by Kate Elliott
She was old, with a crooked back, and as thin as if she had not had enough to eat for many months. But she held my eyes with the confident gaze of a person who is sure of her authority in the world. Her loose, comfortable boubou, the robe sewn out of strips of gold, red, and black cloth, appeared practical for journeying and easy to wear. Her skin was quite black, unusual in these parts, and a scarf wrapped her head, although it had slipped back to reveal twists of silver hair. She wore gold earrings.
“You’re a djeli,” I said. “A djelimuso.” A female djeli.
She opened a case and placed the fiddle and bow within, then closed it and looked at me. “What are you?”
“I’m Catherine,” I replied. The horse shied and snorted. I yanked down on the reins just as a pair of saber-toothed cats ambled out of the night and flopped down beside the well.
“Are these also your companions?” asked the djeli with remarkable calm. When she shifted her head to look directly at the big cats, her earrings caught strands of firelight and sent it shooting like arrows into the night, and then I blinked; after all, the earrings were only gleaming slightly, as any polished surface must do.
“Not my companions, but they seem to have followed me.” I did not see the sable male cat; these might be two of the ones I thought had stayed behind to guard… or to eat…
“Andevai!”
How any man could manage to look so haughty and offended while limping I could not say. And yet, infuriatingly, it was indeed Andevai who emerged out of the night, appearing very much the worse for the wear with his clothing rumpled and stained. Besides that, he looked immensely annoyed. Behind him strolled another three of the big cats, whose demeanors bore the smug satisfaction of a petted house cat that has just deposited a mouse before its surprised human. And I was very surprised.
With not even a polite by-your-leave, and ignoring the huge saber-tooths, he approached the roaring fire.
The djeli rose. “Peace, traveler. I hope the night finds you at peace.”
He pulled up so sharply that I laughed, for it was as if he’d been reined in.
“I have no trouble thanks to the mother who raised me,” he said politely. “May this night find you at peace.”
Honestly, they went on in this vein for far longer than I could ever have dragged out a greeting with my inadequate command of village customs. I thought they might wind down through the health of unnamed fathers and uncles and mothers and cousins into the well-being of the cattle, dogs, chickens, wheat, and barley and what troubles the vegetable garden might have seen since the two had last met, which, since these two had evidently never before met, would no doubt take a century to complete.
“Are you finished?” I demanded when there came a pause, rather embarrassed at my rudeness but really beginning to shake now. I could use fear if I turned it to anger. “Begging your pardon, maestra.” I drew my sword, and the cats rose as if in answer, yawning to display their ferocious teeth, although they stayed by the well. “I thought you were dead.”
He swung around to look at the cats, then back to face me. His own sword remained sheathed. “A more correct statement would be that you wished I was dead.”
“I wished no such thing. I am sure I hold no animosity toward you at all except for the small detail that you tried to kill me. Indeed, for all I know, you did kill me, and I am wandering here as in Sheol, with saber-toothed cats stalking my trail and you plaguing me. I suppose you intend to attack me again, perhaps by the light of this lovely—” I broke off.
The fire was burning without stint.
His presence was having no effect on the fire.
“I want my horse back,” he said wearily, paying no attention to this marvel.
“Why are you not extinguishing the fire?” I demanded.
“Because,” said the djeli, “while magisters draw their power through the spirit world, they have no power in it.”
The look he shot at her should have been a spear of killing ice, but the fire burned regardless and nothing happened to her for violating such precious secrets.
Fiery Shemesh! He wielded no cold magic here!
I snorted, and his gaze flashed to me as his lips curved into the supercilious frown I was becoming familiar with. But I also noticed how stiffly he held his right shoulder; dried blood marred the sliced edges of his coat.
