Cold Steel

48

The festive cacophony twirled on unceasing as I took in a breath and let it out, as I moistened my bone-dry lips. My legs and arms trembled, but I did not fall.

The throned presences leaned forward as if suckling on a suddenly dry teat. Stretched toward me a little more, as if puzzled. Then probed with talons and knife-bladed teeth. The sharp planes of their human-like visages wrinkled as they sniffed the air, as they tugged on the chains and, in increasing frustration, shook those chains to try to force the blood to flow.

But the chains no longer bound me because there was no possible way to separate my mortal blood from my spirit blood.

“I invoke rei vindicatio.” My voice rang clear above the hissing whirl of the courts as the chains slithered off my body and wilted like withering vines on the ground. “Without my blood to seal the contract, we reclaim ownership of our own selves.”

Insubstantial chains make no sound as they shatter.

What you hear are the defiant shouts as we rise.

My sire laughed with the howl of a man who has had to keep his contempt hidden for far too long. He sprouted eru’s wings, unfurling them to their full majesty and making ready to fly. The Wild Hunt scattered with a boisterous roar, fleeing the courts.

“Sire!” I cried, although it was surely hard to hear me in the clamorous storm of its departure. “Sire! How do I get out of here? How do I get home?”

Like the ungrateful, manipulating creature he was, he flew away without a backward glance.

The plaza erupted in a blizzard of chaos. Daggers of ice burned my skin. The dais and its thrones dissolved in a shrieking wail whose punch was like a spear of thwarted greed and rage that drove me to my knees. Agony raked through my chest. But I could not faint. I could not falter.

The courts swelled like vast wings unfurling. Wave upon wave of furious beings pounded against me as storm waves thrash the shore. I drew my sword and frantically parried, deflecting their freezing bite and icy grip. But my strength was ebbing fast.

This was the one part of my plan I had been able to devise no answer for, the reason I feared I might not survive. I had thought to fight my way to the gate and through to the salt mine, where I might hope and pray to find enough water in the desert in order to live and travel a long road back to the ones I loved. But as the wrath of the courts rose like a flood tide around me, I realized I was going to drown before I could ever cut my way to the mortal world.

“Hsss! Hurry!”

A door swung open in the air above me. I shook off the bag of coins and heaved it into the coach, tossed my sword in after, and hooked an arm through the steps. Claws raked through my skirt and petticoats. Teeth fastened on my boot. I kicked until they fell back.

They were only gathering themselves for another, more ferocious assault. But the brief respite was all I needed to pull myself up, roll inside, and slam shut the door.

Gale winds tossed the coach up and down and sideways as it bucketed away from the palace. Where we went I did not know. I clung to my sword. The bag of coins slammed into my belly, winding me. Where the chains had bitten into me to take the first taste of my blood, my chest throbbed like fire. The pain of that wound deafened and blinded me and I just lay there panting in the hope that oblivion would claim me soon. All I could do was tighten my hand around my locket and pray that if I had just been infested with the salt plague, then the disease would consume me quickly and with less agony than this.

“Blessed Tanit,” I murmured, “please bring me home.”

My blood seeped onto the floor of the coach, moistening and melting into the coach’s substance. Blood makes the gate.

I fell through.

The goddess caught me in her arms. She cradled me like a newborn, her brown face smiling down at me. Tears wet her cheeks. A crescent moon shone above her head to light the path for those who must walk into darkness.

“Choose, little cat. For you may have peace now if you wish it.”

“I just want to go home.”

Home is the people you care for, the ones who care for you in return.

Her kiss woke me back into the world. When I opened my eyes I found myself kneeling in a garden lush with pomegranates and ripe grapes and cascades of purple flowers. Before me rose a stone statue of the goddess wearing her lioness head, she who protects women but also gives them the strength to protect themselves.

The horns of a crescent moon sank into dawn. Pain pooled at my chest. Sticky blood oozed down my body to be swallowed by the damp soil. I blinked. A winter wind rattled through bare branches, for I now found myself huddled not in a summer garden but all alone and abandoned in an empty sanctuary. The air had a bitter, angry bite. Someone had stabbed me in the heart and then eaten out my head. I pitched forward onto my face.

A familiar and beloved voice spoke my name. “Catherine. My sweet Catherine, wake up.”

