Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  “There is no trouble. And your people?”

  This could go on for a while, and the night was advancing, and I was standing in one place rather than putting miles between me and those who wanted to kill me. Despite knowing there were certain forms, I could not bring myself to lie about “my people” even for the sake of courtesy, so I chanced rudeness. “Forgive my hasty words, but we are out late on an ill-omened night. I am called Catherine. Have you a name to share?”

  “In my house, I am called Father,” replied the old man with a grin that made me smile. “As for a stranger met on the road, you may call me Mamadi.”

  The tall man spoke with more impatience. “In my house, I am called Duvai. We are hunters, going home much later than we meant to. Hallows Night is no night to wander the forest.”

  At least they weren’t answering questions with questions!

  A howl rose, but neither reacted; I wasn’t sure they heard. Maybe the sound had reached me on a wind blowing between the worlds, although the branches here did not stir.

  “Best to keep moving,” said the old man, setting off after the taper, now almost out of sight among the trees, and the faint patter of the drummer. The tall man nodded at me politely and followed his elder.

  As they walked away, I wondered what horn had summoned the eru and the coachman. Who were their masters? The cold sank deeper and the night grew darker. There was a taste on the air that truly frightened me; the breath of wolves warmed my neck. I sheathed my sword and followed, wishing my fur cloak was a spirit mantle in truth, if it would keep me warmer. They did not slow their pace or offer any comment as we trekked at a brisk stride through the forest, catching up with the others. The charms and amulets woven onto their clothing clattered quietly.

  Once again there rose on the wind a howl, and this time the hunters reacted; they spoke bantering words between their party, joking, it seemed, at the expense of the nervous stripling. They spoke a manner of half-breed language that took some part from the common bastard Latin known throughout the north but that was otherwise a tartan of Celtic and Mande. I could not specifically understand them, and certainly could not speak in their way, but I could follow parts of it, because I heard similar dialects spoken between pupils at the academy. It seemed this was the lad’s first expedition into the bush, shepherded by experienced men, and because he had survived it under their supervision, naturally they were teasing him.

  I said to the tall man’s back, “When you say you hunted in the bush, do you mean you actually crossed into the spirit world, went hunting, and came back? I thought no mortal men could do that.”

  “Flowers plucked carelessly soon wither,” he said in the common speech.

  “I beg pardon if my words seem carelessly chosen, like thoughtlessly plucked flowers,” I replied, “but on a night like this, and in such circumstances as we have met, you can surely understand why I would ask.”

  “I take you for city bred, by your clothing and your manner. Hunters walked into the bush long before others did. Even before djeliw or blacksmiths. Long before there were cold mages. What was never known to those who have not learned history can be excused.”

  At the mention of cold mages, I thought his tone shaded toward ice. “If you’re from nearby,” I continued, still probing, “then your people are surely bound to a mage House, for there is such a House close by here, is there not?”

  My not-so-innocuous query evidently offended him, because he lengthened his stride, and although I am tall, I had to hasten to keep up. On any other night, I would have forged forward on my own, but no one raised in the north leaves their home after dark on Hallows Night. No one. Not even the scholars who tut-tutted as with their intellectual scalpels they dissected the unsophisticated folk beliefs of ignorant villagers.

  Woodland gave way to stretches of pasture and columns of orchard to the stubble of hayfields and strips of plowed fields that had been harvested weeks ago. We plunged into a grove of black pine and halted at the base of a tree whose girth proclaimed it a venerable giant. Its trunk was hung all over with animal horns. The tall man waved at me to step back as, by the light of the wavering taper, they made a half circle and sang more than spoke words while the old man took his knife and nicked the shoulder of the dead beast they carried. Blood trickled sluggishly to dribble at the base of one of the trees. A pressure as of an invisible hand or a flavor as of quivering life or a smell and sound made my head ache. Then it was gone, and wind breathed through the trees. I shuddered and was glad to see them start forward again, for there was power here I did not understand, and I did not want to be too close to it.

