Cold Fire

8

I threw myself into Rory’s line of attack.

Even as I was twisting, bracing myself to slam into him, the air distorted. An undulation of intense heat sucked the cold as into a vast shimmering furnace. A scaly beast gleaming of polished copper shuddered across the sky: eyes like burning emeralds, claws the length of my arms, wings that spanned the tophet wall to wall. Its jaw gaped to swallow him and us and all the city and then the world and finally all of existence.

I smashed into the cat’s massive fore-flank. I did not stop Rory, but we were both carried far enough sideways that he landed out of reach of the headmaster with me draped over his rippling shoulders. I leaped back and whacked him on the neck with my cane.

“Stop! Rory! Stop!”

The big cat cringed and dropped to a crouch. Its pelt shone with a pulse of light, and smeared into a black-haired young man.

“Let go of me!” cried Bee in a tone I recognized as exasperated rather than alarmed.

Stepping between Rory and the headmaster, I turned. The headmaster’s assistant had a hand on her arm, and was in the act of pulling her out of the way. He released her at once.

The headmaster looked as he had always looked: He was a tall, elderly black man of noble Kushite ancestry, a princely scholar of the most cultured and civilized of peoples, a man who was always calm. Why had I never noticed the fulgent green glamour of his eyes?

“Who are you?” Bee demanded.

Remnants of clothes hung like rags on Rory’s body. Even half naked, he appeared predatory. “I have to kill him, Cat. Surely you understand!”

“I’m beginning to think I understand much less than I ever thought I did!” I cried.

“And that wasn’t much,” muttered Bee, as if she could not help herself.

Had the light changed? The headmaster’s eyes were a pleasant, ordinary brown, not green at all. “Begging your pardon, Maester,” I said politely, “but if I am not mistaken, something rather strange just happened.”

“Indeed it did,” he agreed with the careworn smile of a man who has seen everything and has yet to be surprised. “Your young companion turned into a rather large cat and then back into a man. Certainly an unexpected occurrence. He must be cold. May I offer my coat?”

“No!” snarled Rory. I pressed the cane across his chest to check him.

“Kemal,” said the headmaster to his assistant. “If you will.”

The assistant took off his coat and gloves. Bee brought them to Rory.

I said, “Put them on.”

He obeyed, although by the curl of his lip I could tell he was affronted.

“Why do you think you have to kill him, Rory?” I asked, digging for patience.

His tone suggested he was completely disgusted with my callous disregard for his needs. “He’s one of the enemy!”

I could tell from Bee’s busy, bitten expression that she was thinking as wildly and desperately as a runaway coach careens over rugged ground.

“Are you a cold mage, Maester?” she asked. “Perhaps an un-Housed cold mage, making your own way in the world? Hiding your power?”

“I am no cold mage. But I invite you to return to the academy, where I will serve hot tea and we may conduct this conversation in decent warmth.”

Bee delivered her reply with queenly obstinacy. “I mean no offense, Maester, but the last time I took refuge with you, you handed me over to Legate Amadou Barry. I became little better than a prisoner in his exalted house, and I must say-” Her cheeks flamed, and she thought twice about what she must say.

He nodded. “You have my deepest apologies, Maestressa. I was mistaken in believing the Barry house was a suitable refuge for you. The offer of a cup of hot tea comes without price. On my honor as a Napata, I will not reveal your presence in the academy to anyone. No one will know except me, and my servants, who are bound to me.”

“I have to kill him,” said Rory. “Let me go, Cat.”

“No.” I kept the cane pressed to his torso, its hidden cold steel a leash on his straining form. “Maester, will you explain to us what we just saw? If that was not magic, then I surely have no idea what to call it. My cousin and I have had enough of being lied to, betrayed, and kept in ignorance.”

His grave smile made me ashamed of the impetuosity of my speech, and I lowered my gaze so as not to seem to be staring directly at him in a disrespectful way. “These are hard matters, Maestressa, as you correctly comprehend. Did the head of the poet Bran Cof speak to you two months ago?”

Tell no one. I bit my lip. Bee fisted her hands.

