Cold Magic

23

Into summer.

I broke into a sweat. Birds warbled and chirped and shrilled around me in a melodic uproar, and a huge crow fluttered down to earth a sword's length from me. It tilted its head to peruse me first out of one eye and then the other in a way that reminded me oddly of the troll and solicitor Chartji, from the Griffin Inn. As I climbed to my feet, it cawed loudly and flapped away. I paced a circle around the standing stone to take in my surroundings.

That I had landed in the spirit world I did not doubt. Hillside rolled away on all sides into a green summer forest dense with trees I could not identify, although I recognized beech and ash. Was that a river glimmering far off to my left? I supposed that direction to be the east, but I could not be certain, because although the sky was not precisely cloudy, the heavens were veiled by a strange haze that concealed the sun. Yet the air held as much heat as if the sun were shining. Birds flitted over banks of flowering shrubs and waving grass that carpeted the open ground between the crest, where I stood, and the beginning of forest fifty or more paces below. Butterflies bright with blues and yellows and reds made the air seem alive with color, and the place smelled so overwhelmingly of life that I wondered if I might choke on it.

T stood on a path paved with grains as white and fine as salt

ground by mortar into sand. It gritted under my boots as I shifted my weight. My chin stung. I stripped off my gloves and cautiously touched a pair of fingers to the wound, a petty, inconsequential cut still oozing blood. I ought to be dead. Maybe I was dead. Didn't dead souls pass over into the spirit world? I pinched myself, and the bite of my fingers hurt, so either I lived or the dead felt pain.

Movement at the corner of my eye alerted me. An indistinct shape stalked the forest's edge, shadows rippling. My hand tightened on my sword's hilt, but when a pair of saber-toothed cats emerged from the trees, I felt as cold as if a winter's wind had blasted down from the north. Cold steel offered no defense against such massive beasts. I looked both ways down the path. In the direction in which I was reasonably sure I had been walking, a change in the color of air marked where the hills fell away, and hazy, deep greens and muddy blues marked a lowland marsh. The Sieve was nothing more than a vast marshy wilderness, some of which had been drained and penned off into levels where crops could be grown. Last night-indeed, how had it become day?-I had glimpsed a burr of fire that surely identified the old Roman-founded market town of Lemanis.

Beyond the standing stone in the mortal world waited Andevai and his sword and loyal sister and attendant servant. The two cats ambling gracefully along the tree line below did not approach. A third, the one whose shadow I had first spotted, trailed behind them.

Stay on the path, the eru had told me.

I still had to warn Bee.

Alter tucking my gloves into my belt and loosening the tight chain of the heavy winter cloak so air could circulate around my back, I started to walk. I settled into a pace neither so fast it might appear as if I was running, a temptation even to lazy predators, nor so slow that I might seem weakened or injured,

for every natural historian knows that hunting beasts are most attracted to those in the herd who lag behind. The hunt culls the sick, so it was always best to look strong no matter how exhausted one's legs were and how the burden of running was beginning to weigh on one's heart.

Blessed Tank might protect me if she willed, but natural historians suggested that the gods were merely a story devised by humankind to explain the mysteries of heaven and earth. Even if that were not true, Fiery Shemesh, whose glorious, blazing disk I could not see within the silvery haze that made the sky, was likely no god of this world. The cats were this world's creatures, beautiful, deadly, and aloof. They did not glance my way, but I knew they knew I walked the path. I had no food, no water, nothing but winter clothing, beneath which my flesh became slick with perspiration. Nothing but my determination, Bee's bracelet, and a sword that had been given to me by an eru.

The biggest cat suddenly raised its head, and with the most astonishing grace imaginable, bounded up the slope toward me, head level and gaze intent. My throat tightened until I could scarcely breathe, and my heart stuttered, galump galump galump-only those heavy beats were not my pulse pounding in my ears but an actual drumbeat.

I glanced behind.

I did scream, then, or perhaps it was a shout of fury. Tears spill not only from sorrow. Sheer bloody outrage can make you cry.

The djeli Bakary had told me that he could see into but not walk in the spirit world, while cold mages neither see into nor walk there. Yet here came thrice-cursed Andevai on his horse, riding after me as if he crossed into the thrice-cursed spirit world as easily as snapping his fingers.

