Cold Fire

35

The last day of October dawned with rain and blood.

On the previous night, I had crept to the assembly house to eat my nightly bowl of porridge only to find the village gathered to discuss the weather. A red dawn and the afternoon’s steadily rising swells foretold the coming of the Angry Queen. I slept in the rafters of a roofless, abandoned shed, and woke at daybreak soaking wet from a squall of rain and bleeding with my monthly courses. I endured the rain but was glad of the blood.

As the winds began to batter, folk hurried to lash down everything they could before they headed to the ridge for safety. The storm was coming in faster than they had anticipated. Already water flooded up the shoreline far past the high-water mark. The wind had risen to such a pitch that it rumbled. Branches whipped, tearing free. A roof??’s thatch scattered in a bluster of debris. The sea was streaked with foam as the wind sheared the tops off the pounding waves.

The Herald of wind and thunder strode past high in the sky, his black hair a sheet of darkness. The Flood with his blue-green arms washed around the curve of the promontory, spray spitting so high I thought it would speckle the feet of his heavenly brother. I wanted to be like them. I let go of the shadows and stood with my face into the wind and my braid flying out behind me, sure the gale was about to lift me off my feet. And then I would walk the storm.

Only, of course, I was my mother’s daughter, composed of mortal flesh, so the wind shoved me stumbling back. I slammed into a tree trunk. A wind-shorn coconut smacked into the ground beside me, barely missing my head.

A strong hand fastened harshly on my arm. “A remarkably pretty opia be haunting us,” said the shaven-headed man. Once I might have been frightened by his lustful sneer and his machete.

I met his gaze. “The storm is coming for me. Do you want to be here when it arrives?”

He did not.

So I braved the day alone. I sheltered in the lee of the outer walls of the ball court. Rain tore in sheets driven horizontally by the gale. I could barely see the shoreline. A huge wave crashed across the lowest rank of houses, ripping them off their moorings in a splintering crashing roar. Yet the tremendous and unstoppable power of wind and rain and water transported me into a state of almost unendurable rapture. I was so alive.

Dusk settled as the darkness of Hallows’ Night swept over the waters.

My ears popped. The wind ceased between one breath and the next.

A rip like a lance of light sliced through the massed clouds. Her eye opened, vast and terrible, and the spirit who was the hurricane saw me, an insignificant pest far below.

She blinked.

A shining coach pulled by four pearlescently white horses swept out of the embrace of the towering storm wall and coasted over the gleaming foam. The vehicle rolled to a halt on the wrack-ridden shore. Waves parted to flow around it. I ran down to meet them with my bundle of stolen belongings and purloined food slung over my back. The coachman raised his whip to greet me. The eru smiled as she swung down the steps and opened the door. She did not speak, so I merely nodded as I rushed up the steps into an interior lit by cold fire.

I shrieked. “Rory!”

He’d had his legs up on the narrow cushioned bench, lounging, but he swung them down to brace himself as I flung myself at him.

“Oof?!” he said, as I hugged him.

“Rory!”

“You already said that.” He fixed his big hands on my shoulders and held me away to offer a reproachful look. “I waited and waited for you but you never came. I began to think you just sent me away from that cursed old dragon because you were mad at me for trying to tear out his throat.”

“I sent you away to save your life! So much has happened, I can barely remember that now! Why are you here?”

His eyelids closed partway, giving him the hooded look of a man who wants to speak frankly but dares not. “Our sire came to Massilia a moment ago, and leashed me.”

Another presence waited in the coach, facing us from the opposite seat.

A young man studied me. A dash jacket, trousers, and kerchief of unrelieved black gave him the severe look of the accountant who comes to tell your aunt and uncle that they have lost all their money in an ill-advised speculative venture. Worn loose, his straight black hair fell to his hips, and there was something about its thick texture that made it seem it might writhe into life and choke me if I was foolish enough to anger him. I could not read his ancestry in his face, because while the hair reminded me of the Taino, his complexion made me think him Afric, and yet the cut of his nose and cheekbones might have been Celtic, and the epicanthic fold at his eyes reminded me of Captain Tira’s Cathayan origins. He certainly had the arrogance of the Romans! He was, in fact, remarkably good-looking and no older than Vai.