“By your expressions, Maestressas, I will take that for a yes. A pity I was not informed at the time. Although I suppose when two young women are waiting in my office, perhaps with a purloined book in their keeping, they may prefer to keep silence rather than be subjected to questions. Might we go? My old bones feel the cold deeply. I note also your companion has bare feet now that his shoes have torn off.”

Rory said, as if he had decided he would have more success with being reasonable, “Just let me kill him, Cat. It will only take a moment.” He tensed, readying to spring.

A tongue of fire licked the wintry cold. The air pulled at me as if I were being drawn into the maw of a fiery furnace. Green flickered in the headmaster’s eyes, but his expression remained impassive as he examined Rory as if seeking beneath the skin to the cat beneath. I had a heart-squeezingly strong premonition-nothing magical about it-that our young, healthy, strong Roderic and the old, frail, fragile-looking headmaster were not remotely evenly matched. With the cane, I pushed Rory behind me. He was trembling, although I could not have said whether with anger, fear, or sheer shaking eagerness to pounce.

Bee’s delicate little hand caught hold of my wrist, tightening as I imagined the coils of a snake might crush the ribs of a larger animal. “Cat, we have to hear what the head of the poet Bran Cof has to say.”

“Ah! Ow! Yes! You go ahead. I’ll come after with Rory.”

She released my wrist and swept a courtesy to the headmaster as I tried to shake the pain out of my wrist while still holding Rory in check.

“Maester,” she said, “we will accompany you out of respect for your age and lineage. But it is likely the Roman legate and his minions are already on their way to the academy.”

“Then there is no time to waste, Maestressa. I give you my word I will not be party to your being taken prisoner by Romans, mage Houses, or princes.”

“Very well.” She nodded at me before accompanying them down the path.

A cold breeze chased up from the east, the last breath of the hailstorm Andevai had called to quell the crowds. It was better than muskets and swords as a weapon against people out on the streets, forcing them to flee inside. But the weakest and most desperate huddling in alleys or unheated hovels would expire in the deadly cold. Yet winter killed the weak anyway, didn’t it?

I cautiously drew back my cane. “Rory, explain yourself.”

“I have to kill him.”

“Those seem to be the only words you know any more. How can that respected and honored old man be ‘the enemy’?”

“He’s not a man! That body is just the clothes he’s wearing.”

I sat down hard on the bench, my heart knocking about my chest as if it had come loose from its moorings: wings, claws, heat. I covered my face with my gloved hands, and realized how horribly cold my flesh had become. “What do you think he is?” I said through my fingers.

“I don’t think. I know. He’s a serpent. A dragon.” He paced around the bench. “These stupid words you use aren’t the right ones! He is one of the enemy who encircles the world and traps us. You’ve seen what happens when the dreams of the mothers of his kind catch us unawares. Where I live it’s not like it is here in the Deathlands, where their dreams don’t reach. You can walk abroad day and night without fear of being caught and changed. They have always been and always will be the enemy.”

“Rory, sit down, your pacing is making me dizzy.” But it was his words that made my head reel. “How can he be a dragon?”

“He’ll eat me first. He’s much bigger and stronger. But I have to try.” If he’d had a tail, he would have lashed it. “Because he must want to eat you, too.”

“I have attended the academy for over three years. He could have eaten me at any time. Why wait until now, when he couldn’t have expected to see me again?”

“Dragons are cunning and patient and never strike until you least expect it.”

“I least expected it all these years. He’s no threat to us.”

“You just can’t see it! I can’t let you go to his lair.”

“This is not your decision!” Watching his bare feet tread the freezing ground made me wince. My lips were so stiff I could scarcely form words. I had to move, or I would die, too. I leaped up and grabbed his arm. “You’ll die of cold if you don’t get shoes and clothes! I couldn’t bear to lose you. But I have to go to the academy to hear the message.”

“Maybe he won’t eat Bee,” he admitted sullenly. “She does stink of dragons, like they licked her when she was sleeping and she just doesn’t know. I didn’t say anything about it, because she’s right, it is rude to say so, and I could tell neither of you knew or suspected.”

