Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  She tipped up her face.

  I thought he would crush her to him and kiss her searchingly and deeply and with the release of all that frustrated longing, as Vai had kissed me so angrily and passionately on the stairs at Nance’s boardinghouse in Expedition.

  Kemal was not that man. As if he feared she was too fragile for his pent-up emotions, he brushed his mouth over hers in a shy, tentative kiss.

  “Gracious! Is that the whole of what you mean to do?” Bee hauled him bodily into her, pulling him down for a very different sort of kiss.

  I looked away. As my arm brushed the basket, I remembered how General Camjiata had pieced together disparate images from Bee’s purloined sketchbook to guess how to capture me on the jetty in Expedition. Hastily, I unlaced the basket. I held out the skull so it faced the shining column of the dragon.

  The cacica looked back at me. In my hands she was still a skull, but in the reflection I saw in the pearl mirror of the dragon’s scales, she was a living head.

  “Your Highness!” I cried, startled by the apparition. “We are still traveling. I assure you, I mean to find your son Haübey and return you to him as soon as I am able.”

  Her gaze fell on Bee locked in a fervent embrace with Kemal. “Distracted by kissing, as the young are wont to be. My thanks for the proper respect you have shown me, Niece. I give you warning. Trust not in fire banes. The ones you thought were your friends have betrayed you. People will speak and act in all kinds of ways because they do not believe there are ears or eyes to witness.”

  “What do you mean?” I cried, but the creature that had once been the headmaster plunged beneath the surface and I was left with a skull in my hands.

  The churning deeps turned as into glass. I saw through it into an unfathomable sea. Humble fish swam through currents made by memories of that which has happened, which we recall imperfectly, and that which is yet to come, which we cannot foresee.

  James Drake laughs as he stands with a foot on the limp body of a man. Blessed Tanit! The fallen man is Vai. Drake shoves the body with his foot and beckons for a soldier to bring a horse.

  “Catherine!” called Vai from the boat.

  I shoved the cacica’s skull into the basket and ran onto the pier. The dragon flashed away into the chasm, out of the mortal world and into the Great Smoke. As the waves of its departure slapped the shore, Vai raked six fat spheres of cold fire into the air. Light coalesced into gleaming columns so bright I could discern the green of the grass.

  I kissed and then released him. “If soldiers are coming, they’ll know right where we are.”

  “That is my intention. I want to draw them off from the academy.”

  From the road, a horn blatted and was answered thrice.

  Kemal set Bee back from him. “When I have made all safe here, I will find you,” he promised her. He turned to us. “I’ll tell them you stole our horses and fled by road. Go!”

  I dragged a speechless Bee into the boat. Vai pushed off and set to the oars as Rory coiled the line. The current caught the bow, spinning us halfway around until Vai pulled us back. Bee stared toward the bank. A lamp caught flame. Kemal stared after us until Maestra Lian took his arm to help him back up to the academy of which he was now headmaster.

  32

  For the longest time no one spoke. Rory sat cross-legged among the gear, his head buried in his hands. Bee stared back the way we had come. A candle of light floated by Vai’s knee, casting a gleam onto his beautiful face and intent expression. I watched the way his fingers tightened and relaxed on the oars, the way he glanced up between strokes at me, as if he was never quite sure he would still see me there, as if I might vanish between one breath and the next.

  All my breath spilled out of me as I forced the awful vision of James Drake out of my head. I could kill Drake. If he tried to touch Vai, I would.

  “Well!” said Bee. “Not every young woman has a dragon fall in love with her!”

  I laughed, for her gloating tone scoured fear from me. I counted off on my fingers. “Goodness, Bee! A legate. A prince. An infamous radical. Even the mansa seemed inclined to fall for your prodigious charms. It seems unthinkable a dragon in the shape of a man would not do so likewise.”

  “How can you speak to me of any of those others!” she cried. “They are but… trifles compared to…” Words failed her.

