by Kate Elliott
“It will take at least a week for a courier at speed to reach Four Moons House and return,” he said, in a better mood now that he had eaten and had his arms around me. “Our difficulties are threefold. They know who we are, so our attempt to spy has already been thwarted. You must warn Bee and Rory they’re in danger. You and Bee must have time to speak to the headmaster before we leave Noviomagus, so it may be best to play along for a day or two before we break out. Also, this is a very comfortable bed, do you not agree?”
“A woman does not have to walk the dreams of dragons to foresee you plan to enjoy its comforts tonight.”
“So I do!” he remarked, as if surprised at my perspicacity. “I’m not sure you’re appreciative enough of your good fortune. As for tomorrow, I have a plan that plays to both our strengths.”
“I can’t wait to hear what you imagine those to be.”
“Nor will you wait. I am methodical and persistent. You are impulsive and unpredictable. Ouch! Not to mention wild and ungovernable.”
That was true enough, as he soon discovered.
It was a simple plan with room for precipitous change. In such a sprawling compound there were layers of propriety meant to separate the high from the low. The mage House had a lovely breakfast room where a select group of adults broke their fast. There Vai insisted we would go, although the steward asked us four times if we would not prefer a comfortable tray of food in our suite. As we walked through the corridors I could not help but notice they had taken down all the mirrors.
Vai wore the dash jacket of midnight blue with exploding flowers, which he had brought along in the satchel precisely to overawe the House residents. To my surprise it looked splendid, not at all ridiculous. As good as the man looked out of his clothing, he looked particularly fine when he was well dressed and with his beard and hair trimmed the way he liked. He had a way of moving meant to draw the eye. As we entered the dining parlor, shadowed by the steward, everyone looked up. Men and women sat at separate tables, and the women in particular watched as Vai paced the length of the side table with its platters of apple and yam pudding, various porridges of rice, corn, millet, or wheat, warm bread with butter, fried beancake, a haunch of moist beef, and a dozen other mouthwatering trifles. The coffee looked sweet and milky.
“Is this all?” he demanded. “I expected a repast fitting to a House of stature, but…”
I picked up a plate, because the beef was whispering seductively to me.
“Catherine! I cannot allow you to partake of inferior comestibles.” His breathtaking obnoxiousness commanded the entire room. Even I disliked him a little, and that was saying something considering what we had shared in the night. “Is it possible your cook can bestir herself to deliver something edible?”
I hadn’t meant to, but I whispered, “Please, I’m so hungry.”
The next thing I knew a tear was trickling down my cheek. The effect of the tear on the patrician mages was remarkable. They reacted as if a large saber-toothed cat had leaped into their midst: Some froze, while others made ready to flee.
“What is your desire, Magister?” asked the steward in the tone of a man who is never awed by the fits and starts of the powerful, because he is their equal.
“I desire a tour of Noviomagus,” Andevai said not as a request but as a demand. “What sights there are to see, if indeed there are any in such a town, for I recollect my lessons that once this was nothing more than a frontier outpost of the Roman Empire, now sadly fallen. Catherine! Put that down!”
I had taken advantage of his speech to creep over to the side table and fork a slice of beef onto my plate.
“Lord of All, Magister,” said one of the men, goaded into speech, “let the girl eat.”
My husband smiled in the most condescending way imaginable as he turned his dark gaze on the other man, who was not much older and had the look of a person gone a little soft from having lived in luxury all his days. “That is how revolution starts. You give them one scrap of beef out of pity and suddenly they wish to eat rich food that isn’t good for them and is likely spoiled besides.”
I could not help myself. Right in front of their astonished gazes, I wolfed down the slice of beef before he could take the plate away from me. His eyes flared. The chamber grew so cold so fast that my next exhalation made mist.
“I am sure a tour can be arranged,” said the steward hastily.
Vai’s eyebrows rose as the cold eased fractionally. “I am sure you can arrange such a tour, but have you any decently sprung carriages in which we may be conveyed in comfort? I was shocked at the condition of the bed. It was not adequate to my wife’s needs.”