I embraced him, petting his arms and back until he relaxed a tiny bit. “Rory, how about this? You will go right now to the Old Temple District, to the inn called the Buffalo and Lion.”

“‘Helene sent me.’”

“Yes, that’s what you say when you get there. Right now I’m thinking Camjiata’s the only person we can trust to be interested in us purely for his own selfish reasons. That makes it easier to negotiate. You’ll keep the bags with you. Don’t lose them! You know how precious my father’s journals are to me.”

“Cat, you and I don’t know who our sire is.”

“I meant, my father who raised me, not the male who sired us. Bee and I will join you after we hear the poet’s message. We can’t stay at the academy anyway, so we won’t be far behind you. Then you can tell me everything you know about dragons.”

“I just told you everything I know,” he said indignantly. “Do you think I’m keeping secrets from you?”

I searched his face. Was he really my half brother? His eyes and hair were so very like mine, and yet he was not human but a wild creature, nothing tame. Yet I trusted him with my life. “No, I don’t think you’re keeping secrets. But it has to be this way. Promise!”

As if the words were forced out of him, he muttered, “I promise.”

I released him. “Ask on the street for Old Temple, and then the inn. Tell people the militia roughed you up during the riot. They’ll help you. Use your charm.”

“Oh!” he said, distracted by the thought of using his charm. “I am cold and hungry and thirsty. I could use some petting, too.”

“I don’t need to hear about that kind of petting.” I wiggled fingers into the hem of my jacket’s sleeve, fished out the last of my coins, and pressed them into his hand. “Buy yourself clothes and shoes, but try them on first, then haggle over the price, and make sure you get correct change.”

We ran down the path together. Kemal waited at the tophet gate.

“Tell me, Maester,” I said as he chained and locked the gate, “did the headmaster save you from the Wild Hunt?”

His hand paused as he was turning the key. He did not look at me. “Yes.”

“How?”

He slung the key, on its chain, over his neck. “It is not my place to speak of it.”

“Is he a dragon?”

As if goaded beyond measure, he met my gaze. “The headmaster of the academy is a man.”

“One just like you?” I demanded, for I sensed a riddle in his words.

His smile twisted scornfully, which startled me, for I had thought him a passive young person. “In the empire of the Avar, every albino child like me”-he touched fingers to his pale cheek-“belongs to the emperor. It is a crime punishable by death to hide such a child from the imperial governors. So I would answer you, ‘No.’ He is not a man just like me.”

“I take it that is all I am to hear on the matter.”

So returned the diffident exterior, like a shell covering vulnerable flesh. “My apologies, Maestressa.” He inclined his head with a polite bob of his shoulders and followed his master.

Bee and the headmaster were making their way slowly up the hill, the old man leaning on his cane and she with a hand beneath his elbow quite oblivious to his desire to eat either of us. Rory watched the headmaster’s back with a hooded gaze that did nothing to hide his wish to pounce.

“You promised,” I said.

“Yes, I promised.”

I gave him simple directions based on the bell towers and the high plinth that marked the site of the ancient village founded by Adurni Celts. I kissed him on either cheek, to seal our agreement, and waited at the tophet gate as he walked away down the main thoroughfare, lugging the bags. The wide avenue with its shops remained deserted, everyone in hiding.

I watched until he walked out of sight. Then I hurried up the hill, catching the others as they passed the old Kena’ani temple complex that was the original structure built on Academy Hill centuries ago. All that remained of the old complex was the walled sanctuary dedicated to Blessed Tanit and a grove of votive columns in commemoration of the holy trees felled during the Long Winter of 1572 to 1585. The gate into the sanctuary stood open. Within, a man wearing a heavy coat swept the porch of the priests’ house.

“The gate is always open,” the headmaster was saying to Bee, “due to an agreement made during the Long Winter, when the priests kept the gates open to provide warmth and sustenance to the destitute. It was that, or have the entire complex be burned down.”

“But it was destroyed anyway,” said Bee.

