Cold Steel

15

After a long walk we made our way up Academy Hill past the temple dedicated to the Blessed Tanit. Her gates always stood open. Bee and Rory ducked into the temple to stay out of sight while I wrapped the shadows around me and crept into the academy compound past the servant standing at the gate.

The entry hall lay empty, not a single pupil scurrying late to class under the frieze with its princely white yam, winter wheat, towering maize, and other carvings of plants. Another arch led me into the glass-roofed central courtyard. No one was about. Rain pattered an erratic drumbeat on the glass roof. Although it was early spring, a scent like summer kissed my lips, the smell of the spirit world sensed through the water in the ancient sacrificial well at the center of a paved labyrinth. The blood of sacrifices offered generations ago stung at my nostrils. A year and almost three months ago, Bee and I had fallen through the well into the spirit world. I paused now in the quiet courtyard, looking toward the well, which was covered by an iron grate. My blood would open a path from here into the spirit world, but how would I find Vai in all that vast and changing landscape?

Bee was right: The headmaster knew more than he had ever let on. We had to talk to him.

In a rush of clattering footsteps, a crowd of boys and young men swept into the courtyard, all chattering excitedly. They were dressed in old-fashioned robes cut in the fashion of boubous, a plain drapery of muted colors designed not to excite the eye. I caught snippets of words, and it seemed they had been out to watch the festival procession. Although they had not witnessed the disturbance I had caused, rumor of its occurrence had spread. When an older man with blond hair and the ruddy features of a heavy drinker entered the courtyard at the tail end of the procession, they all hushed so quickly that the voice of the one poor boy who hadn’t noticed rang out.

“—They heard a voice say, ‘A rising light marks the dawn of a new world.’ ”

As proctors carrying willow wands converged on the hapless speaker to whip his hands, I looked in vain for a line of girls. I was the only woman in the glass courtyard; no female proctors or servants flocked at the edge of the shuffling horde of youths. The overly talkative boy was biting his lip so as not to cry out under the humiliating punishment as everyone stared.

I could not bear to watch, and anyway, I needed to find the headmaster. A staircase led up to the long corridor and the closed door of his study. The well-oiled latch eased down with a soft click. I slipped inside.

For an instant I thought I had accidentally walked through the wrong door into the wrong room, because nothing in the spacious chamber looked as I remembered it. The chalkboards and desk had vanished, replaced by gilt-embroidered chairs that looked as uncomfortable as they were showy. The bookshelves had been cleared of all their books and scrolls, and they now displayed gold cups, gold bowls, and brass or silver wine flagons. One bookcase held nothing but a grisly collection of skulls, arranged from the largest at the top left to the smallest at the lower right, which horribly seemed to be a baby’s actual skull. On the long table lay not a dinner service for five but so many empty wine bottles and empty glasses I did not bother to count them. Only the circulating stove set into the fireplace and the pedestal holding the head of the poet Bran Cof remained from the last time I had entered this room. It surely did not look like the study of a scholar with the many diverse interests and formidable intellect of the headmaster. It took no great acumen to suspect that he had been replaced as master of the academy.

The skulls stared hollow-eyed at me in stubborn silence. The head of the poet Bran Cof sat atop the pedestal in a stony slumber, his brow furrowed with deep thoughts and his lips pinched closed over all the poems and legal knowledge he had hoarded throughout his famous life. With his hair sticking up in stiff spikes and his bushy eyebrows a little raised, he looked noble and magnificent and just a trifle startled, but I knew he was a filthy-minded and staggeringly unpleasant old man who tried to bully young women into kissing him. His body was imprisoned by my sire, who could not only command the poet but also see through his eyes and speak through his mouth. If I woke the head, would my sire reach through him and trap me with the chain of his voice, as he had before?

I had to risk it.

And I knew just the way to wake him up.

Emphatically not with a kiss. I shattered one of the wineglasses on the table and pricked my arm enough to draw blood. This bead I smeared on the head’s lips and eyes. The cold grain of his face smeared and smoothed into warm flesh. His eyelids fluttered, then popped open with a look compounded as much of fear as of anger.

“You fool! What do you mean by waking me with blood?”

“I need to ask you some questions.” I took a step back, for the transition from stone to flesh disturbed me.