He sniffed, inhaling with a lift of his chin. “A maiden no longer, it seems,” he remarked, “but not gotten with child.”

“Cat,” said Rory, “your mouth is hanging open.”

The coach rocked as we bucked back into the winds. I grabbed at a strap to steady myself as I gaped. How could I ever forget that voice?

The amber gaze, so like mine, pinned me. “Tell me, Daughter. Whose blood shall feed me tonight? That of the girl who walks the path of dreams? Or some other? Son, open the shutters.”

Rory slid open the shutter of the door that opened into the mortal world. A tumult of wind and rain shook the coach. Raindrops iced as they spattered inside. A surly little voice hissed displeasure. A glitter of eyes winked on the door handle. With my sleeve, I wiped away a frosting of ice from the latch. Its gremlin face glowered briefly, but it seemed too intimidated to speak.

Rory leaned across and slid back the shutter on the door that opened into the spirit world. The hunt raced on the wind, tangling across the sky. Beasts clamored within the brawl of storm and surge. In their teeth I heard death: owls silent, snakes winding, hyenas cackling with laughter; the shrill of a hawk before it stoops, the pulse of fear that stops a beating heart, the festering that eats at flesh from within. If you are not to be killed then you must kill: That is the law of the hunt. Its drums sang in my heart, and the promise of blood tasted as sweet on my lips as a kiss.

I had that bastard Camjiata now.

“I know who it is, the power you sense rising.” I shouted to be heard above the din.

“Lead on, little cat,” said my sire, his cruel smile burning.

Expedition.

I leaned out the window to see the jetty lights burning and the masts in the harbor swaying in a blustering wind. Lights riddled the walls that ringed the old city. Sparks spun across twisting braids of smoke from the factories. Like tethered fish, the Taino airships that had spread out to occupy the city bobbed and tugged against the rising wind. We had come in so fast and unexpectedly that the airmen realized the danger too late; Taino sailors began hauling down the smallest airships in a belated attempt to stake them down and save them. The others bucked and rolled. A cable snapped. A stubby prow dipped, slicing across a building’s roof and jarring a cistern off its moorings. Water poured down the walls as people ran to escape the crumbling roof.

All across the city, people raced to shutter windows and tie netting over homes and roofs. Yet because of the speed of the storm, their efforts would not come quickly enough.

What must destroy the fleet would devastate the city.

So be it. Ice rimed my lips and chilled my heart. I was the hunter’s daughter.

But I was also Luce’s friend.

I would have grasped my sire’s hand like a supplicant, but I dared not touch him. “Promise me the hurricane will not come here, only the wind of our passing.”

He set a hand on the rim of the open window. “The hurricane will come someday, for the hurricane lives in this part of the world. But on this night the Angry Queen walks elsewhere. Then she will sleep until the season turns and the waters warm again.”

He leaned out to look. The coach circled the factory district, and one by one every factory engine stuttered and, with a collapsing hiss of steam, died. Gas lamps exploded. All the street lightning went out. A dull boom shook through the air.

He licked his lips with the precision of a cat. “Where is the dreamer? I cannot taste her.”

The maze of troll town glittered below, cutting through the chains of the magic he used to track his prey. I sought for her in my heart, and for a moment I caught her, but a mirror’s reflected light spun her image away and I lost her.

“I have hidden her from you!” I cried as my heart thrilled with triumph.

“So the little cat bites back.” His gaze on me could not be shed. He might have drained dry my spirit as easily as cut my throat to feast on my blood. “Where is the blood I’m owed this night?”

“I’m not sure how to find him.”

“Hunt down the threads that bind the world to find him, Daughter.”

