Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  If I had fallen naked into a lightless pit and had barrels filled with crushed ice and red-hot razor blades poured over me, it would have been easier to endure. Was this the mansa’s power seeking to tear me free? To rip me from the path so his creatures could eat me and thereby consume my spirit and cause my death in the mortal world?

  The cold was so profound, like the winter wind out of the barren lands that could freeze a man where he stood, that I could hold on only by falling in my mind into the stone, becoming stone, joining with the reliefs carved into the granite face. Impervious to cold.

  Pillars mark crossroads, a branching of a track, a choice of direction.

  Death lay behind me. What lay ahead or to either side I could not know. But I refused to die, and furthermore, I would not let Four Moons House get hold of Bee. Whatever else I knew—and that wasn’t much—I was absolutely sure Bee had never been involved in this scheme in any way, except as its victim, like me.

  I would never let Four Moons House get her.

  Never. Not as long as I had breath.

  I flattened myself into the carvings, one grain among many seething within the spire like so many trapped sparks. Birthed in fire and crushed beneath the implacable weight of the earth, I was stone, immovable, untouchable. But I had a voice.

  “As I am bound,” I said into the stone, “let those bound to me as kin come to my aid.”

  Between one breath and the next, the carriage rolled up beside me.

  “Cousin.” Within the scream of the storm, I heard the eru’s voice as clearly as I had often heard the bells ringing out over Adurnam in their nightly conversation. “We are here, beside you.”

  I had trusted all my young life in the memory of my father, the bold adventurer. I had trusted the care and concern of my aunt and uncle, the generosity of the clan toward one of its daughters.

  What allows us to trust? Kinship ought to, but it does not always.

  What, then, causes trust to flower? A smile, perhaps. An offering of tea and bread to a hungry, chilled, and confused young woman, made without expectation of return.

  Pillars mark crossroads, a branching of a track, a choice of direction.

  I leaped down, groping. A strong hand met mine and closed over it, pulling. I slammed into the side of the carriage, found a latch, opened a door, and as the hand released mine, I crawled in, my skirt tangling in my sword. I fell hard onto one of the benches.

  Opposite me, still and silent and calm, sat the djeli.

  I wrestled the sword from my skirt, set my hand on the hilt.

  The djeli raised a hand. “Listen,” he said, and there was that in his voice that expected one to stop and to hear. “I am no threat to you.”

  I drew the sword but because I respected a man as old as he was, I let the blade rest lightly across my thighs and kept a wary gaze on him without staring him straight in the eyes. “You were coming through to get me.”

  “No. I entered the carriage to speak to you. Unlike you, with your spirit mantle, I cannot cross into the bush. Just as the mansa cannot cross.”

  “What do you mean, a spirit mantle?”

  “You wear a curious mantle in the spirit world. I don’t know what to make of it, I admit. Do you?”

  “How could you see me through the door of the carriage? You saw into the spirit world!”

  “I can see because I would be no djeli could I not see. But I cannot walk there.”

  “Did the mansa send those wolves to eat me? That storm to freeze me?”

  “What magic the magisters wield, or their limitations, is not mine to know. My destiny is joined to that of Four Moons House because I speak the history of their lineage, the Diarisso lineage, and of an old war. Later, it becomes the tale of flight across the desert away from the salt plague. After this it becomes the story of those who joined hands and secrets and became the first cold mages.”

  “But you also see into the spirit world. You are tracking me. What do you expect me to do? Give myself up to be slaughtered? Allow my dear cousin to be handed over as I was? I think not.”

  On we rolled as a wind howled around the carriage but could not disturb the two of us sheltered within its confines.

  He smiled, as the elderly can do, a complicated mix of amusement, sadness, wisdom, and calculation, and he had a crinkling at the eyes and a sympathy in the lips that made me want to like him. But I had not the luxury to like him. I shifted the sword on my skirts.

  “You are no Barahal. So what are you, who can cross into the spirit world, and why are these servants aiding you and disobeying the master of Four Moons House?”

