Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  A man, stiff and slow with age, was leading an ox toward the village.

  Andevai watched for a long time, leaning out to keep the houses in view as we trundled east. When at last he sank back onto the seat, he covered his eyes with a hand.

  Had I seen a tear? Or was that only a trick of the light?

  15

  After a while, he lowered his hand and slid shut the window, leaving us in the dim confines, ripe with the smell of our sweat after so many days.

  I had begun to shiver, despite the smothering furs. “I… I wanted to ask if there is anything I should know. Proper greetings? Words or gestures I should not use?”

  “Do what I tell you, and don’t speak. There’s far too much for you to learn to start now. Afterward there will be time.”

  “After what?”

  “We must be purified to pass onto the estate. Then you’ll be brought before the head of Four Moons House and accepted into the house.”

  “Isn’t he a very powerful magister?”

  His tone sharpened. “Naturally he is. And for another thing, don’t sound foolish, Catherine. Just say nothing. Don’t embarrass me—” He broke off. After a pause, he finished. “Don’t embarrass your people.”

  The carriage slowed as we turned off the main road onto a gravel road that crackled beneath hooves and wheels. My pulse outraced the leisurely pace of the horses. I wondered if it was actually possible to faint from fear as the sensational tales we read in the almanacs and saw on the stage would have it. I must endure this, just as my father had endured the wars and had written of his hatred for all that made life a misery for ordinary people. I must endure, because I must. That was all. It had to be done. It was already done.

  The carriage stopped. Andevai drew in a breath. The door was opened, the stair lowered. He got out.

  As I made ready to follow him, he gestured like an ax striking. “It’s forbidden to bring cold steel into the gatehouse. Leave it in the carriage.”

  The sword already felt like a part of me. I hated to leave it, and yet when he frowned, I knew I had no choice. Swordless, I followed him onto a wide fan of raked gravel fronting a massive white stone gate with four arches. Each archway was fitted with massive iron-clad wood gates, and above each arch was carved one phase of the moon. Walls stretched out to either side as far as I could see, high enough that I could discern nothing on the other side except the crowns of trees. To our right, built out from the wall, stood a spacious lodge, the gatehouse. Its walls were decorated with bright geometric lines and patterns. It was set off from the road by a low garden wall, behind which lay a desiccated garden, oval in shape and notable for pruned evergreen hedges, a single unremarkable stone pillar as tall as a man, and an elaborate tiered fountain. Water ran down this excrescence of stone to splash into twin basins formed like the halves of melons. On the rim of the fountain rested several bowls.

  Andevai halted at the gate with hands extended, palms up. I copied the gesture, so afraid I would do something wrong that tears blurred my vision.

  A pair of men in servants’ livery came running from the lane beside the house to take up stations within the garden. The door of the lodge was opened. Four women, wearing indoor slippers, hurried down the steps to stand on either side of a brick path that led by a circuitous route, not a straight line, to the square vestibule. Two young men dressed in fashionable clothing came out, smirking and nudging each other. I could not see Andevai’s face, but his posture became more rigid and he seemed to be breathing faster. As people took up positions on either side of the steps, they started calling to one another in a rhythmic way. Others took up this chant and began to clap and sing. My ears burned.

  As if summoned by the song, a woman emerged from the interior and stood on the threshold. She was tall and robust, older than my aunt but not elderly, and dressed in a long robe made of a black cloth marked with white patterns. Her complexion was lighter than Andevai’s, her brown skin dusted with freckles, and her hair was tied up in a scarf that had pulled back just enough to reveal tightly kinked dark red hair. She raised both hands, as if giving permission.

  I followed him meekly through the gate. We halted at the fountain, where he picked up a bowl, dipped it in the water, and advanced to a stunted leafless tree festooned with amulets, ribbons, and charms. He poured the water at the base of the trunk. I groped for a bowl, and someone laughed. He turned, saw me, and his eyes widened as he made a sudden panicked gesture with one hand. I stared stupidly at him as a whisper passed through the gathering, causing the song’s cadences to falter. He pointed.

