Cold Steel

47

Had I understood the monumental nature of their scheme, I might have taken a nap first.

To argue with elders who object to such a radical change of direction needs a honeyed voice and a stubborn persistence working in concert. The new mansa informed his people that no House could rise on the ruins of the old. The ice had caged it forever and, with it, the old chains by which Four Moons had long sustained itself. Those who did not wish to walk this new path with the mansa had the right to go elsewhere, to join whatever mage House would take them in. The deceased mansa’s nephew and perhaps half of the survivors departed. I was surprised at how many stayed, including Serena and all of the House’s djeliw. I couldn’t blame the bards. Given the choice of the two men, I knew which one I would rather sing about.

The mansa called together the village councils and asked them to invoke rei vindicatio: A community belongs to itself. The ancient contracts were dissolved. Much of the farm and pastureland reverted to the villages, but enough remained for a home farm overseen by House stewards. Here those who wished to work the land would farm, with the surplus marked for the support of the new House.

To uproot and move seventy-one people from their accustomed life is no small undertaking. Remarkably, the September weather held fair for the two weeks’ journey to the city of Havery. Everyone went a little hungry, and everyone except for the littlest, the eldest, and the infirm had to walk most of the way, but not one person died. There was only one serious fight, between two young men over a village girl from Trecon who had sneaked along with the kitchen staff to escape an unwanted marriage at home.

“Should we send her back?” Vai asked me that night.

We were camped next to a mage hostel along the turnpike that ran from Audui to Havery. Naturally the indoor places were given to the elders and the children, but Vai did demand the privilege of a private shelter. It was astonishing how a gal might come to appreciate a crude tent rigged of canvas in which she and her loved one could sleep alone every night on a mat on the hard ground with but a single blanket to cover them.

“The elders are split on the question and have asked if I or my wife wish to make our opinion known. We ought to respect the arrangements made by our elders. That is the way least disruptive to the harmonious peace of the community.”

“Yes, because forcing a young woman into a marriage she does not wish for seems harmonious to me!”

“I can’t suppose other women could possibly hope for the good fortune you had.”

I pinched him in a sensitive spot, although that only made him laugh. “Thus you make my argument for me. It’s one thing for the elders to interview compatible young people and see that they are introduced to each other in the hope that an interest will kindle between them. I understand they wish for family alliances that will benefit the community. But the young people must consent as well, otherwise it is just another form of clientage. Anyway, Vai, you are the last person who ought to argue against disrupting the harmonious peace of the old ways. I say let her stay with us. She can work off a fair price for her transport and food, and after that remain with the House or find her way into a situation she finds more pleasing.” I rolled on top of him. “As I am about to do.”

The elderly prince of Havery was a forward-thinking man who welcomed new technology, new faces, and new trade opportunities with the Amerikes, and who had introduced new laws by which an elected council shared the reins of ruling. As surprised as the man was when the young mansa, his elders’ council, his lawyers, and his household presented themselves to request the prince’s permission to establish a mage House in his city, he was astonished when Vai informed him that the House no longer held villages in clientage and would be setting up a carpentry yard to support itself.

“This is a radical step,” the prince remarked as he bowed over Beatrice’s hand, for it was evident they were already acquainted. “It appears the Honeyed Voice has sweetened yet another ear.”

“In fact,” said Vai, “it is her cousin, my wife, who coaxed me into bed with the radicals. Her, and my good friends from Expedition.”

“You are welcome here,” said the prince, to all of us. “My clan has long suffered, caught between the Parisi prince and the Veneti dukes with their Armorican overlord. That is why I have sought allies elsewhere.” He nodded at Chartji and Godwik. They were not the only feathered people present at his court. “The presence of a mansa and his House will certainly give my rivals pause, especially now that the Iberian Monster’s campaign has shaken up the entire continent.”

“What news of the Iberian Monster?” I asked.

The old man indicated a stack of dispatches on a desk. “An interesting turn of events. He has rallied four Roman legions to his cause and declared his intention to depose the emperor and raise himself to that exalted place, after which he will reform the laws and some such palaver. Last we heard, he won a resounding victory near Nikaia. For the time being, that leaves us here in the Gallic Territories at a temporary peace. We shall see how long it lasts.”

At the law offices of Godwik and Clutch, Chartji took us to a storage room. Here, by diverse means, had washed up most of the belongings we had lost hold of over the last months: Vai’s carpentry tools and the other traveling gear he and I had abandoned when we had leaped into the Rhenus River; the chests left behind at Two Gourds House with all of Vai’s dash jackets and the clothes he had had made for me; even, astoundingly, the chests Bee had been forced to leave with Camjiata, from which Drake had stolen some of Vai’s clothing.