“Much of Adurnam burned at that time. Do you know what saved the city?”

“I do,” I said. “The arrival of the refugees from the empire of Mali. Certain of the refugees had secret magical knowledge, and they found common cause with the Celtic drua. From that union sprang the cold mages. With the rise of the cold mages, the Long Winter was vanquished. Or at least, that is the story we learned at the academy, Maester.”

“So it is. It makes you wonder, does it not? Is there some link between cold magic and the more clement weather of our time? For according to history and the evidence of old Roman ruins found north of Ebora in the uninhabitable Barrens, the climate was less clement, and the ice more advanced, two thousand years ago. What causes these changes?”

“There were no cold mages in the times of the Romans,” said Bee. “Were there?”

“Not as we know them, no. Ah, here we are.”

His chief steward waited on the front steps of the academy entrance.

“Owain,” said the headmaster as he paused at the top of the steps to catch his breath, “the academy remains closed to all callers for the day. Admit no one.”

“As you command, Your Excellency.”

A cascading boom cracked outside. Whoever was shooting off muskets and field cannon was nowhere near the hailstorm. The hum rising off the city reminded me of maddened bees being smoked out of their hive. I hurried after Bee and the headmaster, who had already crossed the wide entry hall.

Surrounded by buildings, the central court lay quiet under its glass roof. No one was around. Midwinter festival wreaths of mistletoe and pine withered atop a trellis arch. The trellis covered the grated shaft of an ancient sacrificial well. A hundred years ago, a now-famous labyrinth had been laid out as a paved walkway spiraling around the well, ringed by stone benches.

I followed the others upstairs to the headmaster’s office. The circulating stove set into the hearth gave off glorious warmth.

“Please,” said the headmaster. Bee and I took off our coats and draped them over the back of a red leather chair. His assistant closed the door and took the headmaster’s coat.

The headmaster’s office had the odd quality of seeming larger than it was because mirrors hung on the backs of the doors. I saw everything twice: the wall of windows, the ranks of bookshelves reaching from floor to the crown moldings, the wide table with paper and books covering its entire surface, and the severed head of the poet and legal scholar Bran Cof atop a pedestal. The headmaster was watching me in one of the mirrors. I could see things in mirrors that others could not, threads of magic like the fine lines of spiders’ webs. In the mirror, he looked like a perfectly ordinary old man. No threads of cold magic wove around his form as they did around Andevai. No vast winged shape billowed from his slender frame. He looked as solid as the furniture.

“Natural historians speculate that mirrors reflect the binding threads of energy that run between this world and the unseen spirit world,” he remarked, as if he had divined my thoughts. “Do you suppose that is true, Maestressa Barahal?”

I glanced down at my scuffed and muddy boots. The ends of the laces had been chewed up as by hungry mice. The longcase clock ticked like the pacing of ethereal feet.

“My apologies, but we don’t have time for speculation,” said Bee. She walked to the corner where the head of the poet Bran Cof rested like a stone bust. I broke into a prickling sweat. I could not bear the thought of those eyelids snapping open, yet I could not look away no matter how much I wanted to. “When did the head speak? What did he say?”

The headmaster smiled enigmatically. “The very questions I meant to ask you. It was at dawn. I was seated here at my desk reading aloud, as is my habit. This day it happened to be a monograph on the salt plague which I recently received from one of my correspondents at the University of Expedition. Perhaps the same words will waken him again.” He glanced at a printed pamphlet lying open on his desk. “‘According to report, if a human is bitten by a ghoul, the onset of the disease is so swift and implacable that the victim will become morbid in less than seven days. However, if a human is bitten by a plague-ridden human, there are three distinct and slower stages through which the disease progresses, although the disease remains invariably fatal.’”

The head remained fixed. Bloodless lips kept their disapproving pinch. The lime-whitened spikes of his hair and the luxuriant droop of his mustache made his features look younger than what the heavy crow’s-feet radiating out from his deep-set eyes told of years and trials. Three scars like ritual marks formed a column beneath his right ear. Maybe the head was just stone after all.