Rory pressed fingers to my knee. “Scent is not only your nose, Cat. Who are you looking for? I can help you.”

“Let her sharpen the blade of her senses on her own,” said our sire. “How can she hone her steel if you do the work for her?”

My right hand I splayed over my breastbone. In the interstices that knit together the mortal world and the spirit world, I sought the ones I loved. Bee’s heart beat so close to mine it was as if my breath mingled with hers, even as mirrors shattered her image into a thousand shards. The locket tingled against my palm, and its warmth tugged me toward Vai’s bright spirit to the north. Rory was right here. I could even feel Bee’s little sisters, Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan, Luce and them at the boardinghouse, their lives like feathers tickling my skin. They were all safe.

I licked my lips, trying to taste the air as my sire tasted it, trying to sense the land as he sensed it. The mortal world was an impenetrable shadow, here and there pierced by essences I had no other word for except light. Scattered across the city and land below shone the spirits of mages strong enough to scent. Some flickered within the mortal shadow like comforting candlelight or gleamed with the steady purpose of gaslight. Others smoldered like half-buried coals. A few flared like pitch torches set alight. One I recognized: Drake simmered in the general’s town house, and at first look it was easy to see his magic as nothing more than a sullen red glow of no particular strength. But Vai had been right, of course. That smolder was merely a cap for a vast reservoir of molten power barely tamped down and ready to erupt.

I marked him. But I turned my heart toward the enemy I sought.

“General Camjiata. Lion of war. Leonnorios Aemilius Keita.”

I closed my left hand at my waist as if I held the hilt of the sword Camjiata had stolen from me. As at my command, my kinsmen bolted on the paths that net the world: loping wolves, baying hounds, rippling cats, silent sharks, winged raptors. From the smallest to the largest, they raced on the scent I envisioned more as a face and a figure and a presence than as a smell.

My senses slammed up against the border between Expedition and Taino country as against a spirit rope strung with amulets and charms. The Taino had woven a barrier around their kingdom not just with wealth and weapons but with what Vai’s grandmother might have called the nyama of their behiques. Yet it took me, half mortal as I was, only a moment’s negotiation a tear a rip in the spirit barrier. I slipped through, and the hunt poured through after me.

The island of Kiskeya slumbered, as yet unaware of this invasion, but her beating heart pulsed in the rhythm of the wedding areito. I heard its chant and rattle but I could not see the plaza or the ball courts; I couldn’t see the people celebrating. They were hidden from me because they were wreathed in shadow. I knew Camjiata was close, but I could not find him.

Yet the world was lit. Flames like gas lamps marked each behique, some burning fierce and strong while others simmered with a fire humble or frail. Yet in truth the presence of all those fire mages was difficult to distinguish against the brightest blaze. Most were like candles held next to a bonfire. The cacica’s magic burned so brightly that she almost blinded all else. How she did not kindle into an inferno I did not at first understand. She ought to be dead. The backlash of her power ought to have consumed her long since, but it had not. Nor was she surrounded by the charred corpses of her catch-fires. She was surrounded by a net of magic that shone as a dew-moistened spider’s web might when the rising sun catches in the filaments and breathes light over them.

Threads pulsing as with the flow of energy stretched from the Taino plaza across great distances into the faraway masses of the huge ice sheets, through the spirit world, and back into the mortal world. These threads did not have color, precisely, nor did they glow as flame does. Like spirit, they were animate, or at least shot through with energy and force. Were these threads cold magic? Each led back to a different point, and those points were not flames but intangible wells of power that reminded me of the deep blue pool on Salt Island that Drake had told me was considered sacred by the Taino.

Those wells of power were cold mages. For at last, I understood what I was seeing. Her catch-fires were all fire banes. She was continually casting off heat into an entire troop of catch-fires linked to her as if they were knitted into one garment. She did not pour the backlash into a single catch-fire but divided the stream into many, so no single one was overwhelmed and thus consumed, as I had almost been killed by Drake. Anyway, the fire banes who were her catch-fires were not killing her combustion, or even absorbing it. Their bodies were conduits. The cool depths of their spirits like wells swallowed the constant pillowing outwash of the cacica’s fire magic and expelled it through glimmering threads into the spirit world.

