Cold Steel

46

Rory tugged on my arm. “Is he gone, Cat? I know he saw me! I was afraid he would make me go with him.”

“He’s gone, Rory. You’re safe.”

“His children are never safe. No one is ever safe!”

“No, you’re all safe,” I said with certainty, and I hugged him.

Fortunately I did not have time to dwell on the bargain I had made. There was simply too much to do, with night falling over the displaced population of Four Moons House. Before anything else we sent runners to the nearby villages of Haranwy and Trecon. Then I cleaned the blood off my sword and hunted down the rest of Rory’s clothes.

The icy sculpture of Four Moons House glittered as the moon rose. Moonlight coruscated through the many facets of the ice, splintering light across the terraces and driveway. In this eerie weave of shadow and bright, Bee and the stewards counted heads and sorted people by injury and need. The cold mages who had been Drake’s prisoners were, like the mansa, injured and unconscious. Three were dead. The cold mages who had been at Four Moons House, like Serena, had absorbed some measure of backlash, but on the whole they had not been badly harmed, although all the pregnant women had gone into labor.

All the fire mages were dead. I pitied them, but I could not mourn.

Mostly I sat with Vai’s head in my lap. No sign of injury marked him but he lay oblivious, the only movement the shallow rise and fall of his chest and the sluggish pulse at his throat. Wasa huddled next to me, petting the cowering puppy. Bintou fetched water for us from the well, and the cool liquid slowly eased her mother’s coughing. I even got a little down Vai’s throat. As the evening wore on I slipped in and out of a doze, glancing up now and again to search for Bee. She was always there, busy managing people. I just hadn’t the strength.

In the middle of the night, wagons trundled up under the light of an almost-full moon and a clear sky. Andevai’s half brother Duvai led the contingent from Haranwy. All were men, all armed with their hunter’s bows, spears, scythes, and a few illegal rifles. I went to greet them.

“Peace to you, Andevai’s brother, and to all who live in your compound,” I said in the traditional way. “Do you have peace?”

“I am well, thanks to the mother who raised me,” he replied, “and my family has peace also. And you, Cat Barahal?”

“I am well, thanks to my power as a woman.”

He raised an eyebrow, as if something in my face made him take pause. Then he looked past me to the massif of ice that entombed Four Moons House.

“Will the village give these refugees shelter?” I asked. “On their behalf, and on my own, I ask for guest rights.”

“That is our duty and obligation,” he said. “We will do what we must.”

“The mansa named Vai as heir.”

“We heard the rumor.” He glanced toward Vai’s mother, who had not left Vai’s side. The stubborn line of old resentment creased his brow. “An honor to his mother, indeed. He has made his choice between his two hats. This turn of events cannot have improved his conceit.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about the hats. You must work honestly with him, Duvai. I think you will find him something changed. He is the village’s ally, not its enemy, not its ruler.”

“Is that what you think? You surely were determined to escape him the last time we met.”

A flush warmed my cheeks. “I am something changed as well.”

The resemblance between the two men was keen, although Duvai was lighter, having a mother who had been born in a Celtic village, and being therefore more mixed of feature and complexion. Ten years older, he had the surety of a man in his prime strength, fully aware of who he is and of his place in the world. Besides that, he was a hunter who had braved the spirit world more than once and returned successfully.

“Are you something changed in the matter of my brother?” he said with a chuckle that made me blush yet more. “I would not have taken you for a woman to be bought by the offer of riches and rank, so I must suppose he found another way to capture you.”

“You are mistaken. No man can capture me. But he might have… courted me.”

His smirk resembled Vai’s. “So my brother finally smiled at you, did he?”

I had no answer to this, except to refrain from punching him.

“Grandmother made us promise never to fight each other. Out of respect for her, and knowing she watches over us still, I will speak in his favor. The elders of Haranwy have agreed to house as many of these refugees as we can until a decision is reached. The rest can shelter at Trecon and other House villages.”

