Cold Magic

13

Godwik's tale wound down many tributaries. He and his thirty-five compatriots were reduced to twenty-seven after battles with vicious saber-toothed cats, foaming rapids, a marauding troo, gusting winds, and a party of belligerent young bucks from a territory whose boundaries they had violated. But, at last, they reached the great wall of ice that marked the southernmost reach of the glaciers on the troll's continent. Here, alas, Kehinde assaulted him with so many detailed questions about the color, texture, weight, height, volume, and consistency of ice that he never got to the sleigh of eru. Brennan and I by unspoken agreement rose to take a turn around the room. The other diners had quitted their tables some time ago, retiring, presumably, to their upstairs sleeping chambers for the night. We paused beside the door into the common room, where raucous laughter greeted the end of a rousing song.

"Let's go in," said Brennan.

"They said they were singing men's songs."

Me had what my father would have called "a hearty laugh." "I know this manner of old men. They were just seeing if they could intimidate you."

"How do you know they're old? You never went into the common room to see them."

"They've been playing the songs old men play."

He was easy to confide in. "Let me ask you, then. One of

those old men-I'm sure he was nothing more than a humble farmer-ordered my… ah… my companion to sit down on the bench and drink with him. And he did!"

"Surely he would obey. They are elders."

"He's a magister."

Brennan shrugged. "He's Mande, as I am. If an elder says to sit, then you sit."

"You're Mande? Not Celtic? The Mande lineages came from West Africa." I eyed his pale skin and reddish blond hair.

His grin flashed. "That's where some of my ancestors came from. I'm also, by breeding, a Brigantes Celt. That's where I get my looks. There's probably the blood of a Roman legionnaire back there as well. Most everyone in these territories is tartan, aren't they? In my village, we call ourselves Mande because we're clients to a mage House whose founders came over from the Mali Empire."

"Four Moons House?"

"For reasons I can't explain, I really can't tell you. My apologies."

"None taken. It seems you left the village, though. The one north of Ebora."

"I don't know how much you hear about it down here, but many of the miners in Brigantia are angry about their working conditions and low pay. What can laborers do when the law courts are controlled by the prince and his jurists?"

"Surely jurists are impartial!"

He smiled sadly, as if sorry to be the one to rip the wool from my eyes. "Of course that is what they say. I've even encountered a few who are. Anyhow, the workingmen and women in my village spent ten years raising funds to sponsor two likely lads to attend the academy in Camlun. I was chosen mostly, I admit, because I was a good fighter and they figured I could protect the other lad."

"Did you?"

He raised his left hand. His knuckles were scarred, and his little finger set crookedly, as though it had been broken more than once. "He learned enough to be taken on at law offices in Ebora. He is now a solicitor, a burr chafing at the robes of the courts."

"I'm surprised the mage House allowed it. Couldn't they have stopped you? The villagers are held in clientage to the mage Houses. Bound by old contracts or by entrenched custom to serve their masters in perpetuity. They're practically slaves." I thought of my own marriage and flushed. "My apologies. That sounds very offensive, doesn't it? It's what I was taught at the academy in Adurnam."

He had a very nice smile, meant to be reassuring, and I felt my face grow warmer even as I reminded myself that an assured man like him could have no possible interest in an inexperienced and ignorant girl like me. "Legally it's not an inaccurate description, just an incomplete one, as Godwik and Chartji and my age-mate who went with me to the Camlun academy would be sure to tell you. What rights you possess as a person who stands in a client status to a lord or a mage House will be different for different people. You remain, however, a dependent, an inferior to their superior rank."

As I was now, bound to Four Moons House.

He went on. "But again, it's never quite that simple. A powerful mage House remains powerful because its elders know how to harvest their fields. One of my great-grandmothers who worked a season up at the magisters' estate house came home with more than her wages. That happens all the time. The child she bore wasn't a cold mage-my grandfather, that was-so he stayed in the village. But the mages keep watch, to see if a cold mage sprouts in one of our stony gardens. Before my age-mate and I were allowed to leave, we had to stand before a mage

seeker to make sure no thread of cold magic was wound into our bones and blood. Beyond that, they cared nothing for what we did as long as it caused them no immediate trouble. Honestly, I think it had not yet occurred to them that the law that protects privilege can also be turned around to break it down. We just have to be patient and hardheaded. But had I been a cold mage, even a weak one, I'd never have escaped. They're harsh jailers, especially to their own."

