Cold Magic

26

Although the music was still playing, I went upstairs to my empty chamber and stripped down to my shift. I tossed and turned on a narrow bed but could not sleep. On midmorning of 9 September 1824, a ferry carrying upward of one hundred passengers had nosed out onto the Rhenus River on a routine crossing in fair autumn weather. It had not reached the far shore. Every soul aboard the ferry had drowned except for one child, who had been plucked by a fisherman from the deadly current.

Daniel Hassi Barahal and Tara Bell had stayed in this inn on their final, fateful journey, with a child in their care. Me. In this inn. Perhaps in this bed. I sought in my memory but found only blank pages. No, there was the man's laugh and the way my mother had held me tightly against her in a rocking coach. If she had been my mother.

Blessed Tanit! What if the real Catherine had actually drowned and Aunt and Uncle had simply found an orphan to pretend to be her? Wouldn't that make more sense?

Burrowing under the wool blankets as though safety or answers could be found beneath, I dozed fitfully and within the weaving of sleep and dreams, I found myself sailing across a blinding expanse of ice in a schooner that skated the surface of a massive ice sheet. Behind, a pack of saber-toothed cats as black as if dusted in coal pursued the ship. A personage stood beside

me. Light glinted on his brow, as if a shard of ice had gotten embedded in his forehead. I knew he was my father, and of course he looked nothing like the man named Daniel Hassi Barahal whose portrait I had once worn in a locket at my neck. I'd given away that locket to a pair of girls in Four Moons House in exchange for an open door.

An open door meant something, surely, but in my dream I could not work out the connection.

A light scratching, a rustle as the door opened, a giggle: these woke me. I buried my head under blankets, feeling the presence of too many people in the room and them engaged in rumpling the bedding.

"Rory," I said into the blankets, "I'm trying to sleep."

Voices murmured, his and hers, breathy with desire; the door clicked shut, followed by footsteps slipping away to some other private place. I was, again, alone. A dreamy languor swallowed me. What would it be like to kiss Andevai? Surely he affected that trim line of beard because he knew it emphasized the aesthetically pleasing line of his jaw. A few people, like Bee, were beautiful because they were so vibrant that the gaze is drawn to them whenever they are nearby; a few have become accustomed to being praised for beauty and expect those around them to be grateful to dwell in beauty's shadow. Andevai was, apparently, vain enough to care how he looked, but what I had taken at first for arrogant vainglory I now suspected had more to do with insecurity. He did not undervalue his cold magic, but he hauled other burdens. He, too, seemed not entirely sure of what he was, caught between his village and his House.

He had pulled me back within the wards, when he might have left me out to be swept away by the tide. The ghost of the memory of his fingers entwined with mine had left its imprint on my skin.

He hadn't meant to cut me. He'd stopped himself. He'd said,

"No." It had been an accident. He was ashamed. That's what made him act that way, gates closed and guard up.

What an idiot I was! Falling into sleep making up stories about a man I did not know and who had been commanded first to marry me, a woman he had never met, and then who, having botched the task, had been ordered to kill me. He had destroyed the airship, and perhaps lives with it. I had seen him kill two men; I knew what he was capable of. His blade's cut would have dispatched me if-for this was the only conclusion I could reach-my true father's blood, knit into my bones, had not protected me from the cut of cold steel.

His face meant nothing. It was just a face. He was a cold mage, even if he was not the actual son of Four Moons House, even if the magisters scorned him for his birth in a village they considered bound to them as unfree people little better than slaves. He was bound to the House by old laws; he was theirs to claim, to raise and train, and to unleash on the world when they needed his magic to enforce their will. Or, to be fair, to curb the excesses of the princes and lords as the magisters were said to have done in the early days of the mage Houses. As the old saying went, "Fear the magister, but if you pay him what he demands, he'll give you what you need. If only the prince's hunger could be satisfied as easily." Yet in these days, many hated the cold mages as much as they hated the princes and the old hereditary councils. The radicals said that those who had little because they were denied more than a pittance would, in time, rise up to demand a larger share.

1 had been content once with what I had. Now it seemed I was caught in the flooding current of a river, torn away from all I had once thought was mine. The Barahals had sacrificed me. Four Moons House wished to kill me. At least the cats hadn't eaten me.