What choice had I? T turned, planted my feet, and made

ready. I would have one chance to kill him before he cut me down.

The cat's roar shattered birdsong. The horse skittered sideways; Andevai hauled it back onto the path, but two more cats-were there five now?-came running up on the opposite side, keening and roaring as they raced, muscles bunching and stretching. Their beauty was so startling that a person might smile at the terror of beauty before death closed in a pounce.

They did not touch the path, and it was clear Andevai knew they could not, but the horse could not know. He battled it as it shied and reared and, finally, dumped him sidelong off the path onto a stretch of grass. Relieved of his weight, the horse ran at me.

"Blessed Tanit, do no harm!" I croaked as the great cat rippled across the grass and with a leap came down on Andevai's chest just as he was trying to get up. He was slammed back by the force of its weight.

I flung up the arm holding my sword to hide the awful kill. The horse broke sideways at the flash of steel and clattered to a halt, reins dangling and eyes flaring, not three paces from me. The cats had not pursued it. They were circling the cold mage.

He was not dead. He was not even bitten or clawed. The saber-toothed cat simply stood on him, pinning his sword arm and chest. It slewed its lovely head around to stare at me. Was it deciding which morsel looked more delectable? Or asking my permission to eat him?

"Oh, no," I said, voice quavering and heart trembling. "Don't look at me\ I don't want to be eaten. And I can't… I can't…" Even after everything, I could not say, Kill him.

1 lowered my sword and whistled softly and wished I had an apple as I slowly, very slowly, reached for and took hold of the reins. The horse came gladly to a steady hand.

Aunt and Uncle could not keep horses, as they were too great

an expense, but the scions of a mercenary house must learn to ride in case they are called away to travel in the service of the family. I knew how to set my foot in a stirrup and swing onto a saddle, how to gather reins in hand and brace myself awkwardly because the stirrups were set for a longer leg than mine. I used thighs and the pressure of my seat and a clucking sound made twixt tongue and palate to suggest to the equine that it ought to walk. A well-trained horse will move without much urging, especially if it is near to large predators and believes that moving will take it away from them.

We started down the path, but I turned in the saddle to see what was going on behind me.

He raised his head. His voice had a strength I admired, considering the position in which he currently found himself. "You can't steal my horse!"

A second cat ambled over and kneaded its sheathed paws gently on his torso, while the first lowered its huge head and licked his face. He swore in a string of curses.

I laughed as I rode away. Maybe I wept, too, or perhaps that was only sweat seeping down my cheeks. A shrill cry cut the air, and I felt my heart contract as with a fever, but after all I spotted a hawk gliding that had surely made the call. Surely it had been no human agony.

I put the horse through her gaits and settled on a shog that jolted me to my bones but seemed not too tiring to the horse, breaking it at intervals with a walk. After some time had passed and when I spotted a stream not too far afield from the path, I reined my doughty steed aside and let her water and graze while I made inventory.

One excellent horse. Two saddlebags, the first containing a very fine suit of fashionable clothing rolled up within heavy canvas, as well as various and sundry necessaries such as an exceedingly sharp razor, a spoon and knife of excellent polished

silver since no doubt nothing available in rustic inns encountered on such a country path could ever touch the lips of a proud magister, and a hoard of coins. The second bag held provisions: dried meat, a half round of cheese, a leather bag filled with nuts, and apples, perhaps to sweeten the horse.

I took off both cloaks and tied them like a bedroll, making sure my gloves were secure. I did not think of my husband, not at all. It was not that I cared for him in any manner, because I did not and could not, but the thought of any person being mauled and devoured made me feel sick. Ought I wish I owned a cruder heart, one that exalted in death and savage vengeance? I could not, even though he had been commanded to kill me.

Blood drawn by cold steel in the hand of a cold mage ought to have cut my spirit from my flesh and dropped me as dead as dead. Instead, my blood on the stone had opened a pathway into the spirit world. My blood. An eru called me cousin. A djeli said I wore a spirit mantle. An aged, dying hunter had said that the spirit world was knit into my bones.