“You’re strong and fast, but your technique is sloppy,” I said as I sheathed my sword with a flourish meant to challenge him. I was beginning to see that the angrier he got, the more he climbed the pinnacle of arrogance, but without cold magic to throw around, and unless he decided to physically attack me with his sword arm injured and within the aura of firelight under the gaze of the djeli, he could do nothing but listen. And I had a lot to say, words I had swallowed for too many days. “My question, though, is why you did not use the weight and height of the horse to your advantage but instead dismounted to attack me. No Barahal would ever make such a mistake.”
“I wasn’t aware,” he said cuttingly, “that you were a Barahal.”
“A weak rejoinder! Not up to your usual standard. Next thing, you’ll accuse me of being in on the fraud.”
“You aren’t actress enough to have managed that. It was obvious you knew nothing of the scheme.”
I lost my rhythm at this unexpected parry. No cutting retort sprang to my lips.
“Anyway,” he added, speech clipped as if the words were difficult to get out, “I thought if I was required to kill you, as I had been commanded to do, that I ought to show enough respect to you to do so face-to-face.”
“How decent of you, truly! What courtesy you’ve shown me! First, you drag me from my home against my will, refuse to let me eat perfectly decent food, are rude to perfectly respectable innkeepers, and then when you’re told to kill me because of a mistake you made and through nothing I have ever done, you try to kill me.”
“I didn’t try very hard!”
“You tried hard enough! You drew blood!” I touched my fingers to the cut on my chin.
He flinched, then drew himself taut. “You should be dead,” he agreed coldly, his color very high and his posture very rigid.
“But I’m not!” I cried. “No thanks to you!”
He shook his head. “If the Barahals had given me the other girl, then none of this would have happened, would it? She would be married according to the contract, and treated well and living better than you could possibly have been in that run-down and ill-furnished house, while you would remain safe and unmolested in the bosom of your so-called family. It seems to me they’re at least as much at fault for handing you over while knowing the mansa would discover the cheat and take out his anger on you. So why aren’t you railing at their part in this?”
Tears pricked at my eyes. “What makes you think I’m not?”
He had the decency to look startled. A foggy notion crept into my head that he might be ashamed, and that his shame might be fueling his anger. No, that way lay insanity. He was whipping himself because he had not yet fulfilled the mansa’s command. He might even conceivably be worried about his village, or his loyal sister, and I was bitterly reminded that he had brought an escort and a spare horse for Kayleigh, which was far more than Aunt and Uncle had arranged for me. They, who had thrown me to the wolves. I hated them all over again. Hated them. Loved them. Choked on despair and anger and sheer exhaustion.
The djeli watched us with a slight smile.
“I ask your pardon for my poor manners,” I said hoarsely to her. “I’ve had some trouble on the road.”
“So it appears,” she said.
“Might I rest at your fire?”
She extended a hand, not quite in invitation for me to sit but more like a request for payment.
“That’s how it is with djeliw and bards,” muttered Andevai. “You have to pay them lest they ridicule you.”
“An unexpected complaint coming from a cold mage,” she replied without heat, “for you magisters might be said to be cou
sins in some manner to us djeliw and bards.”
“Magisters may be, bred from a long line of sorcerers and intermarried with the druas of the north,” he retorted, “but I am not cousin to any of you. I was born into a village of farmers and hunters.”
“Your village serves the mansa and the House,” I exclaimed. “You are servants and slaves.”
He lifted his chin. “Not in the old country we weren’t. My people have always been farmers and hunters. We are proud of that, as we should be.”
The djeli swept her extended arm in a gesture she might have made if she were singing, to emphasize a phrase. Our company agreed with her; her smile made her face rounder and lent a glow to her cheeks. “Yet a farmer’s son has been taken into a blacksmith’s house and taught his secrets. There’s a story.”
“Not one I can tell.” He dragged his left hand over his closely cropped hair, encountered chaff, and flicked the dry grass off before surveying his village garments with a fastidious grimace. How it must annoy him to stand so disheveled, and in such humble attire! He glanced sidelong at me. For some reason, the way he was looking at me made me abruptly wonder what it would be like to draw my fingers along the pleasing line of his jaw.