I choked down a laugh, and tried to turn it into a coughed sob.
At the far table one woman whispered to another, “See how he dresses himself like a peacock and fits her in dull, ordinary feathers!”
Ordinary! Blessed Tanit! In Sala I had myself overseen the making of this sensible ensemble of mock-cuirassier jacket and perfectly tailored traveling skirt with a double row of buttons in the front for ease of dressing and sewn of the finest challis dyed a sophisticated rich spruce green that exactly complemented my coloring.
The steward was by now looking angry. “You may be assured that our carriages are of the first quality, Magister.”
He tried the bread. “Sadly, the same cannot be said for your cook. I will endeavor to accept what you set before me. My wife has begged me to break our journey here for some days of needed respite, for she has a frail constitution and the coach accident quite overset her delicate nerves, but I am not sure I can endure these conditions for even one more night, much less perform other duties.”
As the steward assured him that all would be arranged to his satisfaction, I stealthily ate two slices of bread magnificently flavored with a tincture of garlic and dill. Then I managed to eat my way down the side table as Andevai complained at length about the unlikelihood of anything being arranged to his satisfaction.
Not long after, we were seated in a spacious and exceptionally well-sprung carriage taking a tour of the city under the guidance of the steward. He was, he informed us imperiously, the son of Five Mirrors’s mansa. He did not like Andevai, that was obvious, but best of all, he had begun addressing gentle comments to me as if he felt sorry for me. The djeli had come along, ostensibly to narrate our tour. Although he glanced at the laced-up basket and my cane, he did not remark on them.
Noviomagus had the look of a prosperous town. Folk were out shopping. Servants pushed carts along the cobblestone streets. Like most urban centers that had survived the collapse of the Roman land empire eight hundred years ago, the old forum of the Roman city had developed into a civic center of a new town. A clock tower and a council house identified the public square where festival dances could be held, soldiers could parade, and princely bards and djeliw could declaim to large crowds. My husband compared these agreeable surroundings unfavorably to the superior architecture of cities I was pretty sure he had never visited except in prints collected into books. He then demanded to see New Bridge, whose splendors the djeli described in lengthy detail as we rolled through the streets toward the river. I enjoyed the djeli’s resonant speaking voice and fluid delivery not least because it meant I didn’t have to listen to Andevai go on in that appalling tone.
It was a mercy to get out of the carriage at New Bridge. The air was cool, and the cloudy sky was rent by wind. Andevai asked question after question about the design and engineering of the bridge. He sounded as if he actually knew what he was talking about, as perhaps a man trained in carpentry by an architect would. I lagged behind. The moment the djeli turned his back on me, I slipped away behind a passing wagon. The men attending us shouted in alarm, but I had already hidden in the shadows and raced away. Because the Feast of Mars Triumphant began this evening, shopkeepers had hung the red festival wreath pierced with a short sword from their doors or over their windows. I saw no ram’s masks in honor of the old Celtic war god Camulos, as were custo
mary in Adurnam. Here, Mars Intarabus was known as the wolf-killer because he wore a wolf’s pelt for clothing.
It was a comforting thought, soon succeeded by annoyance as I dodged out of the way of wheeled vehicles and hurried onto quieter lanes behind a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks.
Gracious Melqart! Andevai’s high-handed style really did display him in a most unflattering light. Four Moons House had a lot to answer for in its treatment of him, but he was not innocent of fault. His vanity dovetailed with his pride to make arrogance easy for him. Yet his plan had worked. Now he could keep them off guard with raging and sulking until Bee and I completed our business.
Rory was lounging in the hostel’s parlor with a mug of beer in one hand and a dozing toddler on his lap as he charmed the woman who ran the place. With her ash-blonde hair and skin the color of milk, she looked as if her ancestors had lived in this region since before the Romans came.
“Where is Bee?” I asked.