The brilliance of her power obscured all scent or taste or sound of the general.

I could not find him.

But there was one spirit she did not obscure. Right next to the cacica, a well of dazzling purity plunged into the bottomless blue waters of the spirit world. Its play of welcoming light and restless energy beckoned like the surface of water seen from below when your lungs are almost out of air.

“Vai,” I whispered, but my lips made no sound.

Crows scattered on the vanguard of the storm. Their eyes belonged to the master of the hunt. Clothing myself in their wings, I flew so that I could see into the mortal world with their eyes.

The Taino had chosen this night, Hallows’ Night, to receive Expedition’s surrender.

Wardens and riflemen knelt in ranks on the main plaza, their faces masked with the anger and shame of the soldier who has had his sword removed by his own captain. I glimpsed Gaius Sanogo standing at the rear of the ranks, hands clasped behind his back as he surveyed the scene with his ominously bland smile. In the darkness beyond the light stood companies of Taino soldiers, but I could not judge their mood.

The crows flew onward to the central ball court, which was ringed by a hundred ordinary lamps. That so many lamps burned despite the presence of so many fire banes made the cacica’s power seem even more impressive. In the center of the ball court, the proud Council members, the wealthiest and most powerful of Expedition’s ruling families, knelt with heads bowed. Their families and households and kinfolk huddled at the base of the risers like a discouraged losing team. Behind them stood other Expeditioners notable enough to be forced to attend this ceremony. All looked crushed and defeated. I saw no trolls at all.

The Council was surrendering to Prince Caonabo. His fire magic was difficult to see under the glare of his mother’s power, and even so it was nothing more than a sober, quiet flame. He stood straight and somber, receiving a copy of a written document that I assumed was the First Treaty. On the stone risers, like spectators to the final game in a prestigious tournament, sat many Taino, both women and men. Some seemed skeptical, even disapproving, while others looked pleased and triumphant.

The cacica sat on a carved duho, her seat of power, placed on a raised wooden platform at one end of the ball court. Some of her catch-fires sat near her, while others were scattered around the ball court and some even outside it. The geometry of their placement was too convoluted for me to follow. Nor did it matter, for out of them all, only one caught my eye.

Vai sat cross-legged on a mat on the ground next to the cacica’s duho. With his hands relaxed on his thighs, he looked perfectly at ease as he turned to speak to the queen. I did not like the way she looked at him! Suddenly those rumors that she forced male fire banes to marry her did not seem far-fetched or scurrilous. What did she care about the marriage laws of Europans and the chains that bound him and me? I had a hankering for a chisel.

His demeanor I could not fault, for he displayed toward her the respect he always showed women. She was, I thought, pointing out to him the geometry of her catch-fires, dispersed in a pattern that extended farther than my crow’s eyes could see. Like lamps turned low, each visible fire bane was limned by a nimbus of silvery mist. No nimbus touched Vai. She was not diverting any of the backlash into him.

His eyes widened and his head cocked to one side as if he heard an unexpected sound. After a comment to the cacica, he rose, his gaze lifting to sweep the darkness beyond.

I was sure he had sensed me.

The crows swooped low over the ball court. Behind Caonabo, set between the prince and the platform where the cacica presided, rose six wooden posts. A person was lashed to each post as to a mast. One of the prisoners was Juba, who gazed over the assembly with the look of a man who knows he has been condemned and is not sorry for the crime that has brought him to this place of execution. Juba and Caonabo truly had uncannily identical features, but once you had seen them together, you could never mistake one for the other, for Caonabo was grave and self-contained while Juba was impassioned and impatient.

