by Kate Elliott
With a sound like a monstrous beast inhaling, the flames vanished as all the fires went out.
Drake was dead.
Dead.
I had to secure our precarious situation. The cold mages sprawled limp on the steps, but I had not the leisure to worry about them. The fire mages were frozen. The soldiers stared in horror at my sire. While it was true that a great deal of magic was billowing off him, to my eyes he looked like a perfectly ordinary man. And while his clothes certainly were severe for being sewn out of unrelenting black, they were not otherwise exceptional or astonishing. But the soldiers dropped their rifles and fell on their faces, begging for mercy.
A moment later several young fire mages and a few more soldiers came running around the side of the building, chased by a saber-toothed cat. They, too, surrendered in abject fear, but the instant the cat saw the Master of the Wild Hunt, he turned tail and ran.
I knelt beside Vai and bent to rest my cheek lightly against his lips. The whistling of his labored breathing calmed me. He was alive. Yet that was not his breath whistling. A teakettle hiss shivered the air. Pinpricks of ice jabbed my skin. Crystals grew out across the scorched and blackened front of the building. Ice spread in curves and scallops, cones and six-sided lacework.
Years ago ice had devoured Crescent House.
Now ice was engulfing Four Moons House.
I could no more stop my sire than I could stop winter.
“Bee!” I cried, waving her forward from where she peered out the coach door. “Hurry!”
Without looking to see if she followed, I ran over the threshold into the building, looking neither to my left nor to my right. The path I had taken on the day the husband I had not wanted had brought me here remained fixed in my mind so clearly it took no effort for me to turn right, left, left, and then right to reach the long salon I recalled all too well. Its glass doors looked onto an interior garden enclosed by the wings of the House and a high stone wall behind.
The mural painted along the salon’s walls, depicting the Diarisso ancestors guiding their kinsfolk and retainers and slaves along the hidden paths of the waterless desert to safety, had peeled and smeared and turned brown in patches where flames had begun to eat through the walls. Yet the strong-as-iron women and handsome men clothed in gold and orange strode undaunted, their chains of magical power and secret knowledge wreathing them like vines. The paint glittered with flashes of light as ice penetrated the walls. It made the mural seem to move, as if the ancestors were walking still into the future they had made for themselves out of the devastation of what they had been forced to leave behind.
The glass doors opening onto the garden had cracked and shattered from the heat. I wrapped the hem of my skirt around my hand and opened metal latches so hot they burned, then kicked down the framework of glass doors sagging on their hinges.
I could not count the number of people trapped in the garden. Some had been trying to lift others out over the back wall, but judging from the shouts beyond the wall and the scorched tops of trees, I guessed that several fire mages and soldiers had been stationed there to prevent anyone from escaping. Nearby a big cat roared.
I hated Drake all over again. What manner of man cared more for his own perverted sense of honor and pride than for people’s lives?
Winter chased through the doors and kissed the air. Snowflakes drifted prettily through the chamber on a lazy wintry breeze. I shivered.
Bee did not need to be told what to do. How someone so small and lovely could bellow in quite that ear-shattering manner never failed to astound me. “Everyone! Listen! You will immediately follow me out the front doors. Now! If you stay behind, you will die.”
Her honeyed voice had the rare gift of impelling people to obey without pausing to needlessly quibble. Nor were the people of Four Moons House fools: A fire-ravaged structure would soon collapse. We did not have time to explain the real danger.
More than a hundred people had taken shelter in the garden, many of them children, women, and elders. The djeli Bakary leaned on his cane, so stiff with age he had not been able to ride with the mansa to war. I waved Bee over to help him. The old steadied the young. The young assisted the old. I sought out Vai’s mother and sisters, almost lost in the midst of the crowd as the flight began. Vai’s mother was wracked by coughing.
“Bintou, help your mother. Wasa, that’s a very fine new crutch you have. Don’t let go of it. Yes, you can take the puppy, too. I’m going to carry you.” Wasa’s weight felt like nothing when I hoisted her into my arms. Fortunately the puppy was frightened enough that it did no more than whimper in her thin arms.
Other people led the way out. Bee stayed with Bakary and the slow-moving elders at the rear. The building creaked and moaned around us. Ice bloomed in feathered ridges. Thin blades of cloudy ice popped out from the walls.
“Move! Move!”
A booming roar shuddered through the fragile chambers as part of the building collapsed. The ice kept spreading. Glittering spires grew up from the floors. Clear branches snaked down from the broken ceilings.
We staggered out onto the portico and its terraced steps. The cold mages were beginning to shake themselves, to rise, to drag their unconscious and injured brethren away from the building. I helped Vai’s mother and his sisters down to the gravel driveway, then ran back up the steps.
Serena lay in a pool of blood, doubled over in pain.
“Blessed Tanit!” I cried. “What injury have you taken? Let me help you away.”
She grasped my hand with more strength than I would have expected. “No injury of the kind you mean. I fear this is a miscarriage. Where is my husband?”
The mansa was alive but unconscious and unresponsive. Blistering burns had bubbled up on his neck and arms. Ash rimed his mouth, a smear of blood caught at the corner. Serena knelt beside him and, with the tone of a woman used to command, called others to her.
