit world.”

“Coming to the spirit world was the worst idea I ever had and I’m grateful to you for not reminding me of how stupid it was! Haven’t you asked yourself yet, who spoke through Bran Cof??’s mouth? Someone who could put me under a compulsion? Someone Bran Cof called ‘ my tormenter ’?”

“Bran Cof is obviously not the best judge of character. He compared me to an axe.”

“So did Camjiata’s wife.” I drew the sketchbook off her lap and opened it to a picturesque drawing of a summer carpentry yard where half-dressed and well-built men worked. “You were magnificent, Bee.”

“I was, wasn’t I? I couldn’t believe he fell for the old ‘I don’t think he knows’ trick.”

I laughed, too. “He was an awful old lecher. I wish we knew what the headmaster wants, and who he is! At least I can imagine Rory will survive a while in Adurnam without us. No doubt he already has women arguing over who gets to feed and pet him.”

She chuckled, then snatched the sketchbook off my lap and stuffed it into the bag. “Oh, la! How thirsty I am!”

The coachman approached, carrying four mugs, a tin basket, and a small white ceramic pot in the shape of a boar with a pair of tusks for spouts. He busied himself measuring tea leaves out of the tin basket and into the pot.

“I suppose it’s difficult to run away from things that fly,” Bee said, looking for the eru.

“I suppose it is,” he agreed as he poured water from the kettle into the pot to steep. “Not to mention the four hyenas awaiting you in the bush, if you proved so unwise as to leave warded ground and strike out on your own.”

Bee said, with cool politeness, “Is hyenas what you call them?”

“There are other names. Like most creatures, they don’t always wear the same clothing, but their souls don’t change.”

“Have they been following us?” I asked. “We saw four wolves. Then four kingfishers.”

He set down the kettle on stone and covered the pot. “It is certainly possible they are the same souls in different clothing, hunting you.”

“Why do the creatures here attack my cousin?” I asked.

His blue eyes had the remote intensity of the winter sky, but his gaze did not seem unfriendly. “She is the servant of the enemy.”

“That’s no answer,” retorted Bee. “It doesn’t really explain anything.”

The lines at his eyes crinkled, although his lips did not smile. “It is an answer, but not the one you wish you had. What you do not understand is that I cannot speak as I might wish to speak, because I belong to the one who breathed life into me.”

“You belong to the gods?” Bee asked.

“I belong to the one who owns my breath.”

I nudged Bee. “The headmaster’s assistant said that, about goblins losing their breath.”

“You’ve seen a goblin!” The coachman’s lips parted in almost comical astonishment.

Bee looked at him, then at me, a question in the lift of her brows.

“What do you know about goblins?” I asked.

“The goblins are my makers. But it is my master who owns my breath.”

“Your makers!” Yet when I thought about the clockwork troll, and the lifelike statues waiting in ranks underground, I wondered if he might be not flesh and blood, even though he looked exactly like a man, but something far stranger.

“Cat, close your mouth.” Bee twisted the strap of the knit bag through her fingers as she addressed him. “The creatures here don’t like dragons because the tides of dragon dreams keep changing this world. They can smell dragons on me because I walk the dreams of dragons in the mortal world. That’s why they call me the servant of the enemy. But I’m not.”

“You cannot escape what you are,” he said.

“What are you?” Bee demanded.

“I am a coachman.”

“You work as a coachman. Surely that is not all you are,” she insisted.

“You may think this part of my body”-he touched his chest-“is the only part, because you are confined in a single body. But this is only one part of me. The horses and the coach are the rest of me. So when you take a knife or a sword to my person, naturally I will defend myself.”

As with one thought, Bee and I looked toward the coach and four horses steaming on the road, and then at each other with raised eyebrows, and then back at him.

“Tea?” He poured out four cups. One he took over to the pillar, where he emptied its steeped contents at the base. Returning to the fire, he handed a mug to Bee and one to me.

Bee found her voice. “Food and drink in the spirit world may pose a risk for us.”

He took the fourth. “This tea will offer no harm to either of you, and may do you some good.”

I cupped hands around the mug’s warmth. “You saved my life once. Can you promise me you will save my cousin’s life, if it comes to that?”

“It is not my intention to see her come to harm. But I cannot promise what I cannot be sure I can deliver. I will do what I can. That is what I promise.”

“Why would you alone of the creatures of the spirit world not wish me to come to harm?” asked Bee in a low voice.

“I was not created in the spirit world.” He sipped from his mug as he glanced toward the road. What hands had built that road? “But you may call it kindness, if you wish.”

I crossed to the pillar, spilled a few drops as an offering, and drank the rest. The brew tasted of drowsy summer afternoons adrift in a field of flowers. How tired I was! I lay down on the bench, and as soon as I pillowed my head on my hands, my eyes closed. Bee sighed, trying to say my name.

The world faded as the drugged tea took hold. We had been betrayed.