Cold Steel

32

For the longest time no one spoke. Rory sat cross-legged among the gear, his head buried in his hands. Bee stared back the way we had come. A candle of light floated by Vai’s knee, casting a gleam onto his beautiful face and intent expression. I watched the way his fingers tightened and relaxed on the oars, the way he glanced up between strokes at me, as if he was never quite sure he would still see me there, as if I might vanish between one breath and the next.

All my breath spilled out of me as I forced the awful vision of James Drake out of my head. I could kill Drake. If he tried to touch Vai, I would.

“Well!” said Bee. “Not every young woman has a dragon fall in love with her!”

I laughed, for her gloating tone scoured fear from me. I counted off on my fingers. “Goodness, Bee! A legate. A prince. An infamous radical. Even the mansa seemed inclined to fall for your prodigious charms. It seems unthinkable a dragon in the shape of a man would not do so likewise.”

“How can you speak to me of any of those others!” she cried. “They are but… trifles compared to…” Words failed her.

Vai’s gaze flashed up to meet mine. He smiled the intimate smile meant for me only, the one that made my cheeks grow warm. “I would have demanded more than a kiss.”

“I must say that in your case, Andevai, I do believe that horse has already left the stable,” retorted Bee in the most dignified manner imaginable, after which she spoiled the effect with a toss of her curls and an audible sniff.

Rory lifted his head. “Wouldn’t it be more precise to say in that case that the horse has already entered the—”

“Rory.” Vai’s tone was genial, but he cut him off.

I cut in. “Maestra Lian is a dragon dreamer. Both of you have a ghostly third eye.”

Bee touched her forehead, then giggled giddily. “Don’t joke, you beast! Think of how unsightly that would look! I wonder why the headmaster never revealed the truth to me while we attended the academy.”

“If he had told you what he was and what you were, back before all this happened, would you have believed him?”

“I suppose not,” she said with a grudging sigh. “Anyway, my dream was wrong, about meeting the headmaster in his study.”

“We found the headmaster in Noviomagus on the Feast of Mars Triumphant. He ate fire challengers. I spoke to the cacica as in a mirror. If you didn’t truly understand the dream you were having, you might have interpreted it in a more familiar way.”

“Why, Cat,” she said in surprise, “I do believe you are right for once.”

A horn’s call rose and faded. Rain spattered over us. I clutched Bee’s hand more tightly.

“Catherine, are you cold?” Vai pulled the left oar to steady us in the current. A bauble of cold fire chased out in front of us to light our way.

“I’m scared of being out on the water, to be honest.”

Bee put an arm around me, but her attention was fixed on the globe of cold fire. “Andevai, how far can you push the cold fire away from you before you lose control of it? For that matter, how close must you be to a fire to kill it?”

“In Expedition we did a number of experiments to study exactly these issues.”

“Did you?” said Bee, shifting excitedly beside me on the facing bench. “What did you do?”

“Everything will be different here because of the proximity and mass of the ice, but…” He described how the troll scientists he had worked with had set different combinations of things on fire and adjusted him for distance, angle, and substances placed between him and the fire. They had tested his ability to manipulate cold fire at distance, and how long the brightness would last after he had let go of it. “And both the feathered people and the dragons have an effect on my cold magic.”

As they talked, I shut my eyes and pretended we were in a carriage.

After another hour we put in at an isolated sandbank. The boat became our roof as we huddled beneath like kittens under the beaver-pelt blanket and our winter coats, with Vai and Rory on the outside and Bee and me snug between them. Rory fell asleep at once.

“No kissing,” said Bee.

Vai kissed me anyway. The touch of his lips was as soft as the caress of flowers.

“The cacica warned we must beware cold mages pretending to be our friends,” I said. “But we already know the mansa of Five Mirrors House sent word to Four Moons House.”

He sighed. “Yes. I should have known better than to believe I could return to the Houses.”

“To think dragons walk among us and we never knew!” whispered Bee. By the lilt in her voice I could tell she was wide awake. “It seems to me the spirit world and the Great Smoke are locked in a struggle that neither can win. One grows powerful while the other grows weak, and then they reverse, back and forth endlessly.”

“Perhaps the interlocked worlds are like steam engines, ever heating and cooling,” said Vai.