The crow settled on top of one of the posts. To my utter horror, I recognized the woman tied there. Abby’s clothing was so humble and dirt-stained you could tell she had been snatched from the fields. She had her eyes shut. By the way her lips moved, she seemed to be singing.

Yet even she was not the person I needed to find.

The crow looked into the darkness and fixed on the great stone eye through which the players could score a goal. From the shadows, General Camjiata observed the proceedings, flanked by Captain Tira and the one-eyed proprietor of the Speckled Iguana.

On the ball court, Caonabo was speaking to the Expeditioners. He sounded weary but unswerving, a man who does not like the task he has been given but will carry it out to its fullest.

“Always, we the Taino have held in every regard to the First Treaty, which our ancestors made with your ancestors. We respect the words and agreements of those who came before us as if they were our own, for they are our own. You have allowed the threat of salters to live among you. The bitten must be exiled to Salt Island, even if they are healed. They are dead. That is the law. We did not unearth this disease. You brought it on your ships. We allowed you to build your city as long as the agreement we made was honored. But it has not been honored-”

He broke off, raising a hand to test the air. He turned to address the cacica. “Most dignified and wise of mothers,” he said, “forgive my impetuous speech for I have not received permission to address you, but this wind is not natural. A spirit comes.”

The crow fluttered to the great stone eye and looked down. An expression very like fear pinched the general’s face as he looked at the night sky.

“I see him!” I cried, but by speaking I broke the wings that bound me into the crow’s eyes. I slammed hard onto the seat, knocking breath from my lungs. Rory steadied me.

“I see him,” said the Master of the Wild Hunt, with a smile.

Such simple words to herald death.

The world tipped beneath me as the coach banked sharply, plunging toward the ground. I fell against the latch, and my weight clicked it down with a spark of protest from the gremlin. The door swung out with me holding to it. The wind loosed my hair, and it streamed out behind me like the wings of the storm.

As the coach skated above the paving stones right down the center of the ball court, people scattered out of the way, shouting. They dragged companions with them, or shoved others aside in their scramble to escape. Some flung themselves down, cowering.

The coach rolled smoothly to a halt a hand’s height above the ground. The horses stamped and steamed. I released the latch to step down daintily onto the ball court.

Every gaze was turned to me. I would not have had it any other way.

As one, as in greeting or to show respect, the Taino rose.

I paused one breath, to acknowledge them. Then I sought and found my enemy beneath the stone eye.

“I do not like being betrayed, General Camjiata.” My voice carried easily, for the wind had ceased so utterly that the very atmosphere, like a rope, stretched taut. Yet my long black hair still rippled and flowed in the unseen tides of magic that washed around us. “Not once did you betray me. Not twice did you betray me. But with every promise or offer you have made to me, you betrayed me. Where are my husband and my sword, both of which you stole from me?”

Camjiata stepped out of the shadows. He was not a man to be beaten down. Whatever fears haunted him, no sign of fear marred his face now. He appealed to the crowd.

“An opia haunts us! In northern lands, we call this day Hallows’ Night, and know it for the day when the dead may cross into the land of the living. We cannot trust the shadows that walk out of the night on this night, of all nights.”

“I am no opia-” I retorted, but he cut me off.

“Yet she is no opia,” he cried, with an orator’s gesture that invited his audience to note how he had agreed. “She is a witch and a salter. She has used her witchcraft to escape from Salt Island and means to infest us all with the salt plague.”

A man who knew how to infest an orderly crowd with terror and strife could make the mob do his bidding. As startled and scared as the Expeditioners had been at the appearance of a coach riding down the wings of night, the salt plague frightened them far more. People pushed and shoved and began trying to climb up into the risers where the Taino, so collected and calm before, were now looking alarmed. Everyone seemed desperate to get away before I lurched over to bite them.

At Prince Caonabo’s order, Taino soldiers made a fence around the ball court’s exits, while others hurried onto the risers to restore order. But I wasn’t worried about them. Captain Tira was pushing through the surging crowd; she had a hand on her sword and her gaze on me, and I didn’t have to be my sire’s daughter or a Hassi Barahal spy to figure she had just been ordered to kill me.

