Cold Steel

31

Once I had feared the fury of a magister powerful enough to rule as the head of a mage House more than I had feared the frightful tales of the great powers that lie invisible to us.

What a naïve girl I had been.

Two monstrous dragons reared up to attack each other, heedless of the tiny mortals scrambling away beneath them. Heat poured off them in battering waves. The tops of the cypress trees caught fire.

I grabbed Vai’s arm, for Bee’s comment had jogged my memory at last. “There’s a rowboat at the river’s edge. Bring everything. Rory, hurry!”

We dashed past the ruined gate and the closed doors of the gatehouse, heading toward the house. With a shrill scream the black launched itself against the smaller iron dragon. When their bodies collided, the ground actually shook.

Ash and burning needles spun down over us as we ran down the drive. Vai was cursing; he was a man unaccustomed to being rendered impotent in such a devastatingly comprehensive way. When I looked around, Bee wasn’t with us.

“I have to go back and look for her!” I shouted.

“Rory, find the boat, make sure there are oars.” Vai shoved the bag he was carrying to Rory. His apron of carpentry tools wrapped him like armor. “Catherine, I won’t leave you, so don’t ask it of me.”

Heavily laden, Rory staggered toward the river. Vai and I hunkered in the cover of the trees as the two dragons came rolling past in a frenzy of talons, teeth, and lashing tails. They broke apart. The dragon who had been Kemal beat its wings, the draft driving us to the ground. A thread of blood trailed past my hand with a stench like the forge. The black dragon rose onto its hind legs; its body blocked out half the sky.

A small person ran into the gap between them.

“Bee!” I screamed.

Vai threw me onto the ground, and himself on top. I squirmed and poked but his weight and that of the laden apron trapped me. “Hate me if you wish, but you can’t save her this time. She can only save herself.”

She was refulgent with anger. “Enough, Your Excellency! You have triumphed over all your challengers! Now go and do what things your kind do when all this rending and roaring is over!”

As she spoke she retreated until she stood beneath the iron-gray dragon. It could have crushed her with its talons or snapped her up in one gulp, but fearlessly she pressed a hand on its belly.

“Please, Kemal. You don’t need to challenge him. Turn back into a man, and I’ll give you a kiss.”

“That will work,” said Vai, his mouth against my ear.

It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t being sarcastic.

The black dragon inhaled so deeply that the sparks and smoke swirling around us were sucked into its nostrils in a prelude to a fresh attack. Hail peppered down. Vai took the brunt of the impact but uttered not a sound.

The hail ceased, leaving the ground covered with iron pebbles. Vai rolled off me, rubbing his head and cursing under his breath.

The gleam of the black dragon’s scales cast a hazy light over the two figures on the gravel drive. Kemal had become a man again. He knelt, head bowed, his left arm and leg streaked with blood.

“Come with me,” Bee said coaxingly. She helped him to his feet and toward us along the drive. Their shuffling progress spun in the mirrors of the dragon’s eyes as it watched them go.

I would have run forward but Vai held me back. “Catherine, there are times when you must stop and think and not just leap. If you rush out there, your movement or whatever scent you have of the spirit world may startle it into attacking.”

“Thank Tanit!” Bee staggered up. She listed heavily to one side with Kemal leaning on her. “Help me. He’s injured, and stunned.”

Vai got an arm around him, and Bee let go.

“I was so frightened!” I hugged Bee so hard she grunted.

“Ouch! Cat! Let me go. Where’s Rory?”

“We sent him ahead to secure the rowboat.”

The dragon bellowed so loudly we all cringed. A horn cry answered, followed by a second and a third. Drums pulsed from the heart of the city. Was the Treverni prince raising his militia?

“Will the mages be foolish enough to attack?” I asked. “Can weapons hurt a dragon?”

“Best not to find out,” said Kemal. “My people are few in number. He has now ingested the seed of five males. We must coax him to the river. Once in the water, he will crown. Once he becomes a female, he will dive for the Great Smoke.”

“Very well.” Bee boldly walked onto the drive. “Your Excellency, a part of you must surely still be the headmaster. I need that part of you to listen attentively. Soldiers are coming. You must depart. Otherwise the soldiers will attack the academy with the hatchlings in it. You are a rational and educated man. You can’t want all those young ones killed. So let us move.”

“She’s magnificent!” Kemal breathed.

“Or insane,” muttered Vai under his breath. “Are you sure she’s safe from him?”

Kemal grimaced. “We do not eat people. They smell bad and are not at all nourishing. Among the lore of my kind, it is said humans are poisonous. Cold mages most of all.”

“How have you cut the threads of my magic?” Vai asked.

“I know nothing of such secrets. Why would I?” Bitterness shaded his expression but then, remembering what he had just done, he smiled.

After a hesitation, Vai spoke. “My apologies for any discourtesy I showed you the first time we met, Maester Napata. I’m not just saying that because you saved our lives.”

Kemal staggered along between us, looking unaccountably cheerful for a man who had taken several gashes to the flesh. “My thanks, Magister. Be assured I am accustomed to such treatment from cold mages. Although to be honest, your arrogance had a particularly memorable flair that made it all the more striking.”

I glanced past Kemal to Vai, not sure how he would react to this gentle sarcasm.

“My thanks,” he said with a slight flutter of his eyelashes. I wasn’t sure if he was suppressing a sneer or a laugh. Then he smiled. “I often practiced for many hours in front of a mirror to be sure of bringing it off to its full effect.”

Both Kemal and I laughed.

We hobbled around the kitchen wing. In front of the pier, guarding the rowboat, we discovered Maestra Lian holding a burning lamp in one hand and in the other a poker with which she was threatening Rory. He had an oar in each hand as he tried to dodge past her.

