Cold Magic

18

The words were simple, the silence that followed complex, ugly, smothering. It was so quiet I was sure I heard my husband blink.

"I beg your pardon, Mansa. I have not understood you."

"You heard what I said."

I pushed up gently to hands and knees, careful to make sure my head did not spin, but I was not at all dizzy. My heart was cold steel. I shifted to my feet and walked to the corner, a hand tracing the wall because I was part of the wall and nothing more than the wall, and after that I was window, nothing more, and then I was the door that did not open, curse it, but the next door did. I slipped through and closed it behind me and was out in the garden, all this really before I realized I had developed the thought, I. Have. To. Run. Now.

The garden was a rectangle, with its length extending to a wall beyond which rose evergreen trees. Several paths wound between tall yew hedges, perfect for skulking, so I ducked behind the screen of densely packed leaves and worked my way like a scuttling rat from hedge to hedge toward the far wall.

A bell rang, and I jerked as if a rope had caught me up short. But it was only a calling bell, because in response I heard the shouts and laughter of children racing down interior corridors of the wing that lay to my right. I reached the high wall that

bounded the garden. It had no gate whatsoever and was far too high for me to climb over.

I had to go through the house.

I saw a sturdy double door set next to the corner where the wing to my right met the garden wall. Herel paused, panting, my hand on the latch.

"Catherine!" Andevai's voice carried into my prison.

Kill her.

I had no sword, only my wits and determination. My hand tightened on the latch, and it clicked blessedly free. Mouthing a prayer to Tanit, I slipped into a gloomy corridor. Halfway down the long corridor, children pushed through an open door in a mob of chattering and giggling that subsided as they vanished into whatever rooms lay beyond. None had seen me in the shadows. At the opposite end, where light spilled through windows, doors stood ajar into the main building. I could not go back into the garden or ahead into the main house.

I followed where the children had led and found myself in a narrow corridor lined with heavy coats hanging from posts on one side and a series of doors on the other. From behind the closed doors I heard the noise of children-ranging from the boisterous, cheerful young to the gossipy intense olders- settling down to lessons. I had fled into the school wing.

A new bell rang with an alarming clangor. Men shouted in the distance with deep voices full of malevolent purpose. A breath of shiveringly cold air stirred, like an invisible icy hand searching behind the furniture and down unseen halls for what it had lost.

Kill her.

A matron's voice called sharply, "In your seats! That's the warning bell. In your seats! Silence!"

A foot scraped softly on the plank floor. Too late I shoved

back behind a layer of hanging coats. A hand pulled aside a fur-lined sleeve and a small face peered at me.

"Who are you?" the child whispered with a puzzled frown. A boy with a brown face and close-cropped black hair, he was neither scared nor angry. He looked like he might be very sweet, as long as he liked you.

"I'm Cat," I said with an attempt at a friendly smile, nothing too pathetic or false, I hoped.

"To hide," he added, "you have to move four coats down and stand where the thread is. That's the concealing spot they made."

"That who made?"

"It's a holding illusion," he said with a bright grin. "The matrons say they're too young to weave magic, but they're not, and they promised to teach me if I keep their secret. Go there. It'll hide you. No one knows but me and Sissy and Cousin."

Footsteps drummed elsewhere, the flooring trembling with an echo of their movement. Soon they would come this way.

"Maester Kendall!" a woman's voice called, and he skipped off, opened the door of the last schoolroom, and plunged inside to a fall of excited laughter from his cohort.

Men were stomping this way. I sidled four coats down and stopped when a thread tickled my nose. There I stood, no more than a coat myself, with a cozy fur lining and a heavy wool outer

shell, just right for wearing out in the winter air____________________

So why,

then, were coats hanging so conveniently in this corridor if not to be used by children at their break? Which meant that either they played in the garden, where their shouts and laughter might entertain-or annoy-the mansa, or there was another exit to the outside from this wing.

"Search the schoolrooms!" barked a male voice.

Like the other coats, I did not move.

Down they swept, footfalls shuddering on the Hooting, doors

flung open, childish voices raised with questions, matrons tersely demanding apologies. Two young men in soldiers' livery paced down the coats, rippling them with strong hands, and yet… they walked right past me. At length the searchers satisfied themselves that no fugitive lurked in the schoolrooms. With no explanation to the matrons-who asked for none-they slammed shut the double entry doors and locked them from the other side.