"Are they?"

"I expect their privileged sons and daughters are content. Why would they not be? Those without magic are well trained as clerks, administrators, and soldiers. As for cold mages, the only thing they need fear, so the stories tell us, is becoming too powerful and attracting the notice of the Wild Hunt."

"Then you believe the Wild Hunt serves the unseen courts?"

"The Wild Hunt and the courts are facts that do not need my belief to exist. I know what killed my grandfather."

"I'm sorry to hear of his death in such unpleasant circumstances."

"My thanks. You have a kind heart."

Out of the bramble of conversation beyond the door, a new rhythm was struck, followed by a descending line on the kora underlaid by drawn-out notes on the fiddle. The audience whistled in anticipation.

"Come on," said Brennan, touching my arm. "This should be something."

He pushed open the door. I crept in his wake. Women had crowded into the common room, seated on benches over by the innkeeper's serving bar, while younger men stood along the other wall. The oldsters remained at the center, closest to the hearth. Only Andevai sat out of place, stuck at the left hand of the eldest who, gesturing, called the djeli out of his corner by the fire.

Brennan leaned his broad shoulders against the wall beside the supper room door. I closed the door and stood beside him, wondering if Andevai would look my way, see me, and disapprove, but he sat with elbows on the table and head bent, listening to the old man speak into his ear just as the djeli was listening to the play of the instruments. A smile flashed on Andevai's lips at some comment made by the farmer. I hadn't even imagined he could smile! I had a momentary hallucination that, in these surroundings, my proud husband was comfortable.

The djeli extended his arms, the full sleeves of his robes belling out like a vulture opening its wings. He called out words in a language I did not know but that I could guess was one of the Mande languages, which like the Celtic languages survived in their purest form among bards and djeliw. The conversations in the room stilled. The old farmer sat back, and Andevai looked Up. He saw me just as Brennan bent to speak into my ear.

" The djeli is reminding us that his kind, the masters of speech, hold the traditions of the ancestors. Now he's asking if there is anyone from the Soso lineage here. That's so he won't inadvertently insult anyone when he tells his story, by making the Soso king look bad. He's a Keita djeli and therefore likely to be telling an episode from the Sundiata cycle, in which the Soso king is the enemy and evil besides. So if there is a Soso present, he'll tell a different version, maybe skip over any episode in which the Soso king plays a vindictive role."

Every gaze in the room turned toward Andevai, as if they all knew he would nod and reply with a few words. Which he did, exactly as if their eyes had called gesture and speech from him. A few glanced toward me and as quickly away as the djeli spoke again. The music shifted rhythm so effortlessly that it was like flying along a perfectly smooth road, hooves syncopating and wheels scraping beneath as an anchor pattern, and besides all that, there lit a tip-top-tip-top into the gaps. Looking toward me,

Andevai began to stand as if to come over and scold me. The old farmer put a hand on his elbow and stayed him..

Andevai sat down like a meek child. The djeli launched into his song, his words punctuated at intervals by responses called from the crowd to questions or cues I did ndt recognize or hear. Brennan's attention had shifted entirely to the djeli's song, a tale familiar enough to wrap him in its weave. I was forgotten. Even Andevai's gaze drifted to the djeli, whose gold earrings glinted in the firelight as words poured out of him. The singer commanded the attention of every soul in the common room except mine, for I was floundering in the current of an unknown river.

Also, a faint rhythm not in keeping with the song nagged at my hearing. I stepped away from Brennan and pulled the supper room door open just enough to slip through, closing it after me. Kehinde and Godwik were deep in a technical conversation about katabatic winds.