Blessed Tanit, the man had tried to kill me!
“I could tell you the sordid tale of how we met, journeyed together, and parted at odds,” I said in a tone I hoped might scathe him and purge myself, although I addressed my words to the djeli. “But alas, its immediacy, and lack of a tidy end, pains me far too much to reflect on.”
“Then tell me the stories,” she said, licking her lips, “that your father told you.”
“He wasn’t my father!”
“Wasn’t he?”
“He wasn’t my father! They lied to me. He did not sire me.”
“He gave you his stories.”
“He wrote them down for the family, and I was allowed to read his journals and to believe he was my father.”
“What is a father?” asked the djeli. “Do you have an answer?”
Curiosity and the cat: You know the story.
I led the horse around and away from the hearth and tethered her from a low-hanging branch of the oak. Then I walked to the well, but not so quickly as to startle the big cats. The biggest female thrust her shoulder against my hip. I staggered, steadying myself with a hand on her huge head. Her coat was coarse but also oddly comforting. A noise rumbled through her body, like a purr. Tentatively, I scratched at her head, and she rumbled yet more.
“Catherine,” said Andevai hoarsely, hand on his sword’s hilt, “if you move off slowly—”
“If they wanted to eat me, they could have done so already. I’m the one they’re guarding.” Flung with bravado, the words fell like truth as soon as they left my lips. I spoke to the cat as I kneaded it behind the ears. “Let me get to the water and I’ll fill the trough for you.”
The beast withdrew her weight. I eased past her and slung the bucket over the hook, winched it down, and hauled it up. First, I filled the stone trough with water for the cats. Then I carried a full bucket to the horse, who was eager to drink. I unsaddled her, freed her mouth from the bit, gave her an apple, and paid out enough line so she could graze. I returned with bucket and saddlebags and set the bags on one of the stone benches and myself beside them. Andevai frowned as I pulled out a leather bottle and held it out to the djeli.
“My thanks,” she said, with a gesture meant to decline the offer, “but just as stones cannot ease hunger, your mead cannot ease me. Only stories can feed me.”
I tossed it to Andevai, who caught it one-handed. Then I took out the second bottle for myself, draining the last of the sweet mead. The djeli released her fiddle from its case and set the instrument across her thighs.
I said to the djeli, “I never mentioned a father to you or that he had stories.”
“Everyone has stories,” she replied, “and every creature has a sire.”
“The truth is, I don’t know who sired me. Do you know?”
She narrowed her eyes and examined me, and I returned her gaze boldly. “The spirit world is knit into your bones, and you wear a spirit mantle close against your mortal flesh,” she said. “That much I can see. Your blood is what allowed you to cross from the mortal world into this one.”
With a grunt, Andevai sat down heavily on the third stone bench. Lips pinched tight, he peeled off his heavy coat to reveal a wool tunic slashed at the shoulder and, folded within the lips of cut fabric, the bloodstained linen of a shirt. “Blood opens the path between worlds,” he said, wincing as he tested the movement of his arm. “As every hunter knows.”
I flushed. “I was only defending myself ! Is the wound… bad?”
“Not so bad as to stop me riding.”
“How comes it you can so easily cross into this world and back?”
He rolled his eyes, the expression making him look much younger and considerably less sophisticated. “You spent the night in my village—sheltered and fed by my family—and you cannot answer that question?”
Of course. My cheeks burned. I did not like to look stupid. “You’re like that stripling I met with your brother’s hunting band. You were being trained as a hunter. And then your magic bloomed and you were taken away to Four Moons House to become a magister.”
“If I know how to find the gates that open around the cross-quarter days, if I know how to walk and guard myself in the spirit world and return to the mortal world, that is because of my people, not because of the magisters.”
“Why not stay in the village, then? Remain a hunter?”
He took a long draught of mead and, lowering the bottle, tucked his legs up on the wide stone bench to sit cross-legged. “The question is not worthy of you, Catherine. I am a magister of rare and unexpected potency.”
