Cold Steel

25

Vai’s twitching and muttering woke me. He was slipping in and out of his village patois, obviously dreaming. He was very warm, possibly feverish, trying to throw off the blankets and quilt as if they were weights he had to free himself from.

In a rough, desperate voice he said, “Ah kill ’ee.” Then, more clearly, flat with rage, “I will kill you.”

“Vai. It’s me. It’s Catherine. I’m here with you. You’re safe. We’re safe.” I stroked his hair and face until he relaxed.

He sighed, barely awake. “My sweet Catherine. You’re safe. I’ll keep you safe.”

Between one breath and the next he dropped back into sleep.

The air was pleasantly warm, heat rising from below. I slipped on the linen dressing robe and peeked out the closed curtains to see the sun almost at zenith. Gracious Melqart! We had slept a long time. Voices murmured in the passage. I opened the door. Men were in the parlor, tidying up. When they saw me they averted their gazes.

“Salvete,” I said, speaking slowly. “May we have food? Broth and porridge to start with, and a heavier meal later. Wash water, please. Also, if you can clean our clothes and gear…”

Our things were taken away and food delivered. I ate, but Vai did not wake. He tossed and turned, shivering and then sweating. I washed him down repeatedly with cool water. Once I was able to wake him for long enough to get some broth down his throat, but he fell back asleep as in a stupor. It frightened me that he had driven himself to collapse and I hadn’t noticed. To pass the day I mended his dash jacket, ate, washed my hair, and enjoyed the comfort of a furnished and heated domicile, although I kept a chair shoved under the door latch as a precaution.

Without his cold fire to light the evening, I crawled back into bed at dusk.

What woke me I did not at first know, only that I came awake groping for my sword. The hilt shivered in my hand as I drew it out of the spirit world. Vai was sprawled across half the bed, dead asleep but breathing comfortably. The door’s latch jigged down, and the door bumped against the chair. Veiled in shadow, I padded to the door.

A male voice muttered to his companions in words I understood well enough to get the gist: The mage was ill, the black-haired beast was alone and trapped in the body of a woman, so the cursed magister could be slaughtered like the pig all mages were and his possessions shared among men bold enough to take action.

A hand groped through the crack where the door gapped open, seeking to shove away the chair. I stabbed, pinning the hand to the wood.

“I never sleep. After I kill you, I’ll paint my face with your blood and come after the rest.”

I pulled the blade out.

Whimpering in fear, the men stumbled out the front door. I grabbed the linen dressing robe, tied it around myself, and went after them. By the time I reached the open door, my attackers had vanished into the night. A lamp carried by a single person approached across the snow. With sword raised, I waited. A middle-aged man halted at the bottom of the stairs. His lime-whitened, spiky hair glittered with snowflakes. In his ears shone the gold earrings of a djeli. He spoke with an educated accent as he measured me with a tale-teller’s curiosity and an icing of fear.

“My apologies if the magister was disturbed. I heard too late that ruffians were up to mischief. They will be punished.” There drifted from the village a shout, followed by a scream. “Do you wish to kill them yourself?”

Anger made it easy for me to strike. “No. Give them a year’s punishment at hard labor so they live to tell the tale of how no man can attack a magister. How are we to sleep, knowing the hospitality we were offered has been violated?”

“It is our shame that the magister was insulted. No doubt he keeps one such as you as protection.”

“One such as me? What do you mean?”

He hesitated, looking as if he were trying to decide whether it would be better to answer or to plunge his head into a cauldron of boiling oil. “I mean no offense. Your hair and eyes stamp you as being born with the mark of the Hunt. Such children are known to be unseemly wild and ungovernable, lustful and violent.”

“Are there many like me here in the north?” I demanded, much struck by this revelation. Was my sire tomcatting about every Hallows’ Night? Or was the wolf we had seen capable, like Rory, of walking in human skin?

“Not so many. Most such ill-omened children are set out in winter for the wolves to eat. I will watch here by the door through the rest of the night myself, if you will allow it.”

I let him into the passage to sit on a bench. Once back in the bedchamber I shoved the chair back up against the door and then sat under the quilt in the bed, unable to sleep for the way my blood was pounding. Set out in winter for the wolves to eat! I would just eat those cursed wolves first! Not to mention skewer every night-stalking criminal who hated cold mages.

Vai hadn’t stirred. Asleep, he was so vulnerable. I had once heard him describe to his grandmother the impossibility of a cold mage making his way in the world alone, without a mage House to protect him. Was there no safe place for us?