He waggled his eyebrows. “She went for a walk, though I begged her to wait until you returned. Maestra Artia says there’s been a dreadful epidemic at the New Academy.”
“All the pupils were sent home!” The woman was eager to tell the tale again. “When my husband’s cousin’s wife’s nephew went to deliver a wagonload of turnips and onions in his usual way, he was turned back from the gate by that strange young man who looks like a ghostly spirit. Several of the servants have died. On no account is anyone to enter the grounds.”
“What of the headmaster?”
“A high and mighty nobleman, they say, though I never saw him. He lingers on his deathbed!”
“How frightful!” I exclaimed, and seeing that she was not likely to leave the room without provocation, I surreptitiously pinched the toddler so hard the poor child woke up wailing.
After she apologetically carried off the screaming baby, Rory turned on me. “Cat! How could you? He peed on my arm!”
“Bee won’t be able to stop herself from poking her nose in a little farther. I’m going after her. You must lie low until we return.” I explained the situation.
“How can they wish to shoot me? They don’t even know me!”
“Go wash your jacket. Stay alert and stay inside.”
I walked out of town on the old Roman road that led south along the river to the city of Colonia. For once it was pleasant to have only my own thoughts for company. As much as I loved Vai and trusted his strength and loyalty, Bee had been right: He was not always a restful person to be with. Bee was not a restful person either, but my heart could never truly be at peace unless I knew she was safe, and I wasn’t ever wholly happy except when she was near. I hurried, eager to reach her.
At the third mile marker I reached a large estate. A towering hedge blocked my view of the land. I passed a massive iron gate closed across a pretty lane lined by evergreen cypress trees. The drive cut through landscaped grounds to a distant compound house set back by the river. On the opposite side of the gate, the impenetrable hedge gave way to a row of larger cypress grown close enough to block the view toward the river.
“Cat! Here!” Bee peeked through cypress branches.
I hopped over the roadside ditch and shoved through the branches. Before I could inform her of what an idiot she was to go tramping off without me, she dragged me out of sight behind the cypress. Inside the estate grounds, we hid in a copse of trees of white-barked alder, ringed by yet more cypress. The trees concealed a set of marble benches whose bases were carved with what I first took for serpents and then realized depicted swimming dragons with tapered wings, elongated muzzles, and smoky breath.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” I demanded. “Any terrible calamity could have befallen you! Anyway, I’m so aggravated, Bee, because nothing is going as planned!”
She listened as I explained what had happened. “I trust you did not suffer any mistreatment while staying overnight there!”
Sadly, I blushed, thinking of how we had started on the bed and ended on the table.
“Not that I need hear any details!” she said, laughing. “I have come to agree with the Romans in this. An excess of passion is clearly the sign of a undisciplined mind.”
“Vai is not undisciplined!”
She smiled in the manner of a general contemplating sweet victory. “I wasn’t talking about him.”
In the distance dogs began barking, a clamor that built to a frantic yipping. We leaped to our feet.
“Fiery Shemesh!” Bee exclaimed. “I thought we would be safely hidden here!”
A huge dog with teeth bared charged through the trees, followed by a slavering pack of equally gigantic hounds. They erupted into a deafening frenzy of yips and barks as they surrounded us. I brandished my cane, wishing desperately that it were a sword.
“Behave!” she proclaimed in her orator’s voice. They ceased barking and flattened themselves, ears back. Waggling forward, they acted like courtiers who have fallen out of favor and wish to regain the approval of a mercurial queen. She deigned to allow them to lick her hand and grovel at her feet.
“Gracious Melqart, Bee! You have always had a way with dogs, although I cannot imagine why except that dogs have no discrimination whatsoever, for they will adore anyone who feeds them!”
At the sound of my voice, several growled.
“Down!” she cried. Their growls ceased. She glanced at me with a triumphant smile. “Didn’t Andevai win your heart by feeding you? Care to try your fortune with these? I swear on Melqart’s Axe I will only let them bite off one of your hands.”
