Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  When my father argued that an empire was a violent and unjust form of government, she retorted that the Romans had created peace among warring tribes. When my father pointed out that anyone can make a desert and call it peace, she replied that there is just as much, if not more, injustice among the multitude of principalities and duchies and independent city-states that had arisen throughout Europa after the empire finally fractured into pieces in the year 1000. Certainly the Celtic peoples loved their petty feuds and cattle-raiding wars; her own Belgae people did, and they were Celts, weren’t they?

  When my father objected that an empire could not be natural because no one after the Romans had managed to build one, she laughed and told him the Celts were simply too quarrelsome to unite on any endeavor. And, anyway, she went on, Camjiata was, on his father’s side, descended from the Mande lineage called Keita, who had ruled the Mali Empire. Any fool, she added, knew that Mali’s armies had once spanned West Africa. That was before the salt plague had released the ghouls that had driven out much of the population. Just because an empire had not been achieved again in Europa did not mean it could not be achieved elsewhere by others or ought not be attempted for the benefits it offered. What might those be? my father had wondered sardonically. Security and prosperity, she had replied with, he wrote, “the heartwarming blind certainty of a loyal soldier.”

  Was my father disputing with her out of his own fiercely held beliefs, or just to play his part in a friendly debate in order to pass the time? Perhaps argument was his way of flirting.

  The volume closed with the argument.

  The parlor door opened.

  7

  I jumped, but it was only Bee, slipping inside.

  “So much for working in secret. If it hadn’t been me, you’d have been caught.” She picked up Lies the Romans Told from the table, flipping through it casually. “No illustrations! Bah!”

  “The dates don’t make sense,” I said.

  She raised dark eyes to examine me, then set down the book. “I’m cold. Let’s go sit under the blanket in the window seat.”

  In the window seat overlooking the square, we tucked a wool blanket over us to keep off the chill and closed the heavy curtains behind our backs to hide us from anyone who might wander into the parlor. We did not worry about someone from outside looking up and seeing us there because of the cawl knit into the glass as a screen against prying eyes.

  Our breath made steam flowers on the windowpanes. Winter’s cold had truly settled, although it was still eight days away from year’s end according to the common year: Hallows Night, as they measured such things here in the north. Outside, snow glittered in the square and in the canopies of trees; the streets had been swept clean.

  “Go on,” Bee murmured, leaning against me.

  I frowned. “I wondered that if my father wrote that monograph on Roman lies, I might find some trace of its being written in his journals. Interviews, stories, chance encounters, notes. But the last entry from the ice sea expedition is dated in the summer of 1816. The next two numbered journals are missing.”

  “The record of the rest of the expedition.”

  “So we must suppose. There stands my father on some benighted barren island in the Baltic Ice Sea, in the summer of 1816, debating with my mother over the legality of Camjiata’s war while watching the aurora borealis. Journal forty-nine opens eighteen months later in the final months of 1817. He is drinking and dining in the city of Lutetia.”

  “The city of light, as its Parisi inhabitants call it. I’d love to visit.”

  “Yes. So there he is, acting as a secretary to the legal congress presided over by Camjiata before the general elected himself permanent first consul of the restored Roman Empire. How my father got a post as secretary in Camjiata’s court is never explained. I’m sure that would be much more interesting reading than five volumes recording fifty-eight days of debate and discussion over law and legal codes.”

  “Tell me the utter truth. Have you actually read every single word in those five volumes?”

  “I have! Once. But only to see if he ever mentioned the ice expedition, its rescue, and what happened between him and Lieutenant Tara Bell. He never does.”

  Bee sighed as with unfathomable sorrow, pressing her forehead into the glass and shutting her eyes, making me wonder if she really did have a headache. The square’s stone monument was visible by the light of the streetlamps: a proud female figure standing between pillars, facing the viewer, her right hand raised in the orator’s style and her left hand clutching the sigil of Tanit, protector of women. At the full moon, Bee and I left flowers, or a smidgeon of honey, or a tiny cup of wine at the base of the stele, in honor of those who had come before us, the Kena’ani women who had lived and died in Adurnam, far from their ancestral home and yet tied, always, to their ancient roots. Maybe they watched over us, as mothers watch over their precious children, those children fortunate enough to have living mothers.

  “Go on,” she said into the glass.

  “Eight days before the turn of the year, he is summoned. It’s the last entry, just those two words: ‘Am summoned.’ ”

  “Summoned to what?”

  “It never says. That’s the last journal. Doesn’t that all strike you as odd?”

  Bee straightened as she shook off whatever melancholy possessed her. “Cat, listen. The most reasonable explanation is that he returns in haste to his wife, who bears a child, which is you. With a young wife and a new child, I don’t think it at all odd he might not have written more journals. He wrote them when he traveled. Couldn’t it be that this was the one time in his adult life he stayed in one place? By the hearth with his beloved wife and newborn child?”