The latch clicked. Humming softly and a bit off-key, Rory

slipped into the room. A bed creaked as its ropes shifted under his weight.

"Rory?" I whispered.

"I was trying not to wake you." He sounded cheerful and not at all tired.

"What have you been doing?" He started to speak, but I cut him off. "No, never mind, don't answer." I knew perfectly well what he'd been doing. I could smell. "Are you moon-dazzled? By which I mean insane? Folk don't take kindly to men dancing into their towns, however so humble and isolated that town may be, and… ah… rollicking with their young women."

"Wasn't that included with the food and the bed?"

Perhaps I was only tired. But something about his tone of genuine surprise, and my mood, made me snicker. "You're awful. You know, I have only your word that you and I share a sire."

I sensed the change even before he spoke, a cat gone spiky with feline contempt. "Are you implying I am lying to you about such a matter?"

I stuck my head out of the blankets. The waning quarter moon was rising, visible as a hazy fragment of pearl through the thick glass. I saw him sitting upright with a rigid set to his shoulders as if he were trying to decide whether to claw me for the insult.

"No. But I woke up one morning assuming I knew everything about my world and my life, and now I know nothing." His posture softened infinitesimally, but I could tell he was still offended. "If I've insulted you, then please forgive me. I've had a terrible time. I don't know what to think about anything." My voice choked.

He said, more softly yet, "Go to sleep, little sister. I've arranged for us to leave at dawn."

And so we did. Who knew he had it in him to arrange for transport! I laughed when Emilia appeared at dawn with a sack

of wayfarer's food, and she delivered us to a pair of older men in charge of a wagon filled with barrels of salted fish.

"Giving him two meals, eh?" said the driver with a laugh as she handed the sack to Rory in exchange for a quick kiss.

She said, "No man governs me, Uncle. I'm of age and can do what I like."

"So you say and so you will, until it gets you and the town into trouble." The driver was a stout man, his brown hair half gone to gray. He nodded amiably at me. "Come on up, gel. I'm called Leon. You sit beside me. My cousin-he's also called Leon, but you can call him Big Leon-and your brother can fake turns walking alongside."

I got up beside the driver. Big Leon was a broad-shouldered, dark-complexioned man a good head taller than his paler cousin, and he gave me a searching and suspicious look so dark and penetrating that I began to get a little angry. Then he shook his shoulders with a twitch of his mouth, almost an apology, before he clambered up beside me on the bench. He braced a musket against his outer leg and slung a crossbow and bolts across his back. We moved out, the wagon rolling at a stately pace behind a pair of well-kept oxen.

"Lxpecting trouble?" I asked, noting the cousin's easy way with his weapons.

"Always good to travel in company," said Little Leon. "Folk like their salted fish. There's always some who will take what they want without payment. Sheep, for instance. Or you and your brother losing your goods and carriage and horse to brigands."

"Twins?" asked Big Leon abruptly, looking first at me and then at Roderic, like maybe he had a country superstition that twins would bring bad luck to a journey.

I stuck with the story I'd told the innkeeper. "No, he's older. And a cursed lot of trouble, if you ask me."

Little Leon laughed appreciatively. "That we saw, eh? Him and Em are well matched." Unlike his taciturn cousin, he was a talkative fellow who told us far more than I had ever wanted to know about Emilia and her notorious ways. His gossip did make the miles pass, though. He then regaled us?with the gripping drama of his escape from the Great Hallows Blizzard, as folk were calling it now. The storm had howled out of the north on the second day of November and not let up for five relentless days. He'd been on the road to deliver a wagonload of pig iron from a furnace called Crane Marsh Works in Anderida to the blacksmith in Lemanis, and had barely made the village of Rhyd-cerdin as the whiteout descended to blind him.

"I heard the dogs barking and the temple bell ringing. That's what guided me in."

I gestured toward a land barely dusted with white. "I see little trace of snow now. How can it have thawed off at this season?"

"It weren't a natural storm, lass. Some thought it was the Wild Hunt's last gallop, but I am of the opinion it was one of them mansas taken by a rare fury. The snow came so deep that for weeks no one moved except from house to privy and privy to byre, maybe to the inn for a pint once a few paths were shoveled out. Then not seven days ago came such winds as were not natural winds. All the night they blew. I thought they would scrape the soil right off the bones of the earth. When we woke the next day, we came to find that the snow had been blown away, and to what place I am sure we will never know. I can't say what spirit raised that wind, or if it were a withering of cold mages acting in concert what managed it. Were you caught out in the storm?"