“Maester Kemal!” she cried. “This person steals the boat!”

He let go of us and limped to her. “Maestra Lian, let him pass. His Excellency is about to depart.” He took the poker from her to use as a cane. “Some ruse must be devised to confuse the soldiers and send them away. I fear for the hatchlings.”

“Tell them I wove the illusion of a dragon with cold magic as we were escaping,” said Vai. “Their belief in my exceptional abilities will trouble them for months.”

“If not years,” Rory said, lowering the oars. “Can I get in the boat now, or is that dragon-stinking man going to poke me with the iron stick?”

I poked him. “Rory, don’t be impolite! Maester Napata, my apologies. What will you do now?”

Kemal gestured toward the building. “I inherit the position as headmaster. That was always His Excellency’s intention.”

A shape like the void of night thumped down to the shore. I felt as with the skin of the grass that crushing weight, the ancient fire of its soul, and the spark of a new being about to shed the husk of its old form.

Bee’s flow of words was the leash on which she led the beast to water. “I do not mean to sound inconsiderate or ungrateful, but I do think it most unfair that I should risk so much and yet be told so little. I realize human people are of little interest to your kind except insofar as we hinder your lives or aid you. But, for example, I would wish to know who that very old man was who kissed me and then died! Was he one of your kind, for I am sure he must have been. Why did he say he was waiting for me? He called me his death!”

Because of the cloudy light chasing along its black scales, she was able to see us standing by the pier. She waved cheerfully, looking not one bit frightened.

The dragon slid into the river. The touch of the water peeled away the skin of the beast. As his old skin sloughed off, a slender creature with pearlescent scales unfolded sleek wings. Its crest fluttered in a rainbow of shining color. It looked very like the leviathan that had carried us across the Great Smoke, only much smaller. The water boiled white as she swam in a wide arc out into the current and back to the shore.

Stars peeked through rents in the cloud cover. The head breached. Water poured off the long neck as she towered above us. Her scales reflected us as in a mirror:

The shadow of Rory’s cat spirit limned his body like a cloak.

The glittering threads of Vai’s cold magic flowed like sparkling ribbons that were being sucked into the void of the dragon’s massive weight.

Maestra Lian and Bee each bore the ghost of a third eye shutting and opening on her forehead.

As for me… two Cats melted together, one wreathed in the shadowy threads of magic that bind the worlds while the other was plain, solid flesh.

Bee turned to Kemal. Unfolding around him in the manner of a male peacock’s bright tail, he wore a fan of brilliant colors shaped into the translucent illusion of the dragon that was his true nature. I thought it unlikely he could have looked away from Bee’s smitten regard even if the world had ended and we had all been swallowed by fire and ice.

Her voice’s hoarse tremor was no doubt enrapturing to a man who had been hopelessly infatuated for so long. “I have never seen anything as magnificent in my life as you becoming a dragon.”

She tipped up her face.

I thought he would crush her to him and kiss her searchingly and deeply and with the release of all that frustrated longing, as Vai had kissed me so angrily and passionately on the stairs at Nance’s boardinghouse in Expedition.

Kemal was not that man. As if he feared she was too fragile for his pent-up emotions, he brushed his mouth over hers in a shy, tentative kiss.

“Gracious! Is that the whole of what you mean to do?” Bee hauled him bodily into her, pulling him down for a very different sort of kiss.

I looked away. As my arm brushed the basket, I remembered how General Camjiata had pieced together disparate images from Bee’s purloined sketchbook to guess how to capture me on the jetty in Expedition. Hastily, I unlaced the basket. I held out the skull so it faced the shining column of the dragon.

The cacica looked back at me. In my hands she was still a skull, but in the reflection I saw in the pearl mirror of the dragon’s scales, she was a living head.

“Your Highness!” I cried, startled by the apparition. “We are still traveling. I assure you, I mean to find your son Haübey and return you to him as soon as I am able.”

Her gaze fell on Bee locked in a fervent embrace with Kemal. “Distracted by kissing, as the young are wont to be. My thanks for the proper respect you have shown me, Niece. I give you warning. Trust not in fire banes. The ones you thought were your friends have betrayed you. People will speak and act in all kinds of ways because they do not believe there are ears or eyes to witness.”

“What do you mean?” I cried, but the creature that had once been the headmaster plunged beneath the surface and I was left with a skull in my hands.

The churning deeps turned as into glass. I saw through it into an unfathomable sea. Humble fish swam through currents made by memories of that which has happened, which we recall imperfectly, and that which is yet to come, which we cannot foresee.

James Drake laughs as he stands with a foot on the limp body of a man. Blessed Tanit! The fallen man is Vai. Drake shoves the body with his foot and beckons for a soldier to bring a horse.

“Catherine!” called Vai from the boat.

I shoved the cacica’s skull into the basket and ran onto the pier. The dragon flashed away into the chasm, out of the mortal world and into the Great Smoke. As the waves of its departure slapped the shore, Vai raked six fat spheres of cold fire into the air. Light coalesced into gleaming columns so bright I could discern the green of the grass.

I kissed and then released him. “If soldiers are coming, they’ll know right where we are.”

“That is my intention. I want to draw them off from the academy.”

From the road, a horn blatted and was answered thrice.

Kemal set Bee back from him. “When I have made all safe here, I will find you,” he promised her. He turned to us. “I’ll tell them you stole our horses and fled by road. Go!”

I dragged a speechless Bee into the boat. Vai pushed off and set to the oars as Rory coiled the line. The current caught the bow, spinning us halfway around until Vai pulled us back. Bee stared toward the bank. A lamp caught flame. Kemal stared after us until Maestra Lian took his arm to help him back up to the academy of which he was now headmaster.