by Kate Elliott
Men were stomping this way. I sidled four coats down and stopped when a thread tickled my nose. There I stood, no more than a coat myself, with a cozy fur lining and a heavy wool outer shell, just right for wearing out in the winter air…. So why, then, were coats hanging so conveniently in this corridor if not to be used by children at their break? Which meant that either they played in the garden, where their shouts and laughter might entertain—or annoy—the mansa, or there was another exit to the outside from this wing.
“Search the schoolrooms!” barked a male voice.
Like the other coats, I did not move.
Down they swept, footfalls shuddering on the flooring, doors flung open, childish voices raised with questions, matrons tersely demanding apologies. Two young men in soldiers’ livery paced down the coats, rippling them with strong hands, and yet… they walked right past me. At length the searchers satisfied themselves that no fugitive lurked in the schoolrooms. With no explanation to the matrons—who asked for none—they slammed shut the double entry doors and locked them from the other side.
There I stood, shrouded by coats. Through the now-open doors, I listened to the day’s lesson, which was apparently the same in every age cohort’s classroom, made simple for the little ones and extensive for the eldest.
A history lesson.
Listen, my father had written. Listen to hear if they are telling the truth or only part of the truth, for that is the lesson of history: that the victors tell the tale of their triumph in a manner to grant accolades to themselves and heap blame upon their rivals. Ask yourself if part of the story is being withheld by design or ignorance.
Only he was not my father. It was all a lie.
Tears wove runnels down my cheeks as one matron’s voice above all the others droned on.
“We in the Houses are a tree grown from two roots. We are twin, one born in the north and one born in the south. Our ancestors in the south fled the salt plague and at the end of their journey met our ancestors in the north. We are Celt and Mande, rich in spirit. Those among us who can handle the nyama of the spirit world joined together to form the Houses. Thus, we are grown into what we have now become, we who can grip the handle of power. This all of you know, for it is the story of your ancestors. But there are other peoples in the world who are known to us, each with their own qualities and strengths….”
I cautiously stuck out my head and peered down the corridor to my left. The outline of a door was discernible, a gateway leading out.
A schoolroom door snicked quietly open, bringing with it a swell of matronly voice listing the various well-known peoples of the world and their well-known characteristics: The noble Kushites are gifted rulers, wise and tolerant; the Greeks are philosophers and lovers of art; the Romans are masters of war and engineering; the cunning Phoenicians have plied the seas of commerce for untold generations. The door shut, but the recital went on in muted tones as two girls padded down the corridor and halted in front of me. One had long hair braided tightly and an intelligent gaze in a face whose lineaments and complexion resembled those of the younger boy I’d spoken to earlier, while the other had a white face and blond hair. Nevertheless, there was something similar about their eyes.
They considered me and then looked at each other, their gazes speaking without words. They were young, perhaps twelve winters, fresh faced and healthy and blooming. Then the little beasts each stuck out a hand, palm up, asking for payment.
“You must be what they’re looking for,” said the dark one, with the innocent smile of a child who understands the blackmailer’s art.
“Pay us,” said the fair one, “and we’ll pretend we never saw you.”
“Where does that door lead?” I murmured.
“Are you bargaining with us?” asked the dark one, her eyes wide in surprise.
“Knowing how loud we can scream?” added the fair one reasonably.
I knew how to handle girls like this. Never let them think they held the whip of life and breath over you, or you’d be cursed.
“Of course I’m bargaining,” I retorted in a low but suitably intense voice. “I’m Phoenician. We have to bargain. It’s in our blood.”
They grinned, as bright as a burst of lantern light on a murky night. I braced myself, expecting them to giggle, but they had exceptional self-control. Clearly, they were used to sneaking around where they weren’t supposed to be.
“I know how to unlock the door,” said the dark one.
“You can get outside and go through the park,” added the fair one. “But once you’re outside, we can’t help you.”
“Why are you willing to help at all?”
