Cold Steel

24

Vai knew he could hammer them into the dirt, and because he knew it, they believed it.

“I am a magister of rare potency and considerable influence. My wife and I washed ashore north of here under unexpected circumstances. We seek shelter and assistance in continuing our journey south.”

“Your wife?” Devyn glanced at me with a puzzled frown. The other men cast surreptitious looks at me. “My lord, if you say so, but no shame is there to a man who is capturing a wild beast to burnish his standing in his House.”

Vai stared down the man until Devyn opened both hands and bent his head. “I expect my wife to be shown the same courtesy as you show to me.”

“Your pardon, my lord. My duty it is, to be escorting you.” He spoke to the others in a lilting run of words I could not really understand. To judge from Vai’s look of concentration, he was having a better time picking out meaning from the heavy dialect, and it didn’t appear he liked what they were saying.

Nevertheless, he handed over the food supplies we had taken from the cabin. In exchange they gave us all four horses, one for our gear. The two groups separated: We and Devyn rode south, while the village men continued north.

“How can they know you’re a cold mage just by looking at you?” I said in a low voice. “It can’t just be your good looks. Not every handsome man is a cold mage.”

“You can be sure I am wondering that myself.”

“Why every handsome man is not a cold mage?”

He smiled but did not take the bait. “We’re fortunate they were headed out to trap.”

“I thought with the horses and bows they might be hunting the wolf.”

“They consider the wolf to be the servant of their god, Carnonos. The god’s servant cannot be hunted. They’re troubled by you.”

“That wolf could be my half-sibling,” I muttered. “Blessed Tanit, Vai. Are these my mother’s people?” I glanced toward Devyn to find him watching us.

“The resemblance is remarkable.”

“If this is her village, and the channels we crossed are part of the Baltic Ice Sea, then it makes sense that the expedition she and Daniel were part of used her home as a staging point.”

“An interesting consideration. I will ask.”

But Devyn put off Vai’s questions by insisting only the priest could answer. We rode with little conversation for the rest of the day and well into the evening.

Night wrapped the world in silence. A full moon bathed the trees and the snow-clad earth in a glamour, painting the world in contrasts: the white shine of birch bark and the heavy branches of dark spruce. I felt like a forgotten ghost drawn back to an unremembered grave. It was so cold. Vai wrapped the fur blanket around me.

The road brought us to a clearing.

The moon overhead poured light on a princely hall that sat amid untended shrubbery gone wild. Its arched doorway was staved in as if kicked by a giant. Every window had shattered, and the roof had collapsed. On the lintel above the entrance was carved a crescent moon. Though the manor house rose two stories and had wings flying back on each side, a coat of ice as clear as glass encased the entire building.

Vai sucked in a breath. The mare, taking his mood, sidestepped skittishly before he brought her back under control.

Not a single plant had woven its way inside, despite the age of the ruin. The smashed floor revealed the rubble of a hypocaust beneath. Intact corpses were caught and preserved within the ice as if they had been frozen as they tried to escape.

“Blessed Tanit!” I murmured. “Gracious Melqart, protect us. Noble Ba’al, watch over your faithful daughter.”

“The spirit knows this place because she visited here before in her other form.” Devyn signed a ward against evil tidings.

“I am not a ghost or a wolf,” I said in a choked voice, but he would not look at me. To look at his face slammed me with the axe blow of memory. As a child, I had looked into a similar face, my mother’s face, as she bent to kiss me. A scar had ripped a lightning-like seam across the right side of her face, and she was missing one eye. The hole gaped like a skull’s socket, a gate onto the pain she had suffered. Yet her expression was serene and loving.

“Tell no one. Keep silence,” she had murmured. “Just until we tell you we’ve reached the safe place we’re traveling to. Sleep, little cat. Your father and I are right here beside you.”

The memory opened a pit inside my heart. There was no safe place.

“Bad fortune to be here at midnight, haunted by spirits,” said Devyn. “Best we ride on.”

Vai did not budge. “This is the mage House that was destroyed by the Wild Hunt. Crescent House, it was called.”

“To this place the Hunt came, it is true, my lord. On Hallows’ Night, they were riding with claws and teeth. Bad fortune it is, my lord, to be lingering. Please let us be moving on.” He glanced toward me as if expecting me to turn into claws and teeth, and rend him.

I hated him for fearing me. The frozen shell of the House was a grave for those trapped within, woman, man, and child. The ice had spared no one.

“I am Tara Bell’s child!” In the muffled night my voice rang like a shout. “That’s why I look like her! I’m your niece!”

He looked at Vai. “I have no niece.”