Four Moons House was being inexorably trapped in ice. Amid the clamor of voices, an eerie grinding noise drowned all until the speech of humans was nothing more than the restless tickling of insects. Thick pillars of blue-green ice shot up alongside the doors, spearing all the way to the high roof above. Ice encased the great edifice, every span of it locked away in a transparent cage.
Within the disorganized spill of people along the lower terrace, I found Vai sprawled on the steps. It looked as if he had woken enough to start pulling himself away and then collapsed again. His eyes fluttered. A word formed on his lips but he hadn’t the strength to get it out.
“Vai! Andevai! It’s me. It’s Catherine! Stay with me, my love. Don’t leave me.”
I looked for Bee and instead saw Rory, dressed only in trousers, padding toward me with an alarmed look on his face. He flung himself down on the other side of Vai, trembling with fear as he looked past me. Naturally I turned to see what frightened him so much.
Across the drive my sire dusted soot from his hands with a meticulous frown. He glanced at me across the gap between us and nodded to acknowledge the bargain we had agreed to. Then he gestured with his plain black cane as a lord does when he wants a servant to do something for him. The eru clambered up on the roof and tossed our luggage to the ground. My sire climbed into the coach. The latch winked as if reflecting light, or perhaps making a brassy gremlin scowl in my direction. My sire’s hand covered the latch’s face as he shut the door.
The eru furled her wings. The coachman tipped his cap at me.
“Ha-roo! Ha-roo!”
Wheels rumbled over the gravel drive as the horses first walked and then broke into a smooth carriage trot. The coach rolled away down the driveway. I waited for it to vanish into the spirit world, to cross the shadows and return my sire to his rightful home.
But it did not. It simply drove away back toward the main road, moving at a sedate pace as might a lordly man who has just paid a polite social call on a friendly neighbor.
I stared in consternation.
I had just let loose the Mas
ter of the Wild Hunt into the mortal world.
46
Rory tugged on my arm. “Is he gone, Cat? I know he saw me! I was afraid he would make me go with him.”
“He’s gone, Rory. You’re safe.”
“His children are never safe. No one is ever safe!”
“No, you’re all safe,” I said with certainty, and I hugged him.
Fortunately I did not have time to dwell on the bargain I had made. There was simply too much to do, with night falling over the displaced population of Four Moons House. Before anything else we sent runners to the nearby villages of Haranwy and Trecon. Then I cleaned the blood off my sword and hunted down the rest of Rory’s clothes.
The icy sculpture of Four Moons House glittered as the moon rose. Moonlight coruscated through the many facets of the ice, splintering light across the terraces and driveway. In this eerie weave of shadow and bright, Bee and the stewards counted heads and sorted people by injury and need. The cold mages who had been Drake’s prisoners were, like the mansa, injured and unconscious. Three were dead. The cold mages who had been at Four Moons House, like Serena, had absorbed some measure of backlash, but on the whole they had not been badly harmed, although all the pregnant women had gone into labor.
All the fire mages were dead. I pitied them, but I could not mourn.
Mostly I sat with Vai’s head in my lap. No sign of injury marked him but he lay oblivious, the only movement the shallow rise and fall of his chest and the sluggish pulse at his throat. Wasa huddled next to me, petting the cowering puppy. Bintou fetched water for us from the well, and the cool liquid slowly eased her mother’s coughing. I even got a little down Vai’s throat. As the evening wore on I slipped in and out of a doze, glancing up now and again to search for Bee. She was always there, busy managing people. I just hadn’t the strength.
In the middle of the night, wagons trundled up under the light of an almost-full moon and a clear sky. Andevai’s half brother Duvai led the contingent from Haranwy. All were men, all armed with their hunter’s bows, spears, scythes, and a few illegal rifles. I went to greet them.
“Peace to you, Andevai’s brother, and to all who live in your compound,” I said in the traditional way. “Do you have peace?”
“I am well, thanks to the mother who raised me,” he replied, “and my family has peace also. And you, Cat Barahal?”
“I am well, thanks to my power as a woman.”
He raised an eyebrow, as if something in my face made him take pause. Then he looked past me to the massif of ice that entombed Four Moons House.
“Will the village give these refugees shelter?” I asked. “On their behalf, and on my own, I ask for guest rights.”
“That is our duty and obligation,” he said. “We will do what we must.”
“The mansa named Vai as heir.”
“We heard the rumor.” He glanced toward Vai’s mother, who had not left Vai’s side. The stubborn line of old resentment creased his brow. “An honor to his mother, indeed. He has made his choice between his two hats. This turn of events cannot have improved his conceit.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about the hats. You must work honestly with him, Duvai. I think you will find him something changed. He is the village’s ally, not its enemy, not its ruler.”
“Is that what you think? You surely were determined to escape him the last time we met.”
A flush warmed my cheeks. “I am something changed as well.”
The resemblance between the two men was keen, although Duvai was lighter, having a mother who had been born in a Celtic village, and being therefore more mixed of feature and complexion. Ten years older, he had the surety of a man in his prime strength, fully aware of who he is and of his place in the world. Besides that, he was a hunter who had braved the spirit world more than once and returned successfully.