  “Answer your own questions. I owe you nothing.”

  He sighed. “You are correct that we sit at an impasse. I will get out at the gate, because I must. But you are still marked for death.”

  “Is that a threat, or a promise, or a warning?”

  “It is a phrase. To the Ancestors we will come, one way or the other. We are part of them, as they are part of us. So is it sung.”

  He lifted his staff and I tensed, raising my sword, but he did not attack me. He rapped the roof of the carriage, a rhythm as much speech as beat. The carriage, bowling along like a well-thrown ball, slowed, steadied, and pulled to a halt.

  I braced as the djeli opened the door that led into the mortal world. I set a hand on the latch of the door into the spirit world, ready to bolt, but he only stepped outside into the cold afternoon and said to me, in the words of the language we spoke within the Kena’ani clans where I had grown up, “Peace be with you and in all your undertakings.”

  The words rang strangely; I had never expected to hear them here, and for once I was genuinely too surprised to speak. Beyond him I saw the wall that ringed the estate stretching away out of sight. Might I actually escape?

  He shut the door, and we rolled on. I felt, as a string on a fiddle must feel when the bow commands it, a vibration pass through me as we crossed under the House gate. I heard a shout of surprise and cracked open the shutter. The gatehouse fell away behind, and young men in soldiers’ red came running after as if, like the wolves in the spirit world, they meant to pace us as far as their legs, or their magic, could carry them.

  Were the spirit wolves still following us? The mansa would not give up the hunt so easily. He wanted Bee, and a man like that did not just relinquish the things he wanted.

  Andevai was not sitting here to command me not to open the other shutter. Now that I had escaped from the house and the wall of magic that enclosed their estate, I felt a surge of satisfaction in realizing that I need not listen to Andevai’s arrogant, condescending words ever again. That was a triumph worth celebrating!

  I laughed once, and then I wiped away tears. After that, I closed the shutter and, with sword raised protectively, cracked the shutter of the window that looked out onto the spirit world, bracing for a blast of wintry wind. The breath of wind that brushed my face seemed balmy by comparison to what had come before. I peeled back the shutter.

  We drove through an autumnal countryside. Amid the dark spruce, especially in lower sinks, rose downy birch, alder, rowan, and a few doughty ash trees, their leaves burnished gold. Wind spun falling leaves. Deep in the trees, a herd of hairy beasts ambled on their way, hard to discern in the shadows. Had we traveled this way a month ago, this is the landscape I would have expected to see. A herd of red deer grazing in a clearing opening out beside the track lifted their heads. At first I thought they were looking at the carriage, but their interest was caught by something behind us. First one and then four and then the rest bolted away. I leaned out to see the pack of wolves loping in the distance. It seemed they were slowing down, veering off.

  A beast stalked out from the trees, a huge saber-toothed cat, its coat the gray-black of the underside of a storm cloud. A second and third emerged behind it, colored in the manner of tundra cats that must blend with snow and rock. Rippling with power, they bounded out of my sight. I sat back hard, barely breathing. My heart galloped out of rh
ythm to the steady drumbeats of the horses’ hooves.

  “Where will we go? Can we outpace wolves and cats?” I shouted out the window, into the spirit world. “Who are you? Who am I?”

  I heard only the eru’s laughter in answer.

  Yet it seemed not mocking laughter but the laughter of those sympathetic to you, who see amusement in the prospect of you working out on your own that which has bewildered you. No doubt I had laughed that way myself, waiting for Bee to make a connection that appeared entirely obvious to me. So she often laughed at me, a laugh full of kinship, not scorn.

  I sat for a while, watching the spirit world, with its gray-white sky and absent sun, everything so sharply drawn that my eyes stung to look on it. I shut them for a time. Maybe I dozed as the urgency of the chase drained away.

  Then I started awake, recalling everything that had happened. When I leaned out the window to look behind, I saw no sign of wolves or cats. The terrible fear and tension eased. I sheathed the sword and sat back against the upholstered seat with a sigh.

