Cold Steel

23

Much later, we lay quietly together. For the longest time I luxuriated in the feel of his arms around me. A light fall of snow drifted down outside, flakes dusting along the roof with a hiss.

“Vai?”

“Mmm?” He kissed my neck.

“Our efforts have left me hungry.” I stuck a foot out from under the blankets, and sucked in a breath. “It’s cold out there. You’re such a nuisance, you fire banes.”

Arms tensing, he stopped nuzzling. “I never got used to that name. It always seemed like mockery to me, even when none was meant.”

I really was hungry, but his confession fell so unexpectedly that I thought of how Kofi had seemed to understand Vai in ways I had never glimpsed. “People in Expedition respected you.”

“Because I worked hard and was a good carpenter. Not because I am a cold mage.”

“How did you become such a good carpenter?”

I felt his smile in the tilt of his head against my hair. “My father and uncle were carpenters. They were teaching me the trade. Remember, my magic didn’t bloom until I was sixteen.”

“I thought your father and uncle were hunters.”

“They were also hunters. But a person must have a trade. Before she became ill, my mother was renowned for her basketry. Did I ever tell you that?” He did not wait for my answer. “When things got bad for me in the youth hall at Four Moons House, I started sneaking out to the carpentry barn. The mansa’s uncle let me work there.” He began stroking my belly with a motion similar, I supposed, to that he might delicately use to plane a surface.

“The mansa’s uncle was a carpenter?”

“An architect. He was educated in Camlun and had studied with learned masters across Europa. He said knowing the carpenter’s craft helped him understand how to build. In a mage House, many sons and daughters have no magic, so they serve the House in some other way. Because he was the uncle of the mansa he was willing to defy the mansa by teaching me, since it was seen as lowborn of me to wish to work with my hands. But the work helped me concentrate on my studies. I couldn’t be angry or fighting if I was working with my hands.” His stroking hand clenched.

“How did things get bad for you in the youth hall?”

He pushed to sit. “Can you heat enough water to scald and pluck the grouse? The sooner we can leave here and get away from the ice, the better. Next Hallows’ Night your sire will come after us. I can hide from the Hunt in a troll maze, but you can’t. We must find a way to protect you from him.”

His sudden change of subject forced me to ask a question whose answer I feared. “Did my sire harm you?”

He gave a curt laugh leavened by a self-mocking smile that reassured me that he had not been hurt. “He did an injury to my pride, that is certain. My magic counts for nothing in comparison to the magic he wields as easily as breathing.”

“Yet you had the courage to stab him. Even knowing how strong he is.”

He pulled down the blankets to expose my right shoulder. I had once thought him the pampered, privileged son of a mage House, as highborn as he was arrogant. The callused touch of his fingers, however coaxing and sensual, reminded me that he had been born to a very different life. With kisses, he traced the two seamed scars on my shoulder. “I hurt you instead. How could you know that horrible thing your sire threatened you with?”

“The latch of the coach conceals two gremlin spirits, one inside and one outside. They can see and talk. When I was climbing up the tree in the spirit world, I saw through its eyes.”

“Ah, yes, I remember you talking about the latch.”

“Are you saying you don’t believe me about the latch?”

He kissed my forehead. “Love, why did you try to kill your sire? You would only have killed yourself.”

I brushed my fingers across his lips. “I was so angry and afraid that I forgot.” I swung out of bed and padded over to the table to dress. “Although now that I think of it, if you hadn’t stabbed him the first time and he hadn’t boasted that the injury would fall on his children, then you wouldn’t have known to stop me from trying to kill him.”

“That is convoluted logic even for you.” Sitting up, he shaped four globes of cold fire as easily as I might inhale. “Love, how did your mother get pregnant by the Master of the Wild Hunt?”

I got into my undergarments. “He threatened to kill Daniel, and the other survivors, unless she allowed him to impregnate her.”