“Gas expands as its temperature goes up, and a balloon deflates as its temperature goes down,” she murmured. “What if cold mages are moving the vital energy from one place to another?”

“I’m trying to sleep,” said Rory, and they lapsed into silence.

Tucked against Vai, I listened to him think by listening to the way he breathed steadily, sucked in a breath as a thought struck him, then slowed again as his mind waded through the possibilities. The river flowed with a soothing voice that pulled me into its drowning waters. Held in his arms and with Bee’s back pressed against mine and Rory’s soft snuffling just beyond her, I did not fear. My mother’s hand and my father’s voice had guided me home. I slept.

I woke alone in the frosty chill. A pallor of gray brushed the edges of the night, promising dawn to come. Wisp-lights trailed along the far bank.

Vai knelt beside me, a gloved hand shaking my shoulder. “Catherine, wake up.”

“I’m awake. What are those lights?”

“Troops searching the shore. We’ve got to get back out on the water.”

The Rhenus River flowed north before its final curving southwest plunge toward the vast marshy delta we in Adurnam called the Sieve, which poured through a hundred channels into the Atlantic Ocean. On this stretch of the river the current was steady but not treacherous. Vai gave us each turns at the oars. The banks were overgrown with bushes and woodland. All morning we saw no villages or fields, and only once a rider on horseback.

Just past midday and by now exceedingly thirsty and hungry, we spotted a village on the western bank marked by the round houses typical of northwestern Celts. It appeared to be a peaceful place, folk about the spring business of sharpening plowshares and milking ewes. We pulled into a backwater and tied up.

The village was larger than it seemed from the river, with a pair of temples and a blacksmith’s forge at the intersection of two cart tracks. The crossroads was marked by a stone carved with the image of a seated man with antlers on his head, who held a snake in one hand and an armband in the other. Called Carnonos in my mother’s village, he had other names elsewhere and was often called a god, but I knew the figure was a depiction of the Master of the Wild Hunt, who in the old tales guided the souls of the dead across the veil that separates this world from the spirit world. My father had recorded one such tale in a journal: Everyone knew the worst thing in the world was to walk abroad after sunset on Hallows’ Night, when the souls of those doomed to die in the coming year would be gathered in for the harvest.

The Hallows’ Hunt was, my father had opined, a way for people to comprehend the unexpected nature of death. The old tale had not spoken of blood and chains. Had the Wild Hunt always hunted blood to feed the courts? Not according to the old tales. Likewise, had young women always walked the dreams of dragons? For it certainly seemed that dragons had somehow planted a seed whose fruit had become dragon dreamers.

Had the worlds always been one way, or did the worlds also change, shifting and transforming?

A hammer’s pounding started up at the forge.

“Maybe we’d better go back,” I said.

“Blacksmiths have no love for cold mages, it’s true,” said Vai, “but we can use this to our advantage.”

“How is it to our advantage to have a blacksmith have no love for you, Andevai?” Bee asked.

“Why would you give speeches to gatherings of people, Beatrice,” he responded in exactly the same tone, “when so many are hostile to what you have to say?”

“Because I may change their minds if only they hear and understand the important things I have to tell them!”

“Just so,” he agreed.

Folk gathered to watch us approach the forge. Inside, the bellows kept pace, and the fire kept burning despite Vai’s halting twenty paces away. That was part of the blacksmith’s magic. A white-skinned man with a burn-scarred face and work-marred hands emerged, wiping his palms on a cloth. He spoke with a rough dialect, but I was beginning to get an ear for it.

“Ye is a magister,” the man said. “We like not having truck with yer kind, mage. Some of them mage House soldiers was a-coming through here yesterday. They carried the banner of Five Mirrors, but they had riding with them some men wearing tabards marked with the four phases of the moon.”

Vai showed no emotion, but it was all I could do not to react to the mention of soldiers from Four Moons House. The courier simply could not have gotten there and back so quickly.

“We thanked them kindly and showed them the road out of here. Yet they still went a-taking a lass and a lad and four stout sacks of turnips with them, as they are having the right to do. So if ye must take anything from our peaceful village, take it, and then with our favor, ye may walk out that road likewise, and be quick about it.”

“Perhaps I am the one the soldiers are looking for,” said Vai.