Rory slipped down out of the coach with the grace of a prowling cat and handed me the machete I’d stolen from Salt Island. I stepped back, weighing the machete in my hand as I looked around for Camjiata. But it was Vai I saw. He shoved through the crowd with a naked blade of cold steel in his hand. He looked stunned and angry and oh so welcome as he placed himself beside me.

Captain Tira halted, too far away to lunge at me with her falcata.

“Catherine, they told me you were sequestered with Beatrice!”

“They lied. I was kidnapped and sent to Salt Island.”

As if to reassure himself that I was real and not illusion, he reached for my hand.

A searingly cold wind swept across the ball court. An icy sleet began to drizzle. My sire stepped down out of the coach as into a fine summer’s balm.

His gaze met mine just as Vai’s fingers brushed my hand.

The Master of the Wild Hunt smiled. It was nothing more than a slight upward quirk of the lips and an infinitesimal narrowing of the eyes, but it was the most horrifying expression I had ever seen. I snatched my betraying touch back from Vai’s, but it was too late.

My sire licked his lips, as if tasting the most delicious food.

“Strong and sweet!” His smile mocked me, for he understood perfectly my look of horror. “You are truly my daughter, to have sought and bound such rich blood as this.”

“No!” At last I spotted Camjiata making his way toward the end of the ball court, hoping to escape Vai’s cold steel and my anger. “That’s your prey!”

“The fire weaver?” His gaze lifted to the cacica. “So rare it is to find one such as her. I knew there was tremendous power hiding behind their spirit fence. But I couldn’t get through it to find out. Yet after all, the smell of the cold mage’s blood delights me far more.”

“No! No!” Camjiata was almost out of sight. “Him! Over there!”

My sire stared right where I pointed. “I see only darkness. There is no one there. Do not try to deceive me.”

The Master of the Wild Hunt was blind in the mortal world except to the flare of those who channeled the energies that bind the worlds, that weave life to death and death to life, order and disorder. He could not see Camjiata to take him, even if he could be bothered to want to.

“Stand away!” The cacica’s voice cracked over the night like thunder. Fire flared in every lamp. Light blazed to reveal the Taino soldiers restoring order. The coach, with the coachman and footman, appeared as a perfectly ordinary coach at rest except for the fact its wheels did not touch the ground. What looked like low-hanging dark clouds churned above, chased by flashes of light like fireflies. The pack of hunters had not yet been released.

“Stand away, fire bane,” she called, addressing Vai before she commanded the assembled crowd. “Opia travel at their will. We have no quarrel with them, even if they invite in the spirit lords who are not welcome here. But the salt dead may never walk in Taino land lest we all be poisoned. Those who will not stay on the other shore must be destroyed by fire.”

Her gaze touched Juba’s. In that exchange I saw her sorrow and his defiance: She had favored him over his brother, and I could not tell whether he had never forgiven her for her weakness in loving him more than Caonabo, or if she would never forgive herself.

“That is the law,” she proclaimed.

Sparks shimmered to life on a hot gust of wind as she struck.

“Not my Cat.” Vai pulled me hard against him while yanking the last ice lens out from under his jacket.

Fire kindled in my heart. Abby, and the other prisoners, screamed. Prince Caonabo shouted in protest, but there was nothing he could do. The cacica was a fire mage of unimaginable power with a net of fire banes to absorb the conflagration.

Vai’s ice lens bloomed as he channeled his magic and his anger and his fear for me into it; the curve of the lens amplified its power. The cacica’s fire was vast and complex; its tendrils spanned the ball court and the plaza and farther yet, for the net of her fire magic spanned the island itself. Its threads reached as far as a sick man’s bed in distant Sharagua halfway across Kiskeya, where the constant pulse of her magic kept her dying brother alive.

All that fire, the fire bane and his ice lens killed.

Every lamp snapped out.

