Cold Magic

20

"What did I ever do," I muttered, "to deserve this destiny?"

She sighed sharply. "1 have let it be known that none will mention your presence here until I say to do so. Knowing the hunters ranged deep into the bush and seeing you arrive with your hair and those looks on a cross-quarter eve, people naturally wonder if you are a spirit woman or a real woman. That is why you were brought to me. My son is too ill to receive such visitors."

"Andevai's father is ill?"

"Vai calls him Father, but you would say his uncle. He is my elder son, who sired no sons of his own, alas. My younger son, who sired my two grandsons, has crossed over. Duvai waits too impatiently for the household to pass into his hands. That is the destiny of some men, to see in the passing of one they love an opportunity to better themselves."

Despite everything, despite all my efforts to stay strong, I began to snivel, trying to choke down my sobs.

"If you sit in the corner, he will not see you. Not if I do not wish him to see you, and I do not wish it, for I know what is in your heart."

I wiped my nose with the back of my free hand. "W-what is in my heart?"

"You fear Vai because you fear the mansa. What does the mansa want from you that he brought you into his house?"

She had power as great as that of the mansa but so different it could not be named.

"My death," I said before I knew I meant to say it.

Not even this surprised her. "Ah. A sacrifice. This corner"- she indicated the foot of her bed-"is darkest."

I carried the tray to the corner and sat in the darkness with my sword at my left hand and my cloak pulled around me, the hood over my head. I was still shaking but suddenly ravenous. At least if I was going to die, I would die with a full stomach! I quickly washed and then, cradling the bowl in my left hand, swept the meat to my lips with my right.

The door opened.

Duvai came in first and Andevai after him in a wave of cold that made the hearth fire shudder. They did not stand close. Andevai in his fine, expensive clothing made the humble room appear shabby and sad in comparison, and he held himself aloof, as if he feared he would ruin his clothing by touching anything in the room. Certainly he would have looked down his nose at his older brother, except that Duvai was half a head taller. The contrast was strong: Duvai was taller and bigger, and perhaps as many as ten years older than Andevai, and the hunter was an impressive-looking man with the confidence and pride that comes from being respected by those he lives among.

"Here he is, Mother," said Duvai in a clipped tone that so shocked me with its displeasure that I swallowed the last hank of meat before it was fully chewed. My gulp was, fortunately, covered by his scornful words. "My brother has come home at festival, by the generosity of the mansa who lifted him to a higher station and therefore protects us out of thanks for what a noble son we have given to a House full of sorcerers."

"I am here, Mother." Andevai did not look at Duvai, and it was difficult to know whether it was pride, dislike, vanity, or envy that had cut the chasm between them. "I regret that 1 have

not been here as often as I might have wished, but I am here now. I was following the toll road, and night came on just as I reached Haranwy."

Duvai gestured too broadly. His voice was deep, and his words unexceptional, but his tone was cutting. "We welcome him on a festival night, as we are required to do, now that he is a powerful man in the world. Perhaps his presence here will keep the Wild Hunt at bay on such a night. Or perhaps it will attract them, as honey attracts bears and carrion attracts wolves, they whose arrow and whose spear cannot be turned aside, not by any human power or cunning or strength. Not even by his."

I braced, my left hand at the sword's hilt, but Andevai had more self-control than I had realized. His jaw tightened. The hearth fire dimmed, but it did not go out.

His grandmother certainly did not fear him. "On Hallows Night, the masters cut out the souls of those who will cross over to the other side in the coming year. My son is infested with fever. His body will not outlast this winter. This I have seen. I also have few enough days left in this flesh, so I will see you, sons of different mothers, embrace this night. Even if you cannot like each other, then promise me for the sake of the village never to fight one another. I will always be watching."

Duvai grunted, almost inaudibly. "It will be as you wish, Mother," he said.

I had not thought it possible for Andevai's haughty posture to grow more stiff, but it did. "It will be as you wish," he echoed softly.

The two men embraced, but I had seen snarling dogs more companionable. They parted awkwardly.

