Cold Steel

40

This was what it meant to walk the dreams of dragons, for I had swum through this very moment when I had slept in the belly of the beast as we crossed the Great Smoke. That journey in the ocean of dreams had given me a brief taste of Bee’s gift. I was too astounded to speak.

Footfalls hammered up the back steps.

“But not until we defeat the Coalition and their Roman allies,” he went on, as if I had already agreed. “If we lose now, the mages, princes, and Romans will use their victory to crush the radicals and all dissent for another generation.”

“You created a monster,” I said.

“No, the monster created himself. Why do you think people hate and fear mages? Surely you can see their fears are not irrational. Still, young men are weapons that experienced men will wield. My weapon has proved more dangerous than I imagined. I doubt even Andevai Diarisso can stop him now.”

“Are his fire mages loyal to you, or to him?”

His hesitation was so brief that I noticed it only because I was strung to a high pitch. He smiled crookedly. “You perceive my situation.”

Drake strode into the attic from the other end. “Why did you rush away before I was done speaking to Cat? I want—”

“James!” His curt tone betrayed not a glimmer of disquiet. He might have been slapping down any underling. “Cat has business that will not be possible to manage once we’re on the move.”

He opened the door and ushered me into an attic room with a sloped ceiling, four windows, a dozen lit lamps, and six people sitting at a table writing or reading dispatches.

A man I did not know glanced up. “Ah, General! We’re just about done here. The Barahals have almost finished that cipher for your orders for Captain Barca.”

The Barahals. There were two people in the room I had once thought I had known, before the day they had thrown me to the wolves.

Uncle Jonatan didn’t even look up, so intent was he on a message he was turning into code. He had always been single-minded, more involved in his work than with his family, yet not a bad father for all that. His curly hair had entirely gone to silver since I had last seen him. The wrinkles in his forehead cut deep.

Aunt Tilly had paused to dip her quill in ink. Her face bore the beloved frown that meant she was considering how to stretch the turnips in the bin so no one in the house would go hungry. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun and tucked under a scarf. Her merry, round face looked the same but for the dark circles under her eyes that spoke of hours of fretting. Yet she had always been able to dredge up a smile to hearten her children and ameliorate their disappointments, for just as Uncle Jonatan had remained engrossed in work, she had cared most about the well-being of those she loved.

Drake came up beside me in Vai’s stolen clothes. How I hated him! He put a hand on my back in a proprietorial manner that made me tense, and him smile.

“Why would you bring a spy to spy on spies?” he demanded of the general. “I know she plans to betray us, but what you mean to gain by abetting her I cannot fathom.”

Every head came up at the sound of his voice, just as deer startle when they catch the scent of a slavering wolf. His hand crept along the curve of my waist like a crawling poison. There I stood, caught between the man who had used my ignorance and fear to take advantage of me in a most intimate way, and the aunt and uncle who had raised me from childhood so they could sacrifice me to save their daughter.

Uncle Jonatan leaped to his feet. “Cat! Fiery Shemesh! Is Bee with you? Where is she?”

“Cat!” Aunt Tilly rose, grabbing onto the back of her chair for support as she swayed.

I was the one whose legs gave out. Camjiata neatly peeled me away from Drake’s unwanted embrace and hauled me to a narrow bed placed along one wall. He set me down like a sack. I sat there numb, handless and footless, floating as if I no longer had body or will.

The other clerks hurriedly vacated the room. The click of the door closing behind them made me jump, as if all my skin were flayed and my heart laid out on the table to be carved into pieces by the knives of betrayal.

“I thought you loved me,” I whispered. “All those years, I really thought you loved me.”

Aunt Tilly’s shame twisted her face, and I did not want to see it there.

Uncle Jonatan pressed a hand to my shoulder. “Cat, of course we loved you, it’s just…”

“Don’t touch me!” I shrieked, leaping up. Blindly tearing away from him, I slammed into the wall. Pain burst down my shoulder, and erupted in my heart. I sobbed until I thought my lungs would be ripped from my chest.

For there was no comfort. They had knowingly raised me and nurtured me and prepared me, so I could all willingly and innocently take their daughter’s place as the sacrifice the family had to make to appease the angry mages.

“The mansa tried to kill me,” I said hoarsely, not looking at them but rather at the burning lamps, the flame that consumes the oil that feeds it. “Would it have been a worthwhile sacrifice, if you had saved Bee knowing I was dead?”

