Cold Steel

42

We marched to Red Mount. Luce was not in the company I was assigned to. The Iberian riflemen had hunkered down along the estate’s outer wall. With caps set on the wall to draw enemy fire, they shot over it into the orchard. Drifting smoke spun into coils, concealing half the world. Soon I was sucking in lungsful of heat, chaff, and powder. I kept my gaze fixed on the feather in Captain Tira’s shako, like a bird’s wing in fog. A hand touched my back as for balance and a shoulder brushed mine as I waited, crushed within the close-packed ranks of my sisters.

We made our way in a crouch to the smashed gate. The constant hammer of noise pounded through my body. The Iberians were using planks and doors as shields behind which they pushed forward into the orchard. Scorched leaves crumbled underfoot. Spent bullets, musket balls, arrows, and crossbow bolts crunched under my boots. The peppering fire of rifles melded with the rhythm of drums.

I wrapped myself in shadow and smoke. Using a tree trunk as shelter I peered into the smoky fog of the orchard. Bodies littered the ground. The bloody and battered Iberians had stalled as a rain of arrows and the pop of musket fire trapped them in the ashy trees. One man cowered, huddled up like a broken child, sobbing.

Yet not five paces from him, a different man called laughingly to the Amazons, “These Tarrant bastards are saying no man can dislodge them. Let’s see what you women can do!”

Amid the trees, a soldier was dragging himself along the ground with his arms. His uniform was so covered in ash and his face so smeared likewise that I could not tell whose side he was on. A white fox nipped at his heels, until I blinked and realized it was only smoke pooling on the ground. The soldier slumped forward, facedown. A flash of light about his form dazzled me. The smoky fox leaped, swallowed the light, and vanished. I shook myself, for I was seeing things that weren’t there.

Through patches of smoke I surveyed the layout of the inner compound. There was a two-story fortified stone house with a tower, as well as a long stable and several sheds. The compound wall and the stable wall were cut with loopholes for defense.

A pattern emerged, once I looked for it.

I slipped out of my shadows to report to the captain, who was sheltering behind a broken door propped between two trees. “Captain Tira! All of their musket fire is coming from the western corner. That means the eastern gate and the house are where the cold mages stand.”

“Of course it is,” shouted the captain. It was hard to hear her even though I could have reached out to touch her. “Do you see that reflection of light in the tower window? It’s a spyglass. They’re directing their forces from up in the tower.”

A body fell not ten strides from me. A cloud of wasps swirled over the corpse, but there were no wasps, only grit in my eyes.

A man ran up from the outer gate and crouched beside Captain Tira. I pulled the shadows around me just in time, as I realized it was Drake. He did not notice me. His lean face shone as pale as if he never got any sun, but I thought it was just that he was sweating. His blue eyes were so bright they gleamed like polished gems on the edge of burning.

“There are four cold mages,” he shouted, already hoarse as he struggled to be heard above the din. “Three in the tower and one at the carriage gate. I will burn the carriage gate using the one at the gate as my catch-fire. I’ll also set the roofs of the stables on fire. You’ll have to move fast to break through once I do, or their arrows will kill you regardless.”

“Why did your mages not set fire to the stables before this?” the captain asked.

“They’re young and inexperienced,” said Drake. “Also, there’s a mage in the tower who is the strongest mage I’ve ever touched. He’s the one we must defeat. His reach covers all but that one corner of the enclosure, where they’ve focused their muskets. Do you see?”

“Yes, I already know.” Captain Tira smiled as to herself. “Very well, Drake. At your signal, we’ll advance. You rid us of the cold mages, and we’ll kill the officers.”

She lifted a hand to give the command for forward, just as she nodded toward where she had last seen me. Thus was I given my orders: Kill the officers.

Drummers beat the roll of advance. A cadre of Amazons shielded Drake as the line pressed forward pace by pace through the trees into withering flights of arrows and the sting of musket balls. I could hear nothing but the shattering thunder of rifles around me. After an eternity we had made it halfway along the trees.

In my veil of shadows, the path I crept seemed to weave in and out of the interstices that bind the world. Threads stitch the world together. Every substance, solid or liquid or air, moves with the quivering resonance of a struck bell. I saw with altered eyes: Behind the closed carriage gates lay the bright well of a cold mage.