  Vai’s gaze flashed up to meet mine. He smiled the intimate smile meant for me only, the one that made my cheeks grow warm. “I would have demanded more than a kiss.”

  “I must say that in your case, Andevai, I do believe that horse has already left the stable,” retorted Bee in the most dignified manner imaginable, after which she spoiled the effect with a toss of her curls and an audible sniff.

  Rory lifted his head. “Wouldn’t it be more precise to say in that case that the horse has already entered the—”

  “Rory.” Vai’s tone was genial, but he cut him off.

  I cut in. “Maestra Lian is a dragon dreamer. Both of you have a ghostly third eye.”

  Bee touched her forehead, then giggled giddily. “Don’t joke, you beast! Think of how unsightly that would look! I wonder why the headmaster never revealed the truth to me while we attended the academy.”

  “If he had told you what he was and what you were, back before all this happened, would you have believed him?”

  “I suppose not,” she said with a grudging sigh. “Anyway, my dream was wrong, about meeting the headmaster in his study.”

  “We found the headmaster in Noviomagus on the Feast of Mars Triumphant. He ate fire challengers. I spoke to the cacica as in a mirror. If you didn’t truly understand the dream you were having, you might have interpreted it in a more familiar way.”

  “Why, Cat,” she said in surprise, “I do believe you are right for once.”

  A horn’s call rose and faded. Rain spattered over us. I clutched Bee’s hand more tightly.

  “Catherine, are you cold?” Vai pulled the left oar to steady us in the current. A bauble of cold fire chased out in front of us to light our way.

  “I’m scared of being out on the water, to be honest.”

  Bee put an arm around me, but her attention was fixed on the globe of cold fire. “Andevai, how far can you push the cold fire away from you before you lose control of it? For that matter, how close must you be to a fire to kill it?”

  “In Expedition we did a number of experiments to study exactly these issues.”

  “Did you?” said Bee, shifting excitedly beside me on the facing bench. “What did you do?”

  “Everything will be different here because of the proximity and mass of the ice, but…” He described how the troll scientists he had worked with had set different combinations of things on fire and adjusted him for distance, angle, and substances placed between him and the fire. They had tested his ability to manipulate cold fire at distance, and how long the brightness would last after he had let go of it. “And both the feathered people and the dragons have an effect on my cold magic.”

  As they talked, I shut my eyes and pretended we were in a carriage.

  After another hour we put in at an isolated sandbank. The boat became our roof as we huddled beneath like kittens under the beaver-pelt blanket and our winter coats, with Vai and Rory on the outside and Bee and me snug between them. Rory fell asleep at once.

  “No kissing,” said Bee.

  Vai kissed me anyway. The touch of his lips was as soft as the caress of flowers.

  “The cacica warned we must beware cold mages pretending to be our friends,” I said. “But we already know the mansa of Five Mirrors House sent word to Four Moons House.”

  He sighed. “Yes. I should have known better than to believe I could return to the Houses.”

  “To think dragons walk among us and we never knew!” whispered Bee. By the lilt in her voice I could tell she was wide awake. “It seems to me the spirit world and the Great Smoke are locked in a struggle that neither can win. One grows powerful while the
other grows weak, and then they reverse, back and forth endlessly.”

  “Perhaps the interlocked worlds are like steam engines, ever heating and cooling,” said Vai.

  “Gas expands as its temperature goes up, and a balloon deflates as its temperature goes down,” she murmured. “What if cold mages are moving the vital energy from one place to another?”

  “I’m trying to sleep,” said Rory, and they lapsed into silence.

  Tucked against Vai, I listened to him think by listening to the way he breathed steadily, sucked in a breath as a thought struck him, then slowed again as his mind waded through the possibilities. The river flowed with a soothing voice that pulled me into its drowning waters. Held in his arms and with Bee’s back pressed against mine and Rory’s soft snuffling just beyond her, I did not fear. My mother’s hand and my father’s voice had guided me home. I slept.

  I woke alone in the frosty chill. A pallor of gray brushed the edges of the night, promising dawn to come. Wisp-lights trailed along the far bank.

