Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  The bartender leaned across the bar to follow my gaze with his own. “Foreigners,” he said. “Five of ’em. They’re staying at the Lamb, across the way. Got here yesterday with ten mules and twenty bundles of wool cloth from Camlun. But the warden’s sure they were smuggling rifles. He meant to take them before Lord Owen, but then a lad come in this morning with the cry of sheep stealing and off the warden must go. He told this lot to stay put until he come back or he’d ask Lord Owen to set the militia after them.”

  “Rifles!” I thought of the rifles the eru and coachman had claimed to have destroyed in Southbridge. The men pursuing Andevai: It’s time the mages feel the sting of our anger.

  “You heard of them? It’s a new kind of musket, like.”

  Emilia finished her song to a burst of acclaim and cries for a new song. Someone said he’d go for his fiddle, and another pair left to get drum and lute. Emilia leaned over Roderic, flirting as he sipped ale and imbibed her attentions.

  The bartender glanced once around the room as if fearing eavesdroppers, then bent closer. I bent closer as well, his mouth close to my ear and his breath strong with ale as he whispered, “Mages hate rifles, anything like that. And foreigners are usually radicals, aren’t they? Still.” His hand brushed mine. “If there’s no illegal merchandise, there’s no proof, is there?”

  “Where would rifles be coming from?” I asked, wondering what he would answer.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said with a grin. “Still, she’s a fierce-looking woman, isn’t she? Seems a shame to me for a woman to go cutting her hair all short like a man’s, though. Yours, for instance. You have hair as black and lovely as a raven’s wing.”

  Fiery Shemesh! The man was flirting with me. “Uh, my thanks.” I shifted my hand away as surreptitiously as I could and ponderously veered back to the subject. “That woman looks Avar, or something like Avars would look, I would think. I’ve only ever seen one. In Adurnam.” And him an albino, but I was not about to mention the headmaster’s assistant here or my ties to the academy college.

  “City girl, eh? Thought I heard it in your speech. They do look strange, I’ll say that. Though they haven’t made trouble since the warden told them to stay put. Very quiet folk. And one’s sick with a flux or some such. Says he’s too sick to travel, anyway, like to die. They’ve set him alone in a room and change off tending him.”

  “Who wants to run from the law in the middle of winter? Even radicals can freeze to death. Or get sick and die.”

  He offered to top off my mug of ale. “You fancy radicals, there in the city?”

  “I don’t fancy anyone,” I said in my most quelling tone. “I am”—hard to imagine I would ever be glad to have an opportunity to say this!—“married. But an emergency called me home, and my brother came to fetch me. Then we had that trouble with brigands, so while I’m sure you’re a fine young man, I’m not in a mood to flirt even if I were unmarried.”

  He shrugged, humor flashing in his good-natured face. “A man has to try, when he is smitten. Your gold eyes are a treasure as grand as they are precious. And twice as hard, for the cruel words with which you reject me.”

  I laughed.

  “Yannic! Get those drinks pulled!” shouted the innkeeper from the other side of the room above the hubbub of the crowd.

  One of her daughters sashayed over and shoved a tray onto the bar before the man. “You can flirt when there’s no customers.”

  “How can I do that if no customers means no flirts? You can’t be expecting me to take up with Em again, can you? After she threw me over for Daithi, thinking him likely to gain a fine proud position as cavalry man for Falling Star House? Which he did, and more fortune to him, for he’ll need it. Whilst I drown my sorrow as I may. What am I to do when a fine proud gel fetches up at my bar and talks to me with her pretty ways and golden eyes?”

  “Get on with you,” she said to him. Then she winked at me.

  It got quite busy, with folk calling for drink. I moved to the end of the bar and found a stool on which to perch. The innkeeper had left her ledger forgotten at one end while she bustled out among the tables as the crowd settled and more folk pressed inside having heard, I supposed, that there was music to be had for the evening. The fiddler began tuning his instrument, although how he could hear in the din I could not fathom. Idly, I flipped through the ledger’s pages, for I cannot resist a book set before me no matter its kind. Writing draws my eye; I am impelled as by sorcery to read even if it is an accountant’s list or a solicitor’s instructions or, as here, nothing more than a record of travelers who have passed through this inn. The first entry was dated to the year of May 1824 in a hand more slanted and spiky—exceedingly old-fashioned, like that of an elder taught to write in the previous century—than the penmanship of the current landlady.

