Cold Magic

8

"You are the eldest Hassi Barahal girl?" the personage asked me, an odd question given that he had just asked Aunt the same thing.

"So I have always been told," I retorted.

"Cat," murmured Aunt warningly. "Silence is better than disrespect."

He ignored her and glanced almost slightingly at Bee. Bee was shorter, dainty with a plumpness that made her seem a year or two younger than she really was, and, of course, she was beautiful. His gaze fixed back on me. "It must be asked and answered three times. You are the eldest Hassi Barahal girl?"

Aunt sucked in a sharp breath. "Catherine!" she said warningly.

Uncle shut his eyes.

I just found the cold mage irritating. "As we said twice already. I am the eldest."

"So be it. The contract was sealed with magic. You cannot lie to me." He stared at me a moment longer, gave an abrupt, infinitesimal shake of the head as with utter disdain, and turned to Aunt. "The clothing she is wearing is simply not acceptable. You need pack only a small trunk for the journey. The House will provide all she needs once we arrive."

"Once we arrive where?" I looked at Aunt for clarification, but she was quite deliberately not looking at me, so I looked

toward Uncle instead, but he wasn't looking, either; he'd already steered Bee toward the stairs.

"Darling, up you go. It's well past bedtime."

Bee caught my gaze, but we kept our mouths shut. That was the code of Bee and Cat: Keep your mouth shut and don't say anything until you know what's going on and how much trouble your cousin, who is also your best friend in the world, is in.

Aunt sailed past me and kissed Bee on the cheek. "Yes, darling, just kiss Catherine good night and be gone." Trembling, Bee gave me a kiss on each cheek while Aunt kept talking to the personage. "The dear girl may wish to choose some of her clothing for herself, what she likes best. You know how girls are. They like to have special things with them, very sentimental-"

The magister whistled sharply, a piercing sound that made us all flinch. As Uncle pulled Bee away, she twisted off her bracelet and thrust it into my hand. Then Uncle dragged her up the upper stairs, him hauling with the desperation of a man in pain and she stumbling up backward as she watched me. I didn't move. I was too stunned, her bracelet the only solid weight that fixed me to earth. The personage set a hand on the railing. A wisp of mist rose from the polished wood as he leaned on it, canting head and shoulders to look down into the foyer.

I wondered what would happen if I shoved him over.

"Bring him in," he called to an unseen servant, perhaps to the footman who had been riding beside the coachman.

Aunt tried again. "I am sure she would like to bring a few chosen items with her, if you would just let her go up to her chamber and choose-"

He turned back. "She will not leave my sight. You will supervise the packing of a small trunk, as I have indicated, and she will remain on the landing with me until the trunk is packed. That way she can't vanish?

I am not a ('at for nothing. I'm really very friendly, but there

comes a time when people cross a line and must be put in their place.

"You are being rude, Magister. What gives you the right to speak to my-"

"Catherine!'That is enough."

I flinched. Aunt's tone was just as proud and snappish as his, only hers hurt, for she never spoke to me that way.

"Catherine, you'll mind your manners and remain silent while I'm gone. Shiffa, come with me."

Head lowered, Shiffa followed Aunt up the stairs. I clenched my hands and breathed in and breathed out and said nothing, for so Aunt had commanded. Silence I would keep if I was held over a fire and my toes roasted. Nothing would make me talk now.

"Catherine," he said. "Catherine Hassi Barahal."

I slanted a withering glare at him, but he wasn't looking at me or trying to speak to me. He was only trying out the name, as the schoolmaster at the beginning of term repeats the names of new pupils in order to remember who he has in his class. If I knew what was going on, it would be so much easier to keep my mouth shut, but I had to trust Aunt and Uncle and do what they told me. They had never treated me differently from their own three girls, not even considering how my uncle and father had fought before my parents' untimely death. I knew my duty. I knew they loved me.

He measured the scalloped wallpaper, the spindly legged sofa in the Galatian style set against the wall, the gilt ornament painted on the lintels over the doors, and the parquet flooring, with its mosaic pattern meant to echo the mazelike stone mosaic of the ground floor, where visitors were supposed to stay, blocked by the pattern of the stones from ascending to the upper private floors where the family resided. He fingered the dwarf orange, and the green leaf at once frosted as if caught in winter's grip. It

cracked into dust against his skin. With a grunt of disgust, he rubbed his fingers, then blew on them. White flakes drifted to the floor. He sighed as though to say that every passing breath endured in this plebeian house was more than he could take.

In the flecked depths of the huge first-floor-landing mirror, I studied him. His height, his dark brown complexion and symmetrical features, his hands and that part of his throat revealed above the embroidered collar of his jacket: all matched in the mirror the way he looked on the landing. His magic was hard lor me to see, although faint tendrils snaked out from him. Either he was so powerful that magic exhaled from him, as misty breath is expelled from the lips on a winter day, or he was actually using his magic to search the house, as if he sought to uncover our secrets. How could he just march into this house as if he owned it? I wanted to claw that disdainful expression off his face. But I did not. Because he looked into the mirror and saw I was watching him.

"What do you see in there?" he demanded.