"We weathered it in a safe place." But a sick feeling dug at the pit of my stomach, because I wondered if the mages of Four Moons House had called down the blizzard to kill me. "Did anyone die?"

He glanced at Big Leon, who was scanning the countryside

with the gaze of a man who sees brigands everywhere. As the sun rose, the clouds began to shear off to reveal a blue sky. We fell in beside a river, flowing west. "Not so I heard. How far does your brother mean to walk?"

Rory wore a fur hat and a wide grin, striding with the easy grace of a man enjoying the novelty of the landscape. He did not look tired, as if staying up half the night carousing and engaged in other activities was as refreshing as sleeping.

"As far as he wants," I said. "How far are you taking this fish?"

"To the Crane Marsh Works. This is what's owed them for the pig iron. It's part of the winter feed for those who work the furnace. I was meant to bring it weeks ago, but I've only been able to move out now."

In my thoughts, I paged through Uncle's library of maps. West across the flats on a decent road, and thence up into eastern Anderida, home of mines and ironworks since the days before the Roman invasion. The Romans had left roads and paths aplenty to move the precious metal. The mansa had sent soldiers along this route first thing, looking for me. After six weeks, 1 hoped my trail was cold. Evidently Tara Bell and Daniel Hassi Barahal had chosen this route as well, going in the other direction, and their trail was not just cold but thirteen years dead.

"Your brother booked passage for you all the way to Crane Marsh Works," the carter added, with a curious glance at me, as if wondering why I hadn't known. "Last night."

"I went to my bed early," I said, "for I was exhausted after our harrowing encounter with the brigands."

"How many were there?" asked Big Leon.

"I was hiding my eyes," I said, perhaps too glibly, for the comment earned me a sharp, assessing look. Big Leon then hopped down from the mewing wagon and fell back to walk at the rear

beside Rory, musket under his right arm while he tamped tobacco into a pipe.

"Never mind him," said Little Leon. "You know how some folk are."

"He walks like a soldier."

"Him? Why, I soldiered in my youth, and you'd not guessed it, had you?"

"What, in the Iberian wars? Him, too?"

"Him, too, but we don't talk about that. We don't dwell on old grievances here, lass, for you know how kin might have got mixed up on opposite sides of that war. Why, I'm the son of a Atrebates mother and a Trinobantic father, a mixed marriage if there ever was one, for you know the Atrebates Celts sided with the Roman invaders while the Trinobantes Celts fought against them."

"The Roman invasion?" I laughed. "That ended two thousand years ago, not thirteen years ago like the Iberian war."

"Yet folk recall them just the same, whether it were Caesar or Camjiata. Hard to say who might have fought on which side, eh? So tell me about Adurnam. I hear there's a temple there dedicated to Ma Bellona, the Mother of War, She of the bloody hand, that's so big a thousand men can stand in the forecourt without touching one shoulder to another. Is that true?"

Behind, someone began coughing convulsively, and I whipped around to see Rory with the lit pipe in hand, doubled over, hacking. Big Leon calmly removed the pipe from Rory's fingers and began smoking as he walked; after a bit, wiping his eyes and starting to laugh, Rory loped after.

"Yes, it's true," I said, turning back. "I've seen such an assembly with my own eyes."

Traveling by wagon was not fast but it was steady, and both Little Leon and I liked to tell, and to hear, tales. By the afternoon of the second day, we read the signs that meant we were approaching a blast furnace and mine. The land began to fold

and rise; the woods-mostly elm, oak, lime, and alder-were heavily coppiced. Charcoal stacks or their blackened remains dotted the surroundings. Smoke smeared the blue sky, and gradually a sound could be discerned, faint at first and then rising into a din matched by a miasma of fumes that made my eyes water and my nostrils prickle. A pond made by damming streams spread silvery-blue waters alongside pits and mounds of dirt and heaps of slag. The huge stone edifice of the furnace spewed smoke that covered half the sky as we approached. I covered my mouth and nose with a kerchief, eyes streaming. Rory started to cough. Both Leons tied kerchiefs over their faces.

Two young men came running.