He nodded gravely. “The women in my village suffered much the same. My grandmother was sent up to the mage House to work in the hall. One of the men fancied her. Village girls like her weren’t allowed to say no. He kept her as his mistress until he got her pregnant and discarded her.”

“Is that why you bloomed with cold magic? Because your grandsire was a magister?”

He smiled as at an old joke. “The man who sired my father on my grandmother was a clerk, not a mage. He was sent to Four Moons House as part of the retinue of a woman from another mage House when she married the mansa’s father. Who’s to say the magic came from his breeding? It might have bloomed from an unknown seed. It might have come from my grandmother.”

“The same place you got your looks? From your grandmother?”

“My mother did once say my father was the handsomest man she had ever seen. Of all his children, I resembled him the most.” He looked very appealing, sitting naked on the bedding. The light cast a sheen on his skin that made me want to rub my hands all over him all over again. The curve of his knee drew my eye to the line of his thigh. He had a way of looking at me that meant he knew I knew he knew I was admiring him, and that he was perfectly happy to be admired. He was like Bee in that way: That people enjoyed looking at him gave him satisfaction.

“You’re sitting there hoping to tempt me back into bed, aren’t you? But if we want to dry out your clothes, I have to light a fire.” I glanced at the skin nailed over the window. “It will be dark soon, so I won’t make you stay out for long.”

“How can you dry out my clothes? To go outside, I must have something to wear.”

“You can wear the clothes I brought for Rory. They’ve dried out—”

“Rory?” The courting Vai who had sat patiently through many evenings at the boardinghouse while I flirted with customers had never spoken quite this sharply to me.

“One of my sire’s other children. The saber-toothed cat. You met him in the spirit world, at the hearth of the djelimuso Lucia Kante.”

He lifted his chin, gone a little prickly as if embarrassed he had revealed a spark of jealousy. “I remember the cats. The male is your half brother?”

“Yes. My sire can change form as he wishes.”

“I can guess the details.”

“I can understand why my sire would breed children in the spirit world. Not all of the predators in the Wild Hunt are his children, but at least some are, and he can bind all of us whenever he wishes, as he did Rory. But why did he want Tara Bell?”

“Perhaps he is one of those men who delight in knowing they can take a person who does not want them.”

“I’m not sure we can call him a man. I don’t think he feels what we feel. He must have had some other reason. Think how useful I proved because I was able to cut a fence for him into Taino country.” I told him about the way my sire had enfolded me in his wings, the words he had whispered, and how I had thought at first that he had been speaking of Vai. “But now I think he was talking about himself. Mortal blood feeds the spirit courts and gives them the power to bind their servants to them. He’s bound to the courts, just as I’m bound to him. Just as you and your village are bound to Four Moons House. Why tell me that a prince among slaves is still a slave if he does not chafe at his chains?”

As he considered my words, I could not help but note what a decorative thinker he was, with his chiseled shoulders and those inventive fingers splayed along his chin. “So ‘the palace where those without blood cannot walk’ was the pit. Our ancestors whose spirits walk in the spirit world can’t cross into the palace—the pit—because they have no blood.”

“Yes. That’s why the cacica couldn’t cross and I had to leave her hanging…” I trailed off as I realized I had positioned the skull with a full view of the bed.

Vai followed the line of my gaze. “Catherine, why is there a skull on the table?”

My cheeks burned.

“I don’t remember seeing a skull when we arrived here yesterday,” he added.

“Blessed Tanit,” I murmured, blushing even more scaldingly as I turned the skull to face away from the bed and toward the hearth.

“I thought you were telling one of your jesting tales to entertain me, like you do. I didn’t think the basket really had a head in it.”

Was her vision confined to the spirit world? Could skulls see? Could a skull close its eyes if it had no eyelids? Or would it be forced to watch everything?

“Why would you even have the head of the cacica if the Wild Hunt killed her?” he asked.

“The Taino ancestors put me on trial for her murder but I talked my way out of it.”

“Naturally.”

“The council of elders recognized the merit in my arguments!”

