Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  Uncle was weeping softly. Aunt wore a face of stone, cold and forbidding as she stared at the personage with a force that would have congealed a lesser man.

  The old man sang under his breath, but the power of the whispered words made the air hum. With a wordless shout, he flung the ball of thread into the mirror while holding on to one end. With a sound like a latch opening, the uncoiling thread penetrated the mirror and at once could be seen as glittering links in an unrolling chain. As it rolled, I began to see the shadows of another landscape, the hills and forests and rivers of the spirit world. All our weak images faded to nothing as the mirror turned smoky with power as he chanted words in a language I did not know. Ghostlike sparks spinning off the eru could still be distinguished, but even these sparks were blurred as the chain of binding was fixed and the mirror became opaque.

  What were they doing to me?

  “In this world, one hand is given into another, one house opens its door to a stranger who will enter and become no stranger. In this world, one hand is given into another, and the other house opens its door to a stranger who will enter and become no stranger. This is the chain of obligation bound into the family of Hassi Barahal in payment for what they have owed the House of Four Moons. As it was agreed in the year… The eldest daughter is the payment offered in exchange for…”

  The words flew too swiftly now for me to understand them. It took all my energy to not collapse to the floor and start in on a screaming fit that would put Bee’s tantrums to shame. It took all my energy not to drop to the floor and sob with choking fear.

  In this world, one hand is given into another.

  There are three kinds of marriages legally recognized in the north: a flower marriage, which flourishes while the bloom is still on it and dies when it withers, which no respectable northern woman in these days could ever consider contracting; an ink and vellum marriage, hedged about with provisions and obligations and mutual agreements and legal and economic protections; and the binding marriage, more common in the old days and retained almost exclusively, according to my academy masters, among the Housed because of the raft of legal and magical complications at risk when two children from different mage Houses seal a betrothal.

  We Barahals were assuredly not members of any of the thirty-six mage Houses, nor did we suffer under their patronage or owe anything to any House. Or so I had always believed, until now.

  “Dua! Dua! Dua!” The old man tugged on the thread, and suddenly there was a click like a door closing. A ball of perfectly ordinary yarn nestled in his hand, and the mirror reflected nothing but the landing and the people standing there in various stages of impatience, grief, boredom, and shock. All the magic woven into the mirror had been sapped out of it by the grip of the spell, so even the eru appeared as a perfectly ordinary man with black skin, black hair tied back in a dense horse tail, and the distracted smile of a person whose thoughts wander elsewhere.

  Or maybe I had dreamed that vision in the mirror. Maybe I hadn’t seen an eru at all. Maybe Bee was right, and I was seeing only what I wished were true because it was easier that way than accepting what I didn’t want and could not understand: that the world was cruel and had ripped my parents from me just because it happened that way sometimes.

  The personage rapped his cane twice on the floor. The house seemed to groan, and there came a shout from upstairs, like a girl waking from a nightmare.

  “Now, Catherine, Four Moons House has taken possession of you,” said the personage to me. He produced a large envelope from his jacket and held it out.

  Aunt snatched the envelope from his hand. “You make it sound as if she’s your slave, but she is your wife. That was the agreement.”

  He regarded her with an expression very like contempt. “What difference these hair-splitting words make to the truth of the matter I cannot see.”

  Uncle burst into wrenching sobs. “Please forgive us, Cat.”

  “Enough! We knew this day might come!” snapped Aunt with such anger that even the personage startled and took a step back, bumping into the railing. If only the railing might give way and he plunge over… but it held fast.

  The coachman and the footman sprang up the stairs to grab the trunk between them as Shiffa backed away. They clattered past us, down again to the front door.

  “Aunt Tilly?” My voice trembled.

  “Yes, dear one.”

  Still sobbing, Uncle hugged me.

  “Come along!” said the personage.

  What was his name? I hadn’t even heard it.

  Aunt extricated me from Uncle’s despairing sobs and, clasping my hands, kissed me on the forehead, then on either cheek. She was still not crying, but that was only because—I could see—she refused to release precious tears. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I asked, and my voice was more the wail of a hurt child than that of a young woman accustomed to twisting out of any fall so she landed on her feet. But the world was twisting away under me, and I couldn’t find the ground.

  She released my hands, as dying people release their soul when death arrives. She let me go, and the personage took hold of my wrist in an unyielding grip.

  “Go with your husband,” she said.

  9

  Flakes of spinning snow burned my cheeks as I stumbled down the steps, remembering at last to twist Bee’s bracelet onto my right wrist, as though I were daughter to her mother, embraced by her heart and her protection. I had no bracelet of my own.

  At the coach, the cold mage offered me an elbow to balance on so I could mount the stairs into the interior like a respectable person, but I grabbed the handles and clambered up gracelessly without touching him. We Cats are particular, don’t you know? I wanted to hiss at him, but I knew I must not. I must not dishonor the Barahal name. I must give him no further hold over me, beyond the fact that I was now the property of his house.

  As Bee would say, “Don’t kick unless you can really hurt them.”