"Here you are come, Leon! After that storm blew off the snow, we put bets on what day you'd arrive. Old Jo won! Who are these folks?"

No snow or ice remained where the furnace baked earth and air. Men pushed wheelbarrows of raw ore over a bridge of planks and dumped it into the furnace's fiery maw. What else transpired I could not discern, because the area below was roofed with timber. A bellows wheezed. Water splashed from a wheel and rolled along a wooden sluice.

We drove past and found ourselves in a tiny hamlet consisting of a barracks, a byre, and a temple to Komo Vulcanus, He whose knowledge is hidden, whose portals were wreathed with evergreen and myrtle necklaces from the year's end celebration. Big Leon left us without a word, entering the temple precincts as several men came to the threshold to usher him in.

Set apart from the other buildings, a pretty cottage stood backed up against an uncut copse of yew. Raised on bricks and rimmed with a porch on the side facing the furnace, the main building had no chimney at all, but it was attached via a covered paved walkway to a brick building in back whose chimney produced a healthy trail of white smoke. A man stood on the porch watching over the valley.

"Who is that up there?" I asked, not sure why my pulse began to race.

"Eh, the cold mage," said the carter, surprised I had to ask. "Falling Star House sends a young magister out each winter when the furnace is fired up. To keep a watch."

"To keep a watch? That sounds ominous."

He grunted. "Och, I did not mean it so. The Houses need iron, too."

"Don't they forge cold steel?"

He glanced sidelong at me. "What would a lass like you know of such stories? Anyhow, the mansa of Falling Star House is a responsible man. That young fellow there will keep a watch over the valley, and if there is a fire-for you can be sure fire is the worst danger to them who work the furnace-he can put it out. Might be you could sleep in the magister's kitchens. I can have a lad sent up to ask."

"My thanks," I said, scanning the sky. My eyes felt gritty, and I blinked away tears. "We've an hour's light left in the day. We'll keep walking."

He wished us well and did not argue. Even here in wild Ande-rida, there were few places you might walk for an hour without coming upon a hamlet or a village where a bed might be begged and a supper paid for with copper coins. The lads insisted we take a swallow of ale before we left. Rory charmed them into opening one of the barrels right away, and I plied my most polite brusque smile, and sooner rather than later we ended up walking south on a spur of the Roman road, toward Hawkwood Furnace. Rory carried a tiny gourd filled with salted fish along with the bundle of travelers' food Emilia had given him. In exchange for his services, I presumed.

"We might as well eat the fish now," he said, "for I'm hungry

and we've not eaten anything more than that stinking cheese and dry bread this morning."

They were very strong, and the tiny bones satisfyingly crunchy. I saw him lick his fingers, each one, after savoring the salty morsels, and so I did the same.

"We'll smell offish forever," I said.

"That would be nice."

We strode along companionably into the dregs of the afternoon. At times we chattered about inconsequential things; at times we remained in charitable silence, not needing to talk.

In the way of those whom Lady Fortune favors-not that I would dream of asking for favors from a Roman goddess-we came upon a farmstead just as dusk lowered its mantle. The folk who lived there were of old Atrebates stock, black of hair, pale of skin, and short of stature. They greeted us kindly and did not remark on our height more than five or six times over the course of a country meal of millet porridge and boiled mutton. They refused to accept any coin, it going against the custom of hospitality, so I gave them stories instead. The great tales whose warp and weft weave history fell no more strangely into their ears than the ordinary goings-on in Adurnam, which lay only a few days' walk away but which they had never heard of. We sat up late by a smoky fire in a hearth backed with an iron plate, and they listened, in their way, as intently as the djeli Lucia Kante- whatever she had been, ghost or spirit-had in hers.

In the chill mist of winter dawn, they set us on our way with a quarter of precious cheese and the last loaf of yesterday's bread.

Some hours later, at the big furnace beside the village of Hawkwood, we turned west into the southern reaches of Ande-rida. The tracks were easy to follow. Often, we could mark our goal by the columns of a temple standing atop a distant hill. Every prominent hilltop had its temple enclosure or stone pillar, however humble. I did not mind walking. Stagecoaches and loll

roads were too easy to watch. The weather held as we made our way from one furnace to the next, past the scars left by abandoned mines and alongside empty pastures that in spring would greet starving cattle with fresh shoots. Out here, no blizzard had struck; no snow had come down at all in the last six weeks, we were informed. The weather had held mild.

