Cold Fire

12

How had I come to find myself standing beside Andevai, on a ship in the middle of the ocean? He was leaning on a railing, looking queasy, his mouth drawn tight. A female hand as black as his own wiped his sweating forehead with a stained kerchief. It had to be a dream, because he was wearing homespun laborer’s trews and an ill-cut wool tunic badly dyed in a squamous nettle green, nothing like the flashy, expensive, fashionable clothes he spent so much effort on wearing decoratively, as Lord Marius had said. How fortunate Bee had not been there to hear Lord Marius’s comment, for certainly no mention of Andevai would then have passed without a reference to decoration. Where had she been that she had not heard? Where was she now?

“Bee?” It was my own voice mumbling. I opened my eyes.

For an instant, utterly disoriented, I thought myself back in the bedchamber Bee and I had shared in the house on Falle Square. If the bed were as cold as stone and twice as hard.

No, I no longer had a home. No place was safe.

Bee slumbered on the next bench, the rise and fall of her chest as steady as a clock’s pendulum. Above, the sky remained a leaden blue-gray color. It might have been an hour or a day we had slept there, and by the creased state of my skirts and the rumpled mess of Bee’s hair, I would have called it closer to a day than an hour.

We hadn’t been drugged; we had just been exhausted. I felt rested, and absolutely gut-gnawingly starving. I heard murmuring over by the stone bowl, so I let my hearing take wing.

“I think we should help them,” the coachman was saying in a low voice. “The master expects us to bring the little cat. I see no reason we should bring him the other one, too.”

The eru hissed, as at hearing an ill-mannered insult. “The other girl belongs to the enemy.”

“Maybe she has no more choice than we have, beloved. Even so, are we simply to hand her over when we weren’t specifically commanded to? He will plant her in his garden.”

“So he should! You can stand there and know you will not be changed when the tide washes through. She’s no threat to you.”

“That’s not fair! I may not be changed, but my master owns my breath. My master can unmake me with a word.”

“True enough. I spoke in anger, and I apologize. I cannot be unmade. You cannot be changed. But the master will smell her out sooner or later. He will be angry if he knows she was here and escaped. Even if I agreed, how could it be done so we aren’t punished?”

“Isn’t servitude a form of punishment? Why should we do one more thing for the masters except what is required and commanded?” Passion trembled in the coachman’s voice. “Listen. Water is the gate for her kind. We can say she swam away. The little cat will keep silence. She will not fear the master’s anger.”

Water is the gate! Was that how Bee had crossed? The crawling play of the flames coalesced into sinuous bodies twisting and slithering until I was sure I saw fiery salamanders alive within the flames, whispering Fear the master. Was the fire taunting me, or warning me?

“Of course she will fear him,” hissed the eru. “I fear him and even you fear him. It is impossible not to fear him. The little cat is vulnerable. He will exploit that. How can we trust her to play her part in such a scheme?”

“To give trust is to gain trust. To withhold it until there is no doubt, is not trust. She will defy him, even if she fears him. She’ll do it for the sake of the other one.”

“Maybe it is possible,” said the eru, in a tone of great reluctance. “We could travel by the road that leads past the river. We need do nothing, as long as the girls act.”

“I knew you would say so, beloved. I knew you would risk it, if only to defy him.”

One cannot really hear a kiss, but a texture in the air can change, like the charge of a lightning strike. Could the creatures of the spirit world love? Could a personage who had just told us he was part coach-and-four feel desire and affection? I shivered from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, remembering the kiss I had shared with Andevai. I had disliked and even feared him at first, but as I had slowly come to see a different side of him, I’d become curious and perhaps confused, not sure of my feelings for a man who was so handsome and so obviously interested in me.

A flap and flutter of wings disturbed the silence. A black crow settled on top of the pillar. I made a business of waking, and touched Bee’s head.

She stirred, yawned copiously, and sat bolt upright. “Cat! The villains! They drugged us!”

I indicated the crow with a lift of my eyes. “Of course they drugged us. They fear you will escape, so they hope to keep us docile. But we’re awake now. We must plot our next plan of action.” Keeping my face concealed from the crow, I waggled my eyebrows.

Without moving her head, she slanted a glance toward the crow. Then she exaggeratedly glanced toward the coachman and eru and spoke in a loud staged whisper. “I would never have drunk that poisoned brew had I known! And yet, what can we poor young females do?”