  The sound rose out of the earth like mist and filtered down from the sky like rain. A horn’s call, one might call it, if one had no other word to use, as much a long chuckling laugh as the tarantata of a trumpet’s rallying shrill, as much the eerie moan of a conch shell as a drawn-out cry of despair. I had never heard anything remotely similar, not in all my too-brief life.

  The call licked the air like fire and breathed all the way down into my bones. I knew I had to run. Run. Run.

  The carriage slowed, scraped, and jolted to a halt. The eru leaped down, face creased in a solemn frown. Her third eye did not frighten me, for she only looked at me with two eyes. The third looked elsewhere, sidelong, as at a sight I could never see and would not wish to glimpse.

  “My apologies, Cousin. We cannot convey you as far as we would wish.”

  “Is that the mansa’s command, calling you home?”

  The eru’s laugh made me shudder. “Is that what you think it is?”

  I tried again. “You are a servant of Four Moons House, being called home.”

  “We are not servants of Four Moons House. Although you will find a pair of us in each of the mage Houses. They believe or choose to believe we are their servants, but we are not their servants. Rather we are watchers in the service of a greater power that at all times keeps a tiny whisper of its attention for those among the human lineage who may become too powerful.”

  The horn call blared a second time, gaining strength.

  I clutched the lip of the window until my knuckles whitened. “You’ll abandon me here!”

  “Alas, our masters call. We must obey the summons.” Her expression was difficult for me to read, composed with some portion of humanly compassion and yet a greater measure of something like disdain that was perhaps merely a degree of aloofness to the petty travails of a mortal creature like myself. Or else she was angry. Impossible to say. “As for you, you must depart into the mortal world, for it is not safe for you in the spirit world without a guide. Especially not this night, when the hunt rides. You must find the cunning and the strength to make your way on your own in the world you know. One thing: The cold mages cannot pursue you on Hallows Night and Hallows Day. They dare not walk abroad when the hunt rides. Yet this night of all nights is an ill time for every mortal creature. Find shelter when the sun goes down, and depart at dawn to gain what head start you can.”

  “The djeli said I wear a spirit mantle. Tell me what that means.”

  “It means we are cousins. Go now.”

  She reached inside and firmly slid closed the shutters. An instant later, too quickly for her to have walked around the carriage, the latch of the other door clicked down and the door opened. I climbed out not into the autumnal beauty of the spirit world but into the shivering cold of winter’s twilight in my own. The clouds lay heavy and dark above; the last light drained like hope from the empty landscape of frost and field. There was no wind.

  Sitting above, the coachman lifted his riding whip in salute.

  The horn rang a third time around us, the sound rolling like thunder away over the hills.

  The whip came down across the backs of the horses, whose hooves no longer touched the earth. The eru leaped up onto the running board, and from her back roiled a disturbance in the air. She was spreading wings.

  A wind out of the north howled over us, almost bowling me over. The carriage and the eru and the coachman and the horses dissolved into a thousand shards of ice, and I was battered as by a vortex of bladed leaves so hard I shut my eyes.

  And when the wind died and I opened my eyes, the eru and the coachman and the coach and four were gone. I stood alone, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but my sword and my bracelet and the clothes I wore, as snow began to fall and the gloaming of Hallows Night swallowed a now-silent world.

  19

  Broken woodland surrounded me. In the clearing in which I stood, snow dusted the grass. I had thought we were on the toll road, so smoothly had we traveled, but no road revealed itself to my searching and desperate gaze. Perhaps in the spirit world this was a line of power unseen to the mortal eye in the physical world, for I could see nothing but the last shadows of the trees beneath the darkening sky.

  The hunt rides.

  There! A taper wavered in the gloom to the north of me, then vanished. Voices lifted and faded, then lifted again in song underlaid by hands clapping and a drum’s accompanying patter.