  Oh! With a foot, I indicated the other basin to see if I was meant to use it instead, and several voices choked down gasps. Andevai changed color. Clearly I had committed some horrible, inadvertent offense. I shut my eyes, wishing I could vanish just like the heroes and heroines in the tales.

  But couldn’t I? Not vanish precisely, but hide myself, even in the sight of cold mages? The realization hit me so hard that my mouth opened and I sucked in courage enough to open my eyes and demand with my gaze that he find some way to let me know what to do. With his chin, he indicated the other basin, so I knelt at its rim, all the while watching him and his efforts to direct my ignorance without speaking and without gesturing in a way that would make him look as ridiculous as he must by now feel. Everyone was staring, but I knew better than to look at them. By sheer will, I took up a bowl from the other basin, filled it, and with an iron resolve paced to the tree and emptied the bowl rather more clumsily than I had hoped over the earth. Atop the cold dirt, water stiffened into a lacework of frost.

  He gestured that I should follow as he walked to the lodge’s entrance. He knelt on the lowest of the stone steps. The song ceased. Folk watched with the patience of vultures. There were more of them now, having come in from the fields or the house or the servants’ wing.

  “Magister,” Andevai said. “I return to you.”

  “Be greeted on your return to your home.” The woman with red hair gestured, and an attendant offered him a bowl of water. He drank and handed back the bowl.

  Awkwardly, I knelt beside him. When I opened my mouth to speak the greeting, nothing came out, not even a croak. She examined me without moving or speaking, her gaze as unfathomable as ice. My hands went cold and my face flamed hot. Let this agony pass quickly!

  Behind me, someone tittered.

  Anger creased her expression, and the sound cut off. An attendant offered me a bowl of water, but I was shaking so hard that drops slopped over the side. I barely managed to slurp down a mouthful and hand the bowl back before spilling the entire thing. Although no one spoke, I felt both curiosity and contempt like spoken words. Andevai did not look at me. I thought he was flushed, no doubt humiliated by my awkwardness.

  She turned her back on us. Andevai rose. I rose, half tripping on the step. We walked at her heels into a wide entry hall, where Andevai took off his boots. I followed suit. We stepped up into a long room whose walls were painted with scenes of an unfamiliar landscape with a wide river, many exotic birds, and strange-looking trees. Benches lined the walls. A stool carved out of a single block of wood sat on a raised floor at the other end of the chamber. Servants took my cloak, coat, and gloves. She sat on the stool, facing us. Andevai sat on a quilted square of cloth, and I folded down gracelessly beside him on a separate square of cloth. He offered me no encouraging smiles, no glances of camaraderie. He kept his head bowed and his gaze fixed on folded hands. As soon as the chamber was empty and the doors closed, the woman spoke.

  “I did not want her to feel shamed in front of strangers, so I said nothing. For her sake, if not your own pride, you might have prepared her better, Vai.”

  “We faced unexpected trouble on the road,” he said to his hands, his expression quite rigid. “But that means nothing, Magister. You are correct. I did not think.”

  “Now she must come before the mansa, likewise. So be it.”

  “I saw how Suma and Cuirthi were hovering like wasps, wa
iting to sting me.”

  “The poor manners of a hyena do not excuse the man.”

  “You are right. Their behavior does not excuse mine.”

  “Get through this day, and I will send some of my own women to serve and assist her.”

  “For this I thank you, Magister.”

  She grunted. “Do not forget, Vai, that you do not answer to me, but to the mansa. He expected you to return two days ago. We must talk no longer.” She clapped her hands.

  The doors opened, and attendants entered carrying trays. One was a basin and pitcher for washing. The other held a tureen of white porridge streaked with honey and several small bowls and spoons. My mouth watered. I heard a murmur and turned; folk crowded in the door, peering in: A pair of fashionable young men nudged each other as if in expectation of a good laugh. A pretty young woman in exceptionally rich clothing stared at Andevai, but I couldn’t judge whether she admired him or despised him: Love’s gaze could look like the intensity of contempt, as the poets said. Anyhow, he did not once look toward her.