His gaze sharpened to a leer as he recognized me. “The girl whose eyes are amber. Woken with kisses, I see. You have the look of a woman about you now, shaped by a man’s caresses. Did you escape the marriage, or embrace its carnal pleasures?” His tone had a greasy unctuousness that made me want to wash myself, but fortunately a new thought struck him before he started quoting obscene poetry as I was sure he was about to. Instead, he glanced around with an expression made comical by its wild exaggeration. “Where is the serpent? Where is she hiding?”

“My cousin? I will bring her to torment you if you do not answer my questions. Have you seen my husband? The Master of the Wild Hunt stole him from me.”

A look of cunning creased his features. “I can offer you pleasures the man will surely not have thought of. If you’ll just come a little closer…” His tongue moistened his lips.

I lost my patience and my temper. “Do you really think comments like these make me find you attractive? Or are you deliberately trying to put me off? I love him. If you have the least sliver of a human heart left to you, help me find him. Then you can compose a poem about our travails and triumph!”

His face went so still that for several shaky breaths I thought he had fallen back into sleep.

But he blinked, and spoke in an altered tone, like an impatient teacher scolding a student who is slow to learn. “Best hurry, kitten. You should not have woken me with blood, for the masters crave it and will come seeking it the instant its scent reaches their grasping claws. As it will.”

“I thought my sire was the only master. You serve him, but surely you don’t feed him with your blood.”

“The hunter takes souls, not blood. It amuses him to keep me, because of my knowledge of the law. I was not sacrificed to the courts. Instead I was imprisoned in this terrible state, head separated from body.”

“Yes, I met your body in my sire’s palace.” I shuddered, remembering the way Bran Cof’s headless body had stumbled to serve his master’s bidding. With a gasp, I raised a hand to my mouth. “Blessed Tanit! What terrible thing might my sire do to Vai?”

“You know nothing about the courts and your sire, do you?”

Lowering my hands, I took a threatening step closer. “Tell me what you know!”

His sneer turned mocking as he looked me up and down in a most intrusive way. “For each kiss you give me, kitten, I’ll tell you a secret.”

I lifted the shard of glass. “Tell me what I want to know, or I’ll smear my blood all over your face for the courts to suckle dry!”

His lips pulled back in a horrible grimace, yet he also laughed with a slightly hysterical rasp. “You know not of what you speak, girl. The spirit courts crave mortal blood, for blood gives them protection from the tides and allows them to sustain their power. You cannot challenge them.”

“We shall see about that!”

It wasn’t until the latch clicked down that I realized I heard voices. It was the work of a moment to hide myself in shadow as a servant showed two men into the room.

Lord Marius and Legate Amadou Barry had come looking, just as Bee and I feared. They did not see me, nor did they notice that Bran Cof’s eyes were tracking them, because Amadou Barry walked straight to the tall windows so he could look out over the rose garden, and his brother-in-law followed him without looking around.

“Whenever I enter these halls, I think of her,” Amadou Barry said on a heaving sigh as he tapped the glass with the knuckles of one hand. “I know I saw her on the street, Marius!”

Lord Marius laughed. “Be warned! Your balls will wither if you praise her cherry lips and golden hair in my hearing.”

“She doesn’t have golden hair! It is as black as a crow’s wing. Her glorious hair falls like a riot of curls down her back, for a riot is surely how the thought of her affects my heart.”

The head of the poet Bran Cof rolled his eyes at this stilted speech in a way that made me want to giggle. Fortunately both men were gazing outside and missed it.

“Bald Teutates! You haven’t a Celt’s gift of poetry, that is certain, Amadou. You mistook another woman’s black curls.” Marius wandered over to the table. He picked up several bottles in turn, clearly astounded that they were all empty. “You must give up this unseemly obsession. Your wedding feast will be celebrated the day after tomorrow. Notable men and their retinues have traveled for days to gorge themselves at the table and toast your virility. You will do your duty, as I did mine when I married your sister.”

“You can’t compare your marriage to mine! You and my sister are well matched in every room except the bedroom. Whereas I am to marry a trembling mouse of a fifteen-year-old who has no conversation, little education, and less personality.”

“Her nose twitches, too, have you noticed that? And she has a pointed, rattish chin.”