“Bee, someone is coming.”
My warning came too late. The cypress branches parted to reveal a ghost-pale figure wearing a midnight-blue dash jacket under a plain wool coat. The headmaster’s assistant stared, mouth agape. Kemal Napata was an albino of Avarian ancestry, which meant he had extremely pale skin and straw-colored hair but also broad cheekbones and eyes with an epicanthic fold to mark him as a man whose ancestry resides in the distant East. His surprise was certainly greater than our own. After all I had done and said in the last year, I could easily recognize the look of frustrated longing and struggling restraint that tightened his expression.
“Beatrice Hassi Barahal!”
“Maester Kemal Napata,” she echoed with a graceful courtesy. “Please, if you will, call off your hounds. I do not fear them, for they are quite loving, but I confess to some anxiety that they have taken a dislike to my dear cousin Cat, mistaking her name for her character.”
At the academy we had jokingly called him the headmaster’s dog for his doglike loyalty, but I examined him with a fresh perspective now. He had a stocky frame and an appealing face once you became accustomed to his unusual coloring. More importantly, as the headmaster’s assistant, he must know things most people did not.
I said, “Begging your pardon, Maester Napata, but is the headmaster a dragon?”
His gaze skipped off Bee and landed on me. “Amun’s Horns! You both must leave at once.”
A gust of wind thundered through the cypresses. The white branches of alder lashed. A heavy weight thumped. Whimpering, the hounds huddled behind Bee.
A claw with talons as long as my arm raked between two cypress trees. Smoky mist spun through branches, which crisped to brown as if scorched by heat. The thin carpet of snow in the circle melted so fast that one moment we were standing on white and the next in seeps of water. A very large creature gave a very large huff that so scared me I dropped my cane.
Trees parted as a head thrust through. Its skin was scaled with obsidian flakes that both devoured and reflected light. Its eyes were as big as my head, so fulgent a green that they shone.
My enemy.
What instinctive force clawed up from my gut I did not know; I only knew that this was my enemy and I had to kill it or be killed.
Yet its gaze paralyzed me. In its eyes lay memories like shadows.
I saw a curly-haired man lift a little girl up to stand on the lower railing of a large
, flat ferryboat. He braced himself to steady her. A crippled woman limped up next to them as they stared across a wide river. The little girl was babbling nonstop about her lovely new boots and whether there were any biscuits left to eat and if they would have to sleep in the coach once they got across the river and could she possibly hold on at the back of the next coach with the guard if she was very very good. Her parents smiled fondly at her and apologetically at the other passengers crowding on, some of whom winced away from the woman’s scarred face and empty sleeve. The ferry juddered as it cast off from the shore and began tacking across the powerful current. The woman pressed a hand protectively on her rounded belly. Wind whipped up the girl’s long black braid. The ferry bucked as if wrenched by an invisible hand, and some passengers cried out in fear. But with each tilt and dip of the boat, the girl shrieked with excited glee as she leaned trustingly into her father’s arms. She galloped her little carved horse through empty air, and with a bright smile at her mother, she said—
“Cat! Step back!”
Too late. The vast jaws of the predator opened as the ferry tipped, took on water, and sank as quickly as a stone, so fast that no one had a chance to scream. The railing scraped the girl’s hand as she clung to it, then lost hold. A rumble was all the voice the river had as it tore her father away from her. Her mother’s hand gripped hers with such desperate strength, but as her blood welled up from the scrape and dissolved into the water, she faded out of her mother’s grasp.
Delicately the beast closed its mouth over my body. Then I was drowning in a sea of smoke.
30
In the depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt. When it is woken, all tremble in fear.
In the depths of the black abyss, there drift in a watery stupor the Taninim, called also leviathans, and when they wake, their lashing tails smash ships into splinters and drive the sundered hulks under the waves.
In the depths of earth, wreathed in fire, lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All Dragons. Her smoky breath fills the ocean of dreams. She stirs, waking, and the world changes.