  A howl rose again, and for the first time I understood it was not the voice of wolves but of some other hunter entirely, something far more dangerous. I quickened my steps until I walked practically on the heels of the tall man, but he deigned not to notice me.

  We crossed out of the pine grove. As we walked along the shore of a pond skinned with ice, the stripling fell back to walk alongside me.

  “Duvai thinks you’re a spirit woman who followed us out of the bush,” he confided, “but if that’s so, then you would be beautiful and you wouldn’t be shivering and look so tired.”

  “My thanks,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster in my tired and unbeautiful state, but then I laughed, because I was accustomed to lads of just this age at the academy. While it was only the bold ones who talked this way with the older pupils, I was pretty sure they all thought the same dreadfully tiresome things.

  “My apologies,” he muttered, chin dipping; most likely he was blushing. “But Mamadi says you have human blood, like us.”

  I knew how to fence. I took a chance at a counterstrike. “So this is your first trip into the bush? Do the hunters of your village often cross into the spirit world?”

  “Oh, no!” The young who are male can never resist showing off their knowledge, no doubt because they possess so little. “The veil between the worlds thins in the days leading up to Hallows Night. A very powerful and clever hunter will know where to find the crossroads that lie between the worlds. Even for him it will be a very dangerous crossing—”

  He realized he had said too much. With a grunt meant, perhaps, to be some manner of excuse for breaking off the conversation so abruptly, he loped forward to the front of the procession to put as much distance between him and me as he could. The old man chuckled, although I’d thought him too far away to hear.

  The lake ended in reed-choked shallows netted with ice. As we made our way down a fenced slope next to a stream, I realized I had seen this place before. A village spread across the hollow below. The walls and houses of its compounds looked much like the interior of a beehive, many-celled and complex. Two stockades ringed the village. The outer separated the village from the fields, and the inner separated the residential houses from the ring of gardens, work sheds, and other shelters. Torches marked the gates of each stockade. I had seen this village from the carriage when we passed; it was the only place in all that long journey Andevai had shown any sort of interest in. We were close to the toll road, although I could discern no trace of it in the darkness. Maybe I should have run, but it was night and it was breathtakingly cold, and besides all that, the air breathed its own warning of danger. Alone on Hallows Night, with no fire and nothing more than the clothes I wore and my sword, how could I hope to survive? The hunt rides.

  Outside the stockade, our party was greeted by a group of young men and women putting the finishing touches on a heap of debris—wood, dry dead leaves, desiccated undergrowth—piled just beyond the entry gate. We passed through the open gate to the outer stockade. Inside, on a path leading between gardens, the men conferred in low voices and then the party split up. The old man and the other four adult men with the beast headed off to a shelter where coals glowed in a damped-down hearth fire. Duvai gestured to me, and with the stripling almost bouncing in his excitement, we headed for the inner gate. Two young men armed with spears and longbows—no muskets,
of course, in territory beholden to a House—stood at the inner gate.

  “Peace to you. How are you all?” I asked the guards as we came up.

  “Well. We are well thanks to the mother who raised us,” they mumbled, glancing at the tall man as if for direction, but he only lifted an eyebrow.

  “And everyone in the compound?”

  “Well. They are well.” They refused to look me in the eye—naturally, as I might be a spirit who had walked out of the spirit world specifically to do them mischief. But I could not ask after members of their families, because I did not know them, and they glanced aside and beckoned to the tall man and said, in what they clearly hoped would be an undertone, fearing to insult me in case I was what they feared, “Duvai, what is this? Did you bring it with you or did it follow you?”

  I knew the custom of the countryside. Daniel Hassi Barahal had written of it in his journals.

  “I ask for guest rights.” If I surprised the gate guards, which I did, I surprised the tall man even more. Perhaps he had genuinely thought me a spirit and was now realizing he had been mistaken. By the lights of the torches at the gate, I could see he was older than me, well grown and good-looking, old enough to be called fully a man but not yet middle aged. There was something about him that seemed familiar, and it was only because I had just been thinking about Andevai—as unfortunate as it was that I should ever feel obliged again to think of him—that I wondered if I saw a resemblance between the two, although Duvai’s hair and complexion were lighter.