The blacksmith looked him up and down, for he was wearing his laborer’s clothes, having packed away the precious dash jackets. “Ye is a workman’s son, not a fancy magister.”

“I am a village-born lad, but I am a cold mage likewise. You know how it is with the mage Houses. They take what they want and bind it to them.”

“That, indeed!” said the blacksmith. The village folk murmured in agreement, as they would make interjections when a djeli told a tale. I could not help but notice that men stood in the front ranks with the women and children in a separate group at the back.

Vai went on. “Besides that, I have something to tell you. For many generations have blacksmiths and cold mages stood at odds. You know this to be true.”

“I know it,” said the blacksmith, and from within the crowd people echoed, “I know it!”

“Blacksmiths keep the secret of fire, and a dangerous secret it is,” said Vai.

“That’s true,” said the blacksmith, “but ye must be knowing it is no fit subject for standing out in the public square, to be speaking of such mysteries. Especially not in front of women.”

“There is a way for fire mages and cold mages to work together,” said Vai, “as I have had reason to learn in the western lands across the ocean, which are ruled by a people called the Taino.”

The blacksmith’s blond hair was shaved to stubble, although he had a long beard. He scratched his bristly hair now. “Ye speak like a madman. Why have ye come here?”

“I speak truth. We seek to escape the mage House. I admit we need food and drink, but that is not all we are about.” He glanced at Bee with a lift of his chin.

As in the game of batey, she took the pass. “Are you a free village? Do you rule your own selves? Or are you bound to a prince or a mage House, all that you have and your own labor and children besides chained by law and custom as their property? I know the answer from the words you have already spoken.” Some nodded, while others stared with frowns, wondering what path her speech would take. Perhaps they weren’t sure they wanted to hear such words from a woman. “You are not the only ones who dislike the tithes and chains by which people are bound. We are bound likewise, yet we fight.”

“How can ye fight?” said the blacksmith with a curt laugh. “Best to give them what they want and see their backs as they are leaving.”

“Words can fight when enough people know there can be another way,” I said.

Vai said, “Let fire mages and cold mages work together, and we can break down the power of mage Houses and princes.”

The blacksmith’s sneer stung like the ashy smoke of the forge. “And raise up ourselves in their place? A friendly offer, lad, but this thing cannot be done. We of the brotherhood hold our secrets close to keep ourselves alive. We who live with the fire burning within us live one breath away from our death. This ye are knowing, and likewise I have said more than enough. We are wanting no trouble here. Begone, and we will pretend we never saw ye if any are come to ask.”

“I do not know by what secrets and rituals blacksmiths protect themselves from the backlash of fire, but I do know there is a way for cold mages to protect fire mages. If they trust each other.”

Several of the old men laughed, as if this were the greatest joke they had heard in an age.

The blacksmith’s frown made me think he might melt into white-hot slag just from anger. “Ye’s a tale-teller, lad, is that it? A wanderer trying to taste a piece of bread with what words ye have to spend. The two lasses’ pretty looks are a better lure than yer blasphemous promises.”

The old men gestured for the villagers to move away as from a fight.

Vai did not budge. “You know better than to speak insultingly of another man’s wife to his face, much less to hers, so I will let that pass for this once. This is what I know: Cold magic feeds me, but the backlash of fire magic devours itself. Yet I can teach you how to pour the backlash of fire through the threads of my magic and thus harmlessly into the bush—the spirit world—where it cannot harm you. This is the truth. I swear it on my mother’s honor.”

By no other vow could he have so forcibly impressed them. The blacksmith looked startled, but the outright hostility drained from his face.

“I will talk to ye in the forecourt of the temple of Three-Headed Lugus,” he said at length, “if ye are willing to enter the god’s sanctuary.”

“I am a carpenter’s son. My father and uncle made offerings to thrice-skilled Lugus, whom they called Shining Komo with three hands and three birds.”

The man indicated me. “This one? She is truly yer wife?”

“She is. And the other is her cousin.”

“My apologies,” he said as politely as anyone could please. He beckoned Vai over and spoke in a whisper, but of course I could hear them perfectly well. “To enter the forecourt of the god, ye must abjure the touch of woman.”

“For how long?” Vai asked with perfect seriousness, as if the request were not at all unreasonable.