To my amazement, one of the chests contained all of my father’s journals. The general had kindly sent these items on with a note that read:

It is never too late to change your mind.

Best of all, Bee unearthed the gold and fine linen Caonabo had asked her to deliver to Juba. The cloth shed a smoky flavor, dragon-like, from being packed in with tobacco leaves. “Haübey was meant to wear this finery on his return to Sharagua, but I have decided we need the money more than he does now he has been called back from exile. We can get an excellent price for the tobacco as well. It is no easy task to shelter, feed, and clothe almost one hundred people from nothing!”

The old Hassi Barahal compound where Aunt Tilly had been born had been boarded up in the wake of Camjiata’s defeat sixteen years ago, when the household had dispersed either to Adurnam or to Gadir. With the proceeds from the sale of the gold, Four Moons House obtained the lease for this edifice, which backed up against a gentle tributary stream of the mighty Sicauna River in the northern quarter of town. In the next property over along the bank stood a run-down old villa with a hypocaust system in need of extensive repairs, owned by a Kena’ani shipping clan eager to make an ally of the mansa and his Kena’ani wife and her cousin by offering him use of the building as long as he made the necessary repairs and renovations at his own expense. With the weather rapidly growing colder, the able-bodied set to work to repair enough of the hypocaust system to shelter the cold mages through the coming winter, while the Barahal compound’s buildings were cleaned for the rest of the household.

Five days after we arrived, with the heaviest of the cleaning behind us, Bee and I walked down to the harbor district to the law offices of Godwik and Clutch. I liked what I had seen of Havery, for the little port city had a free and easy flavor that reminded me of Expedition. A lively troll town expanded in the west, near a burgeoning factory district. Besides the usual port-city mix of people of every lineage, clan, ethnicity, guild, and profession, there were enclaves of merchants and artisans and sailors from Expedition, the Taino kingdom, and other Amerikan peoples as well.

“The prince has asked me if I will consider standing for the council when he calls for elections next year,” Bee was saying, “and naturally I will, since many women may feel reluctant to put themselves forward. Someone must set a good example. But we must have a way to make a living as well. That’s why the plan Andevai and I have concocted makes perfect sense. In a way, the mage House and the Godwik and Clutch consortium have become partners through your relationship with both of them. The best part is that you and I will finally get to do the work we were trained for.”

I loved to watch her shine. She was a little like the puppy. She had gotten her teeth into an enterprise that matched her wit and her ambition.

“Trolls are excellent lawyers because they can pick through the fine points of the law. And they are clever scientists because the world fascinates them, and they’re not really scared of anything except dragons. Also, they share everything within the clutch. The food on my plate is the food on your plate. That’s why they have become such keen printers, spreading knowledge like seeds. But one thing troll printers and lawyers can’t do is go places where they would be conspicuous for being trolls. Therefore, you and I—and Rory if he wants to—will act as their human agents. We will investigate things for them that they otherwise would have trouble knowing.”

“We’ll be spies,” I said delightedly.

“If you must use that word, then I am content with it. Andevai says this is exactly the sort of scheme that will please you, Cat. Obviously it pleases me. I can scarcely wait to begin sneaking about and poking my nose into other people’s business, just as we used to in the old days! I mean, when I am not making speeches in the Assembly. But he has been worried about you. He has stewards to take care of the day-to-day running of such a large household, for it is truly an unwieldy task best left to people trained from an early age to manage its complexities. He knows you don’t belong in the mage House, nor does he expect you to serve it. He says you told him once that you wouldn’t have minded being a warden in Expedition, and I can see how that would suit you. This is something like that, don’t you think? You like our plan, don’t you?”

I took her hand in mine. “Of course I do. It’s a marvelous scheme. It’s all splendid, what Andevai is doing, this new endeavor, everything!”

She pulled me to a stop under the feathery brown sign with orange letters that marked the door of the law offices of Godwik and Clutch. “Are you well, dearest?”

I clasped her hands tightly. “I’m at peace, Bee, except for one thing. You know I told you how I met your parents when I was with Camjiata.”

The storm clouds could not have moved in more swiftly, from clear sky to threatening rain. Her voice trembled. “I should have been there with you, Cat! You should not have to face all these terrible things alone!”