  Vai knelt beside me, a gloved hand shaking my shoulder. “Catherine, wake up.”

  “I’m awake. What are those lights?”

  “Troops searching the shore. We’ve got to get back out on the water.”

  The Rhenus River flowed north before its final curving southwest plunge toward the vast marshy delta we in Adurnam called the Sieve, which poured through a hundred channels into the Atlantic Ocean. On this stretch of the river the current was steady but not treacherous. Vai gave us each turns at the oars. The banks were overgrown with bushes and woodland. All morning we saw no villages or fields, and only once a rider on horseback.

  Just past midday and by now exceedingly thirsty and hungry, we spotted a village on the western bank marked by the round houses typical of northwestern Celts. It appeared to be a peaceful place, folk about the spring business of sharpening plowshares and milking ewes. We pulled into a backwater and tied up.

  The village was larger than it seemed from the river, with a pair of temples and a blacksmith’s forge at the intersection of two cart tracks. The crossroads was marked by a stone carved with the image of a seated man with antlers on his head, who held a snake in one hand and an armband in the other. Called Carnonos in my mother’s village, he had other names elsewhere and was often called a god, but I knew the figure was a depiction of the Master of the Wild Hunt, who in the old tales guided the souls of the dead across the veil that separates this world from the spirit world. My father had recorded one such tale in a journal: Everyone knew the worst thing in the world was to walk abroad after sunset on Hallows’ Night, when the souls of those doomed to die in the coming year would be gathered in for the harvest.

  The Hallows’ Hunt was, my father had opined, a way for people to comprehend the unexpected nature of death. The old tale had not spoken of blood and chains. Had the Wild Hunt always hunted blood to feed the courts? Not according to the old tales. Likewise, had young women always walked the dreams of dragons? For it certainly seemed that dragons had somehow planted a seed whose fruit had become dragon dreamers.

  Had the worlds always been one way, or did the worlds also change, shifting and transforming?

  A hammer’s pounding started up at the forge.

  “Maybe we’d better go back,” I said.

  “Blacksmiths have no love for cold mages, it’s true,” said Vai, “but we can use this to our advantage.”

  “How is it to our advantage to have a blacksmith have no love for you, Andevai?” Bee asked.

  “Why would you give speeches to gatherings of people, Beatrice,” he responded in exactly the same tone, “when so many are hostile to what you have to say?”

  “Because I may change their minds if only they hear and understand the important things I have to tell them!”

  “Just so,” he agreed.

  Folk gathered to watch us approach the forge. Inside, the bellows kept pace, and the fire kept burning despite Vai’s halting twenty paces away. That was part of the blacksmith’s magic. A white-skinned man with a burn-scarred face and work-marred hands emerged, wiping his palms on a cloth. He spoke with a rough dialect, but I was beginning to get an ear for it.

  “Ye is a magister,” the man said. “We like not having truck with yer kind, mage. Some of them mage House soldiers was a-coming through here yesterday. They carried the banner of Five Mirrors, but they had riding with them some men wearing tabards marked with the four phases of the moon.”

  Vai showed no emotion, but it was all I could do not to react to the mention of soldiers from Four Moons House. The courier simply could not have gotten there and back so quickly.

  “We thanked them kindly and showed them the road out of here. Yet they still went a-taking a lass and a lad and four stout sacks of turnips with them, as they are having the right to do. So if ye must take anything from our peaceful village, take it, and then with our favor, ye may walk out that road likewise, and be quick about it.”

  “Perhaps I am the one the soldiers are looking for,” said Vai.

  The blacksmith looked him up and down, for he was wearing his laborer’s clothes, having packed away the precious dash jackets. “Ye is a workman’s son, not a fancy magister.”

  “I am a village-born lad, but I am a cold mage likewise. You know how it is with the mage Houses. They take what they want and bind it to them.”

