Cold Magic

16

It is an odd thing, truly, to feel a twinge of compassion for a person you have no reason to wish to feel sympathy for. An odd thing. We halted at another stone pillar and made another offering. Then we drove up a gentle slope in a straight line as the orchard fell away behind us. The great house, with its central round tower and main edifice with a two-storied wing flown out to the right, loomed before me like a beast waiting to devour me. Whatever words I might have been thinking of saying expired on my tongue.

Or so I thought. For then they abruptly flew out of my mouth. "You were a common laborer? A slave to the land? To Four Moons House?"

"Just keep silence, Catherine," he said in a flat voice. "Can you manage that much?"

I closed my lips on silence, its taste like ashes.

The main estate of Four Moons House was a palace, in its own way, with round rooms at either end and its bulk stretching behind. The carriage pulled up before the grand escalade. Out of the interior swarmed a host of people who formed two lines for a formal greeting.

An elderly man wearing white robes and the gold earrings of a djeli limped out, leaning on a cane, speaking in a kind of singsong chant. "He returns! He returns! With his power, he was sent out. With his power, he returns. It is sure he has accomplished what was demanded of him." Here he looked at me, and naturally he took a step back, as if surprised by what he saw. The scarf that looked so handsome on the House women made me feel ridiculous.

Up the stairs I walked, looking neither to my left nor right, keeping my head high; that was the sum of what I could manage. I could not look people in the eye; it might not be the custom here. I was also afraid of what I might see in their expressions.

A hand to be shaken, in the radical way, or a kiss between equals as was the custom of my people; there was none of that here. There must be giving way, the lesser before the greater and I in Andevai's wake, or at least within the ripples made by his passing. We mounted the steps, made an offering of water at the threshold, crossed under the door, and passed beneath a roof so high that birds flew in the rafters. To the right and then the left, through corridors wide enough to be chambers and all with heat rising from the floor. Left again, and right, and I found myself standing in a large room beside a high bank of arched windows over windowpaned doors. The glass looked over an expansive and prettily landscaped garden enclosed by the wings of the house, and a high stone wall.

"Catherine," Andevai said, grasping my left elbow with his right hand.

I wished I had my sword as he guided me toward closed double doors reinforced with strips of sullen iron. My father had written: The strength of the most powerful cold mages can be measured by the magister's ability to extinguish fires and shatter iron.

A servant opened the right side door. Andevai stepped back to allow the elderly djeli to go in first. Then I had to walk beside him. My throat was choked with tears. My pulse was a hammer of sound in my ears, like runaway horses.

The mansa was standing at a table beneath a rank of

windows, surveying papers strewn across some kind of architectural drawing unrolled and fixed at its edges to lie flat. He could be no one else. He was tall and heavily built. He looked neither old nor young. His face was black and his eyes blacker, although his hair, close-cut, was a coarse, tightly curled red. Maybe he resembled the warden of the gate. Maybe they were cousins, or maybe they weren't related at all but simply both descendants of blacksmiths and sorcerers, their ancestors the mixed children of the Afric south and the Celtic north who had made common cause long ago. They had countered the power of chieftains and princes but had not become lords themselves, at least not in name. For after all, the only son of a prince may rule after his father whether he is a good prince or an incompetent one, but if the only son of a magister is not a mage, then nothing can raise him to that position.

The mansa looked at Andevai, and the mansa looked at me, and I stopped dead because my heart could not beat and my feet could not move. Maybe they spoke formal greetings, the three of them between themselves. I could not be sure because I was empty.

Then the mansa spoke directly to me. His voice was a voice, nothing special and nothing strange in it, except that it commanded me.

"Are you the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter?"

"I am the eldest," I whispered, eyes cast down, remembering Aunt's words.

"You are the eldest Adurnam Hassi Barahal daughter?" he repeated.

"I am the eldest."

"You are the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter?"

"I'm the eldest."

"If I may, Mansa," said the djeli. "What she says is no lie, but I am troubled. If you will allow me, may 1 ask?"

The mansa nodded.