  Eighteen twenty-four had been the year of Camjiata’s downfall. The beginning of the end had come on Hallows Night, at the very start of the new year, with the destruction of the only mage House that supported him; his wife, Helene, had perished in a mysterious conflagration that had also consumed the estate buildings of the House. Months of battles, each more desperate than the last, had followed until his final surrender on Lughnasad, in the month of Augustus. I noted how few travelers had stopped at the inn in the months of Maius, Junius, and Julius. No doubt folk feared moving on the roads when they could not know what trouble they might stumble upon. But in mid-Augustus, after the news of his capture spread, the dam burst. The flow of travelers picked up, hastening to do their business before the cold set in. Peddlers, coal and iron merchants, people who could not afford the toll roads, local traffic: all passed through Lemanis. Where were they going? What were they coming from? I could see the birds fly, but at this remove of years and with no more information on the page than name and date, I could have no idea what eggs if any they had in their nest.

  The drummers hastened in to cheers and jibes; a swirl of frigid air kissed my nose and faded as the door was shut against the winter night. Good cheer, ale, and music will keep away unwanted spirits and untimely wraiths. Rory still sat on his bench, a giggling young woman on either side. He caught my gaze on him, lifted the mug, sipped, and made a comical face. I grinned. He did not like the ale, although I thought it a perfectly good country brew.

  My gaze dropped back to the ledger, the column of dates and names.

  Where I saw one entry among many, written no differently than any of the others except in my heart: 3 September 1824. Daniel Hassi Barahal, Tara Bell, and child.

  26

  Although the music was still playing, I went upstairs to my empty chamber and stripped down to my shift. I tossed and turned on a narrow bed but could not sleep. On midmorning of 9 September 1824, a ferry carrying upward of one hundred passengers had nosed out onto the Rhenus River on a routine crossing in fair autumn weather. It had not reached the far shore. Every soul aboard the ferry had drowned except for one child, who had been plucked by a fisherman from the deadly current.

  Daniel Hassi Barahal and Tara Bell had stayed in this inn on their final, fateful journey, with a child in their care. Me. In this inn. Perhaps in this bed. I sought in my memory but found only blank pages. No, there was the man’s laugh and the way my mother had held me tightly against her in a rocking coach. If she had been my mother.

  Blessed Tanit! What if the real Catherine had actually drowned and Aunt and Uncle had simply found an orphan to pretend to be her? Wouldn’t that make more sense?

  Burrowing under the wool blankets as though safety or answers could be found beneath, I dozed fitfully and within the weaving of sleep and dreams, I found myself sailing across a blinding expanse of ice in a schooner that skated the surface of a massive ice sheet. Behind, a pack of saber-toothed cats as black as if dusted in coal pursued the ship. A personage stood beside me. Light glinted on his brow, as if a shard of ice had gotten embedded in his forehead. I knew he was my father, and of course he looked nothing like the man named Daniel Hassi
Barahal whose portrait I had once worn in a locket at my neck. I’d given away that locket to a pair of girls in Four Moons House in exchange for an open door.

  An open door meant something, surely, but in my dream I could not work out the connection.

  A light scratching, a rustle as the door opened, a giggle: these woke me. I buried my head under blankets, feeling the presence of too many people in the room and them engaged in rumpling the bedding.

  “Rory,” I said into the blankets, “I’m trying to sleep.”

  Voices murmured, his and hers, breathy with desire; the door clicked shut, followed by footsteps slipping away to some other private place. I was, again, alone. A dreamy languor swallowed me. What would it be like to kiss Andevai? Surely he affected that trim line of beard because he knew it emphasized the aesthetically pleasing line of his jaw. A few people, like Bee, were beautiful because they were so vibrant that the gaze is drawn to them whenever they are nearby; a few have become accustomed to being praised for beauty and expect those around them to be grateful to dwell in beauty’s shadow. Andevai was, apparently, vain enough to care how he looked, but what I had taken at first for arrogant vainglory I now suspected had more to do with insecurity. He did not undervalue his cold magic, but he hauled other burdens. He, too, seemed not entirely sure of what he was, caught between his village and his House.

  He had pulled me back within the wards, when he might have left me out to be swept away by the tide. The ghost of the memory of his fingers entwined with mine had left its imprint on my skin.

  He hadn’t meant to cut me. He’d stopped himself. He’d said, “No.” It had been an accident. He was ashamed. That’s what made him act that way, gates closed and guard up.