  The men at the gate said what they must. “Enter and be fed. Enter and sleep without evil dreams.”

  With an exhalation of relief, I crossed between the torches and into the enclosure within which compounds and houses clustered. Dogs barked but quieted quickly, recognizing the tall man and accepting me as one of his companions.

  In the dusk it was difficult to count the structures, but the enclosure ringed a fair amount of ground. I estimated there were at least two dozen tapers, which meant at least a dozen compounds burned tapers at their entrances. Even in sophisticated Adurnam, every household burned a taper or a lamp at the door on Hallows Night. At the far end of the village opposite the gate rose a larger round structure, its conical thatched roof like a hat blocking the heavens. From that direction came the sound of a drum talking an easy rhythm, at which the stripling laughed and essayed several steps until the tall man curtly cut him down with a few words. The drum died, as if the man had silenced it, but its demise was followed by laughter, a short rapid phrase of song, and a second, lower-voiced drum beating out an exploratory bass. Out of this desultory introduction, a woman’s deep alto rose in a long stream of melody whose power halted me in my tracks.

  “Feet hasten where there is news to be delivered,” said the tall man to the stripling, and the lad hurried off into the dark. “A warm hearth on a cold night is welcome,” he said to me, and I took that as an invitation.

  We entered a compound whose doors, opening onto a common courtyard, stood close together like friendly relatives. Every door was ornamented with a burning taper, and women were working and talking and making jokes. A child ran along the narrow alley between the buildings, and a pair of women laughed as they crossed the broad, open space with baskets atop their heads. I smelled some manner of glorious cooking; surely that was meat sizzling!

  As we approached a door almost opposite the compound’s gate, a woman about Duvai’s age came to the door to greet him. When she saw me, she frowned. She was a short, lovely woman, wearing a striped wool robe. Inside, a cast-iron stove, surely a sign of prosperity in a humble village like this one, gave off heat.

  “Peace to you, on this evening,” I began as a pair of toddlers, a half-grown lad, and a middle-aged woman gathered on the other side of the threshold to stare at me.

  The woman did not invite me in; instead, she came out and drew the tall man apart and spoke in an undertone while folk emerged from the compound doors to see what was going on. I felt like an exhibition at one of the academy’s lectures. Young and old, female and male, dressed in rustic clothing, these were country folk, not poor precisely because none had the starving look of the beggars I saw on the streets of Adurnam, but the compound was certainly without any of the niceties city people expected. A freestanding brick fire pit cradled a blaze that beat back the night’s gloom. Several log benches and stone mortars rested beneath a big, leafless tree.

  Out of the crowd pushed a young woman who looked a few years younger than I was. She hurried over to the tall man and his companion. After being invited by gesture to approach, she spoke in a voice so quiet even I could distinguish nothing above the murmur of conversation among the people watching me. But she threw glances in my direction as she addressed the hunter and the woman I guessed was likely Duvai’s wife. I began to think this newcomer also looked familiar, because this was the kind of night in which I was bound to see everything in a suspicious light.

  “I won’t!” said the wife with an audible anger that startled her companions.

  Duvai said, “She has already asked for and been offered guest rights. To cast her out would offend the ancestors….” Again the words flew beyond my comprehension.

  The girl beckoned, and I went to her. She led me to a low door set back from the main ground by a tiny, private courtyard. This was the only house with two tapers on each side of its entrance. Before we reached the threshold, the door was opened from the inside and an elderly woman looked me up and down. Before I could start with a new round of greetings, she opened the door wider and made it clear I should enter.

  The earthen walls were so massively thick that the chamber within was smaller than it seemed from outside. Its single room lay mostly in shadow, and it smelled of fresh pine wreaths overlaying a tincture of soured milk and the bite of recently peeled onion. Four benches were stacked beside the door. A bed stood opposite the door. An old chest was set at the foot of the bed, and five bundles of herbs hung from the rafters. Besides the hearth set into the wall and a spinning wheel, that was all.