On the next night we were met with pitchforks and hostility and only grudgingly allowed to sleep above a farmstead byre, with the snuffling and snorts of the livestock as our lullaby. But on the night after, we-guests! utter strangers! how exciting!- entertained a hamlet so full of fellowship that drums and fiddles were brought out for a sweaty evening of dancing. I had to warn Rory off a smitten lass, no more than fifteen, whose ardor was innocent and therefore dangerous to her and especially to us if he mistook her glowing infatuation for worldly experience. Many ales later, when one man put a hand on me in a place it was not wanted, Rory turned on the fellow with a look so like a snarl it was as if I could see behind the appearance of a man to the animal he was in the spirit world. And though my unwanted suitor had served ten years in the warband of one of the cousins of the Prince of Tarrant, who lived hereabouts, the former soldier backed up so fast that he stumbled over a bench and fell flat on his ass to the general delight of the assembly.

"I could have handled him easily enough," I objected the next morning when we had set off again. Although the weather remained fair, my stomach felt sour and the skin around my eyes tight as a headache settled in.

"I do not doubt it." He squinted his eyes against the rising sun and rubbed his face with the back of a hand. "But he made me angry. It was like he'd clawed me."

"Yes, that's just how our generous hosts would have felt toward you if you'd gone one step further with that sweet-faced lass."

He frowned. We'd started out sluggishly, still muzzy from last night's celebration, but I picked up the pace, and we walked lor a long while in silence. The weather remained fair, if cold, but as long as we were not drenched by sleet or drowned in snow, the cold actually made it easier to walk because the ground remained firm. If my nose shone perpetually red from cold, that was a small price to pay for solid footing.

Early on, we glimpsed men in the distance, felling trees; otherwise we might have been alone in the wide world but for the quiet hamlets and farmsteads with their chimneys breathing smoke. Folk did tend to bide inside at this time of year, when the days ran short. Even dogs did not bark for long at us; as soon as we came close enough for them to clearly smell Rory, they tended to slink away with tails tucked.

We paused to take a bite to eat when the sun reached its highest point.

"We should make Mutuatonis by nightfall." I sat on a stone held wall, feet dangling.

He leaned beside me. He wore his long dark hair in a single braid, like a woman, for these days men cropped their hair short. Perhaps it had been otherwise in other times and other places, but I had never seen a man wear his hair as long as my own was. Yet none of his admirers seemed to count it against him.

"Can you see that prominence there?" I pointed to the southwest, to a hill bulging higher than the rolling land around it. "That should be Cold Fort, if my memory of maps is correct. When we get a bit closer, we'll know for sure. There's a temple atop it, within the old earth ramparts. In ancient days it was a rort, maybe a barbarian prince's royal seat."

He wasn't looking toward the distant hill.

"What place is that?" He indicated a manor house far to the south of us, half screened by a row of poplars. "I smell meat cooking."

"A lord's estate. Not a mage House, as you can see by the arrangement of chimneys."

"Every building must have fires against the winter cold, mustn't they?"

"Cold mages kill fire. They heat their homes in the Roman way. Furnaces on the outside heat air that flows inside below a raised floor."

"What lord lives in that fine manor?" He wrinkled his nose. "Can we go there to beg for our supper?"

We were too far away for me to smell anything. "One of the cousins of the Prince of Tarrant, I suppose. He'd have no reason to show hospitality to the likes of us. I'm getting cold."

I hopped down and we set out again.

"From Mutuatonis we have a choice whether to follow the old Roman road west to where it meets the toll road. Then we would turn south and pass through Newfield before reaching Adur-nam. But if Four Moons House still has seekers and soldiers out looking, it will be easier to find us on the toll road. Otherwise, we can cut across the chalk hills and stay in the countryside."

"They will expect you to return to Adurnam?"

"They must assume I will try to reach the Barahals. Although why I would want to see them ever again after they betrayed me…" It seemed my life had turned into an unending parade of betrayals, and while I could comprehend what had led someone like Kayleigh to play the part she had, it was awfully hard to find forgiveness in my heart for all those so willing to sacrifice me.

"Why go to Adurnam? We could leave the Deathlands. Go home.