Chartji looked up as I paused beside the table. "Come to save me from these two and their interminable natural history? I can't abide rat music, I must confess, and I'm not tired enough to fall into a stupor."

I raised a hand to ask for a moment's peace. The troll cocked up her muzzle and bent an eye on me as I crossed to the main window, unlatched one of the shutters at the base, and levered it away from the window. Cold exhaled from the bubbled glass, but I did not need the clarity of expensive glass to perceive that the distant scene of blurred blobs of light was in fact a phalanx of torches being borne along the road out of the south.

I leaned into the glass, night's chill a bite on my skin. I bent my concentration and listened past the tick-tick of sleety drops sliding off the roof to the ground and the creak of a stable door being shoved open and the burr of a pair of voices that, inside a shuttered house, were oblivious to what was going on outside. There! A party of rumbling feet and stamping hooves slowed

with hesitation as a young male voice called to them. At this distance, no person in this inn could have heard his words except for me.

"We're come from Adurnam. Did anyone arrive here before us?"

"A rider came before dusk from Adurnam. Foundered his horse to get here so quick. Is it true what he said? A ship came to Adurnam that sails in the air? And it's been destroyed by those cursed magisters?"

"It's true," replied a different man in a grim voice.

"Are you with the Prince of Tarrant's wardens?"

"No. The prince went to the law court to try to get a legal ruling in his favor. Without a ruling, he's too cowardly to act against a mage House. But some of us aren't cowards. It's time the mages feel the sting of our anger. We've eyewitnesses among US who saw and can identify the cursed cold mage who did it. We almost got him in Adurnam, but he called down a storm and escaped."

"A young magister has taken shelter at the Griffin Inn. It's got no veil of protection to keep you out. But you'll have to act fast to catch him unawares."

My cheek burned against the glass.

A breath of summer's warmth eased in beside me.

"Trouble?" asked Chartji in a low voice.

I jolted back, banging my head against the shutter, then pushed its lower edge farther away so the troll could dip her narrow head in, glimpse the distant torchlight, and duck out again. There flowed from her muzzle a series of clicks and whistles, and Godwik's patter ceased on the instant. Kehinde, too, fell quiet; she shoved her sliding spectacles up her nose. I latched the shutters, feeling chilled to my core.

Chartji cocked her head at me, examining me with one eye, then the other. The movement was itself a question.

"Trouble," I said intelligently.

"Legal trouble?" she asked, tilting her head in that trollish way. "We're experts."

"No. Not precisely."

But I thought, What if I do nothing? What if I let them reach the inn, and what if they are indeed an illegal crew of radicals sent after Andevai Diarisso Haranwy? He has, after all, done a great deal of damage in Adurnam simply because the mage Houses detest the new technology, and he may be responsible for the deaths of people caught in the airship's destruction.

What if I do nothing and let them kill him?

Let them try. They had ridden all this way in pursuit knowing he was a magister. They'd sent a messenger ahead; they already had allies in town, maybe some already in the common room waiting to strike.

But Andevai would not stand idly by. He would defend himself, and it was not in the capacity of cold mages to distinguish the innocent from the guilty within the circle of their power any more than an ice storm can blister some trees in its path and leave others untouched.

If I did nothing, then it was the innocent people gathered in the common room listening to the djeli's tale who would suffer. Probably me, too. But them most of all.

"Peace upon you and all your undertakings," I said to Chartji in the old Kena'ani way.

In perfect mimicry, she said, "Peace upon you."

I put out my hand and took her claw in farewell. "I thank you for your hospitality. I will not forget it. Now I have to go."

I ran to the door and tugged it open, and thanks be to Tank that Andevai looked up, and while I could not see my own expression, he could. We did not know each other at all, not really. We were strangers. But I looked at him, and he rose and spoke briefly to the old man as he stepped over the bench.

"Maestressa Barahal?" said Brennan, looking startled as I strode past him, as if he hadn't noticed me go back into the supper room.

"Fare you well," I said to him over my shoulder. I met Andevai with every gaze in the place sidelong on us, no one wanting to be quite so bold as to stare directly on a cold mage.