In far Sharagua, the heart of the cacique stopped beating. Lips parted to release his spirit into the night.

Snow spun down in a beautiful shower of sparkling white, dusting the ground.

“Catherine!” Vai pressed his mouth to mine, just a touch, to mark that I still breathed.

Darkness and silence settled over the land.

Yet out of that darkness, the cacica spoke, unmoved and unperturbed. “I will enforce the law as I must to protect the people. There can be no exception. And I will not be defied.”

A flame wavered into life, a single oil lamp catching fire. For after all, there was no limit to the source of fire as long as it had fuel with which to burn. As on an inhalation, she gathered her power back into her and began casting it off into her catch-fires. Filaments of cold magic streamed away in a growing flood, her net brightening as she gathered her power. Cold mages weren’t the only ones who could get angry.

She was certainly going to kill me, and possibly Vai in the bargain. I cast one last despairing glance toward poor Abby and the other prisoners, but I simply had run out of time and chance.

“Vai! Run!” I cried.

The cursed fool did not budge. “I’m not leaving you behind.”

A shadow quite inverse to the size of its human form loomed over us like a thundercloud.

“This has all been quite illuminating and much more diverting than my usual hunt.”

My sire’s right hand fell like fate on Vai’s shoulder. With his left, he grasped the chain and slipped the now-clouded ice lens into his palm as he might admire a lovely flower, then closed his fingers over it.

“I will take him now. You’ve done well, Daughter.”

I raised the machete. “You will not! He’s not the one I mean you to take.”

“Whenever did I give you the impression that your wishes, desires, or intentions mean anything to me?” His grasp had paralyzed Vai.

He glanced up at the sky toward the hunters and killers who, when he called, would sweep down to rend and dismember their prey. No human on the ground could see them; perhaps humans could not see the Master of the Wild Hunt either, not really, for he walked half in and half out of the world, perceived as fear and hunger but not truly seen.

The dusting of snow evaporated in a wave of rising heat. I was caught between an immensely powerful fire mage who was about to kill me, and the Master of the Wild Hunt, who was about to kill the man I loved. I could not fight, and I could not run. I had to think with my mind.

For the truth was, why would my sire appear as a good-looking young male? Why would he even care how he looked? I knew something about dealing with vain men.

“Father,” I said, “I know you do not hold me in any affection, but I am the weapon you forged, the one you alone can wield. Are you going to let that fire weaver destroy me? It makes you look careless. It makes you look weak. But I guess you can’t stop her.”

Killing fire pinched at my heart in that instant. I reached for Vai so that touching him would be my last memory before death consumed my flesh and mind.

My sire exhaled. Luminescent snow winked into existence, obliterating the heat. The white flakes were so scintillant they dazzled and blinded. My heart beat on, untouched.

He murmured, “Fire is the serpents’ weapon. You know how I hate and loathe serpents.”

Ice crackled across the stones.

“Kill her.”

The clamor of the hunt dusted down over us as his words released them. They flowed out of the heavens like nightmare, surging forward in a squall of sleeting rain whose icy touch cut skin and caused blood to flow. Deadly hounds loped down the risers, biting and clawing as they passed. I could not tell if they were solid or merely the shadows that haunt dreams, but their touch spread like poison. Hulking dire wolves snarled, and hyenas laughed mockingly as Expeditioners and Taino alike were eaten up by stark fear, even the disciplined soldiers.

Many people tried to run, but the crush was so great they only trampled each other. Others froze, unable to move. A few tried to fight, blocking with arms or clubbing with rifles or slashing wildly with their ceremonial spears. Yet they could do no damage to the sleek cats and men with animals’ faces who pushed through the ball court. A cloud of wasps stung, each touch raising a drop of blood. Bats swooped through, accompanied by silent owls. A red-gold-and-black-banded snake slithered over my sandaled foot; tiny frogs with skin as bright as jewels hopped alongside.

All swarmed toward the cacica’s platform.