A familiar and beloved hand took hold of mine. “Cat, wake up! What on earth got into her to wander off to Tanit’s sanctuary when she ought to have been hiding inside like every other sensible person? I thought I was going to die of anguish when we got back and she was gone!”

“I should like to know what miscreant stabbed her in the chest. She’s fortunate it is such a shallow wound.”

“Look how her skirts are torn. I can’t leave her for a single day without her getting into trouble!”

Warm lips brushed my forehead. “She’s feverish. Let’s get her home.”

I dreamed I was turning into a pillar of salt, grain by grain. I was thirsty all the time, and hot, and uncomfortable, but there was always someone to wipe me down with a damp cool cloth or lift me up to spoon broth down my parched throat. I could not get enough salty gruel to eat.

Sometimes Rory licked my face with his rough cat’s tongue, rumbling softly as he guarded me in his cat shape. Sometimes Bee held my hand and sang to me, off-key, or combed out and rebraided my tangled hair. Sometimes Vai slept beside me in the bed he had built for us—although I had only slept in it once, I recalled its contours with intimate precision.

Obviously I was hallucinating, because I also saw Kayleigh sitting with her mother in attendance on my sickbed, and it was intriguing to watch how animated Vai’s mother was with her eldest daughter compared to the stiff formality she offered her only son. For what seemed like hours Vai would sit on the bed gently stroking my hands or hair while talking softly to Kofi about the latest radical pamphlet by Professora Nayo Kuti or the setbacks the radical efforts had met with in the Veneti dukedoms under the hand of their overlord, the Armorican prince, and his pregnant daughter who would act as regent if she bore an infant son.

Kofi’s laugh heartened me. “I reckon it is as well we happened to come when we did, for I thought sure I should have to tie yee to a chair lest yee burn down the entire building for the way yee lost yee head. Not that yee can burn things, fire bane! Peradventure yee shall have an easier life of it, Vai, if yee stop and think before yee panic.”

“I did not panic!”

“You did,” said Bee, for I just then realized she was sitting on the bed at my feet, her pencil scratching across a page.

“No more than you did, Beatrice!”

“Is this how it shall be, yee two always bickering?” demanded Kofi. “Because if it shall be this way, I can go back to a more restful domicile in Expedition and likewise not have to suffer this frightful cold.”

“You only think this is cold because you’ve not yet experienced winter,” muttered Vai so peevishly that Kofi laughed again, obviously teasing him, and I realized it was Kofi’s willingness to joke with him that had likely won Vai’s trust when the two men first met.

Bee broke in. “I think the worst was when we were searching and those men at the coffee shop said they had seen a young woman answering to Cat’s description drinking coffee with the horned hunter god Carnonos on the street!”

“People will see anything in shadows when they’re frightened,” said Vai, “but I admit it gave me a turn. For you know it’s exactly the sort of thing she’d have thought she had to do, sacrifice herself to save us.”

“It surely is, and it makes me so angry to imagine her even thinking of doing such a thing to us! Never telling us, sneaking off… well, she didn’t, so all’s well.”

All’s well, until you become a salter with sightless eyes, trapped inside a deathless crystal body with your own dying thoughts and a craving that will not go away.

I tossed and I turned, for the ground was rumbling and thumping beneath me. As in a restless dream a woman with feathers and shells in her hair entered the room. Her gentle hand traced my navel; her lips touched my forehead with a kiss that snaked through my body to kindle my blood. She spoke: “She is clean.”

Clean was all very well, but I needed to be able to talk!

Rory touched a finger to each of my eyes. “Cat, I swear, you talk constantly even in your sleep. It’s safe to wake up. I never gave them the letters, so they don’t know anything.”

I opened my eyes. Rory sat in a chair next to me. I lay on the bed Vai had built for us, and strange it was to do so, for we had not had it with us before. A fabric-covered standing screen blocked my view of the rest of the room, its golden suns and silver moons smiling at me. By the quality of the light I guessed it to be mid-afternoon on a cloudy day. I heard the clatter and ring of utensils and cups as people ate at a nearby table.

“Why am I dreaming that Kofi and Kayleigh are here?” I demanded, although my voice came out as a hoarse whisper. “Have I been delirious?”