Rifles cracked in my ear. Beside me an Amazon collapsed, bleeding into the dirt. I flung myself down to use the fallen woman as a shield, but I had to roll away quickly when her body writhed and glowed. Drake was pouring the backlash of his magic into the wounded.

The carriage gates burst into fire so bright that its light speared into the sky. In answer a wash of ice slumped over all, and the flames died. I was close enough that my sword bloomed, so I twisted its hilt and drew the blade out of the spirit world.

Fresh fire tore into the roof of the stables as Drake poured the backlash into the mage at the gate. The magister flared like a candle, too weak to channel so much power, and his light snuffed out: He was dead. Within a fire blazing with doubled force, the carriage gate was consumed. This time, when the fire was killed by cold magic, the damage was already done, the gate demolished.

With a shout the Amazons pressed through the smoking ruins of the gate. The sound of a desperate melee rang on the air, groans and shouts and bayonets striking and the clatter and thunk of crossbows and the incessant fire of rifles. Just as I reached the gate, a hammer of cold killed every rifle in the orchard mid-fire and doused the flames on every roof. Still in shadow, I plunged through the charred planks and beams of the gate. The dead cold mage lay twisted in the wreckage, smoke pooling in his open mouth: He was not Vai.

I stared across a gravel-paved courtyard churned with smoke and bodies. A rifle cracked, and a man in Tarrant green who had taken cover in a stone arch went down as blood sprayed his head. A snarling cat as insubstantial as darkness clawed the bright spark of his soul out of his chest. A wolf sewn of mist leaped upon a woman who had a bayonet in her gut and swallowed her unmoored soul.

As the skirmish boiled across the courtyard, spirit hunters nipped at the fallen.

The Wild Hunt rides on Hallows’ Eve, but its shadows linger all the year long: It is the Hunt that consumes the souls of the dying at the moment of death. There they prowled, my brothers and sisters, a glint of teeth in the smoke, a sliver of light on the wind. Because I stood with a foot anchored in each world, I could see the whole.

The Hunt does not take blood, only souls. For the Hunt itself is the gate through which the souls of the dead pass from the mortal world into the spirit world.

A bolt shot from the tower skimmed my hat’s feather, jostling the cap off. Even invisible, I was not immune to death. No one in the mortal world is immune.

I ran for the stone house, dodging and ducking. I had to reach the tower before Drake did. The ribbon of his fire weaving spun up into the tower to splash into the well of the cold mage who sheltered there. Whoever that cold mage was, he was immensely powerful, able to absorb every bit of the backlash that Drake channeled into him. In a burst of heat, flames skimmed along the roof of the stables and sheds as Drake wakened more fire.

The stronger the cold mage, the better for Drake!

The door to the stone house was shut tight. Window slits gave cover for defensive shooting. A bolt loosed from within kissed my hair, just missing my ear. I slammed up against the wall of the house, now inside their range. How to get in?

The door burst into searing flames that chewed through it with such ferocity I had to retreat from its billowing heat. Men shouted inside, but not in panic. They sounded like soldiers sure of their strength and their good defensive position. In the courtyard and stables and orchard the battle raged on, a chaotic ferment of blood, noise, panic, and determination. Half the roofs in the compound were on fire.

A rising breath of cold magic warned me. I dropped to my knees.

Cold hammered down. Every soldier in the courtyard hit the ground as if felled by an axe blow. Where Drake was I did not know, but all the fires went out. The door of the stone house opened, half fallen off its hinges. Soldiers poured out. So intent were they on their foes that one stumbled over my back, knocking me sideways without even noticing I was a stone in their path. I dodged into the house as, behind me, the Amazons tried to rise before they got cut down.

I could not look back. I had my orders.

A Tarrant captain stood by an old-fashioned brick fireplace. He had a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other.

“The officers wear feathers in their caps. Aim for them,” he said to his soldiers, who were standing calm and collected at the window slits leveling their crossbows.

I stuck him in the gut with my sword so hard up under the ribs that the point tapped brick behind as he gurgled. His eyes opened wide as his mouth formed soundless words, as a man might practice a polite introduction. A silent owl woven out of smoke swooped down and snapped up his soul.

If you are not to be killed, then you must kill. That is the law of the hunt.