“Don’t you understand?” I cried. “Don’t you see who—?”

“Silence!” Vai’s voice snapped.

I dragged in a bitter breath, fighting a flood of anger and an ebb of despair. Of course he was right: The last thing I needed to do now was make them more suspicious by informing them that their worst fears about me were true.

Devyn clipped his horse forward.

In a softer voice Vai said, “Catherine, I’m tired of the cold, love. I’m exhausted, and I hurt. I need to know you won’t freeze to death. Please, let’s get out of here.”

The sight of the ice-caged ruins and trapped corpses had truly shaken me, but it was his effort to disguise the tremor in his voice that made me realize that will alone was carrying him. I rode out of the ghost-ridden clearing, for I knew he would not leave if I did not go.

As if our movement unleashed it, the moon began its slide westward.

Soon the road passed pasture walls built of peat. If there were fields awaiting spring planting, I did not recognize them. Everything was strange to me. My moorings had slipped the dock and I had drifted free. I was riding the road my mother and father had traveled. We had just ridden past the estate where Camjiata’s wife, the dragon dreamer Helene Condé Vahalis, had been born and raised and had died. The general had been here, too, back in the days when he was merely Captain Leonnorios Aemilius Keita.

Why had it all happened? How had the four of them met: the ambitious captain, the loyal soldier, the half-blind oracle, and the restless traveler? Was there ever a reason, a destiny, as Camjiata claimed? Or were the Romans right that the goddess Fortuna was veiled and blind and therefore capricious?

We passed stone walls and winter-seared pasture. Barking dogs gave notice of habitation. Under the brilliant light of the moon rose long houses with peaked thatching, flanked by sheds with sloped roofs. Torchlight flared ahead. As we reached the village, Vai’s magic guttered the torches one by one. The doors leading into the houses opened, and dimly seen faces peered out. Although we didn’t need light on the night of the full moon, Vai extended his right hand in a gesture meant to be dramatic, and pinched four globes of light out of the air. Devyn mumbled a prayer.

We rode down a dirt street through the center of the village. In spring the main street would be nothing but a strip of sloppy mud. There were no modern chimneys, only smoke holes, and no glass windows set in the wattled walls. To judge by the bleating of sheep, the flocks were being wintered over in the same houses the people lived in. Two thousand years ago a Roman legion pressing forward to find tin, fur, and slaves for trade had probably seen the same sights we did now.

Had my mother truly come from this barbaric place? How different Daniel must have seemed to her, with his sophisticated education and his years of travel!

Watchmen paced us through the streets, holding their blackened torches. People slipped out of their homes to follow Vai’s mage light. We halted in front of a substantial house with a high roof. An elderly man dressed in an embroidered wool gown and a calf-length sleeveless leather tunic appeared on the porch. He greeted Vai with incomprehensible words.

Devyn translated into his weirdly archaic and broken Latin. “To you, Magister, we are honored to be giving guest rights. Your magic is strong. You have captured the god’s beast and trapped her in the form of a woman. But in this village the beast cannot be staying. She bears malice toward us by wearing the face of one of our dead.”

“She is my wife,” Vai repeated. “Not a beast. We need shelter for the night. We will go on in the morning.”

“No shelter can we be giving you unless the priest pours the offerings and the god grants his blessing.”

Vai’s lips thinned. I had a feeling that he was trying to decide whether to terrify them with a frightening display of cold magic.

“It can’t hurt to go to the temple.” My teeth were beginning to chatter even with the fur blanket wrapped around me.

“Very well, love. But only because you say so.” He turned to the headman. The arrogant tilt of his chin lent curtness to his words, reminding me of when I had first met his withering disdain. “Because the hour is late and I do not engage in debate on the street, I will allow you to escort us to the temple. You personally will attend me, as befits my consequence and your hospitality. I expect a decent meal, hot drink, and fur cloaks and gloves to make up for this unwarranted insult.”

The old man was obviously unaccustomed to being spoken to in this manner, but he touched hands to his bowed head and, to my surprise, himself took the reins of Vai’s horse as would a servant. Villagers followed us in procession: women draped in long shawls, men wrapped in wool capes, children swaddled in pelts. At the outskirts of the village we passed between a row of granaries set up on stilts. Beyond the granaries a lane entered a rocky pasture. The moon’s light was so bright I could see the shape of every rock tumbled in the field, every face breathing into the frigid night.

The temple grounds were surrounded by a ditch and stockade. The procession halted in front of a plank bridge that spanned the ditch. Vai dismounted, so I did as well.

He turned to the headman. “You will accompany us.”

The man answered, and Devyn translated. “We are forbidden.”