  “But that doesn’t explain—”

  “Cat. You are making too much of this. I know you want the story to be more romantic than it is, although it’s romantic enough. Everyone knows the Amazon soldiers were not allowed to marry on penalty of death. Yet she did marry, and she did leave Camjiata’s army, and she did come with your father to Adurnam to live with his family. So that means she lived in fear of being arrested as a deserter and a law-breaker by the agents of Camjiata. Meanwhile, she must also have feared that the agents of the Prince of Tarrant—who was, after all, one of Camjiata’s most bitter enemies—would arrest her as a spy.”

  “Aunt and Uncle are so ashamed of what she was that they’ve forbidden us to even speak of her. I can’t even ask questions about her life. Is that fair?”

  “I don’t think it’s fair. But if we Barahals are touched with any possible stigma of association with the Iberian Monster, we’ll lose all our business.”

  “That’s your father talking.”

  “People must eat. That’s why your parents came to live with the family in Adurnam, isn’t it? What else could they do? Your father had to go to work again for the family. Yet his heart wasn’t in it. He fought with everyone. The reports he prepared were useless. He did not want to leave your mother and you alone, and your mother could not travel with him into those regions that lay under the rule of Camjiata’s empire where the family needed your father to travel.”

  “To spy for them,” I muttered.

  “Nor did your mother like living in this house, in Adurnam, where she felt vulnerable and maybe disliked. After a few years, the brothers quarreled. Your father and mother left, taking you with them. Then there was that terrible accident when the ferry crossing the Rhenus River capsized, and they drowned with a hundred others, and you survived, pulled out of the water, and so you came to us. Don’t try to make the story more than it is, dear Cat. It’s not a trap. You don’t have to gnaw off your paw to get out of it. It’s just sad that they died, that the two brothers remained unreconciled, that you were left an orphan at six years old. But at least you came back to us—”

  “Hush,” I whispered through my tears.

  Bee froze with her right hand clasped to her chest and her face raised, posed unmoving like one of the living re-creations of
the honored ancestors in a tableaux at the Feast and Festival of the Sun Sacrifice, which here in the north the locals called the winter solstice.

  Put a saber in her upraised left hand, and she’d have run me through, just to put me out of my misery. Because she was right. Everything she said was right. It’s just I didn’t want the story to end that way.

  “Beatriz? Catarina?” Our governess, Shiffa, had been imported all the way from the Barahal motherhouse in Gadir to teach us girls deportment, fencing, dancing, sewing, and how to memorize large blocks of text so we could write them down or repeat them later. All of which she did, and always with a rigid smile. Her giddily cheerful voice rose in volume as she entered the parlor. “Girls! It’s time to leave for the lecture.”

  We did not move. In the square outside, a trio of men barged out of Ranwise Close at a strong clip. I recognized Banker Pisilco’s stoop. He reached the park gate opposite our window, waved a farewell to his companions, and opened the gate into the park. The other two forged on with heads bent together, deep in conversation, but the banker struck out across the lit path past the monument and through the park toward the houses on the far side of Falle Square. It was odd to watch his shadowy form pass from shadow into the aura of gaslight and back into shadow, from light into shadow, light into shadow, and all the while, whether in light or in shadow, his hat glimmered as though dusted with tiny stars.

  “Girls?” Shiffa stumbled among the couches and rattled the journals I’d left lying open on the table. “Oh, dear,” she muttered in a grating tone of fond exasperation. “What are these doing out again? That child!”

  Abruptly, her breathing shifted. Her fingers fluttered pages, and she sucked in a hard breath and whispered to herself in a tone so steely it was as if a different person were speaking, “Melqart’s Curse! We were assured every copy of the codebook had been burned.”

  Bee lowered her hand to grasp my wrist, her fingers tightening until I thought she would crush my bones. We had left Lies the Romans Told on the table. The codebook?

  “Have you found the girls, Shiffa?” My aunt’s voice rose from the direction of the stairs. She sounded as if she were trying not to laugh.

  “No, they’re not in here, maestra,” called Shiffa in her fussy, happy voice, which now sounded utterly false to my ears. “They weren’t in the nursery or in their bedchamber, those mischievous creatures!” She moved out the door, and Bee let go of my wrist as I grimaced.

  “I told you, Tilly!” My uncle’s voice rumbled from farther below. “They’re hiding in the attic.”

  Aunt moved down the staircase to the ground-floor foyer, still speaking. “It’s your own fault for trying to force them to attend a lecture that they assured me they already heard once today.”

  “We are not attending to hear the lecture, but to be seen. The girls have made excellent connections at the college. Tonight’s lecture is more about politics than aerostatics. It’s a bold step for the Prince of Tarrant and his court to agree to tether an airship in the Rail Yard, much less hold a public exhibition of it for all to see. He and his clan are declaring through this act that they do not support the mage Houses’ opposition to the new technological innovations.”

  “As I am well aware, dear. Yet we must be careful never to show an inclination to any side. You know we must not draw the attention of the mage Houses.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “They’ve forgotten about us. That was a long time ago. Camjiata has been safely locked away in his island prison for over thirteen years. Anyway, those rich Fula bankers will be at the lecture.”

  Bee stiffened, but not because she had heard this mention of Maester Amadou’s family. She was looking outside.