I was halfway across the room to the stone stairs before any of the others noticed the captain’s body sliding down the wall as he collapsed. As a sergeant came running I slashed my wicked sharp blade across the throat of the orderly behind him. No one noticed because they were all staring at the dead captain. I slipped past a pair of men guarding the steps and began my climb, dodging around men pressed to window slits, waiting to loose their bolts.

“Felt you a breeze—?”

“Bastards can’t even hold the line against cursed beasts of women—!”

This foul-mouthed man I stabbed from the back and shoved so he tumbled down, his weight staggering those below him. How they shouted in consternation, looking about for the spirit haunting them. Fool! Fool! Always letting my reckless lusts take hold of me.

That was how Andevai had courted me. I had seen what he was, arrogant and vain and determined to win once he entered any contest, and yet despite knowing he would see me as a challenge to be won, I had still allowed myself to be dazzled by his physical beauty and his unrelenting admiration. He had seen my weakness, which was my desire for him, and so he had fed me one morsel at a time until I could no longer resist devouring the whole of what he offered. So be it. Maybe I was a fool, maybe I would one day get so angry at him that I would rip out his throat, but I cursed well was not going to let Drake or the mansa have him. He belonged to me.

The stairs led past an empty first-floor room and up to the top floor, which was a square room with four windows. On a table lay an unrolled map of the landscape over which the two armies struggled, with Red Mount marked by a bold red X. A man with lime-whitened spiky hair bent over the table, tapping a knife’s point on the house in which we stood. The old mansa of Two Gourds House sat calmly in a chair. A middle-aged magister sat cross-legged on the floor, hands on knees, head bowed, panting as he collected himself. His face was reddened, blistered in places. He was not Vai.

“Let me take the next attack,” said the old mansa. “You are weakening.”

“No, no,” gasped the other man. “You are the strongest, Mansa. As long as you remain strong, you can kill any fire they can raise and hammer them all to the ground.”

The old mansa sighed, then beckoned to a pale youth even younger than Luce. “Take the secret way, child. Hurry. Deliver a message to Lord Marius that we must have reinforcements. We will hold, or we will die.”

“I can help you by staying here, Mansa!” With his eager, innocent face, the lad reminded me of Luce before she had gone to war, the way she had been back in Expedition.

“No. This is not your battle. Go!”

I stepped aside to let the youth pass down the stairs because I could not bear to touch him any more than I could have hurt Luce. He looked so innocent. The middle-aged magister brightened as a new aura of fire’s backlash wrapped his body. Fire broke out again across every roof in the compound except for the stone house’s tile roof. Through the north-facing window I looked over a second courtyard, this one ringed by a barn and cowshed and with a brick well at the center. The lad came running out the back of the house, then hesitated and glanced up at the tower where the officer, standing all unaware next to me, looked down at him.

“Curse it! Go!” shouted the officer to the youth.

Two Amazons and an Iberian burst into the courtyard through an arched gateway that linked the two courtyards. The taller Amazon plunged toward the youth, striking with her sword. The lad parried, but the deficiencies of his sword craft reminded me of Vai: He was the pupil who learns fighting by rote and works on perfect imitations of the forms taught by the sword master. That did not make him an effective fighter.

Yet he had no need to be a masterful fighter. Just as I realized the lad was wielding cold steel, the backstroke of his blade caught the glove of the woman and cut just deep enough to draw blood. The tip of the cold steel blade writhed like a viper’s tongue. The soldier swayed as the steel serpent drank her soul; she toppled.

Beside me the officer released a bolt that struck the Iberian in the back, sending him to a knee. The other Amazon dashed back to the clot of soldiers fighting hand to hand under the arch, dragging the Iberian with her.

The young cold mage climbed into the well and vanished.

“He’s in the tunnel,” said the officer.

A hailstorm battered over the estate, pounding so hard I could not hear anything except its drum on the roof. The catch-fire sagged forward as the channel of Drake’s fire was cut off. A soldier caught him as he sagged sideways, too weak even to sit up. The other soldiers around me shot at the felled Iberians and Amazons below, taking their time, making each bolt count.

“An unlawful and dangerous power these fire mages wield,” said the old mansa to the officer. He looked winded and weary, but his outrage was a cloak that shielded him. “Fortunate for us that the young Diarisso mage understood it before the rest of us did.”

“Fortunate for us that the mansa of Four Moons House recognized the young man’s worth, given his low origins,” agreed the officer.