“Here comes the villain!” I declaimed.

The coachman approached carrying a leather bag. By no sign or blush or hint of perturbation in his face could I detect that he suspected I had overheard his conversation. He pulled out a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese.

“How can we know these morsels are not drugged, like that tea you forced us to drink earlier?” I asked haughtily.

He regarded me for one long breath. “From the mortal world. Thereby safe to eat.”

Holding the blade, he offered Bee her knife, hilt first.

A tremor ran through her, and she thanked him prettily before politely taking it.

“There is enough to share,” she said, holding his gaze.

He gave her look for look, and for a marvel, she was the first to look away.

“We are already fed,” he said.

“Can we not eat the food grown in the spirit world?” I asked.

“I would be wary of such delicacies, were I born from the womb of a human mother.”

I wanted to ask how he had been made, but the question seemed rude, and the crow watched. Bee sliced, and we ate as daintily as we could manage being so hungry we might have preferred to bolt our meal as dogs gulp meat.

“We have still a distance to travel, and a stop to make at the river for you to wash so you can be made presentable for the master.” When the coachman looked at me, I knew he knew I had overheard their conversation.

“I am sure it would be polite for us to wash before meeting the master,” I agreed.

He rinsed out the mugs as we brushed crumbs off our skirts. The coach awaited us. We settled inside, keeping open the shutter that looked onto the spirit world. The eru swung up on the back. As the coach rolled forward, the crow took wing.

In time, we came to a crossroads. We took the left-hand path, striking out along a ridgeline track from whose height we could see across vales and rises. I leaned out to let the wind blow into my face. I smelled a peppery spice so hot its aroma made my eyes water. I heard plucked strings in a waterfall of notes. I tasted the tears of the dead whose salt was the memory of voices I had not heard for years: My mother and father, conversing in low, loving voices as my child self drifted off to sleep, safe in their arms.

“Cat!” Bee was shaking me. “Wake up! We’ve come to the river.”

I had fallen asleep. My head was swollen with uneasy dreams, but when I patted my hair, everything seemed in order. I hadn’t sprouted cat’s ears or an eru’s wings. I looked out the window and saw a field of black rocks. Beyond the field flowed a wide river as pale as molten pewter. Light glinted over the water and thrust through my eyes to open a shaft of memory: I am six, and I am drowning alongside my parents. Water pours into my mouth.

“Look!” Bee’s shriek jolted me free.

She pressed open her sketchbook. At the bottom of the page, I saw myself wearing a very irritated expression no doubt because the clothes I wore in the sketch looked like a printed curtain wrapped around my waist topped by an immodestly low-cut blouse of a fabric so gauzy it was almost translucent. Blessed Tanit! As if I would ever dress so indecently! Above, Bee had drawn a field of black rocks. One rock, split in half as if by a bolt of lightning, was circled and had an arrow pointing at it. A river lay behind it and, on the far shore, five mighty ash trees.

I looked out the window. Five mighty ash trees rose on the other side of the river.

“Stop!” She hammered on the roof of the coach.

She shoved the sketchbook into the bag as the coach slowed. Before we came to a stop, she flung open the door and leaped out. Knit bag flapping behind her, she dashed into the rocks like a dog let loose in a trash pit.

The coach lurched to a stop. I jumped out and with sheathed sword in hand ran after her. The rocks were like the oozing remains of a porridge that has congealed into a crusty, jagged blanket. I slipped, caught myself on the nearest rock, and scraped my palm.

Glancing back, I saw the coachman holding the arm of the eru as if restraining her; her wings were half open. Crows cawed. I heard a buzzing noise, like the whirr of a factory floor. A loud splash disturbed the river. Could Bee really escape the spirit world through water?

Bee walked in widening circles, picking her way along the rocks with the knife in her hand. Her body stiffened as she saw something. She dropped to her knees and hacked at the ground.

“Cat, help me!” Dirt spat up.

I hurried over. “What are you doing? Go to the river!”

Ignoring me, she knelt in the cleft of a rock that was split in half. The hollow between the split halves was as wide as my out-stretched arms; rotted debris matted the ground like felted cloth.

“Help me!” She chopped and dug without cease.

The ground heaved. Fissures splintered the earth like veins swelling and bursting. I grabbed her arm to drag her away, but she shoved the knife at me and began digging with her hands.