  I sat next to the far door, facing the back. The coach shifted under his weight as he settled onto the opposite seat by the open door, facing forward. The footman closed the coach’s door. I glanced out the window still open beside him, but the door to the house had been shut and the curtains were all drawn. I bent in order to see the nursery windows on the third floor, and I was sure I saw a face staring out through the misty panes. The cold mage shuttered the window with a snap. Tears stung my eyes. I blinked repeatedly to drive them away.

  The coach rocked as the coachman and the footman heaved on my traveling chest and settled themselves. I heard the clink of coin or other objects changing hands as the old man was given a final offering and dismissed to find his own way home through the bitter night. The coachman slapped his whip against wood and then whistled. More smoothly than I imagined possible, the coachman eased into the carriage court and turned the bulky equipage around. Then we rolled out onto the street, wheels rumbling on stone, returning the way they had come.

  He opened the window on his side. I looked onto the square. The streetlamps gleamed, fading as we passed them and flaring back into life. Snow swirled over the grass and the familiar trees of the park: the oak tree we called Broken Arm because of the time Bee fell while climbing; the five groomed cypresses all in a row, like children in uniform lined up at school; the drowsing cherry tree, dreaming of next year’s fruit. The stele showed her back to me, plain stone. Maybe I would never see the votive’s serious face again. I shivered.

  “Such gaslight will be outlawed soon enough,” he muttered, twitching a shoulder as if in discomfort as we passed yet another streetlight, which flickered. He closed the shutter, leaving us in the dark.

  Or him in the dark, anyway. I could use the faint threads of magic that were stitched through the world to enhance my vision in the dark, just as I could listen for the hiss of the streetlight spurting back to life behind us.

  He fingered his left cuff and drew out an object from
the sharp creases, maybe a key or a scribe’s knife, something formed out of one of the noble metals and small enough to fit lengthwise within the palm of his hand. He fiddled with it, then began tapping it against one thigh to one beat while he drummed lightly with his other hand on his other thigh to a different beat, three against two.

  The coach rolled through unseen streets. The journey dragged on for so long that my anger and fear began to congeal into a dreary sort of resentment. Yet run as it would, my mind could not come up with any reason why Aunt and Uncle had sold me to Four Moons House. My thoughts ticked over with the revolution of the wheels; ideas and bursts of anger and fear clattered in time to the fall of hooves on stone in counter-rhythm to the faint patter of the cold mage’s hands. What disaster had forced their hand? What contract had they sealed? What documents were in the envelope? Why had they done it, and why had they never warned me? Had the head of Bran Cof tried to warn me? Or maybe Aunt and Uncle weren’t the responsible ones. Had my parents got into trouble and used me as surety to get out of it? Did this have anything to do with their deaths?

  Fiery Shemesh! Had I really seen an eru?

  The personage sat there in the dark, silent but for the play of his hands, until I began to wonder if he even knew he was drumming.

  A hundred cunning retorts and cutting stage lines lilted across my tongue, but I bit them down. Let him not believe me to be so cowed, or grateful, or honored that I would beg for any scrap of pity or kindness or, for that matter, some idea of what was going on and what might happen to me now.

  I would not speak until spoken to.

  We left the residential streets and entered a commercial district where I could hear the popping race of goblin chatter and conversations in a dozen variants of Latin. His hands stilled, and he seemed to be listening. A Greek demanded directions in his choppy diction. On the other side of the street, a man declaimed in stentorian tones, “We must stand together. We must raise our voice. We must demand a seat on the city’s ruling council. Our own councillors, elected by us, not appointed by the prince.” The Northgate Poet! Now, at least, I knew where we were.

  I smelled the luscious aroma of coffee and heard the rumble of masculine conversation from inside a coffeehouse, where brew and the company of like-minded raconteurs could be imbibed, a place where a woman would never dare set foot. Farther away, handbells rang a rhythm and abruptly ceased. Close by, a peddler called, “What do ye lack? What do ye lack?”

  Answers, I thought. Questions.

  The cold mage coughed into a patterned kerchief.

  I sat up straighter, waiting for the words I was sure would come.

  He lowered the handkerchief and resumed his drumming.

  The coach rolled along thoroughfares that stayed alive after the fall of night. Beggars clacked for alms. Bells conversed: first an opening from the sharp tenor of the bell that guarded the temple dedicated to Komo Vulcanus, answered by a scolding bass out of Ma Bellona-Valiant-at-the-Ford, and the high, excited response of the sister temple towers, Brigantia and Faro by the river.

  He brought the handkerchief up to his face again, but this time to cover the reek of urine and vomit off the street. I was made of sterner stuff. A flood of noise marred our passage down a street filled with lively evening life, the scent of spilled beer and the off-key singing of drunken men.

  “Away with the oppression of mages! Why should they break our gaslights just ’cause they don’t like ’em?”

  “Nay, it’s princes and their greedy kin who trample us!”

  “You take your choice: taxes or fetters!”

  “Nay! Nay! Let’s call, like the Northgate Poet says: freedom or fetters!”

  “Oi! There’s one of them bloody House coaches now. As you please, boys! As you please! We’re many, and they’re few.”