The old mansa smiled grimly. “True enough. More importantly, he knew exactly how to bridle the young man’s rebellious spirit.”

Perhaps the words angered me, just a little.

The old mansa looked right at me. “What shadow beast haunts this chamber? Beware!”

They turned on me, the five soldiers, the officer, the old mansa.

But I was the hunter’s daughter. So I killed them, all of them, even the old man, because Camjiata had to win the battle today. I killed the blistered magister who had so courageously taken in all Drake’s fire and was dying; ending his agony was a mercy.

When the Amazons broke through and poked their heads into the chamber, they found me crouched by the old mansa, wiping blood from my sword with hem of his boubou. Blood pooled around me. Cold steel cuts deep.

Their laughter hurt my ears. “Bellona bless! Our work’s done for us already!

Rising, I wiped blood from my cheek with the back of a hand just as Drake appeared. He went straight to the mansa and nudged the old man’s body with a foot in a most disrespectful manner.

“Stop that,” I said. “Show respect to the elders.”

He paused, taking me in from top to toe with a gaze made narrow by his deepening frown. “You pick a strange way to show respect. Think of what a powerful catch-fire he would have made. But I can’t expect you to understand that.”

He brushed past me. I could have bitten out his throat, but I crushed Camjiata’s words close to my heart, hiding them from everyone else. Win the battle first, or the enemy will triumph. The old order has to go down if we mean to break the chains that shackle us.

At the north-facing window, Drake swore. “The other cold mage is escaped, curse it. Did anyone see him?”

I said nothing.

Boots stamped up the steps, and Captain Tira appeared. Her gaze swept the chamber. She said, “Excellent. Remove the bodies. This will serve as a good command post for the general. Cat Barahal. Are you injured?” She looked me up and down. “Wasn’t that fabric green?”

The Amazons chortled. “Did a quick dye job, she did!”

Their laughter seemed discordant to me, although they found themselves amusing enough with their voices pitched loud, for they, too, had been deafened by the constant thunder of gunfire. I wiped another thread of blood off my chin, flicked a wet drop out of my eye, and glanced around the tower chamber. A spray of blood cut a line across the map on the table. The officer lay slumped, his head caught on the back of the chair. The five soldiers sprawled at all angles across the room, throats slashed and bellies opened, their blood a spreading stain. Its smell rose like flies, stinging and noxious. A drop of blood seeping from the ceiling dripped onto my hand.

I staggered, bumped into a wall next to Drake, and sank to my knees.

He shoved me away. “Cruel Diana! You reek of blood! Get away from me.”

Trembling, I could neither speak nor stand.

He rolled over the other magister and studied the two cold mages with a flat, emotionless expression. “With a strong enough cold mage, I can do anything,” he murmured to himself, so quietly that I knew he did not mean for me to hear. “I don’t need him. He’s kept me caged all this time because he’s afraid I will figure that out.”

He stepped over to the table where Captain Tira was carefully wiping blood off the map and examined the topography, then snagged a spyglass that was lying across one corner.

“Where are you going, Lord Drake?” asked Captain Tira as he walked to the stairs. “The general is already calling the advance against the Coalition center. He’ll need you soon enough.”

“He does need me, doesn’t he? Far more than I need him. I only need fire banes.” The sting of his presence faded as he vanished down the stairs.

Captain Tira watched him go, but she said nothing and did nothing. I needed to follow him, but a heavy exhaustion pinned me down. A fog of oblivion hazed my vision. How long I knelt there, shaking, I did not know. The chamber was cleared of the dead. An orderly scattered buckets of dirt over the floor to absorb the blood. People left and arrived while I watched the wall go nowhere.

Captain Tira said, “She’s been in a stupor since we took the tower, General.”

“Send an orderly to find her something else to wear. Bloody Camulos! Give me a spyglass! Look at the Coalition center collapse! Captain Tira, I want the Amazon Corps to march to the eastern flank. Lieutenant! Ride this dispatch to Marshal Aualos. I want Lord Marius’s retreating forces cut off from the city gates. I do not want any Coalition troops or any mages escaping into Lutetia. I want no street-by-street fighting. I want a clear, emphatic victory.”

Artillery boomed in sheets of thunder. Drums and horns beat out the pace of the advance as Camjiata’s army roared forward, rifles ablaze and smoke gusting in windy bursts.