Maybe I was dead. I brushed impatiently at tears and squinched up my face. Was this Sheol, that he should pursue me into it? That made less sense than anything else.

I sucked in balmy air, moist and flavorful in my lungs, ripe with green and growing things, and forced myself to think things through, to pretend I wrote in a journal as a means to form order out of chaos. Wasn't that what Daniel Hassi Barahal had done? He had recorded his observations for the family, as was his duty. But behind the words the Barahals might sell for profit lay another layer of his thinking: He was trying to make sense of the world he observed by setting it down in sentences-not to capture it, for the world can't be captured and caged, but to see if he could discern a pattern beneath the bewildering variety, the con-fusions and contradictions and the beauty and the ugliness.

I was flesh and blood; I never doubted that. While I had no

evidence that the Amazon Daniel Hassi Barahal had married was actually my mother, I had equally no evidence she was not. So if Tara Bell was my mother, then who was my father?

What if my father was a denizen of the spirit world?

The woman I believed to be my mother had said Don't tell anyone what you can do or see, Cat. Tell no one. Not ever. If the spirit world was knit into my bones, didn't it make sense she would want me to keep it a secret?

There. That wasn't so hard, no matter how absurd and impossible it seemed, or how numb the thought made me feel, or how my hands began to tremble.

Had Daniel Hassi Barahal truly believed he was my father? Had Aunt and Uncle not known? Had they thought they were giving Four Moons House the right girl, against their will? Had Tara Bell lied to all of them? Could I never stop questions from chasing around my head? To distract myself, I offered an apple to the horse, who snuffled it appreciatively out of my hand.

"I suppose you have a name already," I remarked.

She flicked an ear and raised her head. She was a big mare, and I suspected she had an even temper and a bold heart to take in stride crossing with her master into the spirit world. Her master, who was either being eaten or had fled back into the mortal world to consider his next course of action. I had to find a place to cross back. I considered the stirrups and had shortened one when the horse shied. I grabbed the reins and she stilled, eyes flaring and ears flattening.

I turned.

One of the cats had followed us. The big cats wore summer coats more shadow than sun, and this one had a pelt as dark as sable. It walked long and lithe, more of a lazy stroll, but halted at a reasonable distance just as if it could gauge the horse's degree of panic. The cursed thing sat on its haunches and set about licking a paw, but 1 knew it was eyeing me.

"You've already had your dinner!" I shouted, and then clamped shut my mouth as I wondered if it were licking Andevai's blood horn its claws.

A cold shudder ran right down through my body.

"Horse," I said in a level voice to my new best companion, "it is time to go, slowly and quietly, without fuss." I led her to the path, and once on the path, I shortened the other stirrup and then mounted. All the while, the saber-toothed cat washed its paw and watched me as if I were a large and plump and exceedingly tasty deer it was gathering up the effort to chase. My steed and I commenced a steady walking gait, not too fast and not too slow, and cursed if the cat did not rise gracefully and pad after, keeping its distance but always keeping us in sight.

To be slaughtered in the spirit world. What did that mean for Andevai's spirit? How awful one's last moments must be. If he were dead, then I was free, but I could not precisely rejoice. It is easy to admire what you must not endure, so Daniel Hassi Bara-hal had written. If it was done, then it was done. I had only defended myself, and Bee.

But how on earth, then, had he managed, or even thought, to shout after me about his cursed horse?

I rode the rest of the day, husbanding my strength and that of the horse. Once we passed a boundary stone, but I avoided it and kept moving. The summer day seemed peaceful, and to think of crossing back into the teeth of winter made me wince. The cat still followed us, and twice when I had glanced back, I glimpsed a second cat, but later it vanished, leaving only the one. How easily you become accustomed to a fear that merely buzzes your shoulder but never alights. It was curious, that was all-a curious cat.