I meant to keep watch until he woke, but as dawn lightened night to gray, I dozed off.

A spill of water woke me. He stood naked at the side table washing his face at a basin. Seeing me awake, he slipped back into bed.

“Vai!” I cradled his face in my hands as I studied him for lines of illness. “I was so worried about you. How do you feel?”

“Rested and warm, although I’m hungry. Why would you be worried about me?” I loved the way his hands roamed, knowing just how to touch me. “Ah! You’re worried because I fell asleep last night instead of—”

“Last night? You slept two nights and a day!”

“Did I? I collapse sometimes when I weave too much cold magic for too long without rest.” His casual tone reassured me, as did the kisses he flew along my cheek. “It’s no wonder you’re disappointed and fretful.”

“To be sure! Now that you mention it, I suppose I am a trifle sulky and out of sorts, and not just because I spent all day yesterday as an adoring wife ought, lovingly mending your dash jacket while watching over you in your sickbed, and afterward stabbing a man in the hand.”

He drew back. “What?”

“Last night I stopped three men from breaking into this chamber and killing you.”

He got back out of bed and pulled on trousers and shirt before opening the curtains. The view revealed a snowy meadow and ice-spackled stream but no people, although I heard the hum of troubled voices. “I had hoped to stay here a few days to rest, but we’ll have to move on at once. If you feel strong enough after staying awake all night and stabbing miscreants.”

“Of course I feel strong enough! Do you think I am some delicate flower?”

He buttoned up the dash jacket. “Of course not, love. Delicate and flower are two of the last words I would ever consider using to describe you, along with quiet, placid, cautious, and frail.”

“That’s six words.”

“So it is. You did a fine job mending the jacket, love.”

“My thanks,” I replied primly, although I was secretly relieved the work satisfied his fastidious eye. “By the way, the town’s djeli spent the night in the passage.”

Vai drew his cold steel and spun a shiver of cold magic so I could draw mine. Then he pulled the chair away from the door and threw it open.

Seen through the open door, the djeli rose from the bench. “My lord!”

“Is this the hospitality your village offers?”

“My lord! We feel nothing but shame. The malcontents who attacked you are dealt with.”

“As they should be. By what means will you see us safely conveyed to our destination?”

“The headman has already told me to offer his carriage and outriders to convey you to White Bow House in Sala, my lord. Will that be acceptable?”

“At once! We require provisions for the journey. I assume there are staging points and mage inns along the route?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Vai shut the door and turned to me. “The sooner we’re out of here, the easier I’ll feel.”

“Probably he means the outriders to slaughter us on the road.”

“I doubt it. This is a well-maintained cottage. The arrangement with the cold mages must benefit the headman enough for it to be worth his while to take so much care. Our gear?”

“Everything has been capably cleaned and repaired.”

The coach arrived so quickly that I suspected they had been waiting for us to wake up, meaning to get us out of town before there was more trouble. People gathered under the cold lens of the sky to watch as we left the cottage. Women covered the eyes of their children, as if my gaze might wither the innocent. At the back of the crowd, thin young men stared at the coach with sullen contempt. The djeli handed in heated bricks, a basket of provender, and a bottle of wine while offering a fulsome apology for the disrespect we had endured. Vai thanked him, shut the door, then leaned across me to close the shutters as a whip snapped and the coach began rolling.

“I see no point in allowing them to stare. We can’t change the minds of the ones who hate and fear us, not like this. Are you feeling better, love? I mean, after everything we saw.”

“If you mean the ugly words that hateful old man said to me, I see he meant to poison me against my mother. All he did was make me love and admire her more. Do mages simply kill anyone who tries to assault one of the Houseborn?”

“At Four Moons House, criminals were sent to the mines.”

“I wonder under what conditions they labor there.”

“I don’t know,” admitted Vai, “but everyone in my village knew that people sent to the mines never returned.”

On the first day the carriage rolled uneventfully through the winter countryside. An outrider went ahead to alert each next stage that we were coming. By the second day I was surprised at how good the roads were, until the coachman informed me that they had been built in the last ten years with indentured local labor under the supervision of soldiers. Before that, he said, the journey would have taken a month on a cart track.

At dusk on the third day we rolled into the courtyard of an isolated inn out in the middle of nowhere. No one bustled to assist us. The watering trough had been smashed to pieces.

An outrider came running from the stables. “My lord, the place has been ransacked and defaced.”