The ice-bound House breathed like winter on our backs as we walked away.

No one would ever live there again.

The mansa was brought to Grandmother’s single-roomed house with its tiny private courtyard. The room smelled of pine wreaths even though no one had lived in it for some time. Vai was conveyed to the room where his mother had lived for so many years with her children. She directed him to be placed on a cot and asked for hot water to be brought so he might be stripped of his grimy clothes and washed. This task I asked to do, behind a screen for privacy. The furnishings in the modest room were nothing compared to the luxurious riches in Two Gourds House, but the modern circulating stove, the four-poster bed, an oak table, and the rosewood wardrobe revealed the concern Vai had taken both for his mother’s comfort and for her status in the village.

He mumbled incoherent syllables. Settled in the bed, he tossed and turned for the next three days, feverish one hour and shivering with cold the next as I forced broth down his throat. Every now and then he had lucid moments, during which I told him some of what had happened and fed him gruel. At length the worst of it eased, and he slept like the dead.

At intervals I attended Bee, who sat for hours in the village’s festival house acting as mediator. I admired her fair-minded intercessions between the demands of the Houseborn, many of whom had never set foot in so rustic a situation, and the complaints of the burdened villagers. Disputes were also sparked between the younger generation in the village, who agitated for resistance, saying this was their chance to throw off the yoke of clientage, and the elders, who refused to offend the ancestors and the gods by violating guest rights.

I just wanted to stab everyone when they started to argue. My foot got bruised from Bee stepping on it.

The mansa was dying. Everyone knew it but no one spoke of it. Rory had taken a violent liking to the old djeli, Bakary, and prowled around him seeking any pat of attention, which meant he spent most of his day in Grandmother’s cottage listening to the old bard sing the story of the mansa’s life and deeds, the tale of the Diarisso lineage, and the history of the world.

The history of the world begins with a seed. The seed is the kernel of what you are, but it is also the promise of what you can become.

On the fourth day a delegation arrived from Trecon, where the rest of the House refugees languished. The mansa’s nephew had arrived with the mage House troop from Lutetia. Because the mansa had not regained consciousness, his nephew wanted to immediately convene the House council of elders to vote on the matter of the heirship.

I returned to Vai’s mother’s room to find Vai sitting on the edge of the bed clad in trousers and nothing else. With a hand braced on the wall he stood, trembling across his entire body as he steadied himself to take a step, another step, and a third. It was obvious he was headed for the screen behind which we washed and dressed and kept the chamber pot. He had not yet seen me.

He said in a strikingly peevish tone, “I will manage the business myself, Mama.”

Twice I thought he would topple right over, but he got behind the screen without mishap.

I crossed to where his mother sat on a chair, knelt beside her, took her hand, and smiled up at her.

“He was never a patient invalid as a child,” she remarked. “Fortunately he did not get sick often.”

The girls were sitting at the table beside a window, perusing a book. Wasa elbowed her sister. “Kayleigh used to say no one whined like Vai when he was sick.”

“I heard that!” said Vai from behind the screen, not in a jocular tone.

Because I understood how much he hated feeling weak, I ventured behind the screen to find him sitting, head in hands, on the bench. A mirror and razor rested on the bench next to him. My footsteps brought his head up. His beard was unkempt, and his hair squashed on one side. His skin had an ashy sallowness and his eyes a gray weariness.

“I don’t need help!” he snapped. “I can shave myself!”

“Nor have I the least desire to help you,” I retorted. “I merely came to inform you that the mansa’s nephew has arrived and is making an entirely predictable grab for the heir’s seat.”

“That would be a disaster for Four Moons House! Not to mention Haranwy and the other villages. It’s not his right anyway, to make such a demand when the mansa has already spoken.” He tried to stand but could not keep his feet under him. I had to catch him and ease him back down, for which he repaid me with a string of rude phrases directed not at me personally but at the uncaring world at large, which had not had the courtesy to allow him to heal faster.