The fair one sighed and rolled her eyes with the dramatic glamor that wears itself like a burden. “I’m a diviner,” she said with the weariness of one who has already had to explain this too many times. “Or I will be, when I grow up. Of course I know these things.”
“We discussed what we should do,” added the dark one. “You’re no danger to us, so we’re willing to let you go. But we need something in exchange.”
I could not give them the bracelet Bee had given me. Beyond the clothes I was wearing, I possessed only one other object: the locket in whose heart nestled a tiny portrait of my father. But Daniel Hassi Barahal was not my father. So what would I be giving up by giving it to her? Only my hopes and dreams.
I slipped the chain over my head and handed the silver locket to the fair one. She popped the clasp and squinted at the portrait in the dim light, her fingers tracing the fine silverwork and the chased filigree that decorated the back.
Her frown was soft in the shadows, and for an instant she looked far older than her tender years. “Not what I expected.”
Her words made me shiver, like a memory of the eru’s greeting, but instead of explaining herself, she handed the locket to the dark one, who examined it with a jeweler’s precise measure.
“Done,” she said with a nod. She dropped the chain over her neck and pressed the locket down beneath the loose wool jacket that was buttoned up to her neck.
With no further speech, they skated along the polished wood floor in their soft indoor slippers. I took in a breath for courage and hurried after them. The dark girl with her long legs outpaced her fair cousin and slid to a halt before the heavy door. She bent down by the elaborate lock with a smile that reminded me of Bee’s most mischievous expression. She seemed to be whispering to the bat’s head that adorned the upper part of the lock. The fair one stationed herself at the wall to keep watch.
Was that a glamor shivering in the air, briefly seen as a net of shadow and light? Then it was gone. She slid the crossbar free and tugged open the door, and I slipped outside onto a vestibule and thence out through another door—this one unlatched—into a cold so sere that my lips went numb. I peered cautiously over a stately manicured wood composed of pine and spruce shouldering skyward beneath gray clouds. Bundled in quilted coats ornamented with brightly colored belts, soldiers ran through the trees; their heads were wrapped in cloth against the cold, only their eyes visible beneath red-brimmed hats like so many red-capped finches.
The woods were closed to me. I could not go back into the house. I hugged the wall, became the wall in its dressed smoothness, and ran in the other direction. I had to do what they would not expect me to do: I raced for the grand escalade. If I were bold, I might conceal myself by walking out on the same carriage road I had come in. I could become the pale graveled stone that paved the road. Either no one would see me, or the mansa and his djeli would see right through my pathetic veil and then I would be dead.
At the corner where the wing met the facade, my feet crunched in a spray of gravel. I halted to steady my breath and dig deep for the glamor. All now depended on my ability to veil myself with a glamor.
A flare of complicated emotion burned through me. Who was I, if not the eldest daughter of the Adurnam Hassi Barahal house? Why could I hide myself, listen, and see down chains of magic? Why had my mother told me to k
eep it a secret? Why had an eru called me “cousin”? Had Aunt and Uncle devised the scheme to sacrifice me in place of Bee? Had Daniel Hassi Barahal and Tara Bell been in on the cheat all along? Was the story that they were my loving mother and father an invented fiction that I had swallowed whole? Was I really an unwanted, useless, and expendable orphan plucked from the streets?
Wouldn’t it be easier to be dead than alone? Yet my heart beat too strongly to give up. What I felt was not precisely anger, nor was it blinding grief. It was something deeper, and more ancient, as determined as rock and as rooted as the great trees whose spirits animate the forest.
I would not die for their convenience.
White spun in the air. It had begun to snow. I could be snow. I drifted with the flakes onto the graveled court spreading like a pool beyond the granite escalade. No one would expect such a bold ploy. In front of the eyes of watching soldiers, I paced the measure of lazy snow, and they did not see me.
But someone else did.
Hooves made a crackling din as a carriage rolled around the curve of the drive. The coachman dragged the horses to a stop a stone’s throw from me. The footman leaped down from the back and flung open the carriage door without lowering the steps.