  The elderly woman offered a bowl filled with water. I was so thirsty that I drank it all, but before I could speak to thank her, a quavering voice spoke from the bed.

  Her dialect fell too thick for me to penetrate. Instead, the girl spoke for her. “Let Andevai’s bride approach the mother of this compound, if she wishes to speak.”

  I would have—should have—bolted, but the words chained my heart and my feet. Maybe it was only curiosity that would kill the cat, or perhaps she who lay invalid on the bed had power enough to hold me here, even if she seemed to give me a choice in the matter. The girl I recognized too late: She was the girl I had glimpsed striding through the orchard with the other workers. Duvai, then, must be Andevai’s older brother. Impossibly—or perhaps not—I had run to exactly the wrong place. Could it be the eru and coachman had betrayed me? Yet why bother to stage an elaborate escape? More likely the mansa, or the djeli, had power enough to direct my steps this way.

  The shape in the bed spoke again, and the girl repeated so I could understand.

  “Just because you think you see a wolf does not mean one is there.” She added, “Mother possesses sight.”

  I was breathing hard and fast. “That’s your mother? Andevai’s mother?”

  “Our father’s mother, so our mother. Go to her. She won’t bite, Catherine. Your name is Catherine, isn’t it? I asked already, in the orchard—my brother’s wife will surely become a sister to me!—but he refused to let me meet you.”

  The old woman spoke as in answer, and the girl grimaced and shrugged. “He’s ashamed of us. That’s what they’ve taught him there, to feel ashamed of his people.” She glanced at me sidelong and the next words were not unfriendly precisely but with a bite I had not heard in the grandmother’s tone. “Do you look down upon us also, Catherine?”

  “No, no, not at all.” Now I had to approach the old grandmother lest my behavior be deemed haughty. What had I to lose by being friendly whe
n I now knew he had rejected them? I knelt beside the bed on a pillow set there for visitors. “Grandmother, my greetings to you on this evening. Is it peaceful with you?”

  We went on in this way for a while, and the longer we spoke the stock phrases that were easiest for me to understand, the better I could tease out meaning from her country way of speaking and the gaps made by words that I simply did not know. Andevai’s sister filled in what I missed. I was not even aware when the long ritual of greeting shifted into another type of conversation entirely, for ancient grandmothers generally feel they can interrogate those who enter into their circle, and I was her grandson’s wife and therefore now her daughter.

  “Duvai’s wife naturally believes her husband brought a spirit woman home from the bush to take in as his second wife,” she told me, with help from her granddaughter. “That is why she took so badly against you. She is not a mean or ungenerous woman, but she is jealous of his attentions, for she believes he is a man whom all women—especially spirit women who see him walking in the bush—must desire as a husband. Also, he will become head of the family one day soon.”

  “Why would she think me a spirit woman out of the… ah… bush?”

  “You have the smell of the spirit world in your bones. But I have seen spirit women, and spirit men, and changeling children, and I know you are not one of them but something else.”

  “Do you know what I am?” I demanded.

  The girl hissed warningly at my impassioned tone, but the old mother smiled. “I sense you are confused. Why are you come to our village? I admit, a wedding night celebrated on Hallows Night would be ill-omened, so better that you wait on the bedding. Still, I would think you better served in a big house with plenty of rich food and fine clothing to wait out the hallowing.”

  I held my tongue, thinking furiously. What could I say that would not condemn me?

  “Yet here you are,” she continued. I did not think her sight extended actually into my thoughts. It surely took no great skill to look at my weary, rumpled form and figure that something drastic must have precipitated my departure from a powerful mage House on the deadliest night of the year, especially since Andevai’s sister knew perfectly well that I had only hours before arrived at Four Moons House in her brother’s company. “And now you are our guest, whatever else you may be. I expect you are hungry. Kayleigh, bring meat and porridge. How tired the feet become after much walking!” She lifted her hand a handbreadth off the blankets.