“Stop it! Just pee and go back to sleep. Nothing will happen until you have recovered enough to face the elders.”

He ran a hand along his beard, and I was sure he was thinking that he could not face the elders looking so scruffy. “What of the mansa? What news of him today?”

I shook my head. “No change. Magister Serena is recovering well, although she grieves over losing the pregnancy. You didn’t tell me she’s a diviner.”

“You didn’t ask.”

I left him to it and went back to his mother. “I believe you are better suited than I to handle him when he is afflicted with this distemper.”

She regarded me with an equanimity matched only by Vai’s muttered cursing behind the screen. “Even as a child he had the habit of believing every sunny day would last forever to please him, and that clouds came as a personal affront.”

“Catherine. Love.”

That he used the endearment in his mother’s hearing worried me. I went back to find him stretched out on the bench, an arm flung across his face. He had mottled bruising on his ribs from either the battle or his captivity, his wrists were reddened and scarred with rope burns, and he was thin from the privation of the last days. Benevolent Tanit! The man needed to eat!

“Lord of All,” he murmured with disgust, “to think of how easily I was captured! I could not even break out of my captivity, nor prevent them from using me as a catch-fire for the entire cursed journey. When it came to the point, I could not even save the mansa. Now his useless nephew cocks about like a rooster crowing for attention, while I cannot stand.”

Annoyance and pathos warred in my breast, and after a short struggle, annoyance punched pathos in the snout like the voracious shark it was.

“I will say this once, and not again. You were easily captured because you had collapsed in an exhausted faint after saving the lives of other mages and no doubt many other people on the day of the battle. As for being exploited as a catch-fire, that was an obvious decision on Drake’s part for otherwise he could not have held you as prisoner. The problem is not that you are weak but that you are so unusually strong that Drake saw you as the means to effect his revenge. I may not fully agree with how the Taino treat catch-fires, but from what I saw they do regard them with respect. Drake stole the knowledge from them but not their care for the law and their respect for the balance that is needed to wield power responsibly. He was a thief, and a greedy, resentful, envious, selfish thief at that. Maybe his family stole his inheritance, or maybe they threw him out because they saw what a monster he was. I don’t know. But in the end, Drake’s frightening power came from the strength he took from you.”

I paused to catch my breath. I had not realized how much anger I held against my heart for all the people who use others as nothing more than tools to build a house for themselves, who wrap chains around others and then claim they have the right and even the obligation to do so. Vexation overflowed like water over the brim of a full cup.

“To be perfectly honest, Andevai, it is nothing more than petulant vanity on your part to lie there after everything you have done and querulously complain that it wasn’t enough. Many thousands of people have died because of Camjiata’s war and many more will die, and uncounted more have suffered because of the rule of unjust princes. You are just one person doing what you can. Even you cannot be catch-fire for all the injustice in the world!”

From the table, far enough away that they thought I couldn’t hear, Bintou whispered to Wasa, “I can’t believe she talks to him like that!”

“I’m going to learn to talk like that!” murmured Wasa. “I can’t run about and hit people like Cat does, but I can become an orator like Cousin Bee. I’m going to become a hero and cause trouble all over everywhere!”

“Girls!” scolded their mother.

“So if you are done with your humble business about the pisspot, Husband, then go back to bed. You will get strong if you rest and meanwhile cease whipping yourself raw over the obvious fact that even your astoundingly monumental cold magic has its limits although clearly your vanity does not. Also, I will smack you if you keep whining like this, because I. Have. No. More. Patience. For. It.”

He withdrew the arm that shielded his eyes. His tight jaw and frustrated sneer smoothed into loving concern as he examined me. “Catherine, are you well? Is something wrong, love? I am accustomed to you speaking your mind, but you sound sour and on edge. That’s not like you.”

In two months the Wild Hunt would ride up to my door and take me away, but I was not about to tell him that.

When I did not answer he sighed and, with a grimace, heaved himself up. “Yesterday I could not even sit up, so I am somewhat improved. I’ll go back to bed and be patient a little longer.”