  After we washed our hands, the woman spooned out porridge with her right hand and offered him a bowl; she then offered the second to me. Of course I reached with my sword hand. A man’s laugh rang out. Andevai’s lips thinned. Emotion sparked in the flare of his eyes. I pulled my left arm back as though I’d been slapped.

  Lips thinned with annoyance, the woman nodded toward the doors. At once they were shut, leaving us again alone. With a speaking look, she offered me the bowl with her right hand, and this time I accepted it with my right hand, although I wondered if I dared eat under her scrutiny. Yet when she took a bowl for herself, I knew I dared not refuse to eat—not if she were eating, too.

  The magister balanced the bowl on her right thigh and ate, as did Andevai. Naturally I wanted to eat with my left hand, but instead I set the bowl on the curve of my inside right knee and, praying to every god known in the ancient days of Kena’an, I scooped and ate with my right without the bowl falling off my leg. I was so relieved to be finished that I felt tears in my eyes and blinked to smother them.

  When we had finished, her attendants cleared everything away. The doors were again opened to allow in what seemed a crowd of elaborately dressed men and women. The young men whispered to each other as they glanced at Andevai with smiles as sharp as cold steel.

  “Now,” said the magister, “you must bathe more quickly than I would like for the proper doing of it.”

  “No surprise there with Vai,” said one of the young men. “Him accustomed to the dirt as he is.” Others sniggered.

  The magister raised her voice, declaiming, “The new year rides down upon us. We must make fast our shutters for the hallowing tide.” This comment quieted the sniggering.

  As Andevai rose, I rose and was taken into hand by a pair of healthily robust women as alike as cousins. They led me down a bewildering maze of corridors—no straight lines in this house!—into a chamber half filled with a tiled pool steaming warmth. A curtain hung from the ceiling. The pool extended beneath it. I heard men talking on the other side.

  “She’s always favored him, rather like she favors those hounds of hers. Faithful pets, eh?”

  They laughed, but fell silent as others entered the chamber, maybe Andevai.

  “Maestra,” said the elder of my attendants in a low voice. “Your clothes?”

  “I… I… Am I meant to bathe? I don’t know—”

  “Did the young magister not tell you?” she replied with a grimace.

  The other spoke over her. “He wouldn’t likely know it needed telling, would he? He hardly knows himself. The spirit works in peculiar ways, does it not? Such a potent brew poured into so inappropriate a vessel.”

  “He’s just ignorant, Brigida. Here, now, maestra. To enter past the warded gates, you must be purified. For you, immersion is enough. When the mansa accepts you formally, there will be other rites, and lessons in the proper rituals.”

  My ancestors had a similar ritual. Stripping off my clothing and dunking myself in heated baths I could manage. I unbuttoned my riding jacket as they worked on the fastenings of my riding skirt.

  “We can bring you new clothing, something more… suitable, maestra.”

  “I’d rather keep—”

  “Yes,” they agreed, as if expecting nothing else from an outsider like me. When I was naked, they looked me over much as they might examine a broodmare, studying its conformation. “Your hair, maestra.”

  I unpinned it.

  “Ah! Ah!” they exclaimed as my tresses fell free, and on the other side of the curtain fell a silence, voices stilled, ears listening. “What lovely hair, maestra! A true glory!” Their voices rang within the stone, and I wondered if they were speaking so loudly to make sure the men across the way could hear their praise.

  Only a curtain separated that side from this. I was vulnerable. How easy it would be for someone to brush past that curtain and thrust themselves onto this side. I ventured a toe in the water, thinking I could hide in the pool. It was blessedly warm.

  “No, maestra. Here is a brush and soap. Clean yourself first.”

  I dipped the brush into a bucket of hot water and scrubbed until they were satisfied.