He rolled his eyes in an expression copied from Bee at her most aggravating. “That is one word for it. Kofi and Kayleigh and their baby and people arrived on Hallows’ Day on a ship from Expedition. The Assembly in Expedition has sent Kofi to be ambassador to Europa, only no one really knew where he ought to go, so they sent him to Godwik and Clutch to get his bearings. Then Bee and Vai returned with the others at sunset on Hallows’ Day. You can imagine what happened when they found you missing! It’s fortunate we tracked you down as quickly as we did. I admit it was rather dramatic to find you just at sunrise in the goddess’s temple. Are you better now?”

Venturesomely I swung my feet out from under the beaver-pelt blanket and set them on the plank floor, which radiated heat, for evidently the hypocaust had been repaired. I wore the nightgown I’d been given at White Bow House, and my chest had a poultice on it, wrapped into place by linen strips. “How long have I been sick?”

“Eight days.”

According to report, if a human is bitten by a ghoul, the onset of the disease is so swift and implacable that the victim will become morbid in less than seven days. So the headmaster had read aloud to us the day Bee had argued with Bran Cof in his study.

Eight days! Well! This was encouraging! I stood, and my feet stayed under me. Holding on to Rory’s arm, I shuffled to where I could see past the screen and into the room.

The scene of a family dinner just come to its end could not have been more charming even had Bee sketched it. Vai’s mother was seated in the chair of honor, looking frail but aglow with happiness as she held the hand of her pregnant daughter, Kayleigh. Bintou and Wasa were fomenting mischief with a lad I was pretty sure was one of Kofi’s young cousins, brought with him from Expedition. Old Bakary was seated next to Bee, and to my surprise Beatrice was paging through her sketchbook while the djeli made comments. Over at a lovely new desk Chartji, Caith, Godwik, and the Taino woman I had seen in my delirium bent over a schematic Kofi had unrolled. The behica was explaining about good plumbing, drinking water, and cholera.

Vai stood looking at it, too. He held a fat baby with chubby brown cheeks and a chortling laugh. I had just decided that I had to be dreaming when he turned his head and smiled at me, as if he’d known I was standing there. He gave a half-wink as if to say that I ought to notice how handsome he looked with a baby in his arms and didn’t I want him to have one of his very own?

With a smile, I mouthed, Soon but not yet.

Then everyone else saw me, and their exclamations of delight and concern bent me like a reed under the onslaught of a winter gale. I retreated to the bed and sank down. Vai and Bee hurried in to sit on either side of me.

“Love, how are you?”

“I’m hungry! I could eat a whole side of beef and have room for turnips besides!”

“We were so worried,” said Bee, wringing my hands until I grimaced and said, “Ouch!”

Vai brushed strands of hair off my brow. “Why on earth did you go to Tanit’s sanctuary on Hallows’ Night without telling anyone? We thought you had been taken by the Wild Hunt!”

“I don’t remember that part very well,” I said truthfully. “But I do remember that you asked me if I had anything I wanted to do. I want to build batey courts in Europa so we can have our own batey leagues and tournaments. Isn’t that a good idea? And in a few years we can go to the desert and destroy any of the ghouls that were caught on the other side of the gate. Without blood, no more will ever fall into the mortal world. If the last of them are hunted down, there is a chance the salt plague can be eradicated. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Bee pressed the back of a hand to my forehead. “Is she still feverish?”

“No, that’s exactly the sort of adventure I would expect her to undertake.” Vai flicked a finger along my cheek. “However, there is one thing we’ve all been waiting for you to explain, Catherine.”

Rory had been leaning against the wall, arms crossed. He sighed as might a long-festering boil when it is at last punctured. “You may as well tell the truth, Cat. When you called the coach and four and the eru into this world to help you hunt down and kill James Drake, you had to make a bargain with them that you would allow them to live in your household for as long as they wished.” He opened his eyes wide and raised his eyebrows, head jutted forward aggressively, in warning.

Blinking was all I could manage. “Oh.”

Vai said, “You can imagine our surprise when we brought you home from Tanit’s temple and found the coach, the horses, a heavy bag of gold coins, and the two of them in the stable.”

Bee leaned into my shoulder. “In the hay, indulging in a most ardent embrace. I thought it was sweet, although Andevai did not find it as amusing.”

“Did you not, my love?” I asked.

“We found them a room,” he said. I hadn’t known the man could blush like that!

“Do they bide here still?”