“I doubt that,” I muttered.

But he did go back to bed, stubbornly refusing my helping arm, and he ate every bit of the porridge his mother brought. Afterward he slept restfully.

I had a long talk about law and history with Bakary at the bedside of the mansa, where I found him whistling the spirit melody as he wove a song describing Andevai’s magic and exploits. That night, as always, Bee slept on the far side of the bed while I took the middle between her and Vai. Rory was curled up in his cat form on the floor, with the puppy sleeping trustfully between his big paws. House children who had been sleeping in the village festival house lay crammed together on mats on the floor, exhausted from Rory letting them climb all over him. They had come to us because the mansa’s nephew had taken over the festival house for his entourage without even asking the village elders for their permission.

Vai was dead asleep. I held Bee’s hand, twisting and turning. “If the House council chooses the nephew, we’ll be free. But we haven’t a sesterce to our name, so I can’t imagine what we’ll do.”

“I have an idea about that.”

“Yet I fear for what will happen to the House in that case. I worry the nephew will take a petty revenge on Haranwy. Although I think regardless he’ll have a village revolt on his hands. But if the council supports Vai… Bee, don’t let Vai be trapped by the House.”

“You’re so tired you’re fretting needlessly, Cat. This isn’t like you.”

“You won’t leave me, will you? Never, not until the end?”

“Are you feeling well?” She pressed her lips to my forehead. “You’re not feverish. Dearest, you must sleep. You mustn’t get ill.”

Sometimes the gods are merciful and will let you sleep instead of think.

In the morning, although still weak, Vai insisted on shaving and dressing and walking under his own power to his grandmother’s house. There, by the bedside of the mansa and with his mother seated in a chair behind him, he requested permission of the House elders to stand before them. At once, and far less politely, the mansa’s nephew challenged Vai’s right even to stand there, much less claim to be heir. I did not know what to expect, but the months of war, the days of captivity, and perhaps even his slow recovery had planed down the edges and splinters that had always made Vai so quick to take offense when he felt his dignity and honor were being challenged.

This time he let the other man talk on and on, cajole and whine, even blame the destruction of the House on Vai as if Drake had never existed. The nephew complained at length about the lowborn origins of the village boy in such insulting terms that even though the Houseborn elders might well have scorned Vai’s mother for being born in a cart with no lineage to her name, they still shuddered to see a dignified mother mocked in public in front of her son. At length the nephew ran dry, and by this time everyone was certainly waiting for him to stop.

“Are you finished?” asked Vai. “Very well, then. With the permission of the elders of the House, I will answer.”

They granted it.

“Your words speak for themselves. I would be ashamed to let such speech pass my lips. My mother knows I honor and respect her. That is all that needs to be said. As for the other, according to tradition, the mansa of a mage House is the man whose magic reaches the deepest. Can you stand before the elders of this council and tell them honestly that your magic is stronger than mine?”

Thus Vai defeated him.

Just then the mansa stirred, as though the voice of his heir had roused him. “Let it be Andevai,” he whispered.

Andevai knelt beside him, taking his hand. “I am here, mansa. It shall be as you say.”

The thread of the mansa’s voice was barely audible. It clearly hurt him to speak, but he was determined to be heard. “Andevai, promise me on your mother’s honor that you will stand as mansa and rebuild Four Moons House.”

“I promise on my mother’s honor.”

His mother did not smile. She was not such a woman. But her pride was a light in the room.

As the council filed out, Rory slipped in. “I’ll sit with you in attendance, with your permission,” he said to Bakary and Serena. “He will pass soon to the other side.”

Outside, Duvai confronted his brother. “What do you mean to do, Mansa?” he said mockingly.

Weary but unbowed, Vai frowned. “He yet lives. I am not mansa.”

“The hunter has already crept into the shadows of the House. Death stalks that place.”