“I explained this all to you already, Cat,” said Uncle Jonatan. “But in the end, we lost Bee anyway, so we lost you both. We’re just glad you’re not dead.”

“Only because of my own actions, and the decency of the man you forced me to marry! Did you never think you could have asked me to do it and I would have gone willingly? That I would have done anything to save Bee, at whatever cost to myself? How can any person embrace a child and then throw her away into the cold to die alone and abandoned? How can you live with yourself?”

I was shouting, hands clenched, tears streaming. How could all this rage and grief find an outlet? They could live with themselves: They had and they did! I pounded a fist into the wall over and over until the general caught my arm and held it, held me.

“Is Beatrice with you? Is she well?” Uncle asked.

A part of me wanted to claw his face by refusing to answer. But my mouth opened and I said, “She is well. Let her sisters be told so, for I know she misses them.”

“Cat,” said Aunt Tilly.

I shuddered to hear the voice that had soothed my childish hurts and warmed my orphaned heart with its affection.

Camjiata murmured, “Be brave like your mother.”

So I looked up to meet Aunt Tilly’s gaze.

Sorrow and shame had washed her skin to an ashy pallor, but she did not flinch from my accusing eyes. “Cat, I’m sorry for what happened that day. It took us by surprise. We did not know what else to do.”

Her tender look scoured me, like an acidic bath thrown over my skin.

She did love me. She had loved me then.

And she had done it anyway.

I said, “At least the mansa never lied to me.”

I turned my face into Camjiata’s shoulder. I wanted to forget the terrible moment when she had given me a precious kiss on the forehead and, with that offering, released me to a fate whose end she could not guess except that the mages would be furious when they discovered the truth.

I wanted to forgive them so I did not have to live with this weight on my heart.

But all I could do was weep.

When I closed my eyes, a vision of my grandfather’s malicious glare was chased by the light of flames as he spoke: Begone. Begone. Begone.

The door opened. I glanced up as Camjiata shook his head. Aunt and Uncle left the room. Aunt Tilly’s face was streaked with tears. Rory stood in the attic looking ruffled and annoyed; behind him hovered a pair of young fire mages bouncing on their toes, as if they expected a fight.

“Why don’t you kill them?” Drake asked, and in the wrinkling of his brow and the softening of his tone I read pity. “It would be fair recompense for what they did to you.”

“Do you believe killing them will ease the pain or change anything,” I cried, “except to orphan the children who depend on them?”

“You’re so naïve, Cat. That they know the one they cast out has returned to destroy them will make the triumph all the more sweet.” He glanced at the general.

“In due time, James,” said Camjiata, “in due time, we will march to your old home. But not today.”

“I have been patient.”

“So you have,” agreed the general so sincerely that I believed the general believed it.

Drake dusted his fingers together, tugging on the gloves that always concealed his hands, then turned and walked out. The general closed the door.

“This is where I sleep. You can rest here.”

He set me on a bed, and I lay down because I hadn’t the strength to stand.

Rory sat beside me and began rubbing my hands. A sort of blindness and deafness smothered me. I was a wounded animal panting in the shadows, too weak to lick my injuries.

Camjiata’s voice rumbled softly. Rory replied. They conversed in a friendly manner as Rory’s thumbs stroked back and forth along my palms until the tension eased from my hands. I surrendered to the waters of sleep, for it was better to drown than to suffer with the bloody scar that had been reopened.

Hungry wolves fed at my entrails. I ran from the Wild Hunt, but it was gaining, gaining, and my sire caught me in his icy claws. My severed head rolled down stone steps, bumping like a rubber ball used in batey. It tumbled off a cliff and plummeted into the Great Smoke. Leviathan purred.

Purred?

I woke in a dark chamber. Rory was stretched out beside me, snoring in that snuffling way he had. We were both still fully clothed. My sword, basket, and satchel rested at the foot of the bed. At the table Camjiata sat reading through a stack of dispatches by the light of an oil lamp. The light shed gold on his face, but his eyes were pools of darkness.

I sat up.

Without looking up from his reading, he spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb Rory. “There is ale and bread on the side table. A basin, if you want to wash.”

I slid off the bed. Rory did not stir, but something in his changed breathing made me think he had woken, as wild animals do at the least movement, but was pretending to be asleep to give us privacy. At the side table I washed my face in the basin, then sat opposite the general.