There I stood, shrouded by coats. Through the now-open doors, I listened to the day's lesson, which was apparently the same in every age cohort's classroom, made simple for the little ones and extensive for the eldest.

A history lesson.

Listen, my father had written. Listen to hear if they are telling the truth or only part of the truth, for that is the lesson of history: that the victors tell the tale of their triumph in a manner to grant accolades to themselves and heap blame upon their rivals. Ask yourself if part of the story is being withheld by design or ignorance.

Only he was not my father. It was all a lie.

Tears wove runnels down my cheeks as one matron's voice above all the others droned on.

"We in the Houses are a tree grown from two roots. We are twin, one born in the north and one born in the south. Our ancestors in the south fled the salt plague and at the end of their journey met our ancestors in the north. We are Celt and Mande, rich in spirit. Those among us who can handle the nyama of the spirit world joined together to form the Houses. Thus, we are grown into what we have now become, we who can grip the handle of power. This all of you know, for it is the story of your ancestors. But there are other peoples in the world who are known to us, each with their own qualities and strengths____________________

"

I cautiously stuck out my head and peered down the corridor to my left. The outline of a door was discernible, a gateway leading out.

A schoolroom door snicked quietly open, bringing with it a swell of matronly voice listing the various well-known peoples of the world and their well-known characteristics: The noble Kushites are gifted rulers, wise and tolerant; the Greeks are philosophers and lovers of art; the Romans are masters of war and engineering; the cunning Phoenicians have plied the seas of commerce for untold generations. The door shut, but the recital went on in muted tones as two girls padded down the corridor and halted in front of me. One had long hair braided tightly and an intelligent gaze in a face whose lineaments and complexion resembled those of the younger boy I'd spoken to earlier, while the other had a white face and blond hair. Nevertheless, there was something similar about their eyes.

They considered me and then looked at each other, their gazes speaking without words. They were young, perhaps twelve winters, fresh faced and healthy and blooming. Then the little beasts each stuck out a hand, palm up, asking for payment.

"You must be what they're looking for," said the dark one, with the innocent smile of a child who understands the blackmailer's art.

"Pay us," said the fair one, "and we'll pretend we never saw you."

"Where does that door lead?" I murmured.

"Are you bargaining with us?" asked the dark one, her eyes wide in surprise.

"Knowing how loud we can scream?" added the fair one reasonably.

I knew how to handle girls like this. Never let them think they held the whip of life and breath over you, or you'd be cursed.

"Of course I'm bargaining," I retorted in a low but suitably intense voice. "I'm Phoenician. We have to bargain. It's in our blood."

They grinned, as bright as a burst of lantern light on a murky night. I braced myself, expecting them to giggle, but they had exceptional self-control. Clearly, they were used to sneaking around where they weren't supposed to be.

"I know how to unlock the door," said the dark one.

"You can get outside and go through the park," added the fair one. "But once you're outside, we can't help you."

"Why are you willing to help at all?"

The fair one sighed and rolled her eyes with the dramatic glamor that wears itself like a burden. "I'm a diviner," she said with the weariness of ohe who has already had to explain this too many times. "Or I will be, when I grow up. Of course I know these things."

"We discussed what we should do," added the dark one. "You're no danger to us, so we're willing to let you go. But we need something in exchange."

I could not give them the bracelet Bee had given me. Beyond the clothes I was wearing, I possessed only one other object: the locket in whose heart nestled a tiny portrait of my father. But Daniel Hassi Barahal was not my father. So what would I be giving up by giving it to her? Only my hopes and dreams.

I slipped the chain over my head and handed the silver locket to the fair one. She popped the clasp and squinted at the portrait in the dim light, her fingers tracing the fine silverwork and the chased filigree that decorated the back.

Her frown was soft in the shadows, and for an instant she looked far older than her tender years. "Not what I expected."

Her words made me shiver, like a memory of the eru's greet-ing, but instead of explaining herself, she handed the locket to the dark one, who examined it with a jeweler's precise measure.

"Done," she said with a nod. She dropped the chain over her neck and pressed the locket down beneath the loose wool jacket that was buttoned up to her neck.