I looked wildly around the open courtyard of the family’s compound, but I did not see my sire in light or in shadow. Then a crow fluttered down to perch on the roof.

“Do you intend to stay here?” Duvai held a stout staff as tall as his head, tipped with a fringe of feathers and beads. He shifted it now from his left hand to his right, as if making ready for an attack. “You and your people are eating out our winter stores. You claim you mean to change things, but you’re doing exactly what the mages have always done, living off our flesh.”

Vai was tired enough that he allowed himself to lean on me as he met his brother’s gaze without anger or malice. “What I mean to do, you will know when the mansa dies and I am free to act. But you may be sure that I intend to release every village from the clientage that binds it to Four Moons House. Until then, I ask you to remember what our father taught us.”

“Our father told us that a hero is loved only on troubled days. Otherwise he causes too much disruption for the village to find him a comfortable presence. Is that what you meant to remind me of, Andevai?”

“Are those words meant for me because you think I am the hero? Because if they are, then you have directed them at the wrong person. Although I do not think of Catherine as disruptive. Just precipitous sometimes.”

With a sigh Duvai handed his staff to his younger brother. No doubt Duvai felt it beneath the dignity of any man to have to lean on a woman, much less thank her for salvaging what she could out of a desperate situation.

Vai took the staff as if it were an offering of peace. “Brother, surely you do not forget that when I was a boy, I did nothing but follow after you.”

“You were a terrible nuisance, always underfoot,” agreed Duvai gravely.

I looked from one to the other, seeing the stamp of the father I had never met in their features but also in the way they both carried themselves as men. Strength can be used to harm, but it can also be used to build and to sustain. No doubt they had clashed in later years because they were so much alike. One had always known the place he meant to grow into. The other had hoped to follow, only to find himself completely uprooted and forced into unfriendly earth.

Vai rubbed the wood, approving the polish of the grain. “Father taught us that a man knows he is a man by the good he brings to his village.”

Bakary appeared at the door of Grandmother’s house. All the people loitering in the courtyard and at the gate to the family compound turned to look, every voice stilled.

The old djeli raised a hand skyward. “Mansa,” he said, to Andevai.

Between one breath and the breath that was never taken, I found myself married to the mansa of Four Moons House. Not that anyone had asked if this was what I wanted!

The next day, in the ensuing gatherings and rituals, I crept away by the path I had taken when I had fled Haranwy almost two years ago. The open gate gave way to a track that led through gardens and pasture. A herd of fat sheep worked through the forage. I did not go far through the golden stalks of autumn. An orchard of apple, plum, and cherry had been harvested but for a few stragglers. An old stump made a good resting place. I sat for the longest time staring at the wind in the grass and the sway of branches, but everywhere I looked I saw my sire’s shadow and felt the icy touch of his hand. The pulse of blood in my ears drowned me.

Where the hand of fortune branches, Tara Bell’s child must choose.

I had made the only choice I could, not just once but many times. I had to save the ones I loved, for although I had grabbed for their hands, I hadn’t been able to save my parents that terrible day. Maybe my sire had saved me. Maybe I had accidentally saved myself. All I remembered was how I had struggled to reach them.

It wasn’t drowning I was truly afraid of. It was the moment my mother’s hand had slipped away from mine as the current pulled her into the murky depths where my father had already sunk.

No more! I would not lose them! I would not!

So I had made the bargain with my sire. I wouldn’t lose them, but they would lose me.

Bee’s laughter floated like the memory of summer past and the promise of summer to come. She and Andevai appeared, arguing with the intensity of two people who agree on the fundamentals and are now clashing about what color the curtains should be. Rory trailed after them, distracted by the puppy racing around his heels and barking in excitement as it demanded he play.

“There you are, dearest!” Bee called. “Cat, you can’t just run off like that. For one thing, it looks very disrespectful to the elders both of the village and of the mage House. Furthermore, something is bothering you, and I am going to bully you until you tell us what it is.”