From away behind the kitchen wing, dogs yipped and set up barking, released to the hunt. What was concealed to their sight they might track with their keen noses. Against dogs, I had no chance.
The eru looked at me, captured my gaze. “The bonds of kinship demand I aid you, if I can.”
The coachman did not look at me—his gaze gathered in the soldiers and servants crowding expectantly on the escalade, some of whom were staring curiously at the carriage and others lifting their gazes in search of the approaching dogs—but the invitation was clear.
“You must obey them if they command you to hand me over to them,” I said hoarsely, “for you are servants of Four Moons House.”
The coachman snorted.
“Are you so sure our situation is what it has seemed to you to be?” asked the eru.
The soldiers stirred, parting to make way for the djeli. No glamor I possessed would shield me from the djeli’s sight, his handle of power whose chains reached into the spirit world.
I leaped up into the carriage. The eru shut the door behind me as shouts rang from the stairs and the carriage began to move. My cane was laid across one of the padded seats. I grasped the hilt, feeling the sword’s power through my palm.
“Halt!” cracked a command, and the carriage jolted to a stop as if it had run into an iron wall.
Was that the mansa’s power?
The carriage rocked beneath me as a moving body jostled it, and a whispery sound tickled my ears with unseen feathers. There were two doors in the carriage: the one Andevai and I had always entered and exited by, and the other one, the one whose shutters he had told me I could not open. Could not, or must not?
The unopened door latch shifted now, clicking down, just as a hand jostled the latch of the door behind me that I had entered through.
“I saw a shadow enter the coach,” cried a male voice, not one I recognized, “right after the footman opened the door.”
“Open!” commanded the djeli.
Fear hurts behind your eyes, like bright sun shining. I licked my lips as the other door, the door Andevai had forbidden me, cracked to let in a skirl of wind that cut with knives. I felt my skin opening, blades slicing shallow cuts as blood oozed like tears, but when I touched my cheeks, they were dry.
“Hurry,” said a voice on that wind, the eru’s voice, deep and strong. “Until the mansa’s hand is forced by stronger chains to release this carriage, we cannot move.”
As one door opened behind me, I plunged out onto the other side. A blast of wind slammed shut the carriage door behind me.
The carriage and I rested on a rise within an ancient forest of spruce, the wheels of the carriage fitted perfectly within a rutted track that cut away through the trees. Far away, down the direction Andevai and I had come earlier in the day, I saw a single stone pillar, surely the same one where we had poured an offering. The managed orchards and deciduous trees of the estate were missing. In my hand, in daylight, I held a sword whose blade had the hard sheen of steel. In this place, it looked perfectly ordinary, although in the world I knew it appeared as a sword only at night.
Impossible as it seemed, I had crossed over.
In tales and song, the spirit world exists in perpetual summer. Not here.
Here I stood in a landscape etched so hard by winter that the trees seem scratched on a copper plate against a sky whose grayish white pallor made me wonder if the blue had been drained from it as one might drain water from a tub. No sun’s disk was visible in what I took for a cloudless sky. As my eyes adjusted to the glare, I realized the track had a shimmer as fine as if silver thread were woven into the earth, a trembling current of magic coursing along its length.
“Cousin, run down to the pillar. There, speak these words: ‘As I am bound, let those bound to me as kin come to my aid.’ Quickly. We’ll pick you up there. Whatever you do, do not leave the path.”
The eru blazed, a nimbus of bright orange and flaring blue roaring off her skin. Her face still wore a human shape, but her aspect was so bright she was difficult to look upon. Her third eye was the most ordinary thing about her.
“Run,” said the coachman. He looked no different than he had before, solid and imperturbable. The horses steamed exactly as a china kettle steams when water is boiling inside.