With no further speech, they skated along the polished wood floor in their soft indoor slippers. I took in a breath for courage and hurried after them. The dark girl with her long legs outpaced her fair cousin and slid to a halt before the heavy door. She bent down by the elaborate lock with a smile that reminded me of Bee's most mischievous expression. She seemed to be whispering to the bat's head that adorned the upper part of the lock. The fair one stationed herself at the wall to keep watch.

Was that a glamor shivering in the air, briefly seen as a net of shadow and light? Then it was gone. She slid the crossbar free and tugged open the door, and I slipped outside onto a vestibule and thence out through another door-this one unlatched- into a cold so sere that my lips went numb. I peered cautiously over a stately manicured wood composed of pine and spruce shouldering skyward beneath gray clouds. Bundled in quilted coats ornamented with brightly colored belts, soldiers ran through the trees; their heads were wrapped in cloth against the cold, only their eyes visible beneath red-brimmed hats like so many red-capped finches.

The woods were closed to me. I could not go back into the house. I hugged the wall, became the wall in its dressed smoothness, and ran in the other direction. I had to do what they would not expect me to do: I raced for the grand escalade. If I were bold, I might conceal myself by walking out on the same carriage road I had come in. I could become the pale graveled stone that paved the road. Either no one would see me, or the mansa and his djeli would see right through my pathetic veil and then I would be dead.

At the corner where the wing met the facade, my feet crunched in a spray of gravel. I halted to steady my breath and dig deep for the glamor. All now depended on my ability to veil myself with a glamor.

A flare of complicated emotion burned through me. Who

was I, if not the eldest daughter of the Adurnam Hassi Barahal house? Why could I hide myself, listen, and see down chains of magic? Why had my mother told me to keep it a secret? Why had an eru called me "cousin"? Had Aunt and Uncle devised the scheme to sacrifice me in place of Bee? Had Daniel Hassi Barahal and Tara Bell been in on the cheat all along? Was the story that they were my loving mother and father an invented fiction that I had swallowed whole? Was I really an unwanted, useless, and expendable orphan plucked from the streets?

Wouldn't it be easier to be dead than alone? Yet my heart beat too strongly to give up. What I felt was not precisely anger, nor was it blinding grief. It was something deeper, and more ancient, as determined as rock and as rooted as the great trees whose spirits animate the forest.

I would not die for their convenience.

White spun in the air. It had begun to snow. I could be snow. I drifted with the flakes onto the graveled court spreading like a pool beyond the granite escalade. No one would expect such a bold ploy. In front of the eyes of watching soldiers, I paced the measure of lazy snow, and they did not see me.

But someone else did.

Hooves made a crackling din as a carriage rolled around the curve of the drive. The coachman dragged the horses to a stop a stone's throw from me. The footman leaped down from the back and flung open the carriage door without lowering the steps.

From away behind the kitchen wing, dogs yipped and set up barking, released to the hunt. What was concealed to their sight they might track with their keen noses. Against dogs, I had no chance.

The eru looked at me, captured my gaze. "The bonds of kinship demand I aid you, if I can."

The coachman did not look at me-his gaze gathered in the

soldiers and servants crowding expectantly on the escalade, some of whom were staring curiously at the carriage and others lifting their gazes in search of the approaching dogs-but the invitation was clear.

"You must obey them if they command you to hand me over to them," I said hoarsely, "for you are servants of Four Moons House."

The coachman snorted.

"Are you so sure our situation is what it has seemed to you to be?" asked the eru.

The soldiers stirred, parting to make way for the djeli. No glamor I possessed would shield me from the djeli's sight, his handle of power whose chains reached into the spirit world.

I leaped up into the carriage. The eru shut the door behind me as shouts rang from the stairs and the carriage began to move. My cane was laid across one of the padded seats. I grasped the hilt, feeling the sword's power through my palm.

"Halt!" cracked a command, and the carriage jolted to a stop as if it had run into an iron wall.

Was that the mansa's power?

The carriage rocked beneath me as a moving body jostled it, and a whispery sound tickled my ears with unseen feathers. There were two doors in the carriage: the one Andevai and I had always entered and exited by, and the other one, the one whose shutters he had told me I could not open. Could not, or must not?

The unopened door latch shifted now, clicking down, just as a hand jostled the latch of the door behind me that I had entered through.

"I saw a shadow enter the coach," cried a male voice, not one I recognized, "right after the footman opened the door."