“Something terrible is going happen if I don’t uncover them,” she cried.

Her fingers scraped dirt off a roundish thing that had a coppery shine. Fractured streaks of light chased patterns along its sheeny surface. Beneath the dirt she uncovered ten; no, twenty; no, fifty. Packed tight and deep, the fist-sized smooth objects filled the hollow.

They were eggs.

With a faint pop, one of the coppery eggs cracked. A sliver like a shard of broken glass thrust through the gap. Away in the distance rose the howl of an enraged beast. Gingerly, I poked at the egg with the knife and peeled back an inner shell wreathed with tendrils of translucent goo. A pasty mass pulsed vilely inside, a slimy grub the color of mottled vomit and metallic yolk.

I dropped the knife and raised my hand to smash it.

“We’ve got to help them get to the river!” Bee grabbed the knife and kept digging.

Horrified by my urge to kill something so small and helpless, I scrambled back to perch on the rock. The grub slithered out of the egg. No bigger than my hand, it had four limbs, a tail, a long beast-like torso, and a deformed back all crinkly like mashed-up paper. It had a snout for a face, with pasty-white strings striping its muzzle and head.

It was foul, and I hated it.

It opened its eyes to reveal molten fire, a blaze of blue-white heat. With a shudder, its outer skin hardened and sloughed off as I might shed a coat on going indoors. Beneath shimmered scaly skin as darkly red as the dregs of smoldering coals.

I could not look away from its eyes. That brilliant, fathomless gaze devoured me.

I had seen a gaze like this before: an old man sitting in a library with no fire and three dogs sprawled close, basking in the heat he radiated. He had kissed Bee on the forehead and on the lips.

I had seen jewel eyes like this in the headmaster’s emerald gaze before the spark was subsumed by ordinary brown.

A shadow fell over us in a flutter of black wings. A crow snatched up the tiny creature and gulped it down in one bite.

Bee screamed with pure rage, but she did not stop digging. Around her, more eggs cracked. A crow landed beside me, intent on the nearest egg. On the rock opposite, a bold creature with the look of a plump rodent poised; it had a meek, chubby face, but a frightening mad gleam in its little black eyes as it fixed on a hatchling squirming up out of the hollow. It lunged and caught the thing, which spat and hissed in vain as the rodent ripped off its head.

I jabbed at the crow, which hopped back. Bee dug. The grubs emerged, shed, and crawled. Their sluggish swarm crept toward the river. Predators descended: more crows; a cruel-billed eagle; stinging flies like a cloud of misery that covered the hatchlings with vibrating wings.

The hatchlings had no voices. They just died.

But the wind had a voice, a rising chatter and roar. Shadows boiled on the horizon. My heart froze in my chest. The creatures of the spirit world were racing or shambling or flying toward us in their tens and hundreds: proud eru, gracile antelopes, sleek wolves, clumsy six-legged oxen.

“Bee.” I crunched over broken copper shells. “You’ve got to get to the river.”

“I have to save them.” Her hands were smeared with the grease and mucus of their rising, and still they writhed upward, on her, across her, for she was oblivious to their blood and slime. “I can’t leave until they’re all dug out.”

“We have to go. Pick up what you can carry in your skirts. I’ll cover your back.”

She gathered up her outer skirt and scooped up what hatchlings she could into the cloth. Then she ran, light on her feet despite the rugged terrain. I cut at crows diving at her head. I swiped my blade through a cloud of glittering-winged creatures that had tiny fox faces and grotesque, elongated limbs like grasshoppers. I stabbed a rat, and shook it free just in time to spear a ghastly huge moth trying to fly away with a hatchling.

A chuckling rolling laugh surprised me. To my right, the four hyenas loped closer. I thrust at the closest, my blade catching in the loose skin of its neck. It swung its head back and forth, almost jerking me off my feet, but I wrenched my blade free and raced after Bee. I stepped on a hatchling, crushing it, but there were a dozen crawling beside it. Birds dropped, snagging up the morsels. Some ate them; others flew higher and dropped the grubs to smash on the rocks.

I grabbed up one of the little pathetic creatures, but it bit me with nasty stinging teeth, and I yelped and let go.

“Cat!” Bee splashed into the shallows and opened her skirt.

Hatchlings spilled, flashing and undulating as they began to swim.