I had to look away from her then. My worn but thoroughly polished boots made a good alternative to her probing gaze. Vai did not like the way I polished my boots, so he had taken to doing it for me. “I just think that after all it would have been better if I had found it in my heart to forgive them. I felt so betrayed only because I loved them so much.”

“They shouldn’t have done it!”

“I know, but… it must have hurt them, too.”

She heaved a dramatic sigh and was about to scold me when the door opened and Chartji poked her muzzle out. Her crest was flared in an odd pattern, some feathers flattened and some upright. She whistled a curt greeting, a bit off-key.

“Bee, a letter arrived for you this morning. Of course I did not open it, but it stinks of dragon and I would be grateful if you would remove it from the premises as quickly as possible.”

With a shriek Bee released my hands and dashed inside.

Chartji bared her teeth at me. “Cousin, there is something about you that puzzles me. You rats are funny creatures, hard to understand, but I sense a shadow beneath your smile.”

As the great general Hannibal Barca had famously said just before he and his queen, the Dido of Qart Hadast, defeated the Romans at Zama, Either find a way, or make one.

“I have a few questions about contracts I would like to ask you, Chartji. Is now a good time?”

On our walk home Bee could not contain herself. With the letter clutched in her hand, she stumbled frequently on the cobblestones as she read bits aloud to me. “ ‘In the lore of my people, it is told that the women who walk the dreams of dragons may find among dragon-kind one mate to match them.’ Isn’t that romantical, Cat? He goes on. ‘The obligations placed on me by my position as headmaster…’ That’s why he cannot leave yet. The hatchlings are still too young. They look like youths in size but they need constant care before they are ready to be left on their own. I wonder how many hatchlings the headmaster raised among people at the academy all those years without anyone being the wiser! Kemal begs me to never reveal their secret. He says that the lore of the dragons speaks of dark cruel times when the dragon-born were hunted and killed!”

“It seems to me, Bee, that you could go to Noviomagus for a month’s visit. Then you might discover whether he is the, ah, mate to match you, which I rather doubt since you seem to still have feelings for Caonabo.”

She sniffed imperiously. “According to tradition, Kena’ani women can take two husbands if it serves the clan: one husband from within the clan and one trade husband, an outsider, to seal an alliance.”

“I can’t figure which one you would call the trade husband and which one within the clan.”

She ignored this perfectly legitimate question with an airy wave of her hand. “Anyway, when will I ever see Caonabo again? How can I ever afford even to go to Noviomagus? We can barely afford to feed everyone. The only reason we have managed all the renovation and repairs is that the household is doing all the work.”

I swung her hand in mine. “That’s true. But after Hallows’ Night you must promise me you’ll find a way to go. Just to see what happens. Do you promise me, Bee? Do you?”

“Gracious Melqart, Cat! If I protest that I do not want to, you’ll know I am lying. And if I say yes, love will carry me across the distance like wings, I’ll appear as giddy in love as you! Maybe after things are more sorted out here and the household is better established and everyone has a decent cot to sleep on… Prim Astarte! What I wouldn’t give for decent plumbing!”

We discussed such mundane matters all the way home, and I cherished every word of it.

So it was that at midday on the last day of October, I finished darning a worn elbow on the last of Vai’s dash jackets that needed repair, the much-abused but lovingly tended gold-and-red chained pattern he had worn the night of the areito and Hallows’ Night and thus into the spirit world. As a fine elegant dash jacket suitable for court, it was utterly ruined, but I could read the course of our love across its mended injuries and still-shining threads and know it for the glorious garment it was.

He had selected the sturdiest of his jackets to labor in, and they did get worn. I had worked hard to get all the mending done to my liking, sitting at an old secondhand table at the window in the corner room Vai had picked out for the mansa’s study. At this table in the evenings, while I sewed and Bee drew or practiced declaiming and while visitors came and went, he wrote letters, planned lessons, practiced illusions, and had me read out loud to us from a recently published monograph by Professora Alhamrai regarding accounts of how shrinkage in the ice sheets correlated with the creep of hardy trees into the Barrens.

Besides the table and chairs, necessary for when the mansa wished to meet people, the spacious chamber was furnished with his clothes chests, the chest with my father’s journals in it, a copper basin and pitcher on a stand, and the rolled-up mat on which he and I slept. Because Vai wasn’t there, I heated the air with a little brazier. The hypocaust beneath the planks was blocked by old rubble and not yet cleared out because the dormitories had to be readied for winter first. Fortunately it had been an unusually mild autumn, with not a single snowfall.