"Open!" commanded the djeli.

Fear hurts behind your eyes, like bright sun shining. I licked

my lips as the other door, the door Andevai had forbidden me, cracked to let in a skirl of wind that cut with knives. I felt my skin opening, blades slicing shallow cuts as blood oozed like tears, but when I touched my cheeks, they were dry.

"Hurry," said a voice on that wind, the eru's voice, deep and strong. "Until the mansa's hand is forced by stronger chains to release this carriage, we cannot move."

As one door opened behind me, I plunged out onto the other side. A blast of wind slammed shut the carriage door behind me.

The carriage and I rested on a rise within an ancient forest of spruce, the wheels of the carriage fitted perfectly within a rutted track that cut away through the trees. Far away, down the direction Andevai and I had come earlier in the day, I saw a single stone pillar, surely the same one where we had poured an offering. The managed orchards and deciduous trees of the estate were missing. In my hand, in daylight, I held a sword whose blade had the hard sheen of steel. In this place, it looked perfectly ordinary, although in the world I knew it appeared as a sword only at night.

Impossible as it seemed, I had crossed over.

In tales and song, the spirit world exists in perpetual summer. Not here.

Here I stood in a landscape etched so hard by winter that the trees seem scratched on a copper plate against a sky whose grayish white pallor made me wonder if the blue had been drained from it as one might drain water from a tub. No sun's disk was visible in what I took for a cloudless sky. As my eyes adjusted to the glare, I realized the track had a shimmer as fine as if silver thread were woven into the earth, a trembling current of magic coursing along its length.

"Cousin, run down to the pillar. There, speak these words: As 1 am bound, let those bound to me as kin come to my aid.'

Quickly. We'll pick you up there. Whatever you do, do not leave the path."

The eru blazed, a nimbus of bright orange and flaring blue roaring off her skin. Her face still wore a human shape, but her aspect was so bright she was difficult to look upon. Her third eye was the most ordinary thing about her.

"Run," said the coachman. He looked no different than he had before, solid and imperturbable. The horses steamed exactly as a china kettle steams when water is boiling inside.

Grasping my sword more tightly, I cautiously emerged from behind the reassuring bulk of the carriage. Of the massive building itself, I saw no sign at all. According to the tales my father had recorded, it is life-spirit-that interpenetrates both worlds. Transparent wisps as fragile as the wings of ghostly moths flickered in the air, the souls of human beings alive in the physical world, soldiers and servants running to the escalade that existed only in the world I had just left. Farther back, within the space that would in the physical world mark his audience chamber, the mansa's spirit blazed as brightly as that of the eru. He had not pursued me. Why should he, when he had others to hunt for him?

The spirit flames of other cold mages moved toward the front of the house at the call of horn and hounds. I could not recognize my husband's spirit among the gathering cold mages. All I could tell was that threads of power laced them, knotting and tangling through the unseen barrier that separated the two worlds.

The threads pulsed as power was drawn out of the spirit world into their bodies: The spirit world fed them.

No wonder they were so powerful.

Yet they were still blind. Cold mages cannot see through the veil between worlds.

Rut djeliw can.

The djeli stood at the other door, holding it open as he looked into the empty interior of the carriage. Like the coachman, he looked perfectly ordinary to my vision, just as he had in the mansa's chamber, no glamor, just an elderly man wearing pale robes and gold earrings. He looked through. Somehow he looked past the closed door, and he saw me. He spoke to an unseen person behind him, but I heard nothing although his lips moved. No doubt he was alerting the soldiers and lesser mages, telling them to fetch the mansa.

They will not have me.

I ran.

My feet crunched on what I had mistaken for the glitter of magic but was actually a skin of frost atop the soil. Yet with each step away from the house, the brighter the frost shone, the harder the light became that illuminated the spirit world. A hawk's high call pierced from the heavens like a spear in my heart. A body flashed within the trees, then another. Cold is not just a temperature; it is also fear. A pack of wolves coursed alongside me, loping parallel to the path, tongues lolling, their breath the only warm thing I felt. They were huge, shaggy creatures fit for the bitter winters, fashioned to drag down the great beasts who roamed the barren land. My father had written in his journals of watching dire wolves cut out and run to death a woolly rhinoceros.