“Are you something changed in the matter of my brother?” he said with a chuckle that made me blush yet more. “I would not have taken you for a woman to be bought by the offer of riches and rank, so I must suppose he found another way to capture you.”
“You are mistaken. No man can capture me. But he might have… courted me.”
His smirk resembled Vai’s. “So my brother finally smiled at you, did he?”
I had no answer to this, except to refrain from punching him.
“Grandmother made us promise never to fight each other. Out of respect for her, and knowing she watches over us still, I will speak in his favor. The elders of Haranwy have agreed to house as many of these refugees as we can until a decision is reached. The rest can shelter at Trecon and other House villages.”
The ice-bound House breathed like winter on our backs as we walked away.
No one would ever live there again.
The mansa was brought to Grandmother’s single-roomed house with its tiny private courtyard. The room smelled of pine wreaths even though no one had lived in it for some time. Vai was conveyed to the room where his mother had lived for so many years with her children. She directed him to be placed on a cot and asked for hot water to be brought so he might be stripped of his grimy clothes and washed. This task I asked to do, behind a screen for privacy. The furnishings in the modest room were nothing compared to the luxurious riches in Two Gourds House, but the modern circulating stove, the four-poster bed, an oak table, and the rosewood wardrobe revealed the concern Vai had taken both for his mother’s comfort and for her status in the village.
He mumbled incoherent syllables. Settled in the bed, he tossed and turned for the next three days, feverish one hour and shivering with cold the next as I forced broth down his throat. Every now and then he had lucid moments, during which I told him some of what had happened and fed him gruel. At length the worst of it eased, and he slept like the dead.
At intervals I attended Bee, who sat for hours in the village’s festival house acting as mediator. I admired her fair-minded intercessions between the demands of the Houseborn, many of whom had never set foot in so rustic a situation, and the complaints of the burdened villagers. Disputes were also sparked between the younger generation in the village, who agitated for resistance, saying this was their chance to throw off the yoke of clientage, and the elders, who refused to offend the ancestors and the gods by violating guest rights.
I just wanted to stab everyone when they started to argue. My foot got bruised from Bee stepping on it.
The mansa was dying. Everyone knew it but no one spoke of it. Rory had taken a violent liking to the old djeli, Bakary, and prowled around him seeking any pat of attention, which meant he spent most of his day in Grandmother’s cottage listening to the old bard sing the story of the mansa’s life and deeds, the tale of the Diarisso lineage, and the history of the world.
The history of the world begins with a seed. The seed is the kernel of what you are, but it is also the promise of what you can become.
On the fourth day a delegation arrived from Trecon, where the rest of the House refugees languished. The mansa’s nephew had arrived with the mage House troop from Lutetia. Because the mansa had not regained consciousness, his nephew wanted to immediately convene the House council of elders to vote on the matter of the heirship.
I returned to Vai’s mother’s room to find Vai sitting on the edge of the bed clad in trousers and nothing else. With a hand braced on the wall he stood, trembling across his entire body as he steadied himself to take a step, another step, and a third. It was obvious he was headed for the screen behind which we washed and dressed and kept the chamber pot. He had not yet seen me.
He said in a strikingly peevish tone, “I will manage the business myself, Mama.”
Twice I thought he would topple right over, but he got behind the screen without mishap.
I crossed to where his mother sat on a chair, knelt beside her, took her hand, and smiled up at her.
“He was never a patient invalid as a child,” she remarked. “Fortunately he did not get sick often.”
The girls were sitting
at the table beside a window, perusing a book. Wasa elbowed her sister. “Kayleigh used to say no one whined like Vai when he was sick.”
“I heard that!” said Vai from behind the screen, not in a jocular tone.
Because I understood how much he hated feeling weak, I ventured behind the screen to find him sitting, head in hands, on the bench. A mirror and razor rested on the bench next to him. My footsteps brought his head up. His beard was unkempt, and his hair squashed on one side. His skin had an ashy sallowness and his eyes a gray weariness.
“I don’t need help!” he snapped. “I can shave myself!”
“Nor have I the least desire to help you,” I retorted. “I merely came to inform you that the mansa’s nephew has arrived and is making an entirely predictable grab for the heir’s seat.”
“That would be a disaster for Four Moons House! Not to mention Haranwy and the other villages. It’s not his right anyway, to make such a demand when the mansa has already spoken.” He tried to stand but could not keep his feet under him. I had to catch him and ease him back down, for which he repaid me with a string of rude phrases directed not at me personally but at the uncaring world at large, which had not had the courtesy to allow him to heal faster.
“Stop it! Just pee and go back to sleep. Nothing will happen until you have recovered enough to face the elders.”
He ran a hand along his beard, and I was sure he was thinking that he could not face the elders looking so scruffy. “What of the mansa? What news of him today?”
I shook my head. “No change. Magister Serena is recovering well, although she grieves over losing the pregnancy. You didn’t tell me she’s a diviner.”
“You didn’t ask.”
I left him to it and went back to his mother. “I believe you are better suited than I to handle him when he is afflicted with this distemper.”