Andevai went over and knelt on the pillow. He took his grandmother's thin hands in his own and bent to kiss her hollow cheek. "I missed you, Mother."

Duvai snorted.

This time the fire did go out, and a spurt of ash rose. Strangely, the tapers that lit the room kept burning undisturbed.

"Let the festival be danced," she said to Duvai. "I will hear and dance with you. On such a night, trouble may come to the gate if things are not done properly."

"Of course, Mother," he said with more warmth than before. He said nothing to Andevai but left. The attendant emerged from the shadows opposite and knelt at the fire to set new kindling.

"Don't bother," said Andevai. "It won't light until I'm gone."

She continued with her task as if she had not heard him.

"You are come late, Vai. You who study the magic of winter are most at risk. You dare not walk abroad on the day when the veil is thinnest and the hunt rides. For I am sure the tales tell us that the ancient ones who rule in the other world distrust mag-isters most of all."

"They hunt down those who become too powerful and draw their notice, so we are told, but you can be sure I am not taught enough to become truly powerful. Not I, the son of slaves."

"Is that a bitter apple, son?"

He grimaced. "I asked for nothing. I wanted to be a hunter, not a cold mage."

"Yet you are what you are."

"So I am. Now I am responsible for all of you, as I am reminded every day at the House. Trouble runs at my heels like a pack of wolves. The mansa has ordered me to kill a person."

"That is a heavy task. What manner of person?"

"I have to do it. I have no choice. That is not why I came, Mother. This night and day I cannot travel abroad-no magis-ter can, although our servants can ride where they wish, evidently." How annoyed he sounded! How glad I was that the eru and the coachman had the power to tweak the noses of the proud House mages! "So 1 stopped to see you," he continued, as

humbly as an affectionate child. "The visits I make here are what sustain me through the rest of the year. It will be a colder

winter than most…" He faltered, voice choked, and after a

moment continued. "Best I go see Fa now, to greet him, and then to see my own mama. What news of my mama, Mother?" His voice trembled on the words. Beyond the walls of the house, the drums rolled loudly and in unison as youthful voices whooped and cried out, breaking into song.

"The Hallows fire is being lit," remarked the old woman.

"There is no place for me at a fire's lighting," he answered curtly.

The drums fell into a shared rhythm, one that made my shoulders twitch. I recognized the measure of the drum, calling "koukou," which we'd learned from friends in the city. The sound came closer, as at a procession winding through the compounds of the village.

"Best you wait until dawn to greet your mama. No good for her will come if she is woken now that the medicine has taken effect, for they dosed her before dusk. You may as well go on to the celebration. Let the old and ill take their needed rest while the young dance." The procession's clamor lessened as it moved away through the village. "If you go to Kayleigh now, she'll fit you with proper clothes."

He lifted a hand to touch his fine, elegant jacket with a self-conscious lift of his chin. "Is Kayleigh well, Mother? Is there any trouble for her?"

"No soldiers have trampled through our village's fields since you went up to the House seven years ago."

He ducked his head as if the words pinched him. "But they will. There's worse, Mother. The mansa himself told me today that he intends to take Kayleigh to his bed, to see if more magis-ters can be bred out of our bloodline. What am I to do?"

"What can yon do, Vai? The magister who sired your father

on me did not ask my permission. The magister's gift-if indeed it came from him-lay quiet in your father, but it has woken in you.

"More curse than gift."

"Truly, Andevai, if you could be shed of it, would you?"

"No." He cupped a hand over his eyes to shield his face. "Even to what I endure at the House, I will suffer it in order to learn." When he lowered the hand, his expression was knit of iron. "It would not matter even if I wished. I belong to Four Moons House, as does this village. I must obey them, or it will be the worse for all of you."

"Has the mansa threatened you?"

"That he chooses today to inform me of his plans for my sister? That he reminds me that without the medicine provided by the House, my mother will die? That he mentions this village's obligations to the House? Are these not all threats? Because I failed to properly do what he asked me to do? Maybe there is nothing I can do to make it right no matter what happens. But my only leverage-as the Greeks would say-is to gain enough favor in their eyes by doing what I am required to do. Then, perhaps, the mansa will, one time, allow me to spare Kayleigh being dragged off to suffer his attentions."