So it was that in the lingering summer twilight, half asleep in the saddle as I rocked in rhythm to the horse's smooth gait, I came down into low country as flat as if it had been ironed. The chalk

path gave out in a tangle of scrub vegetation, with thick forest beyond. The loss of a vantage point made me feel small. As I tried to decide what to do next, a hoarse cry like that of an anguished monster bellowed from deep within the forest. Twilight certainly had begun to draw a cloak over the world, and a chorus of frogs, of all things, rose from an unseen pool. The sable cat circled us and Howed over in its lazy way to stand before a wild blooming thicket with flowers strung like tiny bells from drooping branches. As the wind brushed through them, did they tinkle}

The cat yawned in a catlike way that happened also to display to great advantage its impressive saberlike canines, which measured the length of my forearms. I began to think the creature-it was male and probably young-was showing off. It vanished into the shrubbery with a flick of its tail. I pressed my mount forward enough to identify an overgrown track leading into the undergrowth and thence beneath the trees.

I could follow it. But a moment later, I spotted a thread of smoke away to the right, barely visible against the hazy sky. Smoke meant fire. Fire, I deduced, suggested a being not related to a cold mage. I turned away from the thicket and rode parallel along the flats beneath a line of ragged cliffs held together by clumps and tufts of grass.

I soon realized I had misjudged the fire: Whatever hearth expelled the fire came from the cliffs north of me, not from the flats. The twilight hung as though suspended, and it was not yet dark when I spotted a round stone tower, very like an ancient dun although as stout as if it had been built yesterday. I dismounted and led the horse up a track scraped into the earth to reveal chalk. As I came closer, panting at the steep climb, I heard fiddling. At the height, I paused under the canopy of a vast oak.

A bent old woman sat on a flat stone bench with a fiddle set to her chin. She sawed a mournful tune while a fire burned merrily within the confines of a circular hearth constructed of the same fiat stone used to build the dun. The dun had a door, closed, and three high windows, shuttered, and an air of being entirely deserted, like a corpse whose spirit has fled. Beyond the fire and almost lost in the darkness stood a stone trough and next to it a well ringed by a waist-high wall of white stone and capped with a hat of thatch from whose supporting pillars hung a rope and a brass bucket. The horse whickered, smelling water, and the fiddler ceased in midsong and lowered the instrument.

Without looking around and in a voice that sounded much younger than her stooged form appeared, she said, "Peace to you on this fine evening, traveler."

Hearing the village speech here in the spirit world surprised me, but I managed a reply to her back. "Peace to you. I hope there is no trouble."

"No trouble indeed, thanks to my power as a woman. A fine afternoon and a fine day it has been." She still did not turn around. "How does it find you?"

We ran down through an exchange of greetings until I finally asked, "My pardon, but is there some reason you keep your back to me, maestra?"

"Is there some reason you are unaware it is foolish to look any creature in the face in the spirit world before you are sure what manner of creature it is?"

"It is?" I blurted.

She laughed. "Na! Come. Into the light," she said, by which I recalled my surroundings enough to realize that night had fallen and the spirit world breathed in darkness while her cheery fire alone lit the world. There was no moon, and there were no stars, yet neither did the haze that blinded the heavens feel like clouds. Here beyond the aura of light, I began to think the forest below the cliffs had begun to breathe and actually move. A twig snapped.

1 led the mare out from under the oak and, staying well back, circled the hearth until I came around to stand behind another stone bench. I faced the woman across the fire.

She was old, with a crooked back, and as thin as if she had not had enough to eat for many months. But she held my eyes with the confident gaze of a person who is sure of her authority in the world. Her loose, comfortable boubou, the robe sewn out of strips of gold, red, and black cloth, appeared practical for journeying and easy to wear. Her skin was quite black, unusual in these parts, and a scarf wrapped her head, although it had slipped back to reveal twists of silver hair. She wore gold earrings.

"You're a djeli," I said. "A djelimuso." A female djeli.

She opened a case and placed the fiddle and bow within, then closed it and looked at me. "What are you?"

"I'm Catherine," I replied. The horse shied and snorted. I yanked down on the reins just as a pair of saber-toothed cats ambled out of the night and flopped down beside the well.

"Are these also your companions?" asked the djeli with remarkable calm. When she shifted her head to look directly at the big cats, her earrings caught strands of firelight and sent it shooting like arrows into the night, and then I blinked; after all, the earrings were only gleaming slightly, as any polished surface must do.