  “Maestra! The bracelet! The locket, too. You must enter with nothing.”

  I removed both.

  “Is the bracelet a gift from your mother?”

  “No.” I would not tell them that I had only two things left of my mother: first, the warning she had spoken that had taken root in my head; second, a single memory not of her face but of a strong arm carrying me, of her body smelling of sweat and steel. I descended steps into the water, to my knees, to my hips, to my breasts. The water lapped around me, stirred by a similar descent on the far side of the curtain, and I thought, that is him entering the pool naked like me, and I ducked under to let the water swallow me because it was easier than thinking of his body.

  Like all the pure elements and like mirrors, water offers a conduit into the spirit world that lies intertwined with our own. What lies in the spirit world we cannot see; we haven’t the vision to perceive it. Some can reach into the spirit world and draw out filaments of its essence. In this wise, blacksmiths handle fire, potters earth, bards and djeliw the air that gives breath for songs and tales. As for the cold mages, no one outside the Houses understands the source of their power. It exists, as the great ice sheets exist, covering the northern reaches of Hibernia, covering the lands north of the Baltic Ice Sea, covering the Helvitic Alps. Reaching, so Kehinde at the inn had speculated, across the northern pole of the world to join with another vast shelf of ice that smothered the north of the continent we called Amerike which lay beyond the western ocean, the continent that had given birth to trolls instead of humans. How my father would have wished to converse with Godwik, who had also seen the face of the ice!

  A shining face, masked and unkindly. The cold sun, glinting on the ice, blinds. A sharp deadly voice says, We need a new weapon for the war. A courier who can walk between the lands.

  I came up gasping for air, my heart thundering as if I had woken from a nightmare twisted out of my memories and fears.

  “Again,” called the women.

  From behind the curtain, I heard a splash as Andevai came up, his attendants calling to him as mine had called to me: “Again.”

  With a gasp, I dropped beneath the surface, eyes open.

  Diviners pour water on a flat surface and see true visions within.

  I saw Bee, striding down an unknown street on her short legs in a haste of anger and weeping, her mouth moving in full furious spate. She was yelling at someone, but it wasn’t a street after all; it was a canal of rushing light, and she was walking all unaware into the mouth of a golden dragon whose fire flowed like water to obliterate her.

  I flailed to the surface, except that the air seemed still and sticky, as though it were not air at all. As through a long tunnel resonant with echoes, I heard female voices speaking far away.

/>   “Poor Esi was very disappointed. It’s all she’s talked of this year, a betrothal for her with Andevai. She would never accept being second wife to an outsider like this one, so I wonder why the mansa did not have his nephew take this one as his third wife and let Esi marry the young man? That would have solved the problem.”

  “Prohibited in the contract, so I heard. That the girl could not be brought in as a secondary wife. It is Kena’anic custom, I believe, that states a man may marry one woman only.”

  “That can’t be true!”

  “It’s said a Kena’ani woman may marry more than one man, if she chooses. What would you think of that, eh?”

  Their laughter swept like waves.

  “When I was young, maybe! It’s just as well, for Esi’s sake, that she was not allowed to marry Andevai. Youth is handsome, but youth fades. His upbringing, his people, will always drag him down. Sss! Why do you think he was sent to the duty of this contract? If harm comes of the binding, better it fall on him than on one of the precious lads.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. The high magisters say little, but you know it’s whispered Andevai has as cold a reach as they’ve seen in three generations. Maybe they thought he was the only one strong enough. Is she still under?”

  I was still under, arms flailing and groping upward, and yet my hands never broke the flashing surface. My lungs were empty. There was no floor to push off of, nothing under my feet, only an abyss of black water like my future into which I was sinking.

  Drowning.

  I am six years old and the water closes over my head and my mother’s strong hand slips out from mine as she is wrenched away by the furious current. No amount of clawing at the rushing liquid aids me. I have to open my mouth for a breath of air, but all that rushes in is water, filling my lungs and dragging me down into the depths.