“Then we will go alone.” Vai took the reins of the horse that carried our gear and led it over the bridge. Moonlight gleamed on the skulls of cattle set in rows at the bottom of the ditch. I touched the hilt of my sword.

“Do not draw your blade in this holy place unless you are threatened,” he said softly.

“I feel threatened.”

The stockade had no gate, rather an opening framed by two stone pillars. The pillars each had three niches, and in each niche rested a human skull. Their staring silence made my skin crawl.

“Let me sneak in ahead to make sure there’s no ambush,” I whispered.

His cold fire vanished, leaving him and the horse like ashen ghosts under the moon. I wrapped myself in shadows. Beyond the gate a path sprinkled with white stones led down by stair-steps into a hollow. I crept not into a stone building as Romans would have built nor the kind of open-air sanctuary lined with pillars in which Kena’ani worshiped.

I walked into a grove of oak trees. Oaks certainly could not flourish this far north, yet here they were, fully leafed as if with summer, their canopies meeting over my head. Between the trees rose poles from which hung lamps, each one burning a sweet-smelling oil. The smoky heat breathed like summer. Had I passed back into the spirit world?

No. For they were not living trees. They were dead trunks decorated with tin and copper foliage. Wind brushed a tinkling whisper through the metal leaves.

Beside a bricked-in hearth, a man sat on a stool. A huge bronze cauldron hung over the fire. Its polished surface glimmered in the twisting light of the flames. The face of a horned man shone in the curve of the cauldron, and it watched me as with living eyes.

The man at the fire turned. He heard me, although I could sneak as quietly as any mouse. He saw me, although I concealed myself within the shadows. I knew at once who he was. I resembled him in some ways more than I did my mother, for he was darker than his children. There was mage House blood in him.

I did not know what language he spoke, yet I understood him perfectly.

“Beast, we have not invited you to enter. Trouble us no longer, you who come to haunt us wearing my dead daughter’s face. Begone. I banish you.”

“I’m not a spirit! I’m Tara Bell’s child. You are my grandfather.”

“Tara is no longer my daughter. Her home and her family she gave up to follow the Roman goddess Bellona, the lady of war. All men she foreswore except the captain who took her oath to serve him, Captain Leon. She marched south into his service. Her child you cannot be, because the Amazon soldiers bear no children.”

“She did bear a child, because I am hers and in your heart you know I am hers!”

He raised his hands as if warding off an attack. “If you speak, the god will be hearing you!”

“Who will hear who does not already know?” I cried. Would my own grandfather reject me?

“The anger of Bold Carnonos fell upon this village. The magisters of Crescent House made offering of their magic to build an empire. So the god destroyed them.”

“He’s not a god! You just call him that because you fear his power.”

He raised the knife of sacrifice. “We do not want your poison here to call his anger back on us. Begone. Begone. Begone.”

Down the avenue of oak trees, lamps flickered and began to go out one by one. Vai appeared in a nimbus of cold fire, leading the pack horse.

“I heard you shout, love.” He tossed the reins to the ground and, drawing his sword, stepped between me and the man who refused to be my grandfather. “Holy one, you cannot possibly wish to anger a magister, and you especially do not wish to anger me. Because I promise you, no magister you have ever seen or heard tell of has done what I have done. For I have defied the hunter, and stolen his own daughter out of his very nest. Of course she has fallen in love with me and chosen to become my wife. She is no threat to you or to this village. You ought to rejoice and lay a feast to celebrate her arrival, for I assure you that everything about this woman ought to make you proud to call her your kin.”

The priest lowered the knife, his gaze fixed on Vai’s cold steel, which needed only to draw blood to cut his spirit out of his flesh and send him screaming into the spirit world. “The girl has bewitched you, Magister. The god toys with you. It will end in grief and blood. I see it in the cauldron.”

“You see your own fears,” I said hoarsely. “You know what happened to your daughter on the ice, don’t you?”

His pitiless gaze seared me. “I told her to smother the child the moment she gave birth. Do you know what she said to me?”

My heart dropped as if into the pit of my belly. I feared to know. Yet I had to know.

The old man’s malice gleamed in a face so much like mine. “She said, ‘Do you not think I did not try to rid myself of his hateful seed? Yet nothing I did would dislodge it.’ ”

“You don’t need to listen to any more of this, Catherine. We can walk out of here now.”

My feet would not shift. My grandfather’s hate pinned me to the earth. The memory of Tara’s defiance still enraged him.