"Not my companions, but they seem to have followed me." I did not see the sable male cat; these might be two of the ones I thought had stayed behind to guard… or to eat…

"Andevai!"

How any man could manage to look so haughty and offended while limping I could not say. And yet, infuriatingly, it was indeed Andevai who emerged out of the night, appearing very much the worse for the wear with his clothing rumpled and stained. Resides that, he looked immensely annoyed. Behind

him strolled another three of the big cats, whose demeanors bore the smug satisfaction of a petted house cat that has just deposited a mouse before its surprised human. And I was very surprised.

With not even a polite by-your-leave, and ignoring the huge saber-tooths, he approached the roaring fire.

The djeli rose. "Peace, traveler. I hope the night finds you at peace."

He pulled up so sharply that I laughed, for it was as if he'd been reined in.

"I have no trouble thanks to the mother who raised me," he said politely. "May this night find you at peace."

Honestly, they went on in this vein for far longer than I could ever have dragged out a greeting with my inadequate command of village customs. I thought they might wind down through the health of unnamed fathers and uncles and mothers and cousins into the well-being of the cattle, dogs, chickens, wheat, and barley and what troubles the vegetable garden might have seen since the two had last met, which, since these two had evidently never before met, would no doubt take a century to complete.

"Are you finished?" I demanded when there came a pause, rather embarrassed at my rudeness but really beginning to shake now. I could use fear if I turned it to anger. "Begging your pardon, maestra." I drew my sword, and the cats rose as if in answer, yawning to display their ferocious teeth, although they stayed by the well. "I thought you were dead?

He swung around to look at the cats, then back to face me. His own sword remained sheathed. "A more correct statement would be that you wished! was dead."

"I wished no such thing. I am sure I hold no animosity toward you at all except for the small detail that you tried to kill me. Indeed, for all I know, you did kill me, and I am wandering

here as in Sheol, with saber-toothed cats stalking my trail and you plaguing me. I suppose you intend to attack me again, perhaps by the light of this lovely-" I broke off.

The fire was burning without stint.

His presence was having no effect on the fire.

"I want my horse back," he said wearily, paying no attention to this marvel.

"Why are you not extinguishing the fire?" I demanded.

"Because," said the djeli, "while magisters draw their power through the spirit world, they have no power in it."

The look he shot at her should have been a spear of killing ice, but the fire burned regardless and nothing happened to her for violating such precious secrets.

Fiery Shemesh! He wielded no cold magic here!

I snorted, and his gaze flashed to me as his lips curved into the supercilious frown I was becoming familiar with. But I also noticed how stiffly he held his right shoulder; dried blood marred the sliced edges of his coat.

"You're strong and fast, but your technique is sloppy," I said as I sheathed my sword with a flourish meant to challenge him. I was beginning to see that the angrier he got, the more he climbed the pinnacle of arrogance, but without cold magic to throw around, and unless he decided to physically attack me with his sword arm injured and within the aura of firelight under the gaze of the djeli, he could do nothing but listen. And I had a lot to say, words I had swallowed for too many days. "My question, though, is why you did not use the weight and height of the horse to your advantage but instead dismounted to attack me. No Barahal would ever make such a mistake."

"I wasn't aware," he said cuttingly, "that you were a Barahal."

"A weak rejoinder! Not up to your usual standard. Next thing, you'll accuse me of being in on the fraud."

"You aren't actress enough to have managed that. It was obvious you knew nothing of the scheme."

I lost my rhythm at this unexpected parry. No cutting retort sprang to my lips.

"Anyway," he added, speech clipped as if the words were difficult to get out, "I thought if I was required to kill you, as I had been commanded to do, that I ought to show enough respect to you to do so face-to-face."

"How decent of you, truly! What courtesy you've shown me! First, you drag me from my home against my will, refuse to let me eat perfectly decent food, are rude to perfectly respectable innkeepers, and then when you're told to kill me because of a mistake you made and through nothing I have ever done, you try to kill me."

"I didn't try very hard!"

"You tried hard enough! You drew blood!" I touched my fingers to the cut on my chin.

He flinched, then drew himself taut. "You should be dead," he agreed coldly, his color very high and his posture very rigid.