“Stop, Marius! Have pity on me!” the legate said with what I considered a sad lack of generosity. He did not even defend the poor nameless girl from such an unfortunate comparison.

Marius laughed in the hearty way he had, which, I reflected, could start to grate. “You’ll be happier with a biddable wife.”

“I don’t agree.” Amadou paced. “My chief pleasure when I was pretending to be a student here was my mathematics seminar. Beatrice sat on the women’s side of the room, answering questions with a bold intellect worthy of a man. I could never concentrate. It’s just as well your cousin ended the practice of allowing girls to attend the academy when he became headmaster last year. It was too distracting.”

Marius examined the skulls and, to my horror, fetched up beside the pedestal. Bran Cof stared at the far wall. Neither of the men seemed to notice the flush of life in the poet’s cheeks or the steely glamour of his blue eyes. Their petty self-absorption blinded them to the astonishing magic in the room. “I don’t think you truly love her, Amadou. You’re just not accustomed to being turned down. That’s what has put you in a pique.”

“She was too proud.”

“You adored her pride until she refused your offer to make her your mistress.”

“Too much pride is deadly in a woman. Mine was as good an offer as she will ever get. Yet what can I have expected from a Phoenician woman! They prostitute themselves for their greedy goddess, to gain whatever material wealth and trade advantage they can.”

Perhaps his words angered me a trifle, enough that I let slip a thread or two.

“Did you see something?” Lord Marius stepped forward, hand on his sword, as I tugged the shadows tight. He relaxed. “You’re not the only one whose heart has been broken.”

“That can’t have been your heart. I know you found the magister attractive, but there can never have been any hope for you with him. He was fixed on the other girl. You didn’t actually proposition him, did you?”

Lord Marius appeared more amused than disappointed. “Nothing so crude. I let my interest be known.”

Amadou Barry snorted in a coarse way so unlike the staidly respectful student we had believed him to be at the academy that I had to guess I was seeing the legate’s true personality. While I had liked the modest, unassuming student named Amadou Barry, I did not like the Roman legate. “Proud Jupiter! The cold mage had the effrontery to turn down a prince’s cousin? Still, he is certainly one of the most arrogant men I’ve ever met. Did he take offense?”

“Not at all. He fixed me with those beautiful eyes, thanked me for the flattering offer, and told me he didn’t sleep on both sides of the bed.”

“Prettily done, you must grant.”

“Far too prettily done! As polite as if I were an aged uncle asking for another dram of whiskey when he’s already had one too many. Gave me nightmares for weeks!”

He paused as footsteps sounded in the corridor. The door was opened, and the older man with light hair and ruddy cheeks strode in.

“Cousin Marius! Your Excellency! Legate, to what do I owe this honor? I did not expect you, or I would have sent a deputy to shepherd the students to the Mars procession.”

Marius answered. “We have received news that two girls were seen in the city, two fugitives who were students here. They may come to the academy seeking Prince Napata.”

“But girls are no longer admitted as students. I made sure of that! It was never appropriate. I cannot interview two young women without a proper chaperone.”

“The girls left before Prince Napata resigned and you became headmaster. If they come, you must admit them to your study. Delay them with the promise that Prince Napata will return shortly.”

“But the exalted prince left Adurnam over a year ago!”

The head of the poet Bran Cof met my eye, and he glanced at the ceiling as if to share his cutting assessment of this headmaster’s sad lack of intellect.

“Yes,” agreed Marius patiently, “but they won’t know that. Make excuses, have tea brought, and send for us.”

“I’ll have tea brought now. You must explain your purpose more thoroughly, for I am sure that the prince never mentioned that he intended to return to Adurnam.”

I had heard enough, and dared not wait lest my sire discover Bran Cof was awake in the mortal world and talking to me. I escaped when the servants brought the tea service. With a rumble of boys milling outside the children’s classrooms and young men trampling around the lecture halls, I sneaked out through the side entry, past the latrines. The door leading up to the balcony of the main lecture hall, where we young women had been allowed to sit, was chained and locked.

Just inside the gates of Tanit’s temple, Rory met me with a nervous dip of his head, patting my arm and walking all the way around me. “I smelled the soldiers and the horses. Lord Marius is with them. I liked him, but we can’t trust him now, can we?”

“No, we can’t. I don’t think he’s a bad man, I just think he’s not on our side. Where is Bee?”