"Your boots are scuffed."

Men who stand in that arrogant way with their backs straight, their shoulders tight, and their chins lifted the better to sneer at those lower than them can be neither comfortable nor happy. But that doesn't mean they know it. His gaze flicked down to his polished, perfect boots, then up again.

He said, "You have no idea of the privilege and honor being shown to you this day. You are ill prepared and ill mannered and ill suited. But a contract is a contract, sealed, bound, final. I will do my duty, and you will do yours."

He rapped his cane twice on the floor. A chill wind gushed in from outside. Another presence entered the house, one that wheezed as it mounted the grand staircase step by effortful step until an old gray man climbed into view, leaning heavily on the balustrade. He wore gold earrings, the mark of his profession as

either a bard or a djeli, although in these days the two were often indistinguishable. He was otherwise dressed in a threadbare dashiki in the old style, loose and ankle length; he had thrown over it a humble clerk's long wool coat. No fashionable flares added dash or mystery to its lines, and it was patched at the elbows. Snow dusted his shoulders and the silver coils of his hair. When had it begun snowing again?

The old man looked at me, looked at the personage, and heaved a sigh as of grief. He saw the mirror at once, of course, but the mirror did not see him. Bards and djeliw had the ability to manipulate and respect the essence that flows through the spirit world. For them, so scholars believed, mirrors were a conduit into the spirit world that lies intertwined with our own. I was shocked at his lack of vitality and the poorness of his clothing. Bards and djeliw were often feared and sometimes only grudgingly tolerated, but it never paid to scant on the offerings you made to a person who could mock you in the street for your miserliness.

"You can use that mirror," said the personage.

"It will do, Magister," said the old man, "for you can be sure I can make use of any mirror. Naturally a man of your exalted inheritance-child of Four Moons House, descendant of the sorcerers and their warriors who crossed the desert in the storm, those from whom Maa Ngala, Lord of All, removed all fear so they could guide and protect the weak and the helpless-knows what he is about, and he has decided already what it is he means to do. Is this the one?"

"Heard you a lie in what they said?" demanded the personage with an edge to his voice that made me shudder.

The old man merely shrugged as he looked at me and then away. "I heard no lie."

"Then do what you were hired to do. Certainly you've been recompensed handsomely enough."

"So I have, Magister." He reached into a pocket and pulled out a ball of yarn.

Once or twice in your life the iron stone of evil tidings passes from its exile in Sheol into that place just under your ribs that makes it hard to breathe. That makes you think you're going to die, or that you're dead already, or that the bad thing you thought might happen is actually far worse than you had ever dreamed and that even if you wake up, it won't go away.

Uncle trudged down the stairs with shoulders bowed. He wouldn't look at me. Aunt sailed down in his wake with her head high and her expression so drawn I knew she was trying not to cry. Shiffa halted at the top of the stairs beside a trunk.

In the mirror, the humble ball of yarn appeared not as yarn but as a glimmering and supple chain of gold. Now I was shaking. Aunt walked up to me and embraced me tightly, pressing her lips to my ear and mouthing words in an unvoiced voice I alone could hear.

"For now, you must endure this. Speak no word of the family. Say only that you are eldest. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us." She drew back, kissed me on each cheek, and said audibly, her voice a tremolo, "My dear girl."

"You'll stand as witnesses for her," the magister said to Aunt and Uncle.

"Legally, you are required to provide two competent witnesses as well," said Aunt, her expression sharpening as with hope of a reprieve. Uncle said nothing. He would not even raise his head to look at me. "As you have no witnesses, the ceremony cannot proceed tonight. Very well, feel free to return tomorrow-"

He rapped his cane on the floor three times. An echo resounded, the house throwing the spell back at him, but it wasn't any use. We heard a tramping and stamping before the door burst open and slammed against the wall.

"Gracious Melqart protect us!" Evved croaked from below.

Up they thumped as my heart galloped until I became dizzy with dread. And just as quickly I was crackling with indignation, for he had summoned his coachman and his footman to be his witnesses. The coachman was a burly fellow with white skin and spiky white hair, and the footman, who rode in the back and opened the door for his master, was a perfectly ordinary man of Afric origins.

Then I looked in the mirror, and all my indignation vanished, even my dread. I was simply too stunned to feel anything.

There stood the coachman, exactly the same. But the footman was not a man at all, not when you could see what I could see in the mirror. He was a woman, first of all, so tall and broad-shouldered and powerfully built that a glamor disguising her as a man would be easy to bind. In the mirror, she was limned by a phosphorescent glow, bright orange and flaring blue, and she had a third eye, a mystic eye of light in the center of her forehead, that allowed her to see from this world into the spirit world.

An eru she was, for the evidence in the mirror told me she could be nothing else.

My father had transcribed in his journals the tales old people told him in their villages. He recorded the words of scholars as they debated what they knew and did not know. He observed; he described; he speculated. The eru were servants of the long-vanished Ancestors. They were powerful spirits that could cross from the spirit world into this world and back again. They were born out of the ice and, like winter, were too potently magical for any mere human to control. The eru were masters of storm and wind; they need bow before no mere earthly creature.