  What an idiot I was! Falling into sleep making up stories about a man I did not know and who had been commanded first to marry me, a woman he had never met, and then who, having botched the task, had been ordered to kill me. He had destroyed the airship, and perhaps lives with it. I had seen him kill two men; I knew what he was capable of. His blade’s cut would have dispatched me if—for this was the only conclusion I could reach—my true father’s blood, knit into my bones, had not protected me from the cut of cold steel.

  His face meant nothing. It was just a face. He was a cold mage, even if he was not the actual son of Four Moons House, even if the magisters scorned him for his birth in a village they considered bound to them as unfree people little better than slaves. He was bound to the House by old laws; he was theirs to claim, to raise and train, and to unleash on the world when they needed his magic to enforce their will. Or, to be fair, to curb the excesses of the princes and lords as the magisters were said to have done in the early days of the mage Houses. As the old saying went, “Fear the magister, but if you pay him what he demands, he’ll give you what you need. If only the prince’s hunger could be satisfied as easily.” Yet in these days, many hated the cold mages as much as they hated the princes and the old hereditary councils. The radicals said that those who had little because they were denied more than a pittance would, in time, rise up to demand a larger share.

  I had been content once with what I had. Now it seemed I was caught in the flooding current of a river, torn away from all I had once thought was mine. The Barahals had sacrificed me. Four Moons House wished to kill me. At least the cats hadn’t eaten me.

  The latch clicked. Humming softly and a bit off-key, Rory slipped into the room. A bed creaked as its ropes shifted under his weight.

  “Rory?” I whispered.

  “I was trying not to wake you.” He sounded cheerful and not at all tired.

  “What have you been doing?” He started to speak, but I cut him off. “No, never mind, don’t answer.” I knew perfectly well what he’d been doing. I could smell. “Are you moon-dazzled? By which I mean insane? Folk don’t take kindly to men dancing into their towns, however so humble and isolated that town may be, and… ah… rollicking with their young women.”

  “Wasn’t that included with the food and the bed?”

  Perhaps I was only tired. But something about his tone of genuine surprise, and my mood, made me snicker. “You’re awful. You know, I have only your word that you and I share a sire.”

  I sensed the change even before he spoke, a cat gone spiky with feline contempt. “Are you implying I am lying to you about such a matter?”

  I stuck my head out of the blankets. The waning quarter moon was rising, visible as a hazy fragment of pearl through the thick glass. I saw him sitting upright with a rigid set to his shoulders as if he were trying to decide whether to claw me for the insult.

  “No. But I woke up one morning assuming I knew everything about my world and my life, and now I know nothing.” His posture softened infinitesimally, but I could tell he was still offended. “If I’ve insulted you, then please forgive me. I’ve had a terrible time. I don’t know what to think about anything.” My voice choked.

  He said, more softly yet, “Go to sleep, little sister. I’ve arranged for us to leave at dawn.”

  And so we did. Who knew he had it in him to arrange for transport! I laughed when Emilia appeared at dawn with a sack of wayfarer’s food, and she delivered us to a pair of older men in charge of a wagon filled with barrels of salted fish.

  “Giving him two meals, eh?” said the driver with a laugh as she handed the sack to Rory in exchange for a quick kiss.

  She said, “No man governs me, Uncle. I’m of age and can do what I like.”

  “So you say and so you will, until it gets you and the town into trouble.” The driver was a stout man, his brown hair half gone to gray. He nodded amiably at me. “Come on up, gel. I’m called Leon. You sit beside me. My cousin—he’s also called Leon, but you can call him Big Leon—and your brother can take turns walking alongside.”

  I got up beside the driver. Big Leon was a broad-shouldered, dark-complexioned man a good head taller than his paler cousin, and he gave me a searching and suspicious look so dark and penetrating that I began to get a little angry. Then he shook his shoulders with a twitch of his mouth, almost an apology, before he clambered up beside me on the bench. He braced a musket against his outer leg and slung a crossbow and bolts across his back. We moved out, the wagon rolling at a stately pace behind a pair of well-kept oxen.

  “Expecting trouble?” I asked, noting the cousin’s easy way with his weapons.

  “Always good to travel in company,” said Little Leon. “Folk like their salted fish. There’s always some who will take what they want without payment. Sheep, for instance. Or you and your brother losing your goods and carriage and horse to brigands.”

  “Twins?” asked Big Leon abruptly, looking first at me and then at Roderic, like maybe he had a country superstition that twins would bring bad luck to a journey.

  I stuck with the story I’d told the innkeeper. “No, he’s older. And a cursed lot of trouble, if you ask me.”

  Little Leon laughed appreciatively. “That we saw, eh? Him and Em are well matched.” Unlike his taciturn cousin, he