He led me to the withy gate that separated the women’s precincts from the rest of the temple compound. “She went in there, but they made me wait outside.”

I went in, leaving behind the open ground of the main sanctuary with its monumental stone pillars. The women’s precinct had its own garden. Bee’s voice floated over the evergreen foliage. A path wound through a maze of cypress and myrtle until I came to an altar set among fig trees, screened by a fence woven of sticks. Under a sheltering roof stood a statue of the goddess in her aspect as Queen of the Heavens. She was dressed in a simple robe in the Hellenic style, and her elaborate ringed coiffure was crowned by a crescent moon. Her arms extended to offer blessing, and serpent bracelets twined up her forearms. The altar was surrounded by urns that held the cremated remains of infants who had died in an untimely fashion, because grieving mothers would dedicate the urns to the temple as an offering after which they would pray for the goddess’s blessing and for healthy children to come.

I knelt before the image of the goddess and examined her serene stone face. As Queen of the Heavens she protected sailors and travelers, for so many of the Kena’ani people traveled long distances. As Mother of the Earth she offered comfort to women, and promised fertility to those who desperately desired a child. In Qart Hadast, Tanit was also the lion of war who fought for the city. It was strange to think that General Camjiata’s chosen name also meant “lion of war” even though it came from a union of the names of Sunjiata, the first Malian emperor, and fierce Camulos, a god of war among the Celtic people.

“Give me strength, Blessed One,” I murmured, “for you have already given me my heart, and for that I am grateful. Protect us, your travelers. Let us rescue those who need help. Let us find a place we can call home.”

Adurnam was no longer home. I wasn’t the girl who had run to the academy without her coat that day when everything I thought I knew had fallen apart. Hearing Bee’s distant laughter, I smiled, for having her gave me all the courage I needed. I pressed my right hand to my locket and my left to the cane as I shut my eyes. For a few breaths, or for hours, or for years, I heard only silence. Then, faint as a whisper, the pulse of Vai’s being brushed mine.

He was still alive.

When I opened my eyes the stone statue of Tanit stared at me with the head of a lion, in her aspect as the giver of fierceness and strength. The cat who never gives up.

As I never would.

The path led on to the priestess’s quarters. Bee sat on the sleeping-house porch drinking coffee with six humbly garbed priestesses ranging in age from a bent crone to a slight girl seated in a rickety chair with a crutch at her side.

“The cacique is the ruler. The ruler is usually a man, but it may be a woman, like the didos who once ruled in Qart Hadast. The cacique administers the kingdom. But all the women of noble lineage and all the elders have the right to rebuke the cacique if he acts in a way that hurts the kingdom. It is the council of women who approve the choice of heir. And in Expedition, with the new Assembly, women will be allowed both to vote and to serve as representatives, just like men. The trolls insisted on that proviso, because they are citizens of Expedition also.”

The bent crone gave a skeptical snort. “I can’t imagine the prince of Tarrant, or a Roman legate of patrician birth, or even that old bastard of a high priest in the temple here, allowing a woman to stand over them and give them commands. How can it be so elsewhere?”

“There were once queens in Qart Hadast, and there’s no reason there can’t be again,” said Bee. When she realized I was standing there, she set down the steaming mug she had cupped in her hands. “My dear cousin is come to hasten me on my way. My thanks for the coffee, holy ones.”

“You didn’t tell us about the architecture,” said the chair-bound girl with a yearning sigh.

She kissed them all around, and whispered something in the ear of the girl that made the child blush with the pleasure of having been given a secret treasure to cherish at her frail breast.

The bent crone escorted us to the withy gate.

I faced her. “Holy one, do you know where the headmaster went? Prince Napata?”

“Strange it is that I do. He came here the day he left and he mentioned in particular that should two young Kena’ani women happen by to ask for his direction, I should tell them he is gone to Treverni Noviomagus, where the Rhenus River splits into two channels.”

Once we got outside the gate, Bee turned to me and frowned. “Our experiment did not go so well, did it?”

“I did not find Prince Napata in his study on the Feast of Mars Camulos, that is for certain. But if he left a message for us here, that means he wants us to track him down. Perhaps that is what the dream meant, that we would discover where he had gone.”