  East lay the House. Out of the north came the singers. Between south and west lay little enough choice except for a barest glimmer as faint as a thread of spider’s silk caught between two trees. It might be a path. Even if it wasn’t I could hide in the trees. Keeping my sword sheathed, I paced as swiftly as I could without breaking into a run whose haste might trip me up. A rustle like the pelting race of animals through brittle grass chased around me and quieted, but I dared not pause, knowing that spirit wolves—or a family of hunting saber-toothed cats—might have followed my scent out of the spirit world. Could the animals of the spirit world cross into ours, as I had crossed into theirs?

  The enveloping canopy and loamy scent of spruce loomed before me. Beneath the trees, the path continued on as straight as if surveyed by Roman engineers, laid with a glamor so slight it was as if the track exhaled. It was easy enough to follow for a person with my vision.

  Branches swayed above me. A weight dropped so fast down out of the trees that I flailed as netting tangled over my head and in my hands. I gave myself a single breath to strangle my panic, then crouched and pulled the sheathed sword free right on the earth between rope and soil. Pushing the sword’s hilt before me to lift the net, I wormed forward. When I found the edge of the netting, I peeled it back from my head just as two men stepped onto the path before me. I grasped the netting, dragged it up and sideways, and flung it with all my strength at them as I sprang in the other direction.

  I slammed against another body. A hand’s powerful grasp chained my sword arm. The man who had captured me was tall and bundled in winter’s clothing. That was all I could tell, except that he smelled of sweat and wool. I dropped to my knees to get a new angle, my sword’s blade glittering as I torqued it toward his face.

  He made a noise between gritted teeth, something between a grunt and a laugh. He got a knee up between us and kicked me back so hard I stumbled into the netting and slashed at empty air. But I had a cat’s grace. I did not fall, as they expected me to. My chest hurt, but I could still breathe.

  The taper had reached me. In its flaring light, I found myself surrounded by seven men wearing quilted wool coats hung with charms and armed with the bows and spears of hunters. The eldest had a seamed face; the ends of many gray-streaked braids, each bound with an amulet at its tip, stuck out from beneath a wool cap drawn down over his ears. The youngest was a stripling, younger than me and wide-eyed with amazement at finding a creature such as myself alone in the forest with a sword on such a night.

  “Ah!” said the
man I’d slammed into, licking blood off his thumb. “I am cut by your blade. Does the cat scratch on purpose, or is it only startled?”

  “I know how to use my sword,” I said, addressing him. “You dropped the net on me.”

  “You are a knowledgeable person,” he agreed. “Still, we are seven, and you are one.”

  The elder spoke up, his common speech thick enough that I had trouble understanding him. “No wise hunter makes a killing after sunset on Hallows Night,” he observed. “Especially not with cold steel.”

  How did he recognize cold steel?

  Two men folded the netting into a neat bundle that the stripling settled over his shoulders. They set out with the stripling, who coddled a hand drum hanging by a leather loop from his neck. Behind came another pair of men single file with a stout stick braced on their shoulders and a dead animal dangling down, tied by its legs. At first I took it for a tundra antelope, for the edge of the Barren Lands lay perhaps ten days’ walk north of here, and animals might stray. Then I saw that it possessed three horns; two sprang up from just above its pale ears, and the third, in the center of its quiescent brow, was knit with a silver glamor.

  The tall man and the elder waited.

  “Are you a woman of this world, or a spirit creature that followed us out of the bush in the form of a woman?” the tall man asked, not kindly but not angrily, either. He was just asking.

  When had my breathing become so unsteady? I hadn’t been running, but so many shocks tossed into my path one after the next made me dizzy. Ahead, the stripling began tapping out a pattern on the drum as if it were a protective shield.

  “Peace to you,” I said, in the greeting of the countryside, which I’d read about in Daniel Hassi Barahal’s journals. “Do you have peace, friend?”

  The old man chuckled. “I have peace, thanks to my mother who raised me. And you?”

  “And me, I am fine, thanks to—ah—my power as a woman.” Although at the moment it was difficult to know what power that could be. “And the people of your household, they also?”