Were the wolves pacing me in aid of the mansa? Running me to death? Or were they merely denizens of the spirit world, eager to eat a weak creature like myself who had strayed across? To feed on her, as the cold mages fed on the spirit world.

One lunged for me, and I yelped and stumbled sideways. The weight of my flight pressed against a curtain of air, almost enough to halt me. But my left foot came down off the track and at once, impossibly, a wolf appeared there to snap at my exposed boot. I have good reflexes, and good training. I jerked

that foot back onto the path and at the same time unsheathed the sword and slashed at the wolf's muzzle, the tip of my sword grazing its jowls.

With a yelp, it twisted away from my stab. Blood welled in its fur. It tensed, ready to lunge in for the kill. My breath came in bursts, a mist like the tremor of my spirit with each panting exhalation. I raised my sword between us. The wolf did not leap after me onto the track. They waited, crowding close, every cruel gaze fixed on me. They could not cross onto the path.

A shrill whistle jolted me. I threw a glance over my shoulder to see a vast shadow roiling down the track like the approach of a storm. I could see no sign of the place I had started running from, the ground where the mansa and his retainers had crowded very like the wolves waiting to rip out my heart and eat my entrails. I saw only the surge of a storm bearing down on me.

I ran. I was so frightened I felt almost as if I had sprouted wings, I ran so fast.

The storm raced at my back, a thundering gale made cacophonous with the howl of wind, but there was also a shrieking wail like a tortured spirit being whipped forward. The ground beneath my feet began to sprout flakes of ice as sharp as obsidian, cutting into my boots. The stone pillar rose before me, an obelisk like a nail of stone spearing up into the heavens and so tall I could not discern its point.

I leaped up onto the squared base and sheathed my sword, tucking it firmly through the waistband of my riding skirt. I wrapped my arms around the pillar, turned my face into the carved face of the stone, and clung there with all my strength as the gale hit.

If I had fallen naked into a lightless pit and had barrels filled with crushed ice and red-hot razor blades poured over me, it would have been easier to endure. Was this the mansa's power seeking to tear me free? To rip me from the path so his creatures

could eat me and thereby consume my spirit and cause my death in the mortal world?

The cold was so profound, like the winter wind out of the barren lands that could freeze a man where he stood, that I could hold on only by falling in my mind into the stone, becoming stone, joining with the reliefs carved into the granite face. Impervious to cold.

Pillars mark crossroads, a branching of a track, a choice of direction.

Death lay behind me. What lay ahead or to either side I could not know. But I refused to die, and furthermore, I would not let Four Moons House get hold of Bee. Whatever else I knew- and that wasn't much-I was absolutely sure Bee had never been involved in this scheme in any way, except as its victim, like me.

I would never let Four Moons House get her.

Never. Not as long as I had breath.

I flattened myself into the carvings, one grain among many seething within the spire like so many trapped sparks. Birthed in fire and crushed beneath the implacable weight of the earth, I was stone, immovable, untouchable. But I had a voice.

"As I am bound," I said into the stone, "let those bound to me as kin come to my aid."

Between one breath and the next, the carriage rolled up beside me.

"Cousin." Within the scream of the storm, I heard the eru's voice as clearly as I had often heard the bells ringing out over Adurnam in their nightly conversation. "We are here, beside you.

I had trusted all my young life in the memory of my father, the bold adventurer. I had trusted the care and concern of my aunt and uncle, the generosity of the clan toward one of its daughters.

What allows us to trust? Kinship ought to, but it does not always.

What, then, causes trust to flower? A smile, perhaps. An offering of tea and bread to a hungry, chilled, and confused young woman, made without expectation of return.

Pillars mark crossroads, a branching of a track, a choice of direction.

I leaped down, groping. A strong hand met mine and closed over it, pulling. I slammed into the side of the carriage, found a latch, opened a door, and as the hand released mine, I crawled in, my skirt tangling in my sword. I fell hard onto one of the benches.

Opposite me, still and silent and calm, sat the djeli.

I wrestled the sword from my skirt, set my hand on the hilt.

The djeli raised a hand. "Listen," he said, and there was that in his voice that expected one to stop and to hear. "I am no threat to you."

I drew the sword but because I respected a man as old as he was, I let the blade rest lightly across my thighs and kept a wary gaze on him without staring him straight in the eyes. "You were coming through to get me."