The puppy gnawed on my ankle while wriggling its hindquarters in ecstatic excitement.

“I know what you are thinking,” said Vai.

“I don’t believe you do,” I said in my coolest voice, although in fact it was difficult to be morose when a puppy was chewing on my leg.

“I understand your concerns, Catherine.” He flipped out the length of his dash jacket and sat beside me, shoving me with his hip to make room. “Beatrice and I already have a plan, although I agree we should have made it more clear to you. But you’ve been so distracted and tired and hard to talk to, love. You’ve not spoken a word about what happened to Drake, or why Four Moons House is now encased in ice just as if the Wild Hunt had devoured it. Just like Crescent House.”

“It is an odd resemblance, is it not?” I agreed. “But the Master of the Wild Hunt can only enter the mortal world on Hallows’ Night. Everyone knows that!”

He rubbed a finger along the trimmed magnificence of his beard. “That’s true. Still, I did not know an eru had such power.”

“Neither did I!” agreed Bee, with a suspicious look, but it was evident she had not the slightest memory of my sire’s passage through the coach or what he had done.

“I did not know it either, but it appears to be an eru’s work.” It was no lie. The one who gave him birth had had an eru’s form when he was disgorged. Rory looked a question at me, and I shook my head. He pulled his lips back as if to snarl at me, and I opened my eyes very aggressively, head jutted forward, until he backed off. Glimpsing his movement, the puppy gamboled after him.

“Is that all you have to say on the matter?” Vai demanded. “Because it seems no one witnessed every part of what happened except for you.”

“I asked for their aid, for that is my right. I cut a path for them through the mirror. But they had no obligation to stay once Drake was dead.”

At that moment I knew I would not tell them. They could not stop the Wild Hunt, nor could I allow them to follow me into the spirit world. If they knew what bargain I had made, the next two months would swamp them in misery and fear. It would be cruel to tell them. So I would keep silence and tell no one.

He took my hands in his. Bee set her arms akimbo and fixed him with an axe-blow glare. A wind teased through her curls, making them dance, like happiness. His breath brushed my ear.

“No kissing, Andevai!” said Bee. “You promised! You must present your argument in a reasoned and sensible manner.”

He released my hands and stood. I had washed and mended his clothes while he was bedridden, but despite the skillful job I had done, they looked like clothes bought in the secondhand market, not like costly garments appropriate to a powerful magister whose status was every bit the equal of a prince’s. Yet he looked so very fine. It wasn’t the clothes that made him beautiful.

“Catherine, I know you have told me that you cannot live in Four Moons House. And you heard me promise the mansa on my mother’s honor that I will rebuild Four Moons House. I am a cold mage, and I have to do it.”

“I know, my love.”

“Besides the promise to my mother, I have a responsibility to the House that educated me and to the mansa who raised me up. To every fledgling magister who may never get proper training, like the fire banes in Expedition. To my own family, to the village that birthed me, and also to the other villages chained by clientage to Four Moons House. To all villages so chained. All communities have a right to liberty, a right to the dignity and security of their own persons.”

“After which,” said Bee in a portentously deep voice, “he will cause all strife in the world to cease, every infant child to be born healthy, and all men to have the taste to dress fashionably and in colors that suit their complexions. What Andevai is working up to tell you, dearest, is that while he promised to rebuild Four Moons House, he cleverly did not specify how he would do so. Nor did the mansa ask. I keep trying to tell you about my plan, and you keep ignoring me.”

I considered my folded hands, and then looked up at them. So bright they were in the afternoon sun. The wind fell cool across us, but the light cast a glorious, rich glow across the land. From here we could see a glint of the great river whose waters had so altered my life, although in truth it was the hunter who had acted that day for his own hidden reasons. He had driven me to this moment as hunters will, stalking their prey until they are cornered.

So be it. I still had life in me.

Rory scooped up the puppy and walked over to sit at my feet.

I smiled at them, whom I loved best in all the world. “What plan could you possibly have agreed on?”