“Yet after that, the shameless whore spoke of pride! She said, ‘But then I realized that it was loyalty that made the child, because I went willingly to the hunter to save the lives of the others. Loyalty will be her birthright. Do not think I will be ashamed! I will be proud! Because loyalty will be the bright light this child will bring to the world.’ ”

The glimpse into my mother’s heart stunned me.

“I told her she would come to a bad end,” he went on in a rheumy whisper. “The hunter never stops hunting. His children belong to him only. Blood binds them forever and always.”

He shut his seamed old eyes, pressing fingers onto the closed eyelids.

“I see the Hunt in the cauldron every Hallows’ Night. I saw Tara and the Phoenician, dragged down into the river. I saw a child torn from their grasp as Tara reached for her with the only hand left to her. I saw the water choke them and kill them. ”

“Enough!” snapped Vai. “I do not fear you, holy one, although I respect your age, as it is proper for the young to respect the old. You have poisoned your own well with fear and hate.”

The priest opened his eyes. Unlike Tara and Devyn he had dark eyes, and in the firelight they seemed to gleam with a golden brown almost like mine.

“They tell me you walked out of the north, Magister. Surely on the road here you passed Crescent House frozen by the breath of the Wild Hunt. That is not fear. That is truth. Take her, if you must, for you are young and arrogant and you believe all will bow before you and your magic. But you are nothing but dust and salt, and less precious than salt. Go, as did my daughter Tara. Go, as did the Phoenician, Daniel, who believed he could stand beside her. Go, as did the captain who thought he had found a woman whose dreams would deliver up Europa to his ambition. The hunter will crush your defiance and destroy all that you love. The hunter cannot be defeated, because he is death.”

“Come, Catherine. We are leaving this cursed place.”

I followed Vai past the dead lamps and out of the sanctuary to where the village waited in silence. Snow drifted like frozen tears. I feared that the villagers meant to abandon us on the road to die of exposure, but even in this isolated place, respect for cold mages was akin to awe. Hot wine and a platter of warm porridge awaited him, which Vai forced me to share although I was neither hungry nor thirsty. Vai was presented with two pairs of fur-lined gloves and two voluminous fur-lined cloaks. He helped me into mine before wrapping himself in the other. Fresh horses were brought as well as a donkey to haul our gear. Devyn was assigned to accompany us with three older men, grim fellows bearing spears in a way that made me think they had once been soldiers in whatever war had brought Captain Leon to the north, before he became General Camjiata.

People stood with breath misting to watch us depart. I couldn’t tell if they expected a calamity to befall us before we left their sight, or if they wished to store away the memory to tell as a tale over and over again at the winter hearth: how they had seen the lord magister and the beast ride away into the night. It was as quiet as if death had blown a kiss over the world. The only sounds were the crunch of hooves on crusted snow and the moan of the wind. I could not stop shaking.

Our road was a broad cart track glistening with a lacework of frost under the moon’s light. We halted at daybreak in a hamlet of two farmsteads to feed and water the horses. Vai suggested I go indoors to warm myself at a hearth. The women hustled their children out when I came in, so I went back out again, not wanting the children to get cold. My hands hurt, and my lips were numb, and worst of all, a pair of crows now followed us. I was sure they were my sire’s spies.

It was a long, silent, cold day as we rode south. At midday, when we halted in an abandoned shelter for a short rest, Vai sat next to me on a crude wooden bench. I huddled in a shawl of misery, as mute as if the priest in the temple had cut out my tongue.

Vai addressed Devyn. “Is there no mage inn in your village? Surely magisters ride through your village every year or two to claim their tithe in servants and in furs. Now and again a child must bloom with cold magic. Why would Crescent House have built in such a forsaken northern place if there was not something they deemed valuable there?”

Devyn stared at his hands as he answered. “To our village, no magister is now coming. The death of Crescent House has to us brought the curse of the god. Each year after the night of bonfires when the sun turns south, we bring our trade goods and our children to the trade fair at Kimbri. There will you be finding House lodging, Magister.”

“It was the ice, wasn’t it?” said Vai suddenly. “The mages of Crescent House wanted to be close to the ice. Because our power is strongest here.”

Devyn gestured a sign to wipe away the secret knowledge he had unwillingly overheard. “If we wish to be reaching Kimbri before nightfall, then we must be riding, Magister.”

Afternoon shadows lengthened. We passed fields covered with rotting straw against the cold. As twilight sank down over us and the moon rose, a substantial village rose like illusion in the evening mist. Past clusters of thatched huts rose wood buildings with glass windows through which lamplight shone. We turned aside and rode to an ice-rimed meadow. Two cottages posed picturesquely on the bank of a stream, linked by a long enclosed walkway. Smoke rose from the chimney of one cottage. Devyn led us to the cottage with no chimney and thus no fire.