"No. I entered the carriage to speak to you. Unlike you, with your spirit mantle, I cannot cross into the bush. Just as the mansa cannot cross."

"What do you mean, a spirit mantle?"

"You wear a curious mantle in the spirit world. I don't know what to make of it, I admit. Do you?"

"How could you see me through the door of the carriage? You saw into the spirit world!"

"I can see because I would be no djeli could I not see. But I cannot walk there."

"Did the mansa send those wolves to eat me? That storm to freeze me?"

"What magic the magisters wield, or their limitations, is not mine to know. My destiny is joined to that of Four Moons House because I speak the history of their lineage, the Diarisso lineage, and of an old war. Later, it becomes the tale of flight across the desert away from the salt plague. After this it becomes the story of those who joined hands and secrets and became the first cold mages."

"But you also see into the spirit world. You are tracking me. What do you expect me to do? Give myself up to be slaughtered? Allow my dear cousin to be handed over as I was? I think not.

On we rolled as a wind howled around the carriage but could not disturb the two of us sheltered within its confines.

He smiled, as the elderly can do, a complicated mix of amusement, sadness, wisdom, and calculation, and he had a crinkling at the eyes and a sympathy in the lips that made me want to like him. But I had not the luxury to like him. I shifted the sword on my skirts.

"You are no Barahal. So what are you, who can cross into the spirit world, and why are these servants aiding you and disobeying the master of Four Moons House?"

"Answer your own questions. I owe you nothing."

He sighed. "You are correct that we sit at an impasse. I will get out at the gate, because I must. But you are still marked for death."

"Is that a threat, or a promise, or a warning?"

"It is a phrase. To the Ancestors we will come, one way or the other. We are part of them, as they are part of us. So is it sung."

He lifted his staff and I tensed, raising my sword, but he did not attack me. He rapped the roof of the carriage, a rhythm as much speech as beat. The carriage, bowling along like a well-thrown ball, slowed, steadied, and pulled to a halt.

I braced as the djeli opened the door that led into the mortal

world. I set a hand on the latch of the door into the spirit world, ready to bolt, but he only stepped outside into the cold afternoon and said to me, in the words of the language we spoke within the Kena'ani clans where I had grown up, "Peace be with you and in all your undertakings."

The words rang strangely; I had never expected to hear them here, and for once I was genuinely too surprised to speak. Beyond him I saw the wall that ringed the estate stretching away out of sight. Might I actually escape?

He shut the door, and we rolled on. I felt, as a string on a fiddle must feel when the bow commands it, a vibration pass through me as we crossed under the House gate. I heard a shout of surprise and cracked open the shutter. The gatehouse fell away behind, and young men in soldiers' red came running after as if, like the wolves in the spirit world, they meant to pace us as far as their legs, or their magic, could carry them.

Were the spirit wolves still following us? The mansa would not give up the hunt so easily. He wanted Bee, and a man like that did not just relinquish the things he wanted.

Andevai was not sitting here to command me not to open the other shutter. Now that I had escaped from the house and the wall of magic that enclosed their estate, I felt a surge of satisfaction in realizing that I need not listen to Andevai s arrogant, condescending words ever again. That was a triumph worth celebrating!

I laughed once, and then I wiped away tears. After that, I closed the shutter and, with sword raised protectively, cracked the shutter of the window that looked out onto the spirit world, bracing for a blast of wintry wind. The breath of wind that brushed my face seemed balmy by comparison to what had come before. I peeled back the shutter.

We drove through an autumnal countryside. Amid the dark spruce, especially in lower sinks, rose downy birch, alder, rowan,

and a few doughty ash trees, their leaves burnished gold. Wind spun falling leaves. Deep in the trees, a herd of hairy beasts ambled on their way, hard to discern in the shadows. Had we traveled this way a month ago, this is the landscape I would have expected to see. A herd of red deer gracing in a clearing opening out beside the track lifted their heads. At first I thought they were looking at the carriage, but their interest was caught by something behind us. First one and then four and then the rest bolted away. I leaned out to see the pack of wolves loping in the distance. It seemed they were slowing down, veering off.