Maybe it was all a mistake.

“If you have something to say, Bran Cof, speak now.” Bee’s voice rang above the whispering crackle of the fire burning in the circulating stove. “My cousin and I cannot wait forever.”

“Bee!” I cautioned.

“And furthermore,” she continued in the tone of an Immortal Fury who has just remembered an ancient slight and means to pursue vengeance to the ends of the Earth, “if you are really bound between this world and the spirit world as it is said poets and sorcerers and djeliw and bards can be-which I admit seems quite unpleasant, for wouldn’t it be rather like being forced to stand in a doorway all the time, neither going nor coming? Anyway, if you are so bound, then I wish you would not be so coy about it. I know you are a very famous legal scholar, one of the Three Even-Handed Jurists of the old Brigantes Confederation, so I would hope you would show us consideration now we are come before you, at your request. Yes, I am aware we are required to defer to poets, whose words reveal the world in ways we who are not poets could not otherwise see. And your fame as one of the Three Silver Tongues of the western Celts is naturally enough to awe and impress humble students like ourselves. But I must say, the constant references to women as roses with thorns seems a bit much. Men torment women far more than women torment men.”

Did the sun escape a cloudy veil outside? A gleam shuddered within the reflecting angles of the mirrors like the spark of fireflies. A cowl of silvery light writhed around the head of the poet Bran Cof. Color washed the pallor of his face. There crawled beneath his skin a straining like insects swarming or a trapped prisoner trying to claw its way out.

She rolled blithely on. “I can’t endure these constant protestations about the chains women bind on men. In truth, the chains all bind women at the feet of men.”

His eyes opened, corpse-still one moment and full of ire the next.

“Bold Taranis spare me from the complaints of virgins!” His voice was resonant, as lovely as a caress, even in anger. “Especially ones whose black hair is a snare to entwine the helpless and whose dark eyes provoke the tenderhearted to grief. How I despise the beauty of women!”

“Only because you feel entitled to something you have no natural right to possess!”

“Your words dance like sun across ice, but their cruelty is sharper than the winter wind. You must be aware that whatever I might wish for in the Three Matters of Desire has long since been severed from me. You stand there, out of my reach.” He looked younger when he was angry. As the cut of his lips softened, he seemed to age. “A kinder woman would kiss me.”

“A kinder woman might well! I am not she. Anyhow, Your Honor, the last man I kissed died soon after.”

His gaze took her in from head to toe. “That I can well believe! An axe may be forged with all the cunning of a master smith. It may be decorated with the skill that draws the unwary eye as a lure coaxes a hapless trout. But an axe’s purpose is to sever the living heart of trees. Why are you here if not to persecute me with the promise of the sweet pleasure I can never again taste?”

“We were told you have a message.”

“You are not the one I bear a message for.”

“Perhaps my dearest cousin Cat is.”

His gaze did not waver from her bright face but something very unsettling happened in his eyes. It was as if his gaze turned inward.

“Yes, yes, you’ve interrupted me,” he said irritably, yet with an edge of fear. He was speaking to someone we could not see. “Of course you may speak. How am I to stop you?”

His eyes rolled back in their sockets until they showed only white. Shadows-not from this room-settled a curling pattern of insubstantial tattoos across his skin. His craggy features remained the same, but Bran Cof was no longer the personage looking out from those wintry eyes. The gaze studied Bee, then caught on the headmaster with a narrowing like a bow bent but not released. An arrow stabbed my heart. Maybe I gasped. Maybe I moved, shaking with apprehension. Maybe I made no sound and no movement and it did not matter.

Because the head of the poet Bran Cof looked at me. White ice eyes without pupil or iris fixed on me. My chest felt as hollow as if a killing claw had just torn out my beating heart to suckle dry its rich red blood.

The mouth spoke with a sharp, deadly voice.

“So after all, Tara Bell’s child survived and grew, as I had hoped. Your blood spilled on the crossing stone woke the bond between us. As I am bound, so must those bound to me as kin come to my aid. That is the law. Come to me, Tara Bell’s child. Now. ”