Fish with bulbous eyes and teeth like thorns rose out of the water to feed. Pikes and golden-red salmon breached the surface. The water churned with their thrashing. Blood ran in threads. Hatchlings she had not helped reached the shore, nosing into the water.

I stood with one foot on the bank and one in the water, my blade unsheathed. But with so many hatchlings to feast on, even the hyenas had forgotten us, all except the one I had cut. It looked straight at me with black, intelligent eyes, and gave that unsettling laugh.

“Bee, you have to swim.”

She did not answer.

“Bee!”

I spun around. She was gone.

A hatchling crawled over my boot and into the water. A fish rose up with mouth gaping. I stabbed the cursed fish and flung it high. Its body spun off my blade and hit the water. Following its arc with my gaze, I saw Bee.

She was under the river, walking through a coruscating whirlpool that had created a tunnel of water leading to a bright net flung deep within the current. Hatchlings swam on all sides of her; many had latched on to her clothes. She should have been drowning yet she walked as if through air. So fixated was she on herding the hatchlings forward that she didn’t even look back for me.

The last little hatchling launched after her, diving fearlessly into the water.

I slashed my blade through the water to keep biting fish away from the last one. I waded in past my hips, past my chest, my skirts sodden and dragging, calling Bee’s name, but she could not hear me. Water slopped into my mouth. The current dragged at me, pulling me down. The river wanted to drown me. Panicking, I struggled back toward shore, gasping with fear and swallowing more water.

White light splintered the horizon. The frenzy of feasting ceased abruptly. A distant vibration, as of a village bell heard across miles of empty countryside, sounded like the toll of death. The feeding eru in the field rose in a battering of wings and headed for the road. Earthbound animals scrambled after.

“Little cat! Hurry! The tide comes!” The coachman called from the road.

I leaped from rock to rock past the smashed remains of hatchlings and one little grub still working its way toward the river. The coachman stretched out a hand and hauled me up onto the road just as the knife edge of the dream cut over us. I covered my face with my hands, coughing and choking on the memory of the river’s water filling my mouth. I hadn’t been able to follow her.

As the bell’s long reverberation faded, a rush of sound filled its silence. I looked up to see hundreds of eru rising off the road and flying away. Closer, my eru waited beside the coach-and-four. Blood smeared her mouth. I winced away, and my gaze swept the landscape.

Only there was no land. We stood on a causeway, surrounded by a wild gray sea. Waves broke over shallows in foaming white caps. Spray stung my face. I saw not one sign of life, nothing except a single black crow fighting the wind, the eru watching me as she wiped blood from her lips, and the coachman checking the traces on the horses.

My voice trembled. “When the tide came, Bee wasn’t on warded ground. She’ll be changed.”

“Little cat, she who walks the dreams of dragons cannot be altered by their tides,” said the eru.

I thought of how I had clung to Bee when the tide had swept over us at the first river. Other creatures had changed, but she and I had remained as we were.

“You see why we who live in this world hate such as she,” added the eru.

A wave spilled over the causeway. I pressed against the coach, clinging to the open door. “So she’s crossed back to the mortal world?” I said desperately. “I couldn’t follow.”

“You are not as she,” said the eru. “What binds her does not bind you.”

“What binds me?” I whispered.

The eru laughed in a way that made me cringe.

The coachman nodded toward the door. “The master is waiting.”

Bee had escaped. Surely that was all that mattered, the best outcome I could have hoped for. Weary to my bones, my face moist with sea spume and my body battered by a tearing wind rising off the wide, dark sea, I climbed into the coach and sank onto the cushions.

“What were those grubs she dug up?” I asked, looking out at him.

Without answering, he shut the door, although he left the shutter open. Outside, four gray birds with long beaks swept into view, battling the wind. One dove and snatched a fish out of the water. They flapped to rest on the rocky revetment that shored up the causeway and began pecking life and entrails out of the fish. I looked away, down at the brass latch. Glimmering eyes watched me.

The coach rocked as the coachman climbed up into the box. As we began to move, the latch spoke in a hissing gremlin voice, its elongated mouth drawn tight in a mocking grin.

“Dragons. Silly girl. Those that survive will become dragons. Some will breed, and some will nest, and sleep, and dream, and then the tide of their dreams will wash through this country. It can never end until they are all dead. The master is waiting. He is very angry.”

We rolled on as night poured over the sea and blinded me.