A beast stalked out from the trees, a huge saber-toothed cat, its coat the gray-black of the underside of a storm cloud. A second and third emerged behind it, colored in the manner of tundra cats that must blend with snow and rock. Rippling with power, they bounded out of my sight. I sat back hard, barely breathing. My heart galloped out of rhythm to the steady drumbeats of the horses' hooves.

"Where will we go? Can we outpace wolves and cats?" I shouted out the window, into the spirit world. "Who are you? Who am I?"

I heard only the eru's laughter in answer.

Yet it seemed not mocking laughter but the laughter of those sympathetic to you, who see amusement in the prospect of you working out on your own that which has bewildered you. No doubt I had laughed that way myself, waiting for Bee to make a connection that appeared entirely obvious to me. So she often laughed at me, a laugh full of kinship, not scorn.

I sat for a while, watching the spirit world, with its gray-white sky and absent sun, everything so sharply drawn that my eyes stung to look on it. I shut them for a time. Maybe 1 dozed as the urgency of the chase drained away.

Then I started awake, recalling everything that had happened. When I leaned out the window to look behind, I saw no

sign of wolves or cats. The terrible fear and tension eased. I sheathed the sword and sat back against the upholstered seat with a sigh.

The sound rose out of the earth like mist and filtered down from the sky like rain. A horn's call, one might call it, if one had no other word to use, as much a long chuckling laugh as the tarantata of a trumpet's rallying shrill, as much the eerie moan of a conch shell as a drawn-out cry of despair. I had never heard anything remotely similar, not in all my too-brief life.

The call licked the air like fire and breathed all the way down into my bones. I knew I had to run. Run. Run.

The carriage slowed, scraped, and jolted to a halt. The eru leaped down, face creased in a solemn frown. Her third eye did not frighten me, for she only looked at me with two eyes. The third looked elsewhere, sidelong, as at a sight I could never see and would not wish to glimpse.

"My apologies, Cousin. We cannot convey you as far as we would wish."

"Is that the mansa's command, calling you home?"

The eru's laugh made me shudder. "Is that what you think it is?"

I tried again. "You are a servant of Four Moons House, being called home."

"We are not servants of Four Moons House. Although you will find a pair of us in each of the mage Houses. They believe or choose to believe we are their servants, but we are not their servants. Rather we are watchers in the service of a greater power that at all times keeps a tiny whisper of its attention for those among the human lineage who may become too powerful."

The horn call blared a second time, gaining strength.

I clutched the lip of the window until my knuckles whitened. "You'll abandon me here!"

"Alas, our masters call. We must obey the summons." Her

expression was difficult for me to read, composed with some portion of humanly compassion and yet a greater measure of something like disdain that was perhaps merely a degree of aloofness to the petty travails of a mortal creature like myself. Or else she was angry. Impossible to say. "As*for you, you must depart into the mortal world, for it is not safe for you in the spirit world without a guide. Especially not this night, when the hunt rides. You must find the cunning and the strength to make your way on your own in the world you know. One thing: The cold mages cannot pursue you on Hallows Night and Hallows Day. They dare not walk abroad when the hunt rides. Yet this night of all nights is an ill time for every mortal creature. Find shelter when the sun goes down, and depart at dawn to gain what head start you can."

"The djeli said I wear a spirit mantle. Tell me what that means."

"It means we are cousins. Go now."

She reached inside and firmly slid closed the shutters. An instant later, too quickly for her to have walked around the carriage, the latch of the other door clicked down and the door opened. I climbed out not into the autumnal beauty of the spirit world but into the shivering cold of winter's twilight in my own. The clouds lay heavy and dark above; the last light drained like hope from the empty landscape of frost and field. There was no wind.

Sitting above, the coachman lifted his riding whip in salute.

The horn rang a third time around us, the sound rolling like thunder away over the hills.

The whip came down across the backs of the horses, whose hooves no longer touched the earth. The eru leaped up onto the running board, and from her back roiled a disturbance in the air. She was spreading wings.

A wind out of the north howled over us, almost bowling me

over. The carriage and the eru and the coachman and the horses dissolved into a thousand shards of ice, and I was battered as by a vortex of bladed leaves so hard I shut my eyes.

And when the wind died and I opened my eyes, the eru and the coachman and the coach and four were gone. I stood alone, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but my sword and my bracelet and the clothes I wore, as snow began to fall and the gloaming of Hallows Night swallowed a now-silent world.