“Cat!” Bee hurried in without knocking, as she always did when she knew Vai was elsewhere. “I just heard Andevai tell Serena that she must sell all his dash jackets. He wants them out of the house today, so he may begin the new year knowing he has sacrificed like everyone else.”

“Gracious Melqart! I knew we had run low on funds for the kitchen, but I didn’t know things had gotten this desperate!” I leaped up and, with Bee’s help, hid my six favorite of his jackets in another chest, under the fur pelt blanket, together with the beautiful dressing robes.

Bee frowned and grabbed out of my hands the dash jacket sewn from the fabric of flowers bursting into fireworks. “I swear an oath to you, Cat, I just made up the pattern, I didn’t dream it!”

I snatched the jacket out of her hands and folded it in paper just as the red coals in the brazier dulled to ash.

Magister Serena sailed into the room beside Vai’s more clipped, impatient stride. Sadly they looked very handsome together, but I liked her enough that if someday such a suitable match were to be made because I was no longer there, I could bear the thought of it.

Vai smiled so sweetly at me that my heart melted all over again. “It will take another month to get a substantial carpentry shop up and running,” he was saying to one of the stewards, “and meanwhile we’ve had all these expenses to make the House livable. Take both chests. Sell everything. We must all begin the new year with an understanding of our changed circumstances. Don’t argue with me, Catherine!”

“I said nothing! But besides the clothing you must have to wear every day, Andevai, I insist you set aside two elegant dash jackets for when you go to court or are invited to some lordly mansion for dinner. You cannot attend such functions wearing the clothes you work in. It would not reflect well on the House, would it?”

“Indeed it would not,” said Serena in the manner of a woman who has lived all her life with the highest expectations of her rank and station. “The mansa of Four Moons House cannot appear looking as if he works as a common laborer.”

Bee coughed. “Even if he does.”

“In another year or two, everything will be different,” I said placatingly. I had cleverly placed the two dash jackets I knew he would choose at the top of the chest: the fireworks and a damask whose orange and brown evoked colors popular among radical laborers. His decision to sell his beloved clothes had so agitated him that I was able to set those two and yet two more aside before the steward took away the chest.

Fortunately we then were called to the front of the house to eat our dinner of porridge, turnips, and a stew of fish, onion, and tomato. Afterward we helped settle the children and elders into the wagons that would convey everyone to troll town for the Hallows Festival. The household was going to spend the night and day within the maze of troll town, hidden from the Wild Hunt. The children were as excited as hornets.

Bee took my hands. “It seems unfair you cannot shelter in the troll maze as the rest of us do. I don’t like to leave you alone.” She bent a too-wary gaze on me, forehead all a-wrinkle. “Are you sure you’re well, Cat? I swear to you there is a tone in your voice that makes me wonder if something is wrong.”

I kissed her. “I do get to fretting on Hallows’ Night about you, Bee. Even though I know you are safe in the troll maze, I can’t help but worry. Don’t be concerned for me. I promised Rory I would spend the night teaching him how to cheat at cards.”

“Are you sure, Cat? I just feel there’s something you’re not telling me.”

The Blessed Tanit was merciful. The wagons were ready to go, so I did not have to answer. I kissed her again as my heart broke and my smile never wavered. Off they went. I waved until I thought my arm would fall off.

“My sweet Catherine, you have avoided speaking to me all day.” He stepped up behind me, slipping his arms around me.

“I thought you went with them!”

“Without a kiss? I think not. After all, love, I think perhaps I shall stay with you—”

“No!” My hard-won peace shattered. The boiling miasma of anger and terror and shame erupted like an engine that, after steaming along in such a delicate balance for so long, had at last overheated. “You have to go to troll town! He knows your blood! He threatened you!”

“Love, love, that’s not what I meant. I will go to troll town and you will spend Hallows’ Night and Day at the law offices, as we agreed. I just thought how accustomed I am becoming to falling asleep each night and waking up each morning with you in my arms. It seems hard to face a night alone. So with everyone gone and nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon…”

My pounding heart and ragged breathing slowly calmed. “Oh.”

He chased me with kisses all the way back to the mansa’s study.

Afterward we lay on the mat in the corner of the room in the corner of the quiet building, and he kissed me so tenderly I almost wept.

“I know your secret, love,” he whispered against my ear.

My breath faltered. I pressed my face against his cheek, shuddering, for I had no idea how I was going to get through this now.

His smile brushed like love against my skin. “How many of my dash jackets did you hide?”