Messengers came and went as the general directed the battle from the tower. The stone house echoed with the groans of wounded.

A man bumped into me, swearing as he dumped a pot of scalding coffee to splash on the floor.

The general said, “Get her out of the way!”

I opened my hands to find them coated in sticky, drying blood. Swells and ebbs of memory surged in my head: the way flesh parts like a sigh as the blade slices; the submissive acquiescence of the hunted when it accepts it has been marked for death. Blood was spattered all down the front of my clothes. I tried to shake myself free of the awful sight, only I could not get away from myself.

No one took the least notice of me stumbling down the steps. The stone house was crammed with wounded. The stink of blood and piss and excrement melded with the rumble of artillery and gunfire, although the sound was ebbing because the advance of Camjiata’s army was pushing the battlefront away from our position. I staggered into the back court and to a trough filled with pink and slimy water. I stripped off my blood-sodden jacket and fumblingly managed the slippery buttons of the skirt. Then I dumped a bucket full of dirty water over me once, twice, three times until I was gasping and shivering and began, at last, to feel human.

In my bodice and drawers I decided I would have to hunt for clothes, for I could not bear to dress myself back in the blood of men I did not remember killing.

“Trooper! What in the seven hells are you doing here? Your Amazons marched out two hours ago!” A sergeant wearing the Armorican ship jabbed at me with his finger. “Dereliction! Guards! Arrest—!”

I grabbed his out-thrust wrist and twisted it until he yelped. “I am Camjiata’s ward, not an Amazon. Leave me be!”

When I released his wrist, he retreated two steps. A tang of fearful respect charged his scent. “By the Black Bull! Are you the assassin they say killed twenty men in the first assault without receiving a scratch?”

I did not care to dignify this with an answer. “There’s a tunnel in the well that leads out. Best you make haste to block it so no raiders can come through.”

He backed away.

Through the open doors of the half-burned barn, I glimpsed a figure I knew. “Rory!”

I found him doing nurse’s duty among the wounded, moistening faces, offering sips of water. He embraced me with a snarl of relief but pushed me away at once. “I’m very busy. I find I quite like tending the wounded, for I detest the hateful racket of the guns. If you go to the corner, you’ll find some local women sorting through garments they’ve stripped from the dead.”

The local women were a trio of old dames, one toothless, one deaf, and the third the very same old woman who had greeted Rory in his cat body as dominus. She did not recognize bedraggled me, but her weary eye measured me the same as if I had been her own niece.

“Gave a man some trouble to you? Are you harmed, girl?”

I wanted to laugh but the sound would not come. “No. No man harmed me.”

I found a dead Amazon’s uniform that fit me well enough with its sturdy wool jacket and cunningly sewn skirt that could be tied up to different lengths depending on what a woman needed on the march. The cloth was dirty but unbloodied, by which I assumed the woman who had worn it had died from a head wound. My cold steel had returned to a cane. Cupping the locket in my hand, I closed my eyes and breathed down the thread that bound me to Vai.

He was alive.

The barn really stank, not just with ash and blood and piss but with pain, which has a tang as hard as a claw. I found Rory holding the hand of an unconscious soldier. My brother’s sweet smile calmed me, for the groans and whimpers and sobs rubbed like thorns against my heart.

I crouched beside him. “I have to go. Are you coming with me?”

“Shh. I like to hold the hands of the ones whose souls are passing over.”

Curious, I rested a hand on the unconscious man’s cheek. When I closed my eyes and sank my thoughts as into a soundless ocean of smoke, I could first feel and then almost glimpse the delicately wavering glimmer of brightness that sparked through the man’s body: the flickering brain, the subsiding heart. The settling darkness of death’s tide hauled him out to sea. The soldier took in a shallow breath, and then not another. In the dark ocean of death, a shark glided past to snap up the man’s soul and carry it to the other side.

Rory released the lifeless hand. “It brings them comfort to know they aren’t alone when they depart. I love to hunt, Cat, but there’s just something wrong with all this. It tastes bad.” He closed the dead man’s eyes and arranged the hands atop the chest. “You wouldn’t rather stay here? There are so many who need aid and comfort.”

“I have to find Drake.”

With a sigh he rose. “I know better than to try to stop any female when she’s determined to go out on the hunt. Very well.”