“They do,” said Vai, “and in truth, it is convenient to have them, for we could not otherwise afford to house a coach, much less stable four horses. I just find it a little odd.”

They both stared at me with the expressions of people who suspect the worst but feel you are not quite yet up to being accused of perfidy.

In the end it wasn’t just that I could wind shadows about me and sneak around where people didn’t want me to go. It was that I understood the importance of misdirection.

“Now that we have a coach and four, you can go to Noviomagus, Bee. We can go as soon as I’m stronger. Perhaps Chartji has some business for us to take care of there as well, so we can combine work and love! I am sure there are radicals to meet with, too, for it seemed to me that the prince and mage House in Noviomagus had not the least interest in listening to the radical cause.”

“That would be delightful,” cried Bee, blushing.

“Yes, for the first hour, until you fall simpering into Venus’s coils and I am left to mope about Noviomagus on my own, although that kindly steward I met at Five Mirrors House might be sympathetic to my sad plight.”

Vai frowned. “What manner of reckless mischief you can get up to on your own or together I don’t even like to think. Not that it’s any of my business, mind you, for I am sure you can do as you please,” he added as Bee opened her mouth to expostulate.

“You ought to be cautious, though, Bee,” I added thoughtfully. “Maybe you did dream of that fabric before Vai found it, and you just didn’t realize it. I know dragon dreamers are barren when they mate with men, but Kemal isn’t a man even when he’s in man form.”

“Cat!” Blushing, she clutched her sketchbook to her breast.

Vai was still vexing himself over my mention of the kindly steward. “I need to negotiate with the mansa of Five Mirrors House regardless on another matter. Viridor can meet me there. He and I have begun a correspondence regarding new pedagogical methods. I’ll send a dispatch to alert them. Kofi needs to see something of Europa, and I wish to introduce him around.”

So it was that twelve days later, with a light fall of snow dusting the ground, I set off to escort my cousin to meet a dragon with whom she had the intention of becoming romantically involved.

Bee was so charmingly nervous that she kept running back into the house for things she was sure she had forgotten. The coachman stood at the horses’ heads, chatting with Kofi. In company the eru had proven to be much more reserved than the relaxed coachman, so she waited by the door with one eye on the sky, as if making sure a blizzard was not about to drop in.

Shivering, I climbed in to warm myself with heated bricks tucked inside my fur cloak. I had just received two letters. One was from Doctor Asante, written in the manner of a close kinswoman desirous of getting to know better a beloved child from whom she had been long separated. I had read it ten times already. The other was a letter from Kehinde via Chartji, explaining that a printer had been jailed by the prince of Colonia and asking if I might lend my skills to a mission to rescue the man before he was executed for sedition. Colonia wasn’t far from Noviomagus. I could probably manage it by myself.

“You’re looking thoughtful, love. What are you considering doing that I don’t want to hear about until it’s over?” Vai arranged himself on the seat opposite with care, as if he believed a many days’ journey in the coach would not wrinkle his clothing simply because he did not wish it.

I smiled, for Rory and I had, between us and the coachman and eru, covered our tracks. “I can’t help but be reminded of the evening you and I met and married all in the space of an hour. Do you know, Vai, you’re so awfully handsome I suppose I might have been able to fall in love with you that first evening when you took me away from my aunt and uncle’s house, if only you hadn’t been so awful in every other way.”

He relaxed, stretching out his feet to tangle with mine. “My grandmother warned me it is rash and reckless for a man and woman to join their affections in marriage just for the sake of physical attraction. Marriage is meant to be arranged by the elders so no trouble comes of it. Falling in love with my good looks would have been a terrible mistake. If an understandable one.”

“I certainly had no chance to fall in love with your humble demeanor. Since I doubt you have one.”

He glanced at me through half-lidded eyes in the coy way he had when he had drawn out just the sort of teasing joke he loved me to make. Rory stuck his head in, gave me a kiss, embraced Vai in a brotherly farewell, and bounded away into the house far too eagerly.

“I was surprised when Rory decided to stay behind,” I remarked.

“You see, I did forget it!” cried Bee as she clambered in, plopped down next to me, and set a basket on my lap. “Sweet yam pastries, crescent rolls, rice and peas that Kayleigh made for Kofi, and a jar of Serena’s yam pudding. Rory has made me a bet that he will seduce her before we return.”