The air went out of me. I shut my eyes. “Only six besides the four I set aside already,” I murmured hoarsely, as my mind whispered a prayer of thanks to the Blessed Tanit, protector of women. “We’d better go, Vai.”

I dressed in the jacket I had made new out of what was torn. I buttoned on my spruce-green skirt that was so good for striding in, laced up my sturdy boots that had carried me through such a long journey, and set on my head the jaunty Amazon’s shako I had picked up on the battlefield from a fallen sister. I took only my locket and my sword. I twined my fingers intimately through his and savored the pleasure of walking hand in hand with him through the streets of Havery. A few people ran their final errands, but mostly the streets were empty as all made ready to shut their doors and light their candles against Hallows’ Night.

“I do like it here,” I said. “Although Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse is still my favorite place. You have some other scheme in mind, Vai. What is it?”

“We have two buildings,” he said, “so why not two schoolrooms? It seems wrong to me that those poor young fire mages were killed precisely because James Drake offered them a future they could not otherwise have. Cold mages were treated in the Antilles something like fire mages are treated here, with scorn and suspicion. Surely mages can work together as equals. What is to stop us from establishing an academy in which we see what may come about if we act in concert rather than in antipathy?”

“People will fear the prospect of cold mages and fire mages acting in concert. They’ll fear they will set themselves up as princes and lord it over all the people of the land.”

“People do that anyway.”

“I did feel sorry for those young fire mages. Imagine thinking that the best choice you have is to believe what James Drake is telling you! You’ll have to answer people’s fears, though. Naturally some magisters will abuse the knowledge and power they gain. I suppose that’s what you talked about with the blacksmith in that little village when we were escaping down the river.”

He smiled to let me know that no word of the conversation he had had with the blacksmith would pass his lips. “I also remember what the cacica told me. She said that the Taino believe every person is born with a kernel of power. Some waken it, and some never do. You were right to say that every child should have a chance to learn. Do you know, love, Beatrice and I are talking all the time about the things we want to do. All this work is going on for what she and I are hoping and planning for. But you never talk about what you’re thinking about. You must want something, Catherine. You can’t be happy merely to go along with our schemes.”

“I do want something.” I smiled, for I loved him and Bee so much, and all the rest of them, too. “Just don’t let Wasa get up to mischief. She has such a rascal spirit. I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow night.”

It was almost twilight as we reached the gates of troll town. The mirrors and shards of glass that surrounded the district flashed so agonizingly that I turned my back before the pain ripped through me. I kissed him and sent him on his way. The drums called him. They were already dancing, the strangest rhythm I had ever heard, for it was shot through with the whistling and clicking of trolls. It was a new song being born.

I smelled liquor, and the fresh fragrance of the traditional crossing buns filled with plum jam or yam custard. A rollicking party was already under way, as the sailors would have it.

Another sound rose out of the earth like mist and filtered down from the sky like rain: the horn calling the Wild Hunt to ride.

I ran the short distance to the harbor office of Godwik and Clutch, for I had promised Bee and Vai I would sit in a room with four mirrors until the danger had passed. Rory sulked on the stoop, seated on the stairs with a morose eye turned on me as I came up.

“I can’t believe you never told them,” he said. “Even Chartji left for troll town without knowing. How could you, Cat? And making me go along with it, too. It’s not right.”

“What good would it have done? You know them, Rory. They would have insisted on trying to hide me, or fighting the Wild Hunt, or something equally foolish and pointless. They would have spent the last two months so unhappy and grief-stricken and miserable. It’s better this way.”

“I’m not sure you have the right to choose for them.”

The horn’s cry rose a second time, gaining strength.

I sat next to him, holding his hand. “It’s done now. Rory, this is your last chance to cross back over in your own body, for once I am gone you will only cross over by means of death. Do you want to return to the spirit world?”

He pressed his face into my shoulder, then shook himself, and tugged on my braid, and pushed me as a brother teases his sister. “No. My home is here now.”

The third call licked the air like fire and breathed all the way into my bones. I heard the clip-clop of hooves and the scrape of wheels on cobblestones.

Rising, I pulled four letters from inside my jacket. “This is for Bee, this for Vai, this for Doctor Asante, and the last is for Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan. You know what to say to Chartji. Now you’d better go before he sees you.”

His lips were curled into the beginnings of a snarl as he snatched the letters out of my hand. “I’ll see you off. Someone ought to.”