He said in an undertone, "What?" and I murmured, "Torches, a big party," and he said, "This way."

We walked to the back of the inn as the djeli rolled on with his tale. The innkeeper at his bar set down a pair of mugs as if he'd meant to offer them to us but thought better of it. Andevai pushed open the door into the kitchen, where a lass about my age looked up, red-faced, from the steam of a big kettle of some sickly sweet brew. Her eyebrows flew up as she gaped at us, but we were already through and out the back door into a kitchen yard coated in frost. I grasped my ghost sword, but I had forgotten my coat and gloves, and it was too late to go back because we were already committed. Out here under the cold sky, I could distinctly hear the clatter of hooves, although Andevai did not yet seem aware of the sound. He cast his gaze first toward the wall of the stables and then toward the woven hazel hurdle that fenced off the rest of the kitchen yard.

He spoke under his breath, as to himself. "Where are those plague-ridden wraiths?"

He whistled four low notes.

I twisted the ghost hilt, and to my utter astonishment, the sword drew smoothly free. The naked blade gleamed, its length and weight perfectly balanced in my hand.

Its light cast an odd luster on Andevai's profile, making him look, for an instant, unsure rather than arrogant. As he stared at the blade, his gaze flared and his chin lifted belligerently. "Where did you get that? That's cold steel. Only mage Houses forge and possess cold steel."

There were many things I could and ought to have said, but instead I smirked. I might be dead by midnight's bell. This might be my only chance to gloat. "It's my black cane. You never saw what it really was."

He grabbed my right wrist, and I braced*, because I thought he meant to wrest the sword out of my left hand, but instead he tugged me after him to the gate of the kitchen yard.

"Do you know how to use it?" he asked.

"I'm a Barahal."

He unbound the rope and shoved open the plaited gate. We staggered onto a muddy lane crackling with frost where wheels had left their imprints. The lane led away behind a block of row houses. He looked skyward, hearing clearly now the approaching hooves, the ring of harness, a man's call: "There's the Griffin Inn!"

"They might be a party of innocent travelers caught late on the road," he said as we trotted briskly down the lane toward open ground. The sky was overcast except in the north, where stars glittered.

"No. They're looking for you. They mean to kill you for destroying the airship."

"We should never have stopped here. How well can you actually use a sword?"

Gracious Melqart, but the man had a knack for being annoying at the most inconvenient times!

"Barahals begin training at the age of seven. It's in the family, if you will, rather like cold magic runs in the House lineages." Yet honesty compelled me, as if the sword's cold steel spelled my tongue. "But I've never fought in anything but the practice hall."

"Here." He cut a hard left onto a narrow lane, blocks of houses on either side.

"Where is the carriage?" I said to his back as I followed. What

I really meant, I dared not say out loud: Where is the eru, with its wintry gale? "Where are we going?"

"To the turnpike. Quiet." Bending his head like a man bowed by heavy thoughts, he stared at the ground, lips moving but no sound emerging that I could hear.

And I could hear plenty. Music drifted from the inn falling farther away behind us; the song chased on as the story unfolded, drums a pattern grounding my running feet. A voice called from an upper story, "There! There!" Shouts and cries rose as our pursuers reached the temple square. There was no possible way that we, on foot, could outrun them.

A horn's cry rose shrill and clear, and a great shout as from a host of soldiers shattered the night on the turnpike ahead. Horses whinnied, hooves pounded, and a whistle pierced the air.

"Move," said Andevai in a hoarse whisper. "I can't hold this

long,

He lurched on Up the rutted lane at an awkward lope, as if his limbs were not truly tinder the command of his mind. I followed a step behind, and once I had to grab his elbow to stop him from tumbling headlong when he stumbled over a rut. As I steadied him, I saw, on the road ahead where it crossed in front of our dark lane, a company of stern soldiers armed in the House style: The soldiers carried crossbows and spears and wore quilted coats; their horses were caparisoned in the bold designs favored by the Houses, manes braided and stiffened, legs ornamented with bracelets woven of falling threads of fabric that shimmered as the horses paced forward in a stately measure. A House standard hung with amulets stabbed the air within the ranks.