His shoulders tensed. “You mean it. It’s really the head of Queen Anacaona.”

“Of course it is! Why would I say so otherwise? I have spoken more to her after she was dead than I ever did while she was living. She admires your good manners and your… attractive disposition. She told me that an unusually powerful fire bane like yourself would have been a challenge she would have savored.”

His jaw tightened. He pulled the fur blanket around his torso and stood, primly covered from armpits to calves.

“Gracious Melqart, Vai. Are you embarrassed that the skull has seen you naked?”

“You’re the one who turned her to look away from the bed.” His look of offended hauteur only emphasized his grip on the blanket.

I laughed so hard that I cried. With a mumbled apology to the cacica, I draped cloth over the skull to cover the eye sockets.

“Oh, Vai,” I said, wiping tears off my cheeks. “I adore you when you’re indignant.”

He was looking very smoky and irritated in a way that made me bite my lower lip lest I laugh again. The man looked delectable when he had been driven up the pinnacle of disdain by feeling his pride and dignity had been slighted. Without a word of warning, he hauled me to the bed and strenuously, if very quietly, worked through his wounded feelings with my full cooperation.

Afterward he left me a sphere of cold fire and went outside. I uncovered the skull. I had grown so accustomed to the skull that it was easy to chat to her, although I was grateful there was no actual conversation or the chance that she would reveal by expression or unguarded comment what she might have seen. As I lit a fresh fire in the ashy hearth, I remarked that as difficult as it was to cope with the lack of fire, it certainly was pleasant to have cold fire as light. I explained that I had grown up in an impoverished household where beeswax candles were too expensive and tallow candles so smoky and foul-smelling it became a chore to sew or read by their light. I set a slab of fish to soak, and softened the dry barleycake in a hot parsnip-and-bean soup.

The water in the tub held a ghost of warmth in which I scrubbed his clothes. I went through them first, but I did not say anything to the cacica when I discovered three of the prophylactic sheaths tucked up one of his cuffs. The rascal! On Hallows’ Night he had been prepared to reunite with me. Of course, he hadn’t known I’d been imprisoned on Salt Island.

Washing done, I tidied up part of my sewing kit, and mended one of the tears in his much-abused dash jacket. The fire roared, drenching me with blissful heat. But I missed him.

How Bee would mock me!

Let her. I had faced worse than her mockery.

I dressed as warmly as I could and went out. Snowflakes spun on a trickle of wind. With clouds overhead, the air wasn’t nearly as frigid. In summer this shoreline would be marshy and plagued by bugs, but it was breathtaking in the winter evening with the snow shining and the water sparkling with the reflection of the magic he casually unleashed in cascades of bursting rainbows. He was throwing the illusion of light around in gouts of color that fell in waterfalls, spilling from image to image. A magnificent stag lost its antlers to become a horse pulling an elaborate chaise that became a Kena’ani ship with its prow cutting through the waves in the shape of a leaping horse. There was no reason or purpose for it. He was just doing it because he could.

He walked to meet me.

“It’s so beautiful, Vai.”

“Mmm,” he agreed as he kissed me with unexpectedly warm lips.

“I missed you.”

“Of course you did, love.” He put an arm around me as we stared south toward an unknown shore. Snow winked where it dissolved into the water. “We need to find a mage House or inn, or we won’t last long in this cold. Even with a fur blanket.”

“I feel like a thief taking the blanket with us. A fine beaver pelt blanket like that costs a year’s wages in Adurnam.”

“I’m taking no chances with you and the cold, love. Now go in. You’re shivering.”

We set out at dawn, glad to be moving. It took all morning to row across the sound. The water was so formidably calm that I was able to take several turns at the oars. By sighting on an unusually tall tree, we came in fairly close to straight across from where we had started, working back against a placid current. There we found a pier and cabin very like the one we had just left, except it had a shed for drying fish.