Along the avenue, the lit Hallows’ candles set in windows went out one by one. The coach rolled out of the gloom, the four horses gleaming like moonlight. The coachman tipped his hat in greeting. The eru leaped down from the back of the coach. Clouds scudded over the bright stars and thunder rumbled like the feet of the leashed Hunt troubling the sky as it waited to be released.

I glanced at the heavens, and then at the door as the eru opened it and bumped down the steps so I could climb in. She nodded, a spark of blue flashing on her forehead.

“I take it that a willing sacrifice need not be torn to pieces and have its head thrown down a well,” I remarked as I entered the coach.

“No reason to do that unless they try to escape or fight back.” My sire sat at his ease, one leg crossed elegantly. He looked past me at Rory, on the stoop. “Is that your brother? I do lose track, for there are so many of you.”

The door closing cut off the view, but regardless my gaze had been caught by the large, gleaming object on the bench next to my sire. I had last seen the bronze cauldron in the temple of Carnonos watched over by my grandfather. The face of a horned man shone in the polished surface.

“Not a very good likeness, if you ask me,” said my sire, noticing the direction of my gaze. “Imagine! He had the effrontery to pour water into it and watch me every Hallows’ Night. I put a stop to that!”

“Did you kill him?”

“Kill him? Of course not! On Hallows’ Night, the Hunt gathers up the spirits of those fated to die in the coming year. We don’t kill them. You mortals kill each other, or you die of other causes. I only kill one mortal a year, and I do that because I am commanded to do so by my masters.”

Strangely, the moment the coach arrived, all my fear had melted away like ice under heat. The coachman cracked his whip. I pulled the shutter back in time to wave at Rory as we rolled away down the street.

“Then what did you do in the mortal world all these weeks?” I demanded.

“Your mother piqued my curiosity. Tara had all sorts of interesting stories. She told me tales of what the mortal world is truly like, for of course I normally only catch a glimpse of it when I pass through.” He ran a hand along the curve of the cauldron, tracing the figure meant to be him. Like a cat, he rather relished himself. “So besides wanting to get hold of this cauldron, I had a hankering, a curiosity if you will, to make one grand tour.”

I laughed.

“Why does that amuse you? I do not understand your jests, little cat.”

He was not like me or any human. When the river floods and drowns, it does not regret its victims. When a storm lays waste, it does not ponder the uses of power. Fire consumes and does not grieve. The ice gives no thought to what it crushes as it works its way over the land.

But I did not have to like him. “That my mother told you tales, that’s all.”

We turned the corner into a commercial district on the road leading out of town, lined with taverns and inns whose windows were ablaze with Hallows candles. These flames went out one by one as we rumbled along the cobblestones. The buzz of voluble conversation ceased, too, fading to an anxious silence that draped the street with its fear.

The luscious aroma of coffee drifted to my nose.

“Did you try coffee, Sire?”

“No.” He sniffed. “Is that smell coffee? I wondered what that was but I didn’t know how to go about getting it.”

I stuck my head out the window. “Stop here! Sire, do you have any money?”

“Money? Oh! Yes, the stamped metal roundels.”

He passed over a huge cloth bag so weighted with coins I had to set it on the floor, for it was too heavy for me to easily hold. I picked out a denarius by feel, hopped out, and dashed into a benighted coffee shop where men whispered in frightened voices about the suddenly extinguished lights. With so much confusion it was easy to place the denarius on the counter and take four full mugs back to the coach, one for each of us. I wanted to be wide-awake.

As the horses stamped we stood on the street and drank our coffee.

“My thanks,” said the coachman.

“Sharp and nutty,” said the eru, “with a taste of sun.”

When I had drained my cup, I wiped a finger along the bottom and let the latch lick the last drops off my skin.

“Mmm,” murmured the latch. “I like that!”

“What do you think?” I asked my sire.

An owl swooped down out of the night and landed atop the coach, golden eyes unblinking.

“I think it is time to go,” he said. “The courts are waiting.”

I looked him in the eye. His amber stare was just like mine. “It’s what you made me for, is it not? To be the sacrifice.”

A smile ghosted across his lips, then vanished as he glanced toward the owl and shook his head to remind me that the courts heard and saw everything he heard and saw, just as he could hear and see through the eyes of his Hunt. “All the others before you died. So are you trapped, little cat. You will never be free…”

His voice faded as on words left unsaid, for there were words he dared not say within the hearing of the owl because he was not the owl’s master. The owl was spying on him.

But I could guess. All the others before you died, because they failed. So you are trapped, because they could not understand and thus act. You will never be free unless I am also free.