"It is your home, maybe. It isn't mine. I don't understand the first thing about it. What would have happened to me if Andevai had not pulled me back within the wards when that…tide… swept through? Would I have died?"

"You would have changed. Maybe that is like what you call death here. You would have become something other than what you are now."

"What am I?" I murmured. The words made me dizzy. "Rory, do you know our father?"

"I never met him. He is not a personage you meet."

"He must have met your mother, and my mother. In order to sire children. If it's true we were both sired by him, he would

have had to have been a cat in one form… a man in another____________________

You must know something more about him."

"No. Except that one thing my mother said."

"That he was a tomcat."

"That he was a tomcat. And not the sort of personage you go hunting for. If he wants you, he'll call you to him."

"That's really all you know? Aren't you curious to know more?"

"No. Should I be?"

"Do I wear a spirit mantle?"

He narrowed his eyes to look at me, then closed one eye to peer at me, opened it and closed the other, and looked, then opened it and, with both eyes on my face, made a gesture of defeat. "I can smell it, but I see only your human flesh."

Before I could reply, he lifted his chin, tilted his head, blinked, and brought me to a halt with a hand on my arm. "Listen." One moment he had been a relaxed and genial companion; now he was a predator alert to danger. "Horses and men behind us. I smell iron and cold steel."

I did not for one instant doubt him, although I could not sense anything amiss. The sky was flawless, its blue made brilliant by the clarity of the winter air. A breeze had been blowing out of the south all morning, just enough to set the tops of bushes swaying and to send fluttering kisses of movement across fields oi uncut grass. Beyond the open ground rose yew woods,

screened at their edge with bare-branched sapling beech and straggling bushes. Not more than a mile away rose the ridge where the ancient Celts had built Cold Fort and the Romans later raised a temple to claim the stronghold for their own gods.

"It's best if we leave the path," I said hoarsely.

The wind died as the words left my lips. Died was not the right word. It was as if a vast bellows had been turned inside out and sucked the wind back into the lofty caverns where the tempest is born. The temperature dropped from cold to frigid; my lips tasted the fall as though I pressed ice to my mouth.

"There's a cold mage with them," I said, barely able to voice the words because I could not find enough heat in my lungs. "They're tracking us."

I saw no sign of pursuit. They might not yet have come into view. But strangely, although the wind had utterly failed, an odd motion drew ripples across the clearing behind us.

Something was wrong with the light on the grass.

In Southbridge, Andevai had woven an illusion.

"They're in the field," I gasped, heart racing so hard I heard its hammering as hooves thudding on the ground. "Magic conceals them."

I started to bolt, blindly, down the path, but Rory tugged me to a halt. "Is there a crossroads?"

"I don't know." I was becoming frantic. They would kill me if they caught me. To force its prey into a panic is exactly what the predator desires. I had to think. "The ancient forts are built where lines of power intersect. Cold Fort lies on the highest point at the southwesternmost sweep of the ridge."

Perhaps our stillness made our pursuers bold. Or perhaps the magister riding with them wasn't very strong or simply became tired of holding the illusion, now that we were so close. From the Held behind us, a bolt came sailing over our heads. Suddenly

I saw seven horsemen pounding toward us, six in soldier's livery carrying crossbows, with sheathed cavalry swords dangling along their flanks.

Rory said, "Into the trees. Now." He pushed me.

Terror grew wings on my back, and I ran, wishing I was an eru with wings that might fly me into the safety of the spirit world, if you could call that place safe.

I heard a man shout, "I knew that jo-ba was lying. He's in league with her."

I heard the hammer release, the sing of a bolt.

A sharp sudden scream of warning.

As I reached the edge of the underbrush, I cast a look over my shoulder to see a saber-toothed cat hurtling in among the horsemen, muscles bunching as it sprang to topple the lead horseman from the saddle. Confusion reigned as the horses bucked and sidestepped, trying to get their heads out from under the reins so they could flee the deadly beast's massive claws. Two horsemen had pulled out of the fray and were racing toward me. Branches scraped my arms as I shoved through the tangle of bushes. The fabric of my cloaks caught, dragging me to a halt, and I twisted, yanking at the cloth to free myself. Branches snapped as a rider drove his mount into the undergrowth. I plunged farther in, but once beyond the leafless fringe of deciduous trees, I entered the yew forest whose dense canopy sheltered no concealing undergrowth.