  A heavy object slammed into the side of the carriage. I grabbed the seat to keep my place as a roar of voices mobbed around us and began, with the weight of their bodies, to rock the vehicle back and forth. If my heart thundered, it was no more than what I hoped the horses would do: gallop out of there.

  “Clear off ! Clear off !” shouted our coachman, although how I could know it was his voice I can’t say. It carried so.

  Jeers and curses greeted his cry.

  “See how you like the mud when you freeze yer pale white arse in it!”

  “Tip ’em over! Tip ’em over!”

  Maybe my teeth were chattering. “What are you going to do?” I demanded.

  His hands stilled. He’d shut his eyes!

  Even cats can’t see through wood. Nor could I. But I saw a spray of sparks, like Han fireworks spitting gloriously in five colors. A blue sizzle landed in my glove, as if it had spun right through the carriage walls, and it burned not hot but deadly cold as it seared my skin. Men screamed, more in fear than in pain, and the mob scattered as the vehicle lurched forward, throwing me sideways so I hit my shoulder and bit down a yelp. I would not cry in front of him.

  My husband said, quite clearly, in his precise, cultured voice, “A pox upon that cursed wraith!”

  We rolled on. The blue sizzle popped and vanished.

  “You are uninjured?” he asked stiffly. A spark pricked the darkness and expanded into a wan cold light by which he examined me with a frown.

  I was shaking, and my shoulder ached, and I clung to the seat strap, wanting Bee beside me to face him down and wishing Aunt was there to smooth my hair and offer me a cup of hot chocolate, but…

  But.

  But.

  But the truth was that I was trembling too hard to get anything out of my mouth.

  I heard a chant rise in our wake like a nest of hornets maddened by smoke:

  “Better to perish by the sword than by hunger!”

  “Let princes and lords rot in their high castles with none to serve them!”

  “Into the mire with them magisters and their foul cold magic!”

  “I trust you are not too rattled,” he said in a clipped voice. “Once we are out of the city, it’s unlikely we will have to endure any more such unfortunate disturbances.”

  I thought of a hundred terribly clever and scathing rejoinders I might make to a man who could sit there thinking of nothing but his own comfort. Instead I kept my expression as detached as that of an actress returning flowers sent her by an unsuitable beau.

  “Yes,” I said, managing an airy tone of unconcern. I could speak as pedantically as he did! “Some say the trolls have contaminated the restless city laborers with their peculiar ideas. I suppose that out among the bucolic fields and villages ruled by the Houses, we need fear no unpleasantness.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  Since it was not, I said nothing; I had already said too much.

  “I’ve never met a troll,” he remarked, “nor even seen one close up.” He looked thoughtful, and as his face relaxed, it was as if I glimpsed a different man. Then he realized I was staring at him, and his expression closed and the light snapped out.

  “Was there something else you wanted to say?” he asked behind the veil of darkness.

  “No.”

  We clattered on, swung hard around a corner, and rolled through a quiet neighborhood where I heard the splash of water tossed onto stone, a kitchen maid emptying the wash water, perhaps. We rocked to a halt amid the balm of calm voices. His door was opened from outside and he disembarked. Shaking and aching, I emerged blinking into the pleasant courtyard of a compound lit not by gaslight but by the unmistakable hard white glow of cold fire oozing from ceramic bowls hanging from brackets set under the eaves and from pairs of elaborate stone cressets mounted on stands beside the doors and gates.

  A pair of men armed with crossbows and swords shut the gates behind us. Two exceedingly well-dressed and proud-seeming personages—one male and one female—met us with cups of water, which we drank, then handed empty to waiting servants.

  “We expected you before this, Magister,” said the man without preamble, in the manner o
f an equal.

  My husband looked taken aback by the baldness of this greeting. “I was delayed.”

  “We were told to expect the mansa’s sister’s son,” said the woman, looking him rudely up and down, “but you do not resemble him whatsoever, so I suppose you must be that other one we’ve heard spoken of.”

  “I must be,” he said icily.

  I shivered, as if it had actually gotten colder, and maybe it had.

  “I suppose that explains the delay,” she added. “Have you ever traveled to a city before? It must seem very strange to one such as you.”

  “I trust the inconvenience has not disturbed the smooth running of this establishment.” His always-arrogant expression shaded toward anger.

  “Of course not!” she retorted with the indignation common to the proud. “We know our duty and will discharge it and maintain the highest degree of quality appropriate to Four Moons House, as is expected of and understood by those who grew up within the family.”

  These deadly currents I could not navigate or even comprehend, so I was grateful when the male attendant indicated a waiting ancilla, who led us down a corridor and past a flight of stairs. I was ushered into a parlor that overlooked a garden through expensive paned windows and was shown to a well-made chair placed next to a side table polished to a fearful gleam. The woman followed, bringing warmed water in a basin and a warmed cloth so I could wash my face and hands. An open door on the far side of the room revealed a sleeping chamber beyond, fitted with a capacious bed draped with hangings.

  I knew what marriage entailed, but at that moment, with the cloth squeezed so tight in my hands that drops of water stained my dress, I comprehended that, in fact, I knew nothing that mattered.

  What had the Hassi Barahals owed to Four Moons House that Aunt and Uncle must pay in the coin of my flesh?