"Repeat these words as I speak them," said the djeli in his resonant voice. " 'I am the eldest daughter born into the Adur-nam Hassi Barahal house.' "

"I am the eldest-" daughter. I meant to speak the word, but no sound came out of my mouth. "I am the eldest-" Hassi Barahal. Still no voice emerged. "But I am older than Bee is," I said hoarsely.

"There was another one?" asked the djeli. "Another daughter of the Hassi Barahal family, in the house, when you were taken?"

My face burned hot and my hands burned cold. Lips sealed, my father had said. Tell no one, my mother had said. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.

"There was another girl of the right age in the house?" demanded the mansa.

Andevai blinked, and blinked again. "Yes, Mansa."

"You asked three times?"

Stammering, Andevai forced out words. "Th-three times. They said to me exactly what she said to you. She is the eldest. So I married her, by the binding marriage, sealed by a bard, just as you commanded me to do, Mansa."

"And did you first ask, specifically, is this one the right girl or is that one the right girl? The girl we wrote the contract for?"

After a silence, he said in a chastened voice, "No, Mansa. I did not ask specifically about the other girl."

In the depths of the earth, wreathed in fire, lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All Dragons. Dreaming, she stirs, and the earth shakes, and volcanoes spit ash and fire, and the world changes.

In the depths of the ocean, deep in the black abyss, there drifts in a watery stupor the Taninim, called also leviathan. Yet they may be roused, and if they are so, then the lashing of their tails

smashes ships into splinters and drives their sundered hulks under the waves while the shores are swept clean in a tidal fury.

In the. depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt, and when it is woken, all tremble in fear.

So we are told.

But when a magister powerful enough to rule as the head of a mage House is struck rigid with fury and he is standing not ten paces from you, then you will wish you had to face one of the others instead.

The house was built of stone, and yet it shuddered. Glass in the paned windows cracked. The iron bands on the door groaned, as though shrinking in fear. Beneath the floor, ceramic shattered.

"What a fool you are!" said the mansa.

"Mansa," said the djeli, "you can send out a young person on your errand to rest your feet, but it won't rest your heart. Let me discover what has happened." He turned to face me, extended a hand palm up in a gesture that might have seemed reassuring if it were not a spell to call my voice to speak truth. "Is yours the blood of the Hassi Barahal clan?"

I opened my mouth to speak, and then I closed it, because the word I wanted to say would not come out. All I could say was, "So I have always been told."

A sick dread crawled in my belly. I swayed, sure I was about to faint. Andevai stared at me as if I were a serpent that had reared up to confront him. To contest him.

To cheat him.

"They said-!" he exclaimed. "They said she was the eldest Barahal daughter."

"Is that what they said?" asked the djeli. "They must have chosen their words carefully, knowing the contract was sealed by magic."

"What are you saying?" Andevai whispered, face ashen, his triumph in ruins.

"It seems there is no Barahal blood in her at all," said the mansa in a voice so soft it should not have made me shudder like a leaf tossed in a tremendous gale, and yet it might as well have been a roar. "And you, Andevai, you are too much a fool to have seen the trap even as they sprang it. Flow they must be laughing now. I wonder, how have we transgressed that a child born into a village of simpleminded field hands, the children of the children of slaves, should be a vessel of such abundant cold magic? And yet, in the end, one may as well have tried to train a dog to dance."

"But I destroyed the airship-"

"That was the lesser of your assignments. The marriage was the crucial one. So much at stake! And you brought us this useless female!"

"Mansa," Andevai said desperately.

"Get rid of her."

Andevai grabbed my arm and dragged me to the door, pushed it open, and shoved me out. I staggered a few steps before I caught myself short and turned, knowing I must go back inside and ask a question or demand an explanation.

Andevai shut the door in my face. I sank to my knees, sagged against the door, and winced back from the touch of iron bands so cold they burned.

There is no Barahal blood in her at all. All strength sapped from me, I collapsed forward along the floor. No Barahal blood at all.

I lay this charge on you as well, Aunt had said to me when I was only six years old, when I had come to live with them, that you must protect Bee, for there will come a time when she will need your protection.

Four Moons House had wanted Bee all along.

That being so, what did it make me?

The sacrifice.