I spun as the soldier broke out of the bushes, crossbow raised as he sighted in the gloom. A bolt hissed past me; he dropped the crossbow on its leash as I untied my outer cloak. Closing, he drew his sword. I swept the cloak open and flung it over the bead of his mount. Ducking to my right, I threw myself behind a tree trunk. He grappled with the cloak, cursing as the horse shook itself into a halt under a low-lying tree limb. I lis head slammed hard into the branch, but 1 was already running. My

riding habit was cut for practicality, not fashion; the Barahals took their riding seriously. The fabric did not hinder me as I dashed deeper into the woods. The trees had a brooding majesty, but all I could truly discern were the possibilities these gnarled boles offered for dodging armed riders. Another was gaining on me. This young man had a fashionable coat rather than a soldier's kit. He had a sword, and he rode well, and by the way he shouted a command over his shoulder to a soldier spurring his horse to follow, I guessed he must be the magister who had woven the illusion.

I clambered over the moss-covered ruins of a fallen tree, raced along the trunk to the exposed roots, and jumped down, using the cane for balance as I caught myself in a crouch. Then I kept running, having gained two more breaths of distance between me and them, because they had to go around and furthermore were hampered by young trees and shrubs that had taken advantage of the opening in the canopy to steal light for growth. I saw and heard no sign of the others. Of what had happened to my brother I dared not contemplate.

Abruptly out of the forest appeared three soldiers, bearing down on me with swords raised. Bright tabards wrapped them, marked with the four moons of their house: full, half, crescent, and new. Yet light glinted on their iron helmets; sun would not glint so beneath a canopy too dense to allow undergrowth.

The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion. So Andevai had murmured in the carriage when he'd thought I was asleep.

I ran straight into them, brandishing my cane, and where it slashed through the illusion, the hard glare of its cold steel blade shone. Cold steel cuts cold magic.

A shout of anger chased me as I ran on. I scrambled into a gully and splashed across a stream whose eddying shallows were rimed with lingers of ice. I broke onto a path crowded with uncut

bushes and winter-sleeping beech and ash, and lashed my way through to emerge into a long, narrow clearing. The ruins of an old rectangular building whose entrance was crowned by a Roman arch greeted me. Holes had been dug about the tumbled walls as though thieves were seeking buried treasure. I was for a moment alone. The holes made the approach to the arch and the ruins behind it a maze deadly to running creatures. Blessed Tank watched over me, for there was a big hole somewhat triangular in shape, like her sigil, directly in front of the archway. I spread my other cloak over the hole and weighted the ends with bricks and kicked and flung leaves and debris to cover it. I heard the cursed magister's mount snorting as he pushed past the thicket and rode into the clearing. I backed under the arch.

He had the haughty pride magisters were famous for, the curl of lip, the spark of cold fire in the eye. He wore the fine clothes whose weave and tailoring were apparent even at thirty paces and carried a sword hammered out of cold steel in his right hand. Seeing me, he glanced over his shoulder, looking for his companions.

"That's right," I shouted at him. "We've played you for a fool. You think your cold magic is so powerful, but you're blind. A lowborn slave wields more power than you will ever handle or know. How it must burn!"

Young men can be very predictable. If Andevai had endured such a difficult time in Four Moons House despite his ability and the benefit the mage House gained from it, then his age mates within the House, the aspiring magisters born to that sta-tus, must truly envy and despise him for what he possessed that they lacked.

With a grimace on his dark face, he spurred the horse straight at me.

1 actually stalled to laugh, and that only made him more angry, and more blind.

The beast plunged where my cloak gave way, stumbling to its knees into the hole. He lost his seat and slid over the side, grasping desperately at the saddle. I loosed a prayer heavenward: Blessed Tank, do not harm the innocent beast. Then I lunged forward. I whacked the magister on the head, and as his body went limp, I dragged him free, wrenching his leg out of the stirrup. Grasping the reins, I hauled the horse out of the hole and led it a few paces, but its gait was smooth. It was spooked but uninjured. I mounted just as an actual soldier burst onto the scene. The magister moaned, crying out, and I urged my fine steed forward, past the?ruins and into the woods on an overgrown track. This was a cursed good horse, strong and willing.