“Don’t you sleep?” I asked.

“Cursed little. I concentrate best on dispatches at night, when no one disturbs me. A nap or two during the day suffices. How fare you, Cat?”

“Did you expect me to embrace them?”

“I thought it best to get the meeting out of the way. I can’t say I expected your anger. Beatrice did not confide the full particulars to me.”

“So you found a way to discover the full particulars by surprising me with the meeting.”

He looked up with a wry smile. “Is that what you think of me, Cat?”

I could not fathom how I could like him, yet I did. “You want me to kill Drake. But how can I trust you? You betrayed me.”

He glanced toward the door and nudged my foot under the table to signal me that people waited outside. “I did not betray you. You walked into Taino country of your own free will.”

“That you can say that with a straight face and such sincerity is almost admirable! Everything I did was encouraged and machinated by you.”

He smiled. “I’ve got some sack. It’s an Iberian wine from the Sherez region near Gadir.”

I felt the presence of a trap, a danger I wasn’t aware of. Yet with the fall of night my sword had bloomed, even if to his eyes it still looked like a cane. The locket warmed my skin. My parents walked with me, so I nodded.

He fetched a bottle and two glasses. He poured, sipped from the glass as if to mock me for thinking he might mean to poison me, and handed it to me before pouring for himself. I shifted the glass to swirl the wine, then tasted. The liquor had a dark brown color and a strong, sweet taste that I did not like as much as rum’s.

“I wish you hadn’t given my father’s journals to the family. I’ll never get them back now.”

He pushed aside the pile of dispatches. “If you go to Gadir, you can sue in court for rei vindicatio, the right to regain possession of something you already own. If you can stand up in court and swear that Daniel Hassi Barahal sired you and thus you are his next of kin.”

My mouth had gone so dry that my voice emerged hoarse. “Daniel and Tara were married. That makes him my father.”

“Yes. According to the law, the husband of a woman is the father of her children and thus has legal rights of guardianship over them. Whom was Tara protecting?”

I glared at him. “Tara was protecting me.”

“I find it odd she would have believed that by dying she would protect you.”

“She knew Daniel would protect me. I hope you don’t find that odd.”

“Indeed, I do not, for Daniel was exactly the sort of man who could raise another man’s child as if it were his own and never love it less for all of that.”

How he had me then! For I was seized by both overwhelming grief and passionate curiosity.

“What do you mean? What sort of man was he?”

He leaned closer, voice dropping to a murmur. “Ah, Cat, he was a better man than I am.”

I sat back. “Are you mocking me?”

“No, I am not.” I knew he meant it, although I could not have said why. “I am mocking myself. I have asked myself a thousand times since that day why she did not confide in me.”

“The Amazon’s oath she swore condemned her to death for becoming pregnant.”

“She could have told me the truth. I would have found a way. But she felt only Daniel could rescue her, as if Tara had ever needed rescuing from anything except that hells-ridden, pestilent village she was born in. That must be why she hid the pregnancy for so long, waiting for Daniel to come. Or perhaps she hoped that drill, or a battle, would cause her to miscarry and rid her of a thing she did not want.”

“Do you know, General, I start to begin to like you again, and then you say something like that. My mother and father loved me.”

“I do not dispute that they loved you. I’ve read his journals. There’s a passage I recall in particular. ‘Is some other man’s bastard worth this to you?’ So your Uncle Jonatan demanded of his brother Daniel. And Daniel writes, ‘What happened on the ice does not matter. The child will be my child. I have promised Tara that, and even if I had not, it would make no difference, for my little cat is my sweet daughter, the delight of my life.’ ”

He examined me where I sat just outside the spill of light. “Why, Cat—are you crying?”

I wiped a tear from my cheek with the back of a hand. “There’s no shame in grief. I lost my parents when I was six. I lost the love I would have had from them all the years from then to now. Think of what they lost! They lost the years they would have had to watch me grow up, to welcome more children, to treasure each other.”

They were with me still, but it wasn’t the same as if they were sitting across from me at a table in an attic room in a market town in the midst of a war.

“What happened on the ice?” he asked. “There is no journal for the crucial months, the ones during which you must have been conceived. It’s missing, leaving only the mystery of you.”

“The secret belongs to those who remain silent.”