“Son,” said my sire. “Did you not hear me? Kill her.”

With a glance at me as if to apologize, Rory sighed. He bent, and he flowed. Where a man had stood, a huge saber-toothed cat leaped in silent beauty. The change came so swiftly that people running across the ball court to escape the hunt had no time to break out of his path as he bounded to the platform.

The cacica was no fool. Nor was she a coward. She faced the hunt as she drew deep into the fire, but before she could release it, the great cat drove her down beneath claws and teeth. He snapped her neck with a casual shake.

He, my amusing, insouciant Rory. He was his father’s son.

The pack-wolves, snakes, cats, hounds, wasps, raptors, all-converged on the body, rending and tearing.

I had to look away.

The ball court was in chaos, the crowd streaming every which way. The Taino soldiers blocking the ends of the playing field had fled. People stampeded for safety, leaving broken and sobbing wounded behind. A few pockets of order held ground, among them Prince Caonabo who had not panicked but instead had taken advantage of the chaos to cut the bonds of his twin. Juba took the knife from his brother and ran to free the other prisoners. A ceremonial spear in hand, Caonabo approached the raised platform with soldiers at his heels. A shadowy hound loped past, a head hanging from its jaws by long black hair.

Then huge glittering flakes of a heavy snowfall obscured the scene, making it seem I, my sire, and Vai were alone in the world.

My sire opened his fingers. The chain and ring had crumbled into rust. When he blew on his hand, the red dust dispersed like chaff into the blowing snow. Touched by that dust, my machete corroded and deformed as rust bloomed on the blade, creeping up as if to engulf and consume my flesh. I let go. The blade shattered when it hit the ground.

He lifted Vai with one arm and shoved him into the coach.

“But you have this night’s blood!” I cried as I scrambled in after Vai.

The door slammed shut behind me like the hammer of fate, leaving my sire outside and us within, his prisoners. A whip snapped. The coach rocked as the horses pulled us upward.

Vai blinked, shaking himself as if motion and will had just returned. “I understand now. Your sire is the Master of the Wild Hunt.”

“And I hate him!” I cried as I tried to open latches and shutters, but they were all locked.

“Of course you do, love.”

I flung my arms around him, and then we were kissing with the passion of the condemned.

“This is certainly more interesting than the last time you two were in the coach together.”

I broke away to glare at the thin gremlin face with its winking gaze and straight line of a mouth. “Shut your eyes!”

Vai drew back, looking startled. “Catherine?”

“I’m talking to the latch! Prying little beast! I’ll throw you in a furnace and melt you!”

“Catherine? Did you hit your head?”

“Didn’t you hear what it said?”

“What makes you think I let him hear me?” said the latch with a smirk. “But if he weaves me a pretty illusion first, then I’ll close my eyes and let you do that other thing in private.”

“Catherine, as much as I would love to keep kissing you instead of hearing you rave on about furnaces, we need to do something now.”

The door to the spirit world was opened from the outside. The gulf of the sky yawned, for we rolled through the void of heaven. The hunt coursed away into a swirl of lightning and black cloud. As calmly as if he were entering the coach from a street corner, my sire stepped in.

I threw myself across Vai to shield him. “You said there would only be one sacrifice.”

My sire sat opposite us, raising his eyebrows as Vai set me to one side. Vai left his arm around me but did not speak. We faced the Master of the Wild Hunt together.

“By the terms of the contract, we can take only one,” replied my sire. “We have taken this night’s blood. But that doesn’t mean I can’t take a prisoner across to the spirit world with me. I’m going to find out what it was this magister did that he oughtn’t to have been able to do.” As he spoke, his human face slowly congealed into the mask of ice. “Which means that in addition to assuaging my terrible curiosity, I can release you, little cat, from my service. As long as he resides in my palace, I need only tug on the leash to bring you crawling back.”

He leaned forward and pressed a hand on Vai’s chest, his touch the embrace of ice.

Then he flung me out the open door.