As a young man in the mage House, Vai had known in his heart all along that he might as a magister gain the power and glory granted him because of his magic, but he would not be free as long as his village was bound in clientage. A prince among slaves is still a slave. Freedom cuts in every direction. No one is truly free, if even one person lies in chains.

I knew what I had to do.

As the coach rolled on I unbraided my hair and combed it out with my fingers. Let the courts be dazzled by its beauty! I pinched my cheeks to make sure they glowed, and moistened and bit my lips so they shone. My sire watched in silence, his expression a mask of ice.

Feeling bolder, I opened the shutters on both doors and gazed out over both the mortal world and the spirit world. On Hallows’ Night, the coach traveled in both worlds at once.

The spirit world flashed past in changing aspects, all the possibilities that might ever have been and every gradient between: a world in which the mansa ruled, and one in which he suffered an early death in the hold of a ship, and one in which he owned a shop and sold white damask to women who would take it away and dye it into all the colors and patterns they could dream of.

In the mortal world we sped across the quiet waves of the Mediterranean Sea and past the spice-laden markets of Qart Hadast, the jewel of ports. The fields and trees of north Africa trailed away as bands of desert crept their fingers into the green. A long lonely stretch of golden rock and pale dunes passed beneath us until we reached a salt mine. The enterprising miners in the Malian Empire had broken through to an ancient gateway between the worlds and inadvertently unleashed the ghouls who craved the salt of mortal blood and being.

Wind blew grit into the interior of the coach. The land was so quiet where once people had lived and worked and thrived, where they would do so again. The coach rocked from side to side, bucketing as we descended into the pit. Salt links the worlds. Each gate swirls with energy, the power of transition and transformation. These threads bind us all.

The shutters slammed shut. I caught in a breath, the coach jolted to a stop, and all the air punched out of me. My entire body went numb.

My sire leaned forward until his face almost touched mine. “You must be what I made you to be, Daughter.”

“Yes,” I said, because I had finally understood what he wanted the day he had encased Four Moons House in ice. “After that, Sire, you will give up all claim to me and mine. For that matter, you will also give up any claim to bind any of your children who do not wish to be bound.”

He extended a hand in the radical manner, and we shook to seal our bargain.

“By the way, may I have that big bag of coin?”

“Yes. I have no use for it.”

The latch opened the door; the steps bumped down although the eru had not disembarked. That the eru acted as footman was a courtesy for mortal eyes, for the coach was as alive as I was.

My sire climbed out. I grappled with the bag of coins, slinging it over my back despite its distracting weight. No sensible young woman raised in an impoverished family walks away from a pot of gold, even if she may never get a chance to spend it.

I took in and released a breath for courage, and I went out after him. With a hand braced on the threshold of the coach door and my feet still on the steps, I paused to survey my ground as a general may do before a battle.

The palace of the courts lay before me, the realm of both shadow and light, as deep as the murkiest pit and as high as the brightest peak. What Vai had seen as a nest of starving ghouls determined to drain him of his blood, I had seen as a grand feast populated by elegantly clothed and peacock-feathered personages who had grown accustomed to their harvest. Hard to say which was true. Maybe they both were.

The Hunt surged in the air as a mass of boiling black cloud, my brothers and sisters. I saw crows and spotted hounds, smart-mouthed hyenas and silent vipers. A cloud of wasps and a spinning web of spiders jostled against women with lions’ heads and men with the bodies of fish. Dire wolves prowled in their packs shoulder to shoulder with the tawny beauty of the big cats. Yet the hunters had been bound to serve not nature’s course but the courts’ desire.

The coach and horses were not touching the ground. I was pretty sure they could not.

I glanced back at the eru holding on at the back and ahead to the coachman sitting on the driver’s bench at the front. The eru regarded me with all three eyes. “This is as far as we can take you, Cousin,” she said.

I smiled. “Whatever happens, I want to thank you for the trust you’ve shown in me and the trust I’ve been able to give to you. Should things fall out in such a way that you discover leisure to do as you wish at some later date, my solicitor can be found at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch in the city of Havery, where you picked me up.”

The coachman raised his whip in salute.

I jumped awkwardly down into the pit, shifted the heavy bag on my shoulders, and with my sword in hand walked forward after my sire. The pit had become a resplendent plaza crowded with hungry courtiers. They slipped and slid about so much I could not count them, but I began to think they were far fewer than I had first believed. They just took up so much room and never stopped grasping and moving. Eager to get their drop of the rich feast, they parted to make a path for us that led straight to the dais of glittering salt.