"But I'm not!" I cried. "No thanks to you!"

He shook his head. "If the Barahals had given me the other girl, then none of this would have happened, would it? She would be married according to the contract, and treated well and living better than you could possibly have been in that rundown and ill-furnished house, while you would remain safe and unmolested in the bosom of your so-called family. It seems to me they're at least as much at fault for handing you over while knowing the mansa would discover the cheat and take out his anger on you. So why aren't you railing at their part in this?"

Tears pricked at my eyes. "What makes you think I'm not?"

He had the decency to look startled. A foggy notion crept into my head that he might be ashamed, and that his shame

might be fueling his anger. No, that way lay insanity. He was whipping himself because he had not yet fulfilled the mansa's command. He might even conceivably be worried about his village, or his loyal sister, and I was bitterly reminded that he had brought an escort and a spare horse for Kayleigh, which was far more than Aunt and Uncle had arranged for me. They, who had thrown me to the wolves. I hated them all over again. Hated them. Loved them. Choked on despair and anger and sheer exhaustion.

The djeli watched us with a slight smile.

"I ask your pardon for my poor manners," I said hoarsely to her. "I've had some trouble on the road."

"So it appears," she said.

"Might I rest at your fire?"

She extended a hand, not quite in invitation for me to sit but more like a request for payment.

"That's how it is with djeliw and bards," muttered Andevai. "You have to pay them lest they ridicule you."

"An unexpected complaint coming from a cold mage," she replied without heat, "for you magisters might be said to be cousins in some manner to us djeliw and bards."

"Magisters may be, bred from a long line of sorcerers and intermarried with the druas of the north," he retorted, "but I am not cousin to any of you. I was born into a village of farmers and hunters."

"Your village serves the mansa and the House," I exclaimed. "You are servants and slaves."

He lifted his chin. "Not in the old country we weren't. My people have always been farmers and hunters. We are proud of that, as we should be."

The djeli swept her extended arm in a gesture she might have made if she were singing, to emphasize a phrase. Our company agreed with her; her smile made her face rounder and lent a glow

to her cheeks. "Yet a farmer's son has been taken into a blacksmith's house and taught his secrets. There's a story."

"Not one I can tell." He dragged his left hand over his closely cropped hair, encountered chaff, and flicked the dry grass off before surveying his village garments with a fastidious grimace. How it must annoy him to stand so disheveled, and in such humble attire! He glanced sidelong at me. For some reason, the way he was looking at me made me abruptly wonder what it would be like to draw my fingers along the pleasing line of his jaw.

Blessed Tank, the ma'n had tried to kill me!

"I could tell you the sordid tale of how we met, journeyed together, and parted at odds," I said in a tone I hoped might scathe him and purge myself, although I addressed my words to the djeli. "But alas, its immediacy, and lack of a tidy end, pains me far too much to reflect on."

"Then tell me the stories," she said, licking her lips, "that your father told you."

"He wasn't my father!"

"Wasn't he?"

"He wasn't my father! They lied to me. He did not sire me."

"He gave you his stories."

"He wrote them down for the family, and I was allowed to read his journals and to believe he was my father."

"What is a father?" asked the djeli. "Do you have an answer?"

Curiosity and the cat: You know the story.

I led the horse around and away from the hearth and tethered her from a low-hanging branch of the oak. Then I walked to the well, but not so quickly as to startle the big cats. The biggest female thrust her shoulder against my hip. I staggered, steadying myself with a hand on her huge head. Her coat was coarse but also oddly comforting. A noise rumbled through her body,

like a purr. Tentatively, I scratched at her head, and she rumbled yet more.

"Catherine," said Andevai hoarsely, hand on his sword's hilt, "if you move off slowly-"

"If they wanted to eat me, they could have done so already. I'm the one they're guarding." Flung with bravado, the words fell like truth as soon as they left my lips. I spoke to the cat as I kneaded it behind the ears. "Let me get to the water and I'll fill the trough for you."