His cool vanity annoyed me. “In our world, but evidently not here.” I gestured toward the djeli, whose fingers ran up and down the length of the strings of her fiddle as if seeking the weakened point where the string was most likely to snap. “Is it true? That you magisters draw power through the spirit world but have none in it?”
“The secret is not mine to share. Likewise, what of you, Catherine? When my blade cut you, you ought to have…” He faltered and looked past the djeli toward the oak tree whose vast canopy blotted out a portion of the sky. His expression was as shuttered as the deserted dun. “But you did not.”
“I ought to have died.” I touched my tender chin.
He uncrossed his legs, set them soles to earth, and looked at me with a gaze that seared me with its icy anger. But he had no power to freeze my words on my tongue. I knew I shouldn’t taunt him, because I had weeks left to survive before winter solstice freed Bee from the contract, but all that pent-up fury had to explode.
“How frustrating it didn’t work out so well for you! I suppose you’re accustomed to everything falling just as you like it, you with your magister’s rare and unexpected potency and the might of Four Moons House behind you. You with”—your handsome face—“your sister willing to throw herself into the mansa’s bed on your behalf and—”
He rose sharply. I had gone too far, even considering that I was the one who had been sacrificed. He walked away to stand under the oak’s branches. Even with my cat’s eyes, I could barely see him in its heavy shadow. I looked at the djeli to see what she made of this, but her expression retained that smilingly amused interest, not as if she were laughing at us but as if she were well pleased. I had thought her a bent old woman at first, but maybe that had only been the way she played her fiddle. She sat with the erect posture of a woman sure of her place, and the firelight—was it brighter than it had been before, or exactly the same?—had smoothed away the deep wrinkles I had thought I noticed before.
“I ask your pardon,” I murmured, abruptly embarrassed at my outburst. “I’m tired and hungry and I’ve been running for my life.”
“Tell me,” she said.
Andevai shouted a wordless cry of warni
ng. The mare whinnied in panic. A dark shape flowed past them, and I leaped to my feet as the black-pelted saber-toothed cat that had followed me ran in under the tree with a second smaller cat at its side. The two beasts raced to the pride lounging by the well, ignoring the horse, but the mare jerked hard at her slipping tether, which I hadn’t tightened firmly enough. I didn’t mean to aid Andevai, but the horse was blameless, and if she pulled free and bolted, I was sure the cats would pursue her and pull her down, unable to resist the chase. I ran to the tree and held the line while he tied a better slipknot.
A hot wind rose out of the east; its gust made me sneeze.
“Beware,” called the djeli. “A dragon is turning in her sleep.”
Light splintered in the east. Was the sun rising at last? Yet so soon after night had fallen? He’d secured the horse, so I ducked out from under the outer branches and walked through waist-high summer grass to the cliff’s ragged crumbling edge, where the land fell steeply down to the flats and tangled forest. A rim of fire limned the horizon with a burst of fiery gold. In the mortal world, according to the maps I knew and what I thought I understood of where I was standing, that fire rose in the southeast. But it was not fire and it was not sun. The wind that shook the tops of trees did not move like wind but like an unseen hand wiping clean the slate on which all is written. And what came behind it was hot and sharp and painful and obliterating—
His hand gripped my wrist with an iron strength. I was so blindsided that I knew this time I had idiotically let down my guard, and this time nothing would stop him from plunging his sword into my heart and ridding himself of me.
Forgive me, Bee.
Steel hadn’t yet pierced me. I tried to pull my wrist out of his grasp but only slid partway before he fixed his fingers through mine and held on like a madman clinging to his delusions. He hauled me backward. I stumbled clumsily with the grass hissing around us, and we tumbled in under the overhanging branches of the oak and fell to the dirt onto our hindquarters. A shivering bell, barely audible, rang. The air seemed to vibrate as a string might vibrate, plucked by a bard’s hand.