“A phrase I have heard before, from the lips of your husband. Think of this, Cat. If your aunt and uncle had not handed you over to the cold mages, you would never have married him. Destiny is a sharp goad. Never think otherwise.”

“You think it destiny, and not just accident?”

“ ‘Where the hand of fortune branches, Tara Bell’s child must choose.’ We stand on the road washed by the tides of war, you and I. Is it accident that has brought us here? I believe it is not. I believe our fortunes are sealed before we are born.”

He poured himself a second glass and topped up mine.

“Destiny and fortune are just words. I think you are ambitious, General. Ambition is not the same as destiny. You only want to say it is.”

He chuckled. “I like how you speak your mind, Cat. So few manage to be both honest and likable. That is one of your charms. Daniel had the same gift of speaking truth while making his listeners laugh. Do you want to know how I met them? Tara and Daniel, and Helene?”

A jolt like a blow from an axe split through my body. I managed to nod.

“I was a young captain in the army of the Numantian League. One of the princes who ruled the League had made a marriage alliance with a princely clan out of the city of Sala, one of the cities of the Wagadou Federation. The Wagadou Federation grew out of mostly Mande communities who had recently moved into the uninhabited lands northeast of the Rhenus River.”

“Those lands weren’t uninhabited. People lived there already.”

He waved a hand with a casual dismissal. “Herders and trappers, living in the most appalling conditions. Best of all, the new territory was fertile ground for cold mages.”

“Because of its proximity to the ice.”

“Yes, so I understand, although naturally I know little of cold magic. The prince sent me to Sala to escort the noblewoman he was to marry back to Numantia. Instead we found ourselves embroiled in a war against the Atrebates and their allies. The war exploded all across the far north, into the boreal forest and the Barrens. The Celts who live right up against the Barrens are called the Belgae, a barbaric people. A few mage Houses had moved into that area fifty years earlier and civilized them. So we marched north and crossed the Boreal River.”

He paused to drink.

I could not move, nor could I speak. I was frozen, as in ice.

“I met Daniel first, before either Tara or Helene. He was in the city of Sala, at the court of the ghana. He asked if he could travel north with our battalion because he wanted to explore the Barrens. Daniel was terribly entertaining. No man I’ve met before or since could keep a miserably cold and wet huddle of men around a guttering campfire laughing the way he could. He’d heard the Belgae were cannibals. Thought it might be best to investigate from a position of strength, if you will. With an army at his back.”

“Were they cannibals?” I thought of my grandfather, crouching by his cauldron.

He smiled. “He asked in every village we came to if it was true the Belgae were cannibals. And they all said the same thing.”

“What was that?”

“That they themselves weren’t, but the neighboring village, the one they’d been having a feud with for years, was certainly known to eat human flesh.”

I laughed.

He smiled, then sobered. “We fought a skirmish against those cursed Atrebates. Bad, marshy conditions, and low morale. Our cursed colonel turned tail and ran with his entire staff, those who were still alive. So I took over and managed an orderly retreat. We had to escape north because the Atrebates had blocked the road. We couldn’t go overland because the ground was a mire. We ended up in a village next to a mage House, Crescent House.”

I nodded. “Where your wife came from.”

“Yes.” His smile had a bittersweet quality. “And there she was.”

“Helene?”

“Tara. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. I thought she was a boy at first, for she was dressed in men’s clothing. She and her cousin and brother had been out hunting. They had come across remnants of the fighting and run back to warn the village with this mangy dog she kept for years and years—”

“She kept a dog?”

His gaze flashed up. I couldn’t be sure if my outburst had surprised him or if he was gauging the import of my expression before he went on. “As it happened, the village was a client village to Crescent House. The elders insisted I pay my respects to the mansa at Crescent House and explain how I and my troops had come into their territory. Tara accompanied us to give a report on what she had seen. Daniel came, because you could never stop him from doing what he wanted. There we met Helene.”

He poured himself another glass of sack, but I refused a third. The lamp cast gold and shadow over the table. And I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, General Camjiata was a little lonely, a man who had lost the people he loved best.

He did not drink. He looked at me instead, his elbows braced on the table, his chin resting on his interlaced fingers. “You look so much like Tara.”

I toyed with the glass, turning it around just for something to do. He leaned a little closer.

“Catherine Bell Barahal.” A smile like regret wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “You should have been my daughter.”

I inhaled sharply. There was no reply to that!