The beast withdrew her weight. I eased past her and slung the bucket over the hook, winched it down, and hauled it up. First, I filled the stone trough with water for the cats. Then I carried a full bucket to the horse, who was eager to drink. I unsaddled her, freed her mouth from the bit, gave her an apple, and paid out enough line so she could graze. I returned with bucket and saddlebags and set the bags on one of the stone benches and myself beside them. Andevai frowned as I pulled out.1 leather bottle and held it out to the djeli.

"My thanks," she said, with a gesture meant to decline the old'!, "but just as stones cannot case hunger, your mead cannot case me.Only stories can feed me."

I tossed it to Andevai, who caught it one-handed. Then I took out the second bottle for myself, draining the last of the sweet mead. The djeli released her fiddle from its case and set the instrument across her thighs.

I said to the djeli, "I never mentioned a father to you or that he had stories."

"Everyone has stories," she replied, "and every creature has a sire."

"The truth is, I don't know who sired me. Do you know?"

She narrowed her eyes and examined me, and I returned her gaze boldly. "The spirit world is knit into your bones, and you wear a spirit mantle close against your mortal flesh," she said.

"That much I can see. Your blood is what allowed you to cross from the mortal world into this one."

With a grunt, Andevai sat down heavily on the third stone bench. Lips pinched tight, he peeled off his heavy coat to reveal a wool tunic slashed at the shoulder and, folded within the lips of cut fabric, the bloodstained linen of a shirt. "Blood opens the path between worlds," he said, wincing as he tested the movement of his arm. "As every hunter knows."

I flushed. "I was only defending myself! Is the wound… bad?"

"Not so bad as to stop me riding."

"How comes it you can so easily cross into this world and back?"

He rolled his eyes, the expression making him look much younger and considerably less sophisticated. "You spent the night in my village-sheltered and fed by my family-and you cannot answer that question?"

Of course. My cheeks burned. I did not like to look stupid. "You're like that stripling I met with your brother's hunting band. You were being trained as a hunter. And then your magic bloomed and you were taken away to Four Moons House to become a magister."

"If I know how to find the gates that open around the cross-quarter days, if I know how to walk and guard myself in the spirit world and return to the mortal world, that is because of my people, not because of the magisters."

"Why not stay in the village, then? Remain a hunter?"

He took a long draught of mead and, lowering the bottle, tucked his legs up on the wide stone bench to sit cross-legged. "The question is not worthy of you, Catherine. I am a magister of rare and unexpected potency."

His cool vanity annoyed me. "In our world, but evidently not here." I gestured toward the djeli, whose fingers ran up and

down the length of the strings of her fiddle as if seeking the weakened point where the string was most likely to snap. "Is it true? That you magisters draw power through the spirit world but have none in it?"

"The secret is not mine to share. Likewise, what of you, Catherine? When my blade cut you, you ought to have…" He faltered and looked past the djeli toward the oak tree whose vast canopy blotted out a portion of the sky. His expression was as shuttered as the deserted dun. "But you did not."

"I ought to have died." I touched my tender chin.

He uncrossed his legs, set them soles to earth, and looked at me with a gaze that seared me with its icy anger. But he had no power to freeze my words on my tongue. I knew I shouldn't taunt him, because I had weeks left to survive before winter solstice freed Bee from the contract, but all that pent-up fury had to explode.

"How frustrating it didn't work out so well for you! I suppose you're accustomed to everything falling just as you like it, you with your magister's rare and unexpected potency and the might of I'our Moons House behind you. You with"-your handsome face-"your sister willing to throw herself into the mansa's bed on your behalf and-"

He rose sharply. I had gone too far, even considering that I was the one who had been sacrificed. He walked away to stand under the oak's branches. Even with my cat's eyes, I could barely see him in its heavy shadow. I looked at the djeli to see what she made of this, but her expression retained that smilingly amused interest, not as if she were laughing at us but as if she were well pleased. I had thought her a bent old woman at first, but maybe that had only been the way she played her fiddle. She sat with the erect posture of a woman sure of her place, and the firelight-was it brighter than it had been before, or exactly the

same?-had smoothed away the deep wrinkles I had thought I noticed before.

"I ask your pardon," I murmured, abruptly embarrassed at my outburst. "I'm tired and hungry and I've been running for my life."

"Tell me," she said.