  “That, indeed!” said the blacksmith. The village folk murmured in agreement, as they would make interjections when a djeli told a tale. I could not help but notice that men stood in the front ranks with the women and children in a separate group at the back.

  Vai went on. “Besides that, I have something to tell you. For many generations have blacksmiths and cold mages stood at odds. You know this to be true.”

  “I know it,” said the blacksmith, and from within the crowd people echoed, “I know it!”

  “Blacksmiths keep the secret of fire, and a dangerous secret it is,” said Vai.

  “That’s true,” said the blacksmith, “but ye must be knowing it is no fit subject for standing out in the public square, to be speaking of such mysteries. Especially not in front of women.”

  “There is a way for fire mages and cold mages to work together,” said Vai, “as I have had reason to learn in the western lands across the ocean, which are ruled by a people called the Taino.”

  The blacksmith’s blond hair was shaved to stubble, although he had a long beard. He scratched his bristly hair now. “Ye speak like a madman. Why have ye come here?”

  “I speak truth. We seek to escape the mage House. I admit we need food and drink, but that is not all we are about.” He glanced at Bee with a lift of his chin.

  As in the game of batey, she took the pass. “Are you a free village? Do you rule your own selves? Or are you bound to a prince or a mage House, all that you have and your own labor and children besides chained by law and custom as their property? I know the answer from the words you have already spoken.” Some nodded, while others stared with frowns, wondering what path her speech would take. Perhaps they weren’t sure they wanted to hear such words from a woman. “You are not the only ones who dislike the tithes and chains by which people are bound. We are bound likewise, yet we fight.”

  “How can ye fight?” said the blacksmith with a curt laugh. “Best to give them what they want and see their backs as they are leaving.”

  “Words can fight when enough people know there can be another way,” I said.

  Vai said, “Let fire mages and cold mages work together, and we can break down the power of mage Houses and princes.”

  The blacksmith’s sneer stung like the ashy smoke of the forge. “And raise up ourselves in their place? A friendly offer, lad, but this thing cannot be done. We of the brotherhood hold our secrets close to keep ourselves alive. We who live with the fire burning within us live one breath away from our death. This ye are knowing, and likewise I have said more than enough. We are wanting no trouble here. Begone, and we will pretend we neve
r saw ye if any are come to ask.”

  “I do not know by what secrets and rituals blacksmiths protect themselves from the backlash of fire, but I do know there is a way for cold mages to protect fire mages. If they trust each other.”

  Several of the old men laughed, as if this were the greatest joke they had heard in an age.

  The blacksmith’s frown made me think he might melt into white-hot slag just from anger. “Ye’s a tale-teller, lad, is that it? A wanderer trying to taste a piece of bread with what words ye have to spend. The two lasses’ pretty looks are a better lure than yer blasphemous promises.”

  The old men gestured for the villagers to move away as from a fight.

  Vai did not budge. “You know better than to speak insultingly of another man’s wife to his face, much less to hers, so I will let that pass for this once. This is what I know: Cold magic feeds me, but the backlash of fire magic devours itself. Yet I can teach you how to pour the backlash of fire through the threads of my magic and thus harmlessly into the bush—the spirit world—where it cannot harm you. This is the truth. I swear it on my mother’s honor.”

  By no other vow could he have so forcibly impressed them. The blacksmith looked startled, but the outright hostility drained from his face.

  “I will talk to ye in the forecourt of the temple of Three-Headed Lugus,” he said at length, “if ye are willing to enter the god’s sanctuary.”

  “I am a carpenter’s son. My father and uncle made offerings to thrice-skilled Lugus, whom they called Shining Komo with three hands and three birds.”

  The man indicated me. “This one? She is truly yer wife?”

  “She is. And the other is her cousin.”

  “My apologies,” he said as politely as anyone could please. He beckoned Vai over and spoke in a whisper, but of course I could hear them perfectly well. “To enter the forecourt of the god, ye must abjure the touch of woman.”

  “For how long?” Vai asked with perfect seriousness, as if the request were not at all unreasonable.