“You stay here, Rory. I can see the noise and confusion trouble you.”

“Vai told me to keep an eye on you.”

“Is that what he told you? To keep me out of the fight?”

He laughed, a startling sound amid so much suffering. Yet not one head turned our way. No one cared if people laughed; it was better than crying. “You don’t know him well if that’s what you think he would say. He told me once that any person who knows the stories of hunters who captivate spirit women in the bush knows that a man does not try to cage or leash a spirit woman, because if he does, she will vanish back into the bush and nothing he can do will stop her. He asked me to walk beside you, Cat, as he would do if he were here. Goodness, you’re being very snappish, and I must say that you stink of blood.”

I shuddered, for there was a chasm in my heart blessedly veiled in darkness, and I did not want any light to shine down there.

“Calm, Cat. Calm.” He stroked my arm. “I better come with you or you’ll do something foolish. Probably you already have.”

At the doors children were digging out precious bolts and bullets from the walls and collecting them in a sack. In the courtyard riders gathered. General Camjiata emerged from the stone house, writing on a scrap of paper. He handed paper to a messenger and pen to an aide, then saw me. With a nod he indicated I should accompany him.

“I have to find Drake,” I said as I took the reins of a horse led up by an orderly.

“Cat, you’ll never find him in this chaos. Stick with me, and he’ll turn up. He always does.”

“I’m not sure he will this time. I think he’s gone rogue.”

He did not answer, for we were already riding out of the estate. I had no grasp of the time, only that it was now late afternoon and the thrust of the battle had raged away to the southeast. The land was a sweep of trees, fields, and pasture. No doubt this bucolic landscape made a restful scene on ordinary days. Now it crawled with soldiers and was strewn with bodies, discarded weapons, and lost hats and tassels. Camjiata was right: Alone, I had no chance of finding Drake or Vai among so many tens of thousands.

Because the general had rolled up the Coalition’s western flank, Lord Marius had fixed his efforts to the east in an attempt to keep open the Liyonum Road for the Romans as they marched up from the south. Even without the spyglass, it was easy to tell from a distance where cold mages were still fighting to kill the general’s guns. Smoke would billow in clouds that hid whole sections of the field from view, then patches would clear with startling urgency as artillery and rifles ceased firing for a space. A wind was really picking up out of the east, and black clouds had piled up as if about to break down over the city.

Rory had his head down, hands over his ears. The noise just never let up.

“There they go!” said Camjiata, holding the spyglass to his eye.

Tents in the Coalition’s encampment caught fire. A battle by magic chased through the field, fire rising, then dying, rising and dying and finally rising again, as in a game being played like cat and mouse. Fire mages were flushing out cold mages and tracking them down. Was Drake directing them? Was that where he was? A gray sleet moved in over the city but just before it reached the camp it died in a violent updraft of air. The encampment began to burn in earnest.

Meanwhile artillery was being shifted to the south and east. We followed it to a ridge, where the command unit halted. The hillside sloped down to a stream beyond which ran the Liyonum Road. The general intended to bombard the Romans as they marched in column along the road, thinking to rescue their allies.

A soot-stained messenger came pounding up. He wore the badge of the Iberian Lion Guard. “Dispatch from Marshal Aualos, General.” He held up a folded paper.

Camjiata did not lower the spyglass, which was fixed on the burning encampment. Figures fled in all directions, many of whom surely were not soldiers. People will die regardless.

“Read it to me,” he said.

“My lord Keita, we have cut off Lord Marius so he cannot reach the city gates. The Parisi prince is dead on the field. We have taken thousands prisoner. The citizens of Lutetia have barricaded the gates to their city. Of cold mages we have captured twenty-eight alive.”

Twenty-eight cold mages taken prisoner! My icy heart flamed hot. Was Vai among them?

The general lowered the spyglass, handed it to me, and took the wrinkled paper to scrawl a note on it. “Tell the marshal that the cold mage Andevai Diarisso is to be sent directly to me.”

“Marshal Aualos said to tell to your ears alone that the particular mage you seek is not among the prisoners.”

I pressed a hand to my locket. It was still warm.

“I want the marshal to secure the encampment and the city gates. Harry any retreating Coalition units until they rout. I want Lord Marius captured, or dead if must be. When the Romans arrive, we will have them surrounded on three sides, with the river at their back.”