Andevai stumbled again, and I caught him as he winced. "Blacksmith… fire's mage… powerful. Fighting me."

The soldiers shouted in unison and pushed forward.

"Aren't those House soldiers?" I demanded. "Shouldn't we call to them?"

"Illusion," he hissed. "Must move, get to the inn ruins. Hold them off there until the carriage reaches us."

Two figures darted into the lane behind us. By the way they moved, I knew at once that they carried weapons. Yet it seemed they had not yet seen us within the darkness; they were, perhaps, looking beyond us toward the turnpike where the House soldiers still rode past in a seamless illusion.

"Stay here," I said to Andevai. I broke into a run, grateful for the excellent cut of my riding clothes, which did not impede my strides or my reach.

Too late they registered my approach. I parried a clumsy thrust from the closer one, then shifted sideways to strike a blow upward with the hilt alongside his head that dropped him to his knees. I spun with a backhand sweep that caught low on my blade a staff blow aimed at my head by the other man. Grappling, I kicked him as hard as I could in the knee. He shrieked and collapsed backward. I bolted back the way I had come. Andevai had staggered to a halt; the cursed fool was pulling a useless knife from under his jacket.

"Move!" I barely forced out the word. Sweat broke over my body, and I heaved once but nothing came up.

Andevai moved. He ran down the lane and I pelted after, glancing back once, but I'd laid them down well enough; obviously they were not trained soldiers but rather crude, angry men without much more experience than fistfights outside an inn after an evening's wallow in ale. We reached the junction of lane and wide turnpike. To our left, red fire burned in the square where the doors of the smithy were laid open, white sparks blazing as they showered out of the door and spat onto the vanguard of the House soldiers, but amazingly the illusion held under this rain of sparks. I ran after Andevai toward the ruins.

Men shouted in confusion, their shattered cries of disorder and fear like a counter-rhythm to the patter of drums that

fluttered at the edge of my hearing. Was the djeli still singing? Music is its own spell. Who knows what power it wields?

We dashed along the road, the confrontation falling away behind us. Andevai fell onto his knees in the char and ashes of the burned inn, hacking as he bent double. I halted between the stone pillars that had once marked the gate into the inn yard. The lintel slashed a black line above my head. The gates had been smashed and hauled into the courtyard. A harsh light glowed above the temple square; I had an awful premonition that the smithy had caught fire.

Far away, across the river, I heard a bell ringing.

The rain had stopped, but I shivered as the chill seeped into my bones. The sound of footfalls brought me spinning around, my hand so cold it was hard to grasp the hilt. I groaned. There came my assailants, one limping behind and the other jogging ahead. I could not suck in enough air. I didn't think I could kill. And if I couldn't, what would they do to us?

Andevai appeared beside me. "Give me the sword," he said.

The two men closed inexorably on us, big, burly, unstoppable men who held their weapons like they knew how to kill with them. In another six steps they would cut us down.

I recalled words scrawled in one of my father's journals:

My thanks to the gods that fortune has spared me from that most terrible act, that I have never taken another persons life.

"It is yours for this one act." I pressed the sword into Andevai's right hand.

Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage is a wicked thing.

Two strokes, and they fell, dead.

He wiped his brow with his left hand, his expression pure in its anger and not remotely directed at me. Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage severs the soul from the body, so common wisdom has it: They need only draw blood, the merest cut, to kill you.

In the distance, I heard the sounds of a company in disorder, shouting, confusion, a pair of whistles calling for scattered men to form ranks. I stared at the corpses sprawled in the gateway, a step away from me. A wind stirred ash. Andevai looked east down the road.

"Late!" he exclaimed with withering scorn. His brow furrowed as he looked at the sword in his hand. Then he looked at me, and his eyebrows raised, and he offered the sword, hilt first. "If you think I'm going to try to keep it, then you don't understand the properties of cold steel."

"My thanks," I said hbarsely as I snatched it out of his hand.