I knew that hunters held various proscriptions, as well as hanging amulets about their bodies before they entered the bush to hunt, so I felt it prudent not to listen to their secret business. Instead, Bee and I introduced ourselves to the women.

In a village like this, still fixed in the traditional ways, women and men kept most aspects of their lives separate. The women took Bee and me to a little temple dedicated to Mother Faro, the name they gave the deity of the river, where we poured libations over the stone altar. Afterward we settled into a common room lined with pots made by the most prestigious woman in the village, a potter who had married the blacksmith. The potter was black in complexion, a woman of renown married in from another prosperous village. Food and drink she offered in plenty, although no beef, as that was reserved for the men at this time of year. Women and children wandered in and out to observe us. I brought out my sewing kit, and they exclaimed over my steel needles, commonplace in Expedition but precious here. I sewed while Bee talked.

It was just so interesting to watch how Bee coaxed people into thinking about things in a new way. The women had never heard of Expedition or the Antilles, nor even of General Camjiata, although they had all heard of the Iberian Monster, known as a marauding general whose troops ate babies and who magicked women into men to make more soldiers for his army.

“All this talk of an assembly in a far country makes little difference to us,” said the potter. “What I want to know is how a man can write a law code and suppose any mage or prince will care what it says? They can ignore it easily enough.”

“Not if you do not ignore it!” said Bee.

“Words scratched on paper do not a binding make. Only blood makes a binding.”

“We are bound if we believe there is only one way things can be,” said Bee.

“Do you think we can stand against their soldiers?” asked the potter as others nodded. “You are young and innocent to not know the way of things.”

Regardless of how little agreement Bee fostered among the women who stayed up late to listen, she kept them listening, even if only for the novelty. She and I slept together in an alcove bed tucked into the wall, with a pair of dogs curled at our feet. In the morning I gave the potter a steel needle, and the women provisioned us with enough barley-cake, turnips, and beans to last three days.

“What did you discuss?” I asked Vai once we were back out on the river.

“I can’t speak of it.” To a man raised as he had been, such secrets were sacred. He was careful not to touch me. Even Rory was unusually solemn, in a mood I might have called brooding.

Bee said, “I did not see you, Rory. Were you with the men?”

“I don’t like temples. They make my skin itch.” He perused our faces as if he expected to uncover a rebuke. “I saw a terrible thing while you three were about your feasts and friendly talk! These people wish they were not bound to the mage House, but they bind people in their turn, don’t they? While they feast and sing and sleep, aren’t there people who serve?”

“Everyone must work,” said Vai, with a shake of his head.

The river’s voice almost drowned out Rory’s words, for he could barely choke them out. “I heard a noise in one of the byres as I was sniffing about as I like to do at dusk. There was a man handling a woman who did not want him. He pushed her down into the dirty straw and pulled up her skirt and shoved his part into her. She did not cry out for help or fight but I could smell her humiliation and shame. So I pulled him off. I told him I was the spirit of vengeance visited upon men who abuse helpless women. He laughed at me. He said the woman is a slave and thus a whore because slaves have no honor. So I showed him my true face. And he pissed himself and ran off. Then the woman reviled me. She said she was taken from her village by soldiers when she was young and sold months later to the blacksmith’s father. Any man in the village can use her as he wishes, just as he said. She will be punished now for what I have done. So I was ashamed for having done a thing to bring trouble on her. I told her she could escape with us.”

“Lord of All,” muttered Vai.

“But she refused! She said she has a healthy boy child who has been adopted as a son by a village man who has only daughters. He means the boy to marry one of the girls and inherit his cottage. If she runs, the boy will be turned out. She cannot let the chance go that he will have a good life. How can this be true? How can people live, with their spirits crushed day after day?”

“Blessed Tanit protect her!” murmured Bee.

Rory trembled with hissing fury. “I thought the radicals mean to free people who are bound to serve others. But what of people like her? I should have stolen the boy and made them both come with us, but I was a coward.”

For a long while we floated downstream in silence.

At last I said, “You’re not a coward, Rory.”

“Such a woman would fare worse as a stranger in a town with a child in tow and no family to protect her,” added Vai. “That the child may flourish gives her hope each day.”

Bee said, “You can’t save every mistreated person, not alone and with the law against you.”