"I doubt it."

He hissed in a breath. "I am trapped. What is one life set against all that?"

"A question you will have to answer."

"They despise me, Mother. Whatever stories I may tell my mama so that she does not worry, you know the truth of it. I am nothing to them, only they cannot waste me because I am too powerful."

"Is there no other House where you can go?"

"They dare not cast me out, because they know another House will take me. They will not trade me away because 1 am

too valuable. Even if I ran away, no other House will shelter me. They wouldn't dare risk the mansa's enmity should he discover where I was hiding. Anyhow, if I were to leave my teacher on bad terms, what other teacher would take me in?"

"Is there no life for you outside a mage House?"

"Why do you even ask?" he cried bitterly. "Do you think I would be better off an outlaw starving in the hills? No princely house can take me in, because the mage Houses would turn on it and destroy it. No guild will take me, for the same reason. And, anyway, what guild would admit a poor village man with no guild connections, n*6 property, and no craft? I suppose I might walk to a city and seek work as a laborer. No cold mage survives for long outside the protection of a House. People fear and resent us. My own father's other son fears and resents me! Even a magister cannot stay awake always. You know the saying: Saber-cats, wolves, and mages can be killed when they sleep. But, anyway, let's say I could. I might be able to escape them. Let's say I could travel to Qart Hadast or into the Barren Lands or across the ocean to Expedition. I have skills, and I have power-then what? I could hunt, maybe. I remember what hunting magic I learned from Fa before the cold magic bloomed and the House took me away. But do you think I would abandon you and my mother and sisters and my kin and the village to the mansa's anger? Because he will punish you to get back at me. So even if I could walk free, you cannot."

Even wrapped in my fur-lined cloak, I was by now shivering where I crouched. Crystals of ice skinned the surface of my uneaten porridge as the sorcery of winter radiated from him, released by his emotions. The fire was laid but not alight, and the elderly woman had vanished.

"These are harsh chains," said his grandmother in the same gentle tone she had been using all along, "although even you cannot say for certain what the mansa will do."

"Please say nothing to Kayleigh of what I learned! Let her have peace for as long as she can."

"Go on, Vai. You have friends who have missed your company."

He left.

After the door closed behind him and the fire spurted up with a flicker and licked along the wood with gathering strength, I leaped out from my corner. I gulped down the last of the cold porridge before I set the bowl down on the chest at the foot of her bed and let her see the sword; although out of courtesy, I kept it in its sheath.

"I thank you for the food, Grandmother, and your kind words, but I have to leave. I'm sorry for his troubles and for yours. T am quite sure that it is wrong for an entire village of people EO be held hostage and in such an indenture for so long with no recourse, but I will not offer up myself just because-"

"Why does the mansa want you dead?"

Her question compelled me. It was as if she had ensorcelled my tongue. "Andevai married the wrong woman. He was sent to the Barahals to marry Bee, but he was tricked by Bee's parents into marrying me to save Bee."

"You were party to this deception?"

"I knew nothing of it! The Barahals deceived me, too. They lied to me, just as they lied to him! I am expendable, to the Barahals and to the mansa."

"So you mean to run for the rest of your life, never able to rest?"

The weary, horrible prospect unrolled before me like a path overgrown with vicious brambles. I would run and run and be torn until at last I collapsed with the wolves at my throat breathing death into my face. And yet even so, I could not accept defeat.

"If I can survive until the winter solstice, then they might

still wish to kill me, just for the revenge of it. But as soon as Bee reaches her majority, the contract expires. So she has a chance if I can find her before they do. I'll never let them take her. Never."