He added, “Had she married me instead of Daniel, you could have been my heir. We might still manage it.”

“Your heir?”

“Like the didos of old, the queens of old Qart Hadast. Like Queen Anacaona. Is it so strange a thought? While it is true in these days most people in Europa would scoff at the thought of a woman ruling, that is purely due to local prejudice and current custom. You look surprised, Cat. You can’t believe a woman cannot rule just as well as a man. You met the cacica. You were raised in a Kena’ani household.”

“To rule as emperor is the wrong thing to wish for. We must work for Assemblies like the one in Expedition.”

He chuckled. “Do you believe you can demand Assemblies in every city in Europa and have them established overnight?”

“No, of course one battle will not win the war.” He had trapped me.

“It will take years, decades, more likely generations. Yet all might be accomplished swiftly if a single man could set it in place.”

“And then what? Retire gracefully, leaving the happy subjects to rule themselves?”

He sipped at his glass.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“You want to believe me.”

“I want to believe a lot of things! I want to believe my parents are alive and soon to be reunited with me. Is this what my mother feared? That you would claim me and pass me off as your own child? I won’t be your heir, and I’m not your daughter.”

In silence he studied me over the brim of his glass as if waiting for me to rethink my position and change my mind. But I was not to be trapped as Vai had been. I knew how to riposte.

“Did you love her?” I asked.

He drained the glass and set it down with a hard clunk. “You are not the only one to have lost those you held dear.”

“I’m sorry they aren’t with us now,” I replied quickly, for his spike of anger startled me.

“This is why you and I will never be done, little cat, for we are all that remains of them.”

“Maybe so. Anyway, as this war goes on, it seems we need each other.”

I went to the side table to slice bread and smear dollops of cheese on top.

Many scribes and storytellers have recorded the history of the world, each colored by its author’s own interpretation and illuminating only the part of the tale she feels is important or wishes to reveal. Stories tell us what we think we know about the world. Sometimes they share truth and knowledge, and sometimes they propagate lies and ignorance.

But words are only one road to change. The sword, which is not fighting but any form of action, is the other. Some cut a path that others may follow into the wilderness of possibility. The general saw not limits but unchained opportunity. I did not trust him, but I believed that, as Rory had once said, he said what he meant, and he meant what he said. At least in the moment he said it.

“What exactly is it you need me for, Cat?”

“Your legal code will release villages and clans from clientage. That’s what I need.” I offered him the plate. “Do you ever worry about your safety? Since I’m to be the instrument of your death.”

“Will I die because of a deliberate action on your part against me? Might you be the tool someone else will use to destroy me? Or is your refusal to be my heir the death of my hopes to set in place a successor whose ideals will match my own and thus improve the destiny of humanity?”

I laughed. “Oh, that was well played, General. But the answer is still no.”

He took several slices of bread off the plate. “You can’t possibly believe that I believe you came to me because you have been seized by an overwhelming desire to join my army.”

“We have a common enemy,” I said in a low voice.

He glanced again toward the door, then smiled with a confiding look that drew an answering smile from me. Was I so starved for affection that I would rub up against any hand that offered a friendly pat?

“So we do. It is the only reason you are not weighted in chains and thrown into the river to drown. I mean that in the poetic sense, you understand.”

“When you offered to make me your heir, did you mean that in the poetic sense as well?”

“Oh, no, Cat. I mean that with all seriousness.”

“Even though you distrust my motives for coming here?”

“Were I to truly gain your loyalty, I would know it to be sincere and unshakable. Do not dismiss my offer out of hand.”

Unlike with Vai and the mansa, nothing in the offer tempted me. “Should you gain your empire, it should then die with you. I will not be the means to prolong it. I stand with the radicals, General. Each day we add to our numbers. You are strong, but in the end, we will be stronger.”

He lifted his glass as if in toast to my speech, then drank.

I drank with him, not in his honor but in honor of all those who fought. I could not help but see Bee and myself caught between the mansa and the general—just as, in another way, we were caught between courts and dragons. Vast forces battled, sweeping us up in their conflict. At first we had been ignorant pawns, able to run but never to stand. Alone we did not have the means or the strength to effect change.

But in the midst of the monstrous assembly that is slave to fortune, each solitary small figure who linked her hand to another built a chain of loyalty and trust.

We make ourselves into the net that we throw across the ocean.