Rory shifted onto the bench beside Vai. “I want to row now. I’m too angry to talk.”

Though our hearts felt wintry, signs of spring had crept into the landscape: buds greening on trees, violets in patches of color beneath the stark woodland, birds flocking north as they honked or trilled. In this flat country the river split into channels separated by long, flat islands. We passed several villages. At midday we saw riders on the eastern shore. Later in the afternoon a man with a spear watched us pass. Sheep worked their way over a greening pasture still damp with yesterday’s rain. As we swept around a wide bend, the sun peeped out from behind a patchwork of clouds.

Open land breached by a canal spread away from the eastern bank. Through this grassy expanse a troop of mage House soldiers picked their way toward the water’s edge.

“Curse it,” said Vai. “Bee, you’ve the steadiest hand. Keep the prow in line with the current. Rory. Catherine. You two sit close in the middle.”

He shifted up to kneel at the prow as Bee settled to the oars. Rory and I weighted the bench at the stern. My cane flowered into a sword as two boats exactly like ours appeared alongside us. It was an impossible illusion to hold through every shift and nuance, and Vai meanwhile kept glancing up at the sky. Thunder rolled although the sky hadn’t the weight of storm clouds.

The soldiers parted to let through a man on a horse. In his flowing robes and with his height and hair, I knew him at once as the mansa of Four Moons House. Soldiers with crossbows knelt to take aim.

“How could the mansa have come after us so quickly?” muttered Vai.

“The dragon betrayed us,” muttered Rory.

“Kemal never would!” Bee glared, but her steady rowing and skillful piloting did not slacken.

A force both terrible and strong was grinding within the clouds drifting innocently above. On the shore the mansa raised his gaze heavenward as snow began to fall. Vai was going to hide us in a blizzard. All we needed to do was get beyond the range of their bows.

More soldiers rode into view. They were wearing three different uniforms: the black-on-white squares of Five Mirrors House, the four phases of the moon of Four Moons House, and the strung bow of White Bow House. Mansa Viridor trotted up to greet the mansa and look across the water toward us. I was too shocked to utter a word.

“I should have known better than to trust friendship offered by cold mages,” Vai muttered.

Snow began to fall in earnest.

Soldiers bundled two slight figures to the shoreline, making sure we could see the swords held to their throats. Vai’s hands gripped the gunnel. The illusions of the other rowboats dissolved.

“Who are those terrified girls?” said Rory. “Do the soldiers mean to kill them?”

“Those are my little sisters,” said Vai in a voice I scarcely recognized because it was flat with fear and rage. “Lord of All, he will kill them. They are nothing to him. Love, go on to Havery. I will find a way back to you, but I cannot abandon them.”

He cast me a desperate look, shed his coat, and plunged into the river with his sword.

A crossbow bolt plopped into the river near him. A captain shouted at the troops to stop shooting because the man they wanted was in the water. The girls could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. They clung to each other as swords caged them. I looked at Bee, and she looked at me. I knew what she would say before she said it.

“Cat, you have to go after him while he’s still in the water so they can’t shoot you.”

“I have to stay with you to protect you, Bee.”

Her gaze held me. “Rory and I can protect ourselves. Look how frightened the girls are. Together, you and he can manage an escape with them. You know where to meet us. Go!”

I shed my cloak. This river had drowned my parents, but I plunged in anyway. Fear drove all thought from my mind as I came up floundering and gasping to the surface.

Rory called, “Swim! Don’t paddle like a dog!”

I churned my arms through the current and did not gulp down more than four or five mouthfuls of water before my feet scraped on river bottom. I crawled onto the bank, trying to hack out the water I’d swallowed. A crow flapped down from the sky and landed so close to me, watching me with its black eyes, that I shrank back. Then it fluttered off, cawing. Soldiers surrounded me as though I were a cornered boar, their spears ready to pierce me through.

I leaped up, fumbling for my sword. A whistling hiss spat past my ear. Something pushed hard on my shoulder, spinning me backward.

A crossbow bolt stuck out of my flesh, right below the collarbone. Where had that come from?

I toppled to my knees. The world filled with a whirl of snow. An imposing man loomed before me out of the blizzard. His voluminous robes rippled across my sight like the wings of death.

“Don’t kill her,” the mansa said.

I fainted.