The door opened. I whirled while pulling the sword half out of its sheath. Three elderly women entered, and by the time I accepted that these were not the mansa's soldiers, several older men had entered as well, including Mamadi. I retreated to the foot of the bed with my back to the wall as the men set out the benches. Eight men and seven women of advanced years took a place, men on one side; women on the other. Last, Duvai entered, supporting a bent and frail man who could barely walk. He looked as old as the tiny woman in the bed, yet I guessed he was her son. He wore about his neck and had pinned to his clothing many amulets, and in his rheumy eyes I saw blindness.

Duvai brought him to me. He traced the air around me without touching me, and a shiver of power crawled along my skin. Duvai helped him sit on the first bench. Still holding on to his nephew, the old man spoke to the assembly in a voice as hoarse as a frog's spring croak. "The spirit world is knit into her bones. But she is not a spirit woman. Hers is true human flesh. Therefore, she did not deceive us in asking for guest rights. It is a serious matter to consider handing over one we have promised to shelter."

"The mansa will punish us," said one of the women, "if we do not turn her over."

"Give her to Andevai," said a man, "and let him do what he must."

"To kill in the village on Hallows Night," said Mamadi, "is a very dangerous thing. Spirits will flock to her blood. That they would enter this village would be a very ill thing for the village."

"Then hold her prisoner," said that first man, "until Hallows Day has passed. Let her be taken back to the House, or have her throat slit beyond the stockade. We'll be rewarded."

"Rewarded as we were before," asked another woman, "to see our noble son snatched away by the mansa?"

"Will we be rewarded for offering guest rights to a traveler who asked properly and then breaking our word?" demanded another woman. "What troubles will rain over us in the years to come, because we have done a wrong thing? She must be released to go on her way. If the mansa's hunters track her down later, then it will not be on us that she is dead."

"If we do not tell Andevai," said another man, "then how will he know she was here? If he does not know, the mansa does not know."

They discussed the matter while I stood there pressed against the wall, amazed so many spoke in my favor. Or not in my favor, precisely-I never felt they cared much for me one way or the other-but in favor of a code that safeguarded guests. This was not about me, but about the integrity of the village.

When all had made their arguments, the old hunter spoke again in his frog's whisper. "If she has been offered guest rights, then we risk a worse thing if we turn her over to the mansa. If other villages should hear-and they will hear, you can be sure- then how can we expect them to greet our hunters and our women out gathering if they are caught betimes needing shelter? The mansa may fine us, add to our burden, even kill some among us, but his power is limited to this world. If we go against what the ancestors and the gods have told us is right behavior, then we offend a deeper power. And trouble will come down much harder on us, and on our children and on their children."

Last of all, Andevai's grandmother spoke. "If we prosper only through the suffering or death of another, then that is not prosperity."

It was agreed by a nodding of heads, some resigned, some reluctant, but in the end no one objected.

Duvai said, as briskly as if he had been waiting eagerly just for this opportunity, "Vai cannot leave the village until dusk tomorrow. If I set her on her way at dawn, we can fairly be said to have given her shelter and not left her vulnerable or tried to trick her into being trapped by him later. After that, it is out of our hands."

Silence followed his words.

Torn equally by shame, gratitude, and suspicion, I whispered, "My thanks to you."

I did not know what reaction I would receive for these paltry words, but to my surprise, after Duvai left to make his preparations, they invited me to sit among them. They were curious about who I was and where I came from. They asked nothing about Andevai or how I had fallen into the trouble that currently engulfed me. Being an inland village, they had not heard of the Kena'ani, not even to call them Phoenicians, but they were interested to hear I was city born and raised, and they asked questions about where I came from and what life was like in a city. Duvai's uncle, the best traveled among them, had been once to the city of Havery, when he was a young man, and he had never desired to repeat the experience. They might have kept me in the smoky little house all night had Andevai's grandmother not intervened.

"Let the guest be fed and invited to the celebration," she said.

The elders took their leave.

She said to me, "Trust can only be offered where it is also received."

"I ask for your pardon, maestra. But I was raised by people I thought were kin, who I thought cared for me. They threw me to the wolves the moment they feared for their own daughter. Why should I trust anyone?"