Rory was waiting by the gate, his figure half concealed behind one of the entry pillars. “I saw the other man lurking here, the one called Eurig who fed us.”

I chewed on my lower lip. “He must be spying, but for whom? Probably everyone now knows we were at the law offices. Let’s see if we can recover our gear before we go.”

After making sure no soldiers or spies loitered in sight, we hastened down Academy Hill under glowering clouds. The rain held off until we reached Falle Square. We left Rory in the alley to stand guard. A wind swept in with waves of freezing sleet that drove Bee and me through the back gate with more haste and less caution than we ought to have used. I ran across the courtyard to kneel by the basement window, peering into the dim kitchen to make sure there was no fire and that no skulking visitors were awaiting us. The chamber was empty, just as we had left it. The driving sleet stirred up fallen leaves as it drummed on the cobblestones. Shuddering, I raced back to the carriage house.

Bee had already pried up the boards and opened the chest. “Help me!”

The double doors were cracked open just enough to give light to work. Sleet pattered on the roof and wind rattled the shutters. We set the dash jackets aside, for they would have to go on top, and split the tools and practical clothing into the three packs.

“I had hoped the headmaster might help us get to Haranwy,” I said, shivering. “Don’t you think it’s strange that he quit his post and left Adurnam right after we fell down the well?”

Bee gave me an indignant look. “Of course it’s strange. Why bide in Adurnam for so many years and suddenly leave? What do we do, Cat? I can sell several of my gold bracelets for money for passage on a coach to Noviomagus. It’s a long way. It will be so expensive.”

“It will take weeks of travel even if the weather improves. I don’t dare wait so long. We don’t even know if the headmaster can help me. I have to go to Haranwy to ask Vai’s brother for help. His people know how to hunt in the spirit world. Once we get to Haranwy, you and Rory can go on to Noviomagus. Anyway, it’s better to go to Haranwy first now that the mansa and the legate know we’re here. They’ll be watching the roads. But we can walk by back lanes and footpaths, where it’s easier to hide. We’ll need only food, for we can beg shelter in haymows and stables. I remember the route well enough, past Cold Fort and through Lemanis…” I trailed off, remembering Cold Fort.

Never before marrying a cold mage had I had to consider the uses of illusion. In Southbridge Londun, Vai had woven the illusion of a troop of turbaned soldiers riding down a road, a feat that would have impressed me more had I liked him at the time. In Expedition he had done nothing but play with the illusions of small objects, forming light into the shape of lamps or a gleaming necklace with which to adorn me, because in Expedition cold mages had less magic to draw on. Yet he had woven illusions out of cold fire so skillfully they had seemed like solid objects, impossible to know as intangible unless you tried to touch them.

Rory and I had almost been caught near Cold Fort by a troop of mage House soldiers under the command of a cold mage. They had ridden across a field under a mask of illusion that made them invisible to unsuspecting eyes, but not to cold steel.

Too late, I closed my fingers over my cane. The ghost hilt buzzed with the energy of cold magic pouring into it.

“Quiet.” I got to my feet. “Abandon everything. Go out through one of the windows. Meet me at the hat shop.”

Bee grabbed the little knit bag with her sketchbook. I crept to the carriage house door. The cistern was covered by a plank lid. Unswept leaves from the apple and pear trees littered the ground. The big brick oven was closed tight. Behind, Bee stuffed the flasks and my sewing kit into the knit bag as she eased toward the shuttered windows.

I wrapped shadows around myself and padded under chill daggers of sleet to the basement steps. The hiss of sleet and the whine of the wind drowned all other sounds. I pressed numb fingers against the door. I drove my awareness down the fraying threads of magic that had once protected the house from intruders. A foot scuffed faintly on damp leaves over by the cistern. An exhalation stirred in the passage beyond the door.

There were other people here. I just could not see them, for the courtyard looked exactly as it ought under the cloudy afternoon light.

A slap of wind huffed down over the courtyard with a spray of ice so strong that it hammered me to my knees. As I twisted the hilt to draw cold steel, the basement door was flung open. The wind and ice ceased, to reveal the courtyard walls lined by turbaned mage House soldiers, their crossbows fixed on the carriage house doors. Not yet drawn out of its sheath, my sword withered back into a cane as the cold magic that had been holding the illusion in place vanished and a man spoke.

“Bring them inside.”