Grasping my sword more tightly, I cautiously emerged from behind the reassuring bulk of the carriage. Of the massive building itself, I saw no sign at all. According to the tales my father had recorded, it is life—spirit—that interpenetrates both worlds. Transparent wisps as fragile as the wings of ghostly moths flickered in the air, the souls of human beings alive in the physical world, soldiers and servants running to the escalade that existed only in the world I had just left. Farther back, within the space that would in the physical world mark his audience chamber, the mansa’s spirit blazed as brightly as that of the eru. He had not pursued me. Why should he, when he had others to hunt for him?
The spirit flames of other cold mages moved toward the front of the house at the call of horn and hounds. I could not recognize my husband’s spirit among the gathering cold mages. All I could tell was that threads of power laced them, knotting and tangling through the unseen barrier that separated the two worlds.
The threads pulsed as power was drawn out of the spirit world into their bodies: The spirit world fed them.
No wonder they were so powerful.
Yet they were still blind. Cold mages cannot see through the veil between worlds.
But djeliw can.
The djeli stood at the other door, holding it open as he looked into the empty interior of the carriage. Like the coachman, he looked perfectly ordinary to my vision, just as he had in the mansa’s chamber, no glamor, just an elderly man wearing pale robes and gold earrings. He looked through. Somehow he looked past the closed door, and he saw me. He spoke to an unseen person behind him, but I heard nothing although his lips moved. No doubt he was alerting the soldiers and lesser mages, telling them to fetch the mansa.
They will not have me.
I ran.
My feet crunched on what I had mistaken for the glitter of magic but was actually a skin of frost atop the soil. Yet with each step away from the house, the brighter the frost shone, the harder the light became that illuminated the spirit world. A hawk’s high call pierced from the heavens like a spear in my heart. A body flashed within the trees, then another. Cold is not just a temperature; it is also fear. A pack of wolves coursed alongside me, loping parallel to the path, tongues lolling, their breath the only warm thing I felt. They were huge, shaggy creatures fit for the bitter winters, fashioned to drag down the great beasts who roamed the barren land. My father had written in his journals of watching dire wolves cut out and run to death a woolly rhinoceros.
Were the wolves pacing me in aid of the mansa? Running me to death? Or were they merely denizens of the spirit world, eager to eat a weak creature like myself who had strayed across? To feed on her, as the cold mages fed on the spirit world.
One lunged for me, and I yelped and stumbled sideways. The weight of my flight pressed against a curtain of air, almost enough to halt me. But my left foot came down off the track and at once, impossibly, a wolf appeared there to snap at my exposed boot. I have good reflexes, and good training. I jerked that foot back onto the path and at the same time unsheathed the sword and slashed at the wolf’s muzzle, the tip of my sword grazing its jowls.
With a yelp, it twisted away from my stab. Blood welled in its fur. It tensed, ready to lunge in for the kill. My breath came in bursts, a mist like the tremor of my spirit with each panting exhalation. I raised my sword between us. The wolf did not leap after me onto the track. They waited, crowding close, every cruel gaze fixed on me. They could not cross onto the path.
A shrill whistle jolted me. I threw a glance over my shoulder to see a vast shadow roiling down the track like the approach of a storm. I could see no sign of the place I had started running from, the ground where the mansa and his retainers had crowded very like the wolves waiting to rip out my heart and eat my entrails. I saw only the surge of a storm bearing down on me.
I ran. I was so frightened I felt almost as if I had sprouted wings, I ran so fast.
The storm raced at my back, a thundering gale made cacophonous with the howl of wind, but there was also a shrieking wail like a tortured spirit being whipped forward. The ground beneath my feet began to sprout flakes of ice as sharp as obsidian, cutting into my boots. The stone pillar rose before me, an obelisk like a nail of stone spearing up into the heavens and so tall I could not discern its point.
I leaped up onto the squared base and sheathed my sword, tucking it firmly through the waistband of my riding skirt. I wrapped my arms around the pillar, turned my face into the carved face of the stone, and clung there with all my strength as the gale hit.