Andevai shouted a wordless cry of warning. The mare whinnied in panic. A dark shape flowed past them, and I leaped to my feet as the black-pelted saber-toothed cat that had followed me ran in under the tree with a second smaller cat at its side. The two beasts raced to"the pride lounging by the well, ignoring the horse, but the mare jerked hard at her slipping tether, which I hadn't tightened firmly enough. I didn't mean to aid Andevai, but the horse was blameless, and if she pulled free and bolted, I was sure the cats would pursue her and pull her down, unable to resist the chase. I ran to the tree and held the line while he tied a better slipknot.

A hot wind rose out of the east; its gust made me sneeze.

"Beware," called the djeli. "A dragon is turning in her sleep."

Light splintered in the east. Was the sun rising at last? Yet so soon after night had fallen? He'd secured the horse, so I ducked out from under the outer branches and walked through waist-high summer grass to the cliff's ragged crumbling edge, where the land fell steeply down to the flats and tangled forest. A rim of fire limned the horizon with a burst of fiery gold. In the mortal world, according to the maps I knew and what I thought I understood of where I was standing, that fire rose in the southeast. But it was not fire and it was not sun. The wind that shook the tops of trees did not move like wind but like an unseen hand wiping clean the slate on which all is written. And what came behind it was hot and sharp and painful and obliteratingHis hand gripped my wrist with an iron strength. I was so

blindsided that I knew this time I had idiotically let down my guard, and this time nothing would stop him from plunging his sword into my heart and ridding himself of me.

Forgive me, Bee.

Steel hadn't yet pierced me. I tried to pull my wrist out of his grasp but only slid partway before he fixed his fingers through mine and held on like a madman clinging to his delusions. He hauled me backward. I stumbled clumsily with the grass hissing around us, and we tumbled in under the overhanging branches of the oak and fell to the dirt onto our hindquarters. A shivering bell, barely audible, rang. The air seemed to vibrate as a string might vibrate, plucked by a bard's hand.

My heart, my flesh, my bones, my spirit-all these thrummed as though caught within the vibrating string, within the almost inaudible thunder of a distant drumbeat that rolled on and on.

And then the air quieted and the world fell still. I was sitting on my backside, panting, with my left hand in a fist against the earth and Andcvai holding my right hand, our fingers twined intimately together.

Me released me at once, shaking free as if the touch of my skin hurt his, and scrambled to his feet. To check on the horse. Who was fine, perfectly fine, grazing at a fine stubble of grass over on the hearth side of the fine old oak. I could not catch my breath.

"Are you still there?" called the djeli. "Or were you caught in the tide of the dragon's dream?"

A rising clamor drifted from beyond the canopy: Birds.

1 ike a woman who carried four times my years in her bones, I creaked to my feet and took one slow step and a second. I grasped hold of a low-hanging branch to steady myself as I looked over what had once been the levels with a summer forest whose foliage was mostly familiar to my eyes. As in a trance, I pushed through the leaves and beyond them to get an unobstructed view.

The world had changed. A wide, flat, open landscape spread away to the horizon. This was no place I had ever seen. A lazy river spread so wide it might as well have been a shallow sea, its many channels weaving a net through solitary islets and green carpets of reed. Scattered across higher 'ground rose slim-trunked trees crowned with swords as leaves and trees alight with flame-red flowers. Everywhere flocked birds in such number and painted with such bright colors that the sound and sight rendered me mute with wonder.

"Come back to warded ground," said Andevai. I had not even noticed him walk up beside me. When I glanced back, the tree I had thought was an oak looked entirely different, with a huge trunk and stubby branches more like roots, covered with clusters of white flowers.

"It's the same tree," he said, noticing my startled gaze. "If you stay out here, you may be caught in another tide. Now perhaps you do not wonder why it is dangerous to hunt in the spirit world. Besides the beasts and monsters, I mean."

"What happens to those who are caught in the tide?" I asked as I stared at the fluttering, rippling landscape of birds and river and dawn sky drenched with rosy gold but without a sun.

"They never come back."

"Why didn't you leave me out there, then?"

An icy, contemptuous look was the only answer he gave me. He turned and walked away, under the shadow of the tree.