“Good fortune with that,” Vai said. “Serena is not interested in dalliance.”

“How would you know?” I demanded.

He flashed a smile, silently laughing at me. “She’s angling for a prestigious marriage with a very promising magister from Five Mirrors House. There are two powerful candidates to be heir, and the mansa there wants to move one out of the way so there is no trouble.”

Bee batted her eyelashes as her most dangerously honeyed smile lit her face. “If that is the case, don’t you worry about bringing such a powerful magister into Four Moons House?”

He looked at her blankly. “No. Why would I?”

Kofi stuck his head in. “I shall ride up front to see the countryside. Fair wild, I call this!”

“I want to hold on in back with the eru,” I said.

“No!” Bee and Vai spoke at the same time, as Kofi shut the door.

“You are so recently recovered, dearest,” said Bee. “It really is outside of enough that you are making such a long journey so soon.”

“It was your idea!”

“It was your idea!” retorted Bee primly. “I only agreed because it is time I got to have an adventure!”

“Because giving radical speeches and slamming down rude hecklers as soldiers march to arrest you is not an adventure? Wrestling an overloaded rowboat for hundreds of miles down the Rhenus River with only a lazy cat for company is not an adventure? Sleeping with the most famously handsome radical in Europa—”

“What?” said Vai. “Bee and Brennan Du… what?”

“—is not an adventure? Not to mention the part where you marry a prince of the Taino, or are asked to run for a seat on the first elected council in Europa.”

Bee sighed happily, paging through her sketchbook with the dreamy blush of an addled schoolgirl. “Yes! Who knows what will happen next?”

The latch’s sliver eyes and wire mouth glittered as its sour little voice woke. “I won’t know. No one tells me anything.”

In the sudden hush that throttled the ones I loved best in all the world, the coachman snapped his whip and cried, “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!” The eru leaped onto the back of the coach, and we rolled out onto the street, wheels rumbling on stone.

Bee put her nose down by the latch, which matched her glare for glare.

In a low voice Vai said, “I thought you were just making that up to entertain us, like you do.”

“What do I ever make up, I should like to ask? Andevai! You do believe I punched a shark, don’t you?”

“Yes, love, I believe you punched a shark just like I believe you drank coffee with the Master of the Wild Hunt on the streets of Havery on Hallows’ Night.”

Bee sat up. Her eye turned on me as her expression bloomed into the full flower of indignant suspicion. “But she did punch a shark. James Drake was on the beach and saw it happen. He told the general and me all about it.”

They looked at each other, sharing an unspoken thought, and then they looked at me.

In the depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt, and when it wakes, all tremble in fear. In the depths of the black abyss there drifts in a watery stupor the leviathan whose lashing tail can smash ships into splinters and drive the sundered hulks under the waves. In the depths of the smoke lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All Dragons. If she stirs, waking, the world changes. So we are told.

But none of that seemed at all frightening compared with the prospect of Bee and Andevai united in exasperation and anger, against me.

Me!

I thought about how many days it was going to take us to reach Noviomagus and how many hours of that time they were going to spend scolding and haranguing me as only they could.

“Everyone knows all the good parts except me,” groused the latch. “For instance, where are we now and where are we going? Why? How did we get here?”

There is more than one way to skin a cat. Or at least, if you’re the cat, to stay unskinned by rebuking tongues and accusing eyes for just a little longer.

“Fortunately, it’s a very expansive story and one I can tell you if you don’t mind hearing every piece of it all. At length.”

“Catherine, I believe you owe us some manner of explanation!”

“Cat, what have you been hiding from us? What did you do?”

“I don’t mind, no matter how long it takes!” said the latch, with the nearest thing to a real smile I had ever seen on its dour face. “Do you have any of that coffee stuff? That was very tasty.”

“We can get coffee along the way like we did before. Let me see. There’s a great deal you don’t know, so it’s best if I start at the beginning.”

First I peeked into the basket to see that there was indeed a jar of Serena’s most excellent yam pudding tucked to one side. Then I settled myself more comfortably on the seat and smiled at my beloved if fulminating cousin and my handsome if reproachful husband. Finally I winked at the latch that had just saved me.

The latch winked shyly back, like a child caught out on its first budding infatuation.

Never let it be said I could not talk my way out of any trouble that I could not punch.

“The history of the world begins in ice, and it will end in ice.”