"Go after her! There's a reward if you bring back her thrice-cursed corpse."

A whistle shrilled, and answering whistles rose from the wood.

I had a choice between two paths. I sent my steed down the leftward track, which soon opened into a decent trail. We went flying along past a farmstead and, not long after, a compound of a half dozen round houses fenced by a round palisade. A pair of children, standing outside, shrieked and called after me; they had brown faces, heads wrapped against the cold. A man, much lighter, appeared in the low doorway of one of the houses. He raised a hand as though to hail me; then I saw his gaze fix behind me. As I passed, he ran to grab the children.

A wagon track offered a wider route. I turned right, heading for Cold Fort. The woods fell away into cleared fields, and another lordly house rose away to the right like a dollhouse. Beyond the cultivated lands rose the ridge, with at least two lighter scratches on the slope marking paths chewed through the turf to reveal chalk soil below. Away to the right, a road intersected this track. On it, heading my way, galloped four riders. The sight struck my breath right out of me as brutally as a sword cut to my chest. I crooned to the horse, asking for more speed,

more heart. He opened up stride like a warrior, and we reached the intersection before them and hit the path up the slope.

Naturally we slowed, and someone loosed a bolt at my back, but either his heart wasn't in it or his aim was bad, for the bolt stuck, shivering, in the hillside. Three breaths later, a sting like an insect's bite burned my right leg, and I looked down to see a bolt caught in the folds of my skirt. With a curse, I grabbed it and flung it away, but warmth trickled down my leg.

"Up! Up!" I said, willing the gelding to climb. I looked down to see the quartet meet up with the single soldier. They conferred; then a trio started up the path behind me while the other two headed onward. Did they mean to climb to Cold Fort on another track and cut me off?

But I had made my decision and chosen my path. I had lost Rory, maybe forever. I had to reach the temple and hope I could cross into the spirit world, where they could not follow. My leg was beginning to throb. At least, I thought bitterly, I had blood already drawn to open a gate onto the other side.

My horse, as befitted the mount given to a son of the House, was superior to theirs in courage and conformation. He was magnificent, a princely horse eager to show me his mettle. We reached the ridgeline having gained on our pursuers. Wind cracked over us. The land spread away below: the yew wood; a lordly house with gardens and corrals and a stockade within which a surprising number of cattle, as small as carved playthings, crowded despite the late season when normally most would have been slaughtered.

1 turned my mount toward the massive earth ramparts of the old hill fort. Pillars and a roof marked a temple within the ancient walls. As I rode along the undulating ridge slope, I spotted figures atop the ramparts, signaling. Did priests live in the temple year-round?

Behind me, the trio was closing, and on the road below, the pair had dismounted and, leaving their horses, climbed on foot.

Farther away, I saw a dozen riders converging in the area from which I'd come, maybe in the hamlet where the man had gathered in his children. As if called by sorcery, six horsemen appeared in the earthwork's narrow front gap.

Fiery Shemesh! They had reached Cold Fort before me. I saw no sign of Rory.

Only one direction was left to me, a rash run down to the west where the town of Mutuatonis sprawled by the River Ouse with a hazy cap of smoke rising from its busy hearths.

"Catherine Hassi Barahal!" A man's voice called from the soldiers waiting at the gap.

So they would lure me in with hearty cheer and false promises before they cut my throat!

"Catherine!" the man repeated, gesturing to get my attention.

Before I plunged down the slope on my final doomed run, I hesitated. I knew that voice.

"Brigid's luck!" interposed a stentorian tenor. "I did not believe you, brother. Yet here she is, just as her cousin said she would be!"

The men at the ramparts were not wearing the livery of Four Moons House. They wore the green-jacketed uniforms of the Tarrant militia. The officer in charge was a tall, lean Celt with a thick mustache, a clean-shaven chin, and short hair stiffened into lime-whitened spikes. Four troopers flanked him, two with hair stiffened and lightened in the same manner while two kept black hair clipped tight against their heads. The sixth man seemed slighter than the others, although equally martial in his tailored military garb. He beckoned with a wave of his hand.

"Maestressa Barahal! It is you! Come on! Come in! Beatrice told us to meet you here, to bring you in to safety."

Blessed Tanit.

For the soldier who called me in was none other than Amadou Barry, the academy student Bee was so currently infatuated with.