We stood without water or shade for an hour or more as troops ponderously trudged past our position to meet the approaching Romans. Far to the south the crack and boom of rifle fire started up; about half an hour later the rumble of cannon woke a mile or more away. But for the sound, and the departure and arrival of messengers, our watch on the ridge passed uneventfully. I couldn’t think for the constant noise. Rory tucked himself into the shade of a tree, where he leaned his head against the trunk and closed his eyes. Exhausted, I sank down beside him.

The pounding hammer filled every crevice of flesh, and blood, and air, and earth. I fell as off a cliff into a dream.

Winged as an eru, I flew above an ocean of smoke. All around clamored my brothers and sisters, each fashioned in their own shape, and all of us killers. Flashes of light like silvery minnows caught in the waves as the dying gave up life. My siblings dove into the waters to gulp up each soul.

The spirits of the dead walked through us, the hunter’s children, from the mortal world into the spirit world.

I saw everything: A man rides away from his comrades on a desperate errand although they urge him to turn back. My eru’s sight could not encompass the features by which a mortal person recognizes another: the flash of sweetness when he really smiled, the way his eyebrows rose when he was teasing me, the promise of his lips. I saw instead the fathomless well of a cold mage whose person is the conduit through which weave the energies that bind the worlds.

Vai.

Thunder jostled my sight, and I lost track of him. The current of battle swept me south. Camjiata had deployed his artillery parallel to the road. It pounded into the Roman columns caught marching at double time, trying to reach their Coalition allies. Every time the Romans tried to break out they were met with a fierce attack from the general’s Iberian Lion Guard or his Amazon Corps. The Kena’ani skirmishers with their white sashes had moved miles down the column to hit the hapless rear guard, which was cut off from the front by the lumbering baggage train.

So small rats were, seen from the height. Their lives of no moment, not truly. So much death churns through the world that we look the other way lest we be overwhelmed by its weight. But I was my sire’s daughter. I had no heart whose conscience burdened my wings.

Separated from its Coalition allies by the tide of the battle, the Invictus Legion retreated step-by-bloody-step south, hoping to meet and join up with its brother legions. However much I had disliked the legate, he held the ranks together under merciless fire. The remnant hunkered down at last within the walls of a lord’s estate.

Farther south an eagle standard went down amid screams of angry victory shouted by jubilant Iberians. Pressed by an unrelenting stream of cannonade, the Romans broke and ran, all but the Ironclad Legion. Under the command of an unflappable young tribune, it worked its way along the river and, in a meeting of grim embraces, joined up with the Invictus.

Twilight reached its fingers out of the east as a front of cold air. The current of the past hauled me into the tower room where I had stalked hours ago.

The first two men have no warning. I am no cold mage, to kill with merely a cut, so I slice their throats open to bleed them out. Cold steel has a sharpness that tastes like finest wine. The others realize they are trapped in the room with a monster. They try to fight, even the old mansa of Two Gourds House tries to draw cold magic to stop me, so I incapacitate him next. The officer puts up the worst struggle, for he is a canny and experienced man who does not want to die. The pulse of his ebbing heart’s blood booms in my ears.

“Cat! Wake up!” Rory was shaking me. Everything was all blurred and smeary. He embraced me so tightly I couldn’t move. “Cat, you were having a nightmare.”

Thunder shuddered through the earth. Drops of icy rain spattered onto my forehead. Instead of blood-soaked clothing, I wore an Amazon’s uniform. Who was I? What had I become?

Rory pulled me to my feet. “We’re moving out. Look at those clouds! No one wants to be up on this hill in a storm.”

“The general is asking for you, Maestra,” said a young officer. He ducked at a growl of thunder, for there really was a storm crashing in on the wings of twilight. “Hurry! The walls of Lutetia have caught fire.”

The glow of flame lit the north as Camjiata’s retinue moved out. A terrible fear ripped through me. The whole city would burn. Drake would burn it all, the mage House and every building inside the city walls, just to show he could do it. Bee was in there, and not just Bee but tens of thousands of ordinary people going about their lives.

Blessed Tanit protect them! I stared in horror as flames leaped along Lutetia’s walls.

A blizzard of sleet swept in with the night, swift and brutal. Born out of cold magic, the storm slammed down and, just like that, extinguished the flames.