There came the carriage out of the night, the horses gleaming rather like the sword, as if they, too, were forged of cold steel. Blessed Tanit! Could they be? Or maybe that breathlike mist rising from their nostrils was akin to the exhalations of steam, dangerous and powerful if the pressure grows too high. The coachman hauled the vehicle to a stop in front of us, and the footman leaped down from the back to slam open the steps and wrench back the door.

"Where were you?" demanded Andevai.

"There's more trouble here than what you see," said the coachman. "We discovered a cache of rifles, several hundred in crates-"

"Rifles! Within a two days' journey of Four Moons House? Catherine, get in!"

I clambered in and sagged onto the bench. I sheathed my sword as Andevai climbed up and dropped onto the seat opposite me.

"Rifles!" he said, to the air, to the ancestors, to no one.

The footman closed door and stair; the carriage creaked and shifted as he-she?-leaped onto the back. Andevai slammed back the shutter and stuck out his head.

"What did you do with the rifles?" he called.

"Trouble coming!" called the coachman with a laugh. "Your illusion has melted, Magister."

"It will have vanished when I touched the sword," retorted Andevai. "Not because I lost control of the illusion! Or was too weak to sustain it. Cold steel cuts soul and magic alike. You know that."

"I don't think he was doubting you," I muttered under my breath. "Just reporting a fact."

"The rifles are so much scrap metal now, Magister," said the footman from up behind.

Andevai glanced at me, then closed the shutter so hard the carriage resounded. I twisted the hilt of my ghost sword, and the blade slipped back inside its intangible sheath, although it still appeared doubled in my vision. As the carriage slewed around, he pulled a wisp of illumination like a disembodied flame out of the air and stared at the sword with narrowed eyes.

"It looks like a black cane," he said irritably. "I can think of no possible way the Barahal family could possess cold steel. Where did your people get it?"

I kept my mouth closed tight as a burst of voices shouting in frustrated outrage rose from the town behind us. The carriage gained speed along the road, our ride so smooth I began to wonder if we were actually running along on the surface of the turnpike or if we had risen above it on a tide of magic. My head swam dizzily. My teeth began to chatter.

He swept the thick fur blanket off the seat beside him and thrust it onto my lap. "You look like you need this. You may as well rest, as it's obvious from that mulish expression you're not going to tell me anything." He stared at his hands as if staring at death, his brows drawn down and his expression resolving again into his habitual scornful anger.

I scooted into the corner farthest from him and bundled myself into the blanket, wrapping it tightly around me because I was shuddering. Maybe most of my convulsive shivering was from the bitter cold and maybe it was just exhaustion that had drained all warmth from me. I rested my head against the padded side and closed my eyes.

Perhaps I dozed.

At some indeterminate point, I opened my eyes to see him, wedged in the opposite corner in his smudged and disheveled traveling clothes, with no coat or blanket, staring at his hands as he wove light into helrriets and horses, let them dissolve, and pulled new illusions into miniature form.

"The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion," he muttered to himself as he manipulated the patterns of light lifting and shadow falling.

Tiny soldiers faded, and a face appeared: lips, nose, eyes, and a shadow's skein of long black hair. My face. He was weaving my face in light.

Before he could glance up to study me and see me looking, I shut my eyes.

The carriage rocked, jostling me, then steadied.

With my eyes closed, I could not fight off exhaustion. Thought faded.

When I woke again, he was asleep, propped as uncomfortably upright in his corner as I was in mine. It was the first time I had seen him asleep, his face in repose. Bee would have proclaimed his lineaments handsome: his lean face set off by the beard trimmed very, very short around a well-shaped jawline, his long black eyelashes, his skin the brown of raw umber seen in painters' studios.

Bur Bee had not been forced to marry him. It is easy to admire

what you must not endure, as my father had written years ago during the Iberian war.

My husband had killed two men in front of my eyes, and how many more in Adurnam's Rail Yard I would likely never know. I fixed the ghost sword in its sheath between my body and the carriage and shut my eyes, but could not find rest.