On the dais stood four chairs beaten out of gold and four stools carved from obsidian. As my sire approached, human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: they who ruled as the day court and the night court, for the spirit world was washed by both light and dark. What manner of people they were I could not tell: Were they spirit creatures who had begun to lose the ability to change and had thus become more and more solid? Ancestors who craved a rigid sort of immortality? Elders who stood in relation to humans much as dragons did to the feathered people? I did not know, and right now I was not going to find out.

The courts awaited the sacrifice. Chains like whips lashed my sire to his knees before them. He knelt, but he did not bend his head; his lips were drawn back as if he wished to growl. The Hunt stirred with myriad hisses and chortles and howls and snarls.

“Give us what is ours.” The voice of the courts thundered, many in one. “So you are required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”

They ignored me, so I walked past him and planted myself in front of the dais, facing up to their chairs.

“Peace to you,” I said with my friendliest smile. “Does this night find you at peace?”

A vast and horrible silence smothered the world. Their golden eyes chained me with a will as heavy as eternity. I fell into the rip current of their gaze, into the breathing heart of the ice.

At their deepest levels, the worlds vibrate. A force flows through every part of existence. Cold mages can redirect this flow; fire mages energize and disperse it. As for what exists in the spirit world beyond our ken, courts and dragons are just names we give to powers we do not comprehend and cannot escape.

Because I was my father’s daughter I could make a story of it, a way to understand and put words to something far bigger than I was: In the worlds there is an ancient and unending duel between dragons and courts. In the Great Smoke, the mothers of dragons dragged innocent girls into the ocean of dreams, using mortal women to midwife their fragile hatchlings.

Thus the duel tipped to favor the dragons, and so the other side had fought back.

In the old village tales written down by my father in his journals, the Wild Hunt did not take blood. Death comes to all things in the mortal world, and the Wild Hunt rode on Hallows’ Night to gather in the souls of those fated to die in the coming year.

Perhaps the cold mages had come to the attention of the courts because powerful cold magic caused changes in the flow and ebb of energy in the spirit world. Perhaps mages shone so brightly and their blood tasted so sweet that, once one had been taken to bind the Wild Hunt the very first time, the courts developed a taste for their blood and then a need for it and then a desperate craving. By drinking the blood of mortals they had in the end become what we called ghouls: creatures who devour the essence of others in order to live.

I did not have to devour the essence of others in order to live. I could live perfectly happily working in a humble office with my dear cousin, building up a respectable business that involved spying and sneaking, although obviously I would be first to volunteer to do the most dirty, adventurous, and strenuous work. I could sleep perfectly happily on a mat on the floor with the man I loved, even though obviously I would prefer to lie in a bed he had built for us, because it was more comfortable. I was eager to teach my brother to cheat at cards, to nurse Vai’s mother through her weak spells and nurture Vai’s sisters into women, to hope Luce survived the war, to get to know Doctor Asante, and to write about everything to Professora Alhamrai, and maybe even to return to Expedition someday to visit the people I had become so fond of. I wanted to introduce batey to Europa. That would be something, a ballcourt in every city and town!

The courts tried to hammer me flat under the crushing cold of the ice, they wanted me to be afraid, to give up, to give in. But I braced myself on my sword and warmed my hands on my locket. I answered the polite greeting they had not made, for they did not know how to reciprocate in the traditional way.

“I have no trouble, thanks to my power as a woman. I just want to clarify two things. There is one sacrifice each year. There cannot be another, and it is this sacrifice that binds the Wild Hunt and indeed all your servants for another year. So you all agree and accept me as the sacrifice?”

“We accept.”

They were so hungry and impatient and greedy that they threw their chains off my sire and onto me. Their touch tore at my skin as a hundred sharp nails of ice, a net of barbs poised to puncture me and drink me dry.

“That being so, you take my mortal blood. Is that not right? Mortal blood seals the contract by which you first bound the Hunt and all your other servants?”

They answered by tightening the chains. A bloody seam opened on my breast right above my heart. So rich and sweet blood streams, alive with the salt of life and the spice of power. They suckled the air to suck me dry, to use the salt of my life to yet again chain those who served them.

Blessed Tanit! It hurt.

My soul was being torn from my body, all life and love and courage and strength pouring through the gash.

But I still had a tongue.

I still had breath.

I had a plan.

“My mortal blood I sacrifice. But only my mortal blood. You have no right or claim to my spirit blood, the blood I inherited from my sire. So if you have taken even a drop of my spirit blood, then the contract is broken.”