A path led south through woodland of stunted pine and scrub birch. We stowed the boat and started walking. When a freezing mixture of snow and sleet began to fall on the wings of a stiff east wind, we were forced to turn back and shelter indoors for the rest of the day and night. To be snuggled together with the fur blanket wrapped around us was no hardship, but in winter we could not survive long on love alone.

Thank Tanit, the next morning dawned clear. We walked all morning. I was hungry, and he actually looked tired, although I was not about to tell him so.

Instead I talked. “Kofi said you would be the net that Expedition’s radicals threw across the ocean to Europa.”

“If the charter the Assembly is writing in Expedition can be displayed in towns here, that may encourage people to demand that communities should have a say in ruling themselves.”

“That’s why Kehinde wanted the portable press from Expedition so badly, isn’t it? To escape princely censorship of her pamphlets.”

“Kehinde?”

“Professora Nayo Kuti, the scholar and radical pamphleteer. The prince of Adurnam imposed martial law when the people demanded the right to elect a single tribune to the Adurnam council. If electing a single tribune to represent all the people is too radical for such a prince, imagine what he would say to the idea of an Assembly!”

The trees and ground with their coat of snow sparkled in the sunlight. The sky was so blue it seemed to have no limit, only to fall away forever as into a spirit world where every layer fit inside another layer without ever reaching an end.

“That’s not the only thing I carried away from Expedition,” he said. “In Europa, cold mages have always stood at odds with the blacksmiths who wield dangerous fire. What if cold mages and fire mages could work together, as they do in the Taino kingdom?”

“I thought fire banes were slaves in Taino country.”

He smiled as at a jest I ought to understand. “The situation is more complex than that. In the Antilles those with cold magic are generally so weak and untrained that it’s no wonder they are considered an inferior breed of magister.” He indicated the basket. “Even the cacica was startled and impressed by my magic.”

I opened my mouth to joke about how she had been ogling him on Hallows’ Night, but when I considered the contours of his pride and the respect due to her dignity, I decided against it.

Fortunately he had gone on. “She explained to me how catch-fires work. It is exceptionally dangerous both to the fire mage and to the catch-fire. That is why when a Taino man or woman first blooms with fire magic, a kinsman volunteers to become their catch-fire. To the outside eye it may look like slavery. But it is just the family taking responsibility until the new fire mage learns to properly control the weaving.”

“But I heard of fire banes being sold against their will into the Taino kingdom.”

“I don’t know, love. It may be. People also act wrongly at times. But I can’t help but think about how much more we could do in Europa if cold mages worked in harness with fire mages. Not that the mansa would ever listen to me.”

“Honestly, Vai, the prospect of fire mages and fire banes working together alarms me. We’ve seen what James Drake is capable of.”

“Not every person is like James Drake.” His breath misted the air before its heat faded.

“If cold mages and fire mages worked together, then people would fear them more and hate them worse. What would stop magisters from taking over everything? I mean, besides the Wild Hunt? Any magister who learned how to hide from the Hunt in a troll maze would tell every other magister. If mage House magisters hide, then someone else will die. Someone has to die to feed the courts. As some unknown person did when we were in the spirit world. As Queen Anacaona did.” I tapped the basket.

“People will die regardless.”

“Yes, but we don’t have to accept the things we might change. ‘Risks must be taken if we mean to get what we want,’ as Brennan Du once said to me.”

“No doubt hoping to impress you so you’d give him a kiss,” muttered Vai ungraciously.

“Not every man admires me just because you do.”

“That is exactly my point, Catherine. As long as clientage remains part of any legal code in Europa, as long as princes and mage Houses can bind entire villages into generations-long servitude, then how can things truly change? Camjiata is the only one with a legal code that will abolish clientage. There is no benefit to the princes and mage Houses to abolish clientage, because they prosper by it.”

The skin of frozen snow crunched satisfyingly beneath my boots as I smashed each step into the ground just as I planned to smash my foes. “Did Camjiata charm you like he charmed Bee? He’s not our friend.”