So how had an eru come to serve humbly at the beck and call of a cold mage?

"Is there any further objection?" asked the personage with a kind of weary sarcastic scorn.

"There is a matter of documents we were forced to place in the keeping of Four Moons House as a surety," said Uncle hoarsely.

"I have them." He beckoned to the old man. "Do as you are bound. Make it quick! I'm late already!"

Scholars distinguish between three kinds of contracts: a flower contract composed by a handshake and a few words, that blooms and dies according to the will of the makers; an ink and vellum contract written and sealed with the force of the law courts behind it; and a chained contract, sealed by magic and never lightly undertaken because it cannot be broken or altered except by death. Bards and djeliw, the masters of speech, can thread words of power into the webs of seeing that are the essential nature of mirrors, and by this action can chain certain contracts into the spirit world itself, making of them a binding spell, an unshakeable obligation, an unbreakable contract.

Uncle was weeping softly. Aunt wore a face of stone, cold and forbidding as she stared at the personage with a force that would have congealed a lesser man.

The old man sang under his breath, but the power of the whispered words made the air hum. With a wordless shout, he flung the ball of thread into the mirror while holding on to one end. With a sound like a latch opening, the uncoiling thread penetrated the mirror and at once could be seen as glittering links in an unrolling chain. As it rolled, I began to see the shadows of another landscape, the hills and forests and rivers of the spirit world. All our weak images faded to nothing as the mirror turned smoky with power as he chanted words in a language I did not know. Ghostlike sparks spinning off the eru could still be distinguished, but even these sparks were blurred as the chain of binding was fixed and the mirror became opaque.

What were they doing to me?

"In this world, one hand is given into another, one house opens its door to a stranger who will enter and become no stranger. In this world, one hand is given into another, and the other house opens its door to a stranger who will enter and become no stranger. This is the chain of obligation bound into the family of Hassi Barahal in payment for what they have owed the House of Four Moons. As it was agreed in the year… The eldest daughter is the payment offered in exchange for…"

The words flew too swiftly now for me to understand them. It took all my energy to not collapse to the floor and start in on a screaming fit that would put Bee's tantrums to shame. It took all my energy not to drop to the floor and sob with choking fear.

In this world, one hand is given into another.

There are three kinds of marriages legally recognized in the north: a flower marriage, which flourishes while the bloom is still on it and dies when it withers, which no respectable northern woman in these days could ever consider contracting; an ink and vellum marriage, hedged about with provisions and obligations and mutual agreements and legal and economic protections; and the binding marriage, more common in the old days and retained almost exclusively, according to my academy masters, among the Housed because of the raft of legal and magical complications at risk when two children from different mage Houses seal a betrothal.

We Barahals were assuredly not members of any of the thirty-six mage Houses, nor did we suffer under their patronage or owe anything to any House. Or so I had always believed, until now.

"Dua! Dua! Dua!" The old man tugged on the thread, and suddenly there was a click like a door closing. A ball of perfectly ordinary yarn nestled in his hand, and the mirror reflected

nothing but the landing and the people standing there in various stages of impatience, grief, boredom, and shock. All the magic woven into the mirror had been sapped out of it by the grip of the spell, so even the eru appeared as a perfectly ordinary man with black skin, black hair tied back in a dense horse tail, and the distracted smile of a person whose thoughts wander elsewhere.

Or maybe I had dreamed that vision in the mirror. Maybe I hadn't seen an eru at all. Maybe Bee was right, and I was seeing only what I wished were true because it was easier that way than accepting what I didn't want and could not understand: that the world was cruel and had ripped my parents from me just because it happened that way sometimes.

The personage rapped his cane twice on the floor. The house seemed to groan, and there came a shout from upstairs, like a girl waking from a nightmare.

"Now, Catherine, Four Moons House has taken possession of you," said the personage to me. He produced a large envelope from his jacket and held it out.

Aunt snatched the envelope from his hand. "You make it sound as if she's your slave, but she is your wife. That was the agreement."

He regarded her with an expression very like contempt. "What difference these hair-splitting words make to the truth of the matter I cannot see."

Uncle burst into wrenching sobs. "Please forgive us, Cat."

"Enough! We knew this day might come!" snapped Aunt with such anger that even the personage startled and took a step back, bumping into the railing. If only the railing might give way and he plunge over… but it held fast.

The coachman and the footman sprang up the stairs to grab the trunk between them as Shiffa backed away. They clattered past us, down again to the front door.

"Aunt Tilly?" My voice trembled.

"Yes, dear one."

Still sobbing, Uncle hugged me.

"Come along!" said the personage.

What was his name? I hadn't even heard is.

Aunt extricated me from Uncle's despairing sobs and, clasping my hands, kissed me on the forehead, then on either cheek. She was still not crying, but that was only because-I could see-she refused to release precious tears. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked, and my voice was more the wail of a hurt child than that of a young woman accustomed to twisting out of any fall so she landed on her feet. But the world was twisting away under me, and I couldn't find the ground.

She released my hands, as dying people release their soul when death arrives. She let me go, and the personage took hold of my wrist in an unyielding grip.

"Go with your husband," she said.