Yet I had trusted the eru and the coachman. Why?

She gave a soft noise, more of a grunt than a laugh. "As you heard, no one argued to spare you for your own sake. Rather for the village's honor."

"You might have said all that in my hearing to make me believe I can trust you."

"My hearing is weak. I could not hear what you just said." The tenor of her voice made her point clear. I had insulted her and, indeed, the village. "You may walk where you wish, leave if you feel you must. No one will stop you. Duvai will await you at the gate at dawn."

Thus was I dismissed, and I opened my mouth to speak, regretting what I had said, and then pressed my lips closed before I spoke words I was not sure I meant. To babble out meaningless assurances of my respect would only condescend. Maybe I ought to have been more trusting, but I dared not. The one thing I was sure of was that Duvai would be pleased to make his younger brother's life more difficult. How far he was willing to go against the mansa I could not know. The villagers had no recourse if the mansa acted against them. The village belonged to the House.

Just as I did. But I did not have to live here, or stay here.

The elderly attendant gestured to show I had overstayed my welcome, so I took myself and my sword and my weary heart into the cold as she shut the door firmly behind me. Outside, the compound appeared deserted. Snow spun lazily. I ventured out the compound gate and stood against a wall, staring toward the structure at the center of the village, with its thatched roof and a railing built around under the eaves. Smoke eked from stone chimneys and heat radiated from the open doorways. Inside flashed movement; drums beat, accompanied by the stamp of feet and calls of encouragement. Drums have their

own magic. My toes twitched, and my feet shifted as my shoulders hitched a little back and forth.

"Catherine?" Kayleigh stood at the compound gate, looking around without seeing me where I stood not ten paces from her.

I said nothing, and when she walked away, I hurried the other way. It was easy enough to remain unseen when it seemed the entire village had crammed into the festival house. Night is a friend to cats on the prowl. At the inner gate, I became air and walked right past the two young guardsmen; not so difficult in any case because they were diverted by the sounds of the celebration they were missing.

"Did you hear Vai? Says he'll still outlast us tonight."

"You'd think if them at the House treat him so poorly he'd have been humbled, but he's the same as he ever was."

They laughed as I passed out of range. Three older men stood vigil at the gate of the outer stockade. Outside the stockade, a bonfire blew heat into the cold night. In the farthest aura of its light, just beyond visual range, pairs of eyes glimmered and four-legged shapes moved, prowling the perimeter. Waiting.

I stopped short. I took in a few breaths to steady my pulse as the sound of drums rolled like a shield around the village. Then I turned around and crept back past the inner gate, against the wall. A burst of laughter surprised me. Andevai strode among his age-mates up to the inner gate to fetch their friends; several older men had come to take their place at guard. The young men jostled and talked in a rapid release of insults and jokes as they coursed away back toward the celebration. Andevai walked as easily among them as he had, I now realized, moved uneasily within the House. He looked much less affected in the homespun clothing worn by country folk. He and his friends looked like the kind of young men a young woman might happily flirt

with. Laughing, they pushed into the festival house while I remained alone in the dark.

Everyone had either gone into the festival house or bided behind closed doors in their compounds. They had a place to be, while I…

I became aware of a shadowy figure spinning and hopping into the open ground, its movements woven in with the rhythm of the drums. I held still, willing myself to become the stockade behind me, nothing more than poles of wood tied tightly together. Nothing to see. Nothing to take notice of. I could see in the dark that it was no man who approached me. It was a tall creature with horns and feathers and a mantle shimmering over its massive form. It spun and spun, the mantle flaring around it like sparks spinning in a vortex of wind. But there was no wind. And the mantle was not woven of cloth; it was woven out of threads of magic. The air had become deadened, and my ears grew as full as if stuffed with cotton until I could not hear the drums except as vibrations trembling up through the soles of my feet.

Although I had drawn a cawl of concealment over me, the creature spun closer and closer until it became clear it knew I was there. That it saw me. That it meant to investigate me as a guard investigates a suspicious noise and a movement where there ought to be stillness.