Lamps, seen through glass windows, guttered out as we approached. The door opened and men hurried out who had clearly been making everything ready for us. Their faces looked ghostly in moonlight. They made a deep courtesy.

My body ached, stiff with cold and with emotion I dared not claim.

Vai touched my arm, his forehead wrinkled with concern. “Catherine, let’s go in.”

Yet then my mother’s brother spoke. “Was there ever peace for her, before the hunter came to kill her?”

My gaze flashed to him. “They knew peace for a few short years.”

“The magister calls you Catherine. Is that the name Tara gave you?”

“Yes. She named me Catherine.”

His mouth was creased with sorrow; his weathered face held many lines, and none made me think he had ever laughed much. “Catherine,” he repeated. “Named after Hecate, the goddess of gates, who guards the threshold between the living and the dead. True it is, that the hunter sired you. But it is sure you are my sister’s, for I see Tara in every line of you. I loved her once. But she left us and she never looked back.”

“They loved me,” I said hoarsely, for I needed him to know that. I clasped the hilt of my sword in one hand and pressed the other to the locket hanging at my breast. “She was pregnant again with another child, with Daniel’s child, who would have been my brother or sister. They didn’t mean to leave me behind. They meant us to all be together.”

His words slipped into an older rhythm, as if only he and I were awake in the whole wide gloaming. “From what cloth is longing woven? Is it silver? Is it gold? Yet even fine garments wear out, while longing still clads me.”

His words caught in my heart and, on an impulse I could not control, I extended a hand toward him. He reined his pony away as if even the thought of my touch might contaminate him.

“Catherine, let them go,” said Vai, grabbing my mount’s bridle.

I was too stunned to protest as Devyn and his soldiers rode into the village for the night. Vai sent the local men away, then drew me inside the cottage and shut and latched the door.

The cottage had two chambers, one on each side of a central passage. A back door opened onto the enclosed walkway that led along the hypocaust to the attached cottage, where the stove burned. Heat poured up from beneath the floorboards.

In the parlor a knotted carpet had been rolled back to leave space for a tub of steaming water, buckets for rinsing, and a bench heaped with linen towels. Our gear had been set on a table next to a folded stack of clean clothes. By the light of cold fire Vai closed the curtains while I stared at the unexpectedly luxurious surroundings, feeling as if I’d found silk in a ragged shepherd’s hovel.

“Love, come here.”

He undressed himself and then me, pinned up my braid, and coaxed me into the tub with him. As the water warmed my numb limbs, he just held me. My thoughts had hit a wall. I could only comprehend the lap of water sloshing against the side of the tub, the steady rhythm of his breathing against my back, and the pressure of my head resting along his cheek.

In the other chamber waited a spacious curtained bed with an astounding feather quilt of exquisite construction. Dressing in the linen bed robes they had laid out for us, we snuggled together under a wool blanket on a settee. We shared a tray of honeycakes, a bowl of porridge garnished with butter, and a bottle of bold red wine. A part of me was hungry, but it all tasted like sand.

He spoke at random. “I can only figure one reason they thought me a magister the moment they saw me. Most people here have the pale skin and hair of Celtic ancestry, although some like your grandfather are more obviously mixed, likely the bastard descendants of Crescent House. To their eyes I must be a magister and thus a nobleman.”

“Why would cold mages want anything in this terrible place?” I said angrily.

His lips crimped down. He pressed a hand over mine. “Love, you’re very tired. We both need to sleep. Some things are better examined in the morning.”

“I don’t even know what day it is. We don’t even know what year it is…” Days and years were not the pain clawing up out of my bruised heart. “First Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan gave me away. Now the man who is my uncle fears me and my grandfather wishes I had been smothered at birth. My mother and father are dead. My sire is a monster. And I miss Bee. I don’t even know where she and Rory are or if they’re all right.”

Tears welled out of the pit exposed by the half-remembered whisper of my mother’s voice in my heart. She had reached for me. She had cherished me despite everything.

Vai tucked us under the bedcovers and let me cry in his arms. He said nothing, and when my tears at long last dried up, I knew there was nothing he needed to say. Any man or woman can speak words and not mean them, or mean them and not have the strength to carry them through. Instead he kissed the tears from my cheeks and sighed with weary satisfaction as he settled me comfortably against him. Strange it was how his silence brought a measure of peace to my heart. We had traveled such a long way, and even farther if one measured from the first day we had met.

“Vai?” Seeking another form of comfort, I dropped kisses along the curve of his neck.

More worn out than I had guessed, he had already fallen asleep.