  “Which is the only reason I am attending,” said my aunt. “You know there will be trolls.”

  “Trolls are clever creatures in their own way, Tilly. This unreasoning prejudice serves you ill.”

  Bee grabbed my sleeve and tweaked it to get my attention. With a lift of her chin, she indicated the twilit streets beyond the ice-rimed panes. An unmarked black coach rumbled down the west side of the square, pulled by four horses as pale as cream. As it passed down the street, each lamp it passed flickered and faded and, once the conveyance had rolled on, flared back into life. The coach turned the corner left onto our street, its journey traced by the dying and rising of light.

  The lamp standing beside the park gate dimmed to a sullen shell of orange-red. The coach halted in front of our house. The coachman swung down to hold the reins of the two lead horses. Their breath rose out of their nostrils like smoke. A footman, dressed in a heavy black flared coat, climbed down from the brace between the back wheels, bumped out a pair of steps from the undercarriage, and opened the coach’s door.

  Bee squeezed my fingers so hard I actually grunted in pain. In a swirl of flared fashionable jacket so saturated a red you could faintly discern its color against the dusk, a personage descended from the coach, leaning on a gilded cane, and walked up the front steps. From this angle, we could not see him arrive at the front door, located under cover of the stoop and concealed by the entry pillars. Three sharp knocks rapped the heavy door, delivered by a blunt instrument. The entire house, all four stories and set back, shuddered like a cornered animal.

  “I don’t like this,” Bee muttered in her serious voice, nothing like the blabbering light-minded aether-head she often pretended to be. “It reminds me of a dream I had last month. Twilight brings bad tidings….” She released my hand.

  I shook out the ache in my fingers. “Ah! That really hurt!”

  “We’ve got to hide,” she said in an altered tone. She shoved away the blanket and pushed out from behind the curtain. “Hurry, Cat!”

  The way she looked, with her entire body tense and a scared heat pouring off her, flooded me with cold fear. I slid off the window seat. My feet touched the chilly floor just as the front door below was opened, as though the opening door caused the floor’s exhalation of cold.

  Evved could talk down his nose at anyone. “I’m sorry, maester, the family is out for the evening.”

  The personage pushed past our steward without a word. Of course, I couldn’t see him, but I felt that presence enter the house in the same way your hair rises and your neck tingles before a storm. I felt it in the joints and eaves of the house, straining to protect us against a presence powerful enough to enter without an invitation.

  “If we move fast…” Bee made a little humming noise, a buzzing through her teeth, and hurried to the open door, past the open journals. Shiffa had taken the Roman lies book.

  From below rose voices.

  “What manner of intrusion disturbs our evening?” demanded Uncle in the voice he used to dismiss the pretensions of social-climbing trolls. “We have not given you leave to enter. We are not at home.”

  A male voice, reeking of mage House privilege, replied, “That is an odd sort of lie, because here you are.”

  “As you can certainly see by our dress, we are in the act of departing the house for an evening engagement. Please be so good as to call tomorrow.”

  We slithered out the open door into the passage that ran back from the wide first-floor landing. The door to Uncle’s office was closed, but the latch clicked down, pushed from inside. I shoved Bee behind me and dug deep for a concealing glamor as Shiffa emerged from the office. She walked right past us, past the full-length mirror in which our reflections clearly showed, to me, and halted at the railing beside the potted dwarf orange tree at the top of the grand staircase. She bent forward to observe what was going on in the entryway below.

  The voice continued. “I hope I need not remind you to what manner of person you are speaking. I am here now, so you will attend me now. I will be done with my business and gone within the hour.”

  “Fiery Shemesh!” cursed Uncle, his voice tingling with suppressed fury—and fear. “You’re from Four Moons House. A magister from the Diarisso lineage.”

  A cold mage in our house! Beh
ind Shiffa’s back, we skated soundlessly across to the foot of the upper stairs.

  “Did you not get the message I was meant to arrive today?” His words and accent were cultured and elegant, yet his indignation soured them. It was almost enough to make my straight hair curl.

  “We received no message, no warning.” The tight way Aunt Tilly choked out the words really frightened me. The house vibrated with sympathetic anger. “You can’t possibly still maintain you have a claim.”

  “Indeed, we can and we do. The contract clearly states that Diarisso ownership extends until the twentieth birthday. Ownership reverts to the Hassi Barahal family only at sunset on the evening that begins the natal day, when the subject attains her legal majority.”

  Bee tugged on my wrist, having more self-possession than I did. We set foot on the stairs, creeping toward the next floor.

  “I believe the proper legal term is rei vindicatio,” he went on. “I am here to reclaim ownership of what you have been generously allowed to keep possession of.”

  There was a man whose pretensions wanted slapping down! How he could make those words come out with such condescension was beyond my understanding. We kept climbing, working around the boards that creaked.

  “You’ll have to come back tomorrow,” said Aunt even more briskly, “because she’s not here.”

  We stopped, Bee and I. We just stopped, as though an unseen hand with fingers of ice had fastened itself on our shoulders and pulled us to a halt.