Like a cornered rat, I tensed with a hand on the hilt of my sword, ready to draw and fight my way free.

Yet I saw as with fractured vision: The creature was not a single entity but three. It was a mask, a big puppet built over a simple framework of wood. I could see right through the feathers and fabric and frame to the inside. A man, an ordinary man, carried this armature across his shoulders. His skin was painted with clay, thick strokes forming symbols I did not recognize. The clay glimmered as if smoldering with heal. As he spun, his

gaze slid right over me once, a second time, and yet again, but he did not see me.

But the third entity saw me. Horned and feathered, it loomed above me like a twirling giant limned with silken threads of white fire, its trailing cloak like luminescent^mist. It had eyes darker than the night and infinitely deep, and with these eyes it stared into my heart, and I knew it could devour me and that it would devour me if it decided I was a danger to the village on a night when perilous spirits might try to invade.

Some throat-catching instinct made me release the hilt of my sword.

Do spirits blink?

It spun away into the night, vanishing down one of the narrow streets and leaving me untouched.

My breath came in painful gulps. Shuddering, I chafed my gloved hands, but that did not warm them. I clawed at my frantic, muddled, matted thoughts as I fought to find a calm thread of reason: It had turned away. It had chosen not to harm me. It had recognized I held no animus toward Haranwy Village.

"There you are, Catherine!"

Perhaps I shrieked.

Kayleigh laughed as if I had made a joke, and rested a hand on my arm in a companionable, sisterly way. "Grandmother sent me. Did you get lost?"

Maybe the village's guardian spirit had let me go, but forgetting that Andevai had been commanded to kill me would be fatal.

"I need to… relieve myself. There is perhaps a… uh… dung-house?"

Kayleigh snickered. "Your pardon. That's not the word we use. We have a place, but it will be cold this time of year. If you don't mind, my mother has a pot in her house you can use."

She led me again into the compound of Andevai's family and

to a door no larger than the others. Inside, past a small, square entryway, stood a different room entirely. Hung with lace curtains and furnished with a circulating stove built into the hearth, a fine four-poster bed, a small elegant table supporting a wicker sewing basket, and a beautifully carved wardrobe that shone with the luster of rosewood, it might have passed for a city merchant's bedroom. The main room boasted a plank floor instead of the packed dirt of the entryway. These accoutrements looked so out of place that I forgot my manners and stared until Kay-leigh reminded me to take off my boots and step inside.

Two girls slept curled up on a cot. In the bed lay a woman whose face was so wasted and sunken, her complexion such an ashy, unhealthy gray, that it was impossible to discern any relationship. Heat soaked me. I took off my cloak and draped it over my arm, then wiped my brow.

"Here," whispered Kayleigh, drawing me aside and behind a screen.

She offered me a covered chamber pot and left me alone behind the screen with the pot, a bench, and a smaller wardrobe with one of its sliding doors open. A man's expensive and fashionable dash jacket had been folded on a shelf; it was the jacket Andevai had been wearing earlier. A glimmer teased my eye, and I pushed aside a pair of polished boots to see a sheathed sword, tall and slim like my own, propped in the wardrobe's corner. I tasted the metal's sharp flavor in the stifling air. Andevai carried cold steel, the better to kill me with.

But not tonight. Tonight he would laugh and dance with his companions. Fury scalded me. But I did actually badly have to use the chamber pot. I did my business, and afterward Kayleigh offered me warm water to wash and a comb to tidy my hair.

"I've never seen hair like yours," she said, untwisting a black strand from the comb and pulling a finger down its length. She touched her head, her hair confined beneath a tightly wrapped

scarf. "It's so thick and straight, and as black as night. Your eyes, too, they're such a beautiful color, like amber."

I did not know what to say, so I busied myself braiding my hair. "You have so many fine things. Were these wardrobes made in the village?"

She regarded the larger one with pride. "The rosewood came all the way from Havery. Andevai had it brought in for Mama. He stints on nothing for her." She bit her lip as her gaze flashed to the sword I held close.