“Perhaps not, but he is our ally in the fight to abolish clientage. ”

“How can you say so? He shelters Drake. Who, may I remind you, wants to kill you, after you’ve witnessed me being humiliated!”

“I can crush James Drake.”

“Never let it be said that you lack confidence.”

His tone sharpened. “Do you doubt me, Catherine?”

I halted in the middle of the path. “Of course I don’t doubt you! But James Drake nearly burned me alive. The backlash of his magic didn’t pour harmlessly through me as it did through you. Even so, the worst thing was that he meant to kill you, if he could have. When I saw him again, I was so angry and scared that I kept insulting him until he lashed out at me. He would have done something dreadful if the general hadn’t stopped him. I don’t know how to stop myself from provoking him if we see him again.”

He grasped my arms. “That man will never hurt you, Catherine. Never.”

“That’s right, because I will kill him.”

He was silent for so long I thought he might be displeased by my bloodthirsty rejoinder. At length, with a frown, he spoke.

“I know you hate your sire, love, and I understand why you do. But don’t forget there is a part of him that gives you strength.”

“He’ll never truly let go of me,” I murmured, shuddering, for an unreasoning fear seized me. What if he could hear and see all I said even here in the mortal world? How could I ever escape, with his claws already in me?

“James Drake?”

“You’re the one James Drake can’t let go of. He doesn’t really care about me. I meant my sire will never let go of me, never stop hunting me…”

Perhaps the wind whispered. Alarm, like a dagger, pricked my neck. I pulled away from Vai to examine the woodland. Flakes of half-forgotten snow drifted among the slender trunks.

Vai drew cold steel and spun a breath of magic to waken my sword.

Sometimes the danger that stalks you stays hidden because it comes in plain sight.

A black wolf trotted down the path toward us, out of the south. When its uncannily golden eyes met mine, I knew it was some manner of kin. The wolf flicked a look over its shoulder and loped into the trees. A chittering bird fell silent. Tremors brushed the soles of my booted feet. A metallic jingle chimed.

“There’s someone coming,” I said. “Horses and men.”

Where the path dipped, curving to the right, nine men came into view. Four riders had spears braced in their stirrups, with bowcases slung from their saddles and primed with arrows. One carried a musket. Five men walked alongside lugging packs and traps. They wore sturdy winter clothing and fur hats. Some had the white skin of northern Celts, while others had mixed coloring. Seeing us, they halted in surprise.

Vai touched my arm. “Be ready to hit the ground. I will stun them all.”

The man with the musket gave a curt command. The horsemen dismounted, and all knelt submissively. The leader handed his musket to a comrade. With hands open and extended in supplication, he walked forward. He was an older man with a dusky, weathered face and a beard streaked with gray. Something in the shape of his blue eyes and the cut of his cheekbones struck me as familiar, although I had never seen him before.

Where I had grown up, young people showed respect to their elders by never looking them directly in the eye. Although we were younger than he was, the man kept his gaze lowered subserviently. Twenty paces from us he pulled off his hat to reveal a thick head of dark red hair, veined with white and pulled back into a braid. Ten paces from us he dropped to both knees.

“Salve, my lord.” He enunciated each word carefully. “Of your presence, we know nothing before we are coming upon you. We would not be displaying our spears in your face if we knew. To us, grant forgiveness, at your pleasure. To our households, your coming brings honor. What do you desire?”

“Who are you?” Vai demanded.

The man glanced up as if to gauge how angry Vai was. In that moment, his gaze skipped to take me in. He ducked his head, hands clenching into fists.

“My lord, I am of the people called the Belgae. I am Devyn, son of the priest Mad Kirwyn, he who is beloved of Carnonos the god.” He studied me. “Your pardon I ask, my lord. How is this beast come to be walking beside you? Have you caught a spirit woman on the ice? She wears the black hair and golden eyes of the hunter. But the face she wears is the face of my dead sister.”

Vai looked from the man to me and back to the man. The shape of Devyn’s face was familiar because it was the same as my own.