Vai and I drew our swords. Under Vai’s mage light we investigated the two-room inn and the stove house and kitchen behind. Every piece of furniture had been stripped out except a wooden slops bucket with a leaking bottom, filled with frozen excrement. Shattered floorboards exposed the pillars of the hypocaust system, on which were painted curses. Amulets plaited with animal bones, withered leaves, and chicken feathers caked with dried blood hung from the lintels.

Outside, Vai called over the most senior outrider, a quiet man who performed his duties and kept the younger men in line. “Speak honestly and I give my word I will hear your speech without reprisal. Why do the people here hate cold mages so much they would do this?”

The man considered his gloved hands. “My people have been living in these lands since the dawn of time, my lord. Then in my father’s youth, the outsiders came. You mages brought down the anger of the god over all the countryside.” He glanced at me. “The mage houses and their princely allies rule us now. They take our young men to build roads and to fight, and our young women to be servants and to be shamed. For this privilege, my lord, we must be paying a tithe of our furs and meat to the mages likewise.”

Snow dusted down over us. The men watched with the caution of servants. They were five and we were two, and yet they showed no sign of being eager to attack us.

Vai spoke. “Did you know there is a man, General Camjiata, who has written a legal code that outlaws clientage? A law that says no person may own another person as property or claim another community as its possession?”

“Do you mean the Iberian Monster, my lord?” asked the senior man. Unaware of how he was twisting his hands, he had almost pulled off one of his gloves.

“You have the look of a soldier about you,” I said. “Perhaps you fought in the war twenty years ago.”

His gaze flashed to me before settling back to Vai. “We should go on, my lord. We’ll nurse the horses along and get to the next hostel. There is moonlight, and your magic, to light our way.”

“I’ll scout ahead.” In full sight of the riders I wrapped the shadows around me. They exclaimed as I vanished, and I was glad of it, because if they refused to like or trust me, then I wanted them to be scared of me.

Vai walked in front of the horses with a lamp fashioned of cold fire. The clop of horses’ hooves and the stamp of the men’s footfalls faded into winter’s silence as I ran ahead. It was so quiet that the ambush revealed itself by the heavy breathing and restless shifting of men hiding alongside the road in a ditch. There were only ten, armed with iron weapons. I trotted back to the coach.

“Wait here,” Vai said to the attendants. “By no means come forward until you hear sounds of fighting. Catherine, no killing unless we have no choice.”

“They mean to kill us!”

“Maybe so, but they are not without fair grievances and no means to gain a hearing. If we have no choice, we won’t spare them.”

I acquiesced rather than argue; I would do what I must when the time came. Sparks of cold fire bobbing along the ground gave us just enough light to creep off the road and thus up behind them. At the ditch I stalked in among them where they shivered, waiting patiently.

“Did ye hear a footstep?” one whispered.

“Hsss! Look!”

A carriage and horses glided down the road, fitted with a coachman and footman. It was an astonishing illusion, except for a lag in the turning of the wheels. Still, the ambushers should have been instantly suspicious of it for the lack of sound. Instead, wound up and eager, they leaped.

The carriage and horses dissolved into a hiss of falling ice.

Cold magic hits like a hammer, so sing the bards and the djeliw. Air becomes ice. Iron groans. I dropped to my knees just as all the iron in their weapons shattered in a burst of shards and screams. Only cold steel was safe.

Wreathed in my threads of magic, I ran among them. The smell of their hot blood and the scent of their panic lanced through my veins like lust. My sire was a killer and my mother a soldier, but I remembered what Vai had said, so I only pricked them in shoulder and thigh. Many were already bloodied. Two had to be carried by their fellows. Routed, they fled into the night.

When I gave the all clear, Vai joined me on the road. I laughed, exultant at our easy victory.

He looked grim and said only, “You are unharmed?”

“Yes. That was spectacular!”

He sighed. “I cannot help but think there would not be this kind of trouble if not for the inequity of the law and the burdens placed on people bound into clientage.”

“You’re kinder than I can be toward people who meant to do us harm! Bandits and troublemakers! You need to work on the wheels of the carriage. They didn’t quite look right.”

In the light of a perfectly shaped illusion of a candle lantern, we walked back the way we had come as Vai rolled illusory wheels ahead of us, trying to fix the lag. Soon we met the outriders approaching at a brisk trot, for they had heard the screams. When the servants saw the stains of blood upon the ground and the fragmented remains of the weapons, they turned as grim as Vai.

The night hung suspended as we traveled on as through a dream.

After some time one of the young men abruptly asked Vai what he had meant by “a legal code.” The senior man harshly told the lad never again to speak of such matters.