"Is there something else you want to say?" I asked, more brusquely than I intended.

"There's nothing else."

I wasn't sure I could enter a conversation with a girl whose brother had been ordered to kill me and whose grandmother and uncle had convinced the village elders to spare my life, at least until I left their village.

"Do you want to sleep?" she asked. "No one will come in here until dawn."

"No," I murmured, thinking of the guardian's depthless eyes, and yet as the word emerged, a yawn cracked my jaw. "But maybe I could just sit down one moment."

Weariness chose for me. I slept.

I woke with the taste of smoke on my tongue and the whisper of flames dying within the closed stove. Kayleigh was gone. The girls slumbered peacefully, while the ill woman's sleep was clearly drugged; a bead of drool caught at the corner of her lips and her eyes rolled beneath closed eyelids as if in her dreams she was seeing horrific sights hidden from the rest of us. I sat up, pulse thundering in my ears as panic stormed through me. But my sword lay on the cot alongside me, my boots sat neatly beside the door, and my cloak had covered me. I was rumpled from sleeping in my clothes but otherwise untouched. I checked behind the screen; the smaller wardrobe remained as I had left

it. I touched the other sword, but a hissing spray of sparks burned my fingertips. I licked the smarting skin. Stealing the sword was clearly out of the question.

None of the sleepers stirred. I crept to the door, pulled on my boots, and swung my cloak over my shoulders. For good fortune I kissed the bracelet Bee had given me.

I slipped outside into the shocking cold night. The celebration drummed on, its beat stronger and faster. Clouds covered the sky. I had no idea how late it was or how long I had slept.

Duvai's house lay silent and dark, exhaling heat from the fine stove within. Surveying the houses with their thatched hats, I recognized that many of them breathed threads of smoke from brick chimneys. Were so many furnished with the comfort of stoves? For a humble rustic village, there was more here than I had realized.

I crept to the festival house, encountering no guardians, and sidled up to one of the doors. When none of the villagers crowded inside paid me any mind, I squeezed in to the very back with a shoulder shoved against a pillar of wood. I raised up on my toes to peer over the assembly, who were clapping and swaying with the drums. Older folk sat on benches at the front. The drummers sat or stood, some straight-faced with concentration or grinning like madmen as they watched and answered the dancers. If a rhythm were like a chain of magic, and maybe it was, then I would have been able to see the threads that linked them to the others, for although they were separate individuals, together they were one conversation in constant movement. The folk dancing in the cleared space were young men, stripped down to their trousers and to light linen undershirts so drenched with sweat that the fabric clung to their torsos.

Naturalists claim that however much the female may be said to love the accoutrements of fashion and furnishings, ii is the

male who is driven to display himself. Blessed Tanit, it was very hot in here! There are always two or three young men in any group who compete for the highest degree of attention, who want to be the best. Or who are the best, with a subtle flare that touches the essence, until the interaction between what they are doing and what the drummers are doing becomes the thing.

Andevai was a very good dancer, and furthermore he was shamelessly flirting with the attention of the gathering while competing for that attention with several other extremely spectacular young men who were also easy to look at. Who would imagine him as a contrite young man who had buried his head in his hands before his grandmother with so much humility? The dancers egged each other on as the women clapped and whistled and shouted encouragement, and the older men smiled as they shook their heads as if remembering past glories and regretting lost youth.

What woman does not enjoy such a display of male athleticism and grace?

A dead one.

With a flourish, the drums sent the young men to the sidelines, to a chorus of whooping and praise, and beat a new rhythm to call young women into the circle. The young men crowded over to a long table. Andevai broke off a piece of dark country bread he would have scorned, I am sure, if it was offered to him in the dining room of a perfectly respectable inn. He ate with the others with every indication of relish, all of them chattering and jostling as they worked their way down the table of common platters laden with festival food.

A hand brushed my elbow, then took hold firmly as a male voice spoke in my ear. "He who tries to wear two hats will discover he does not have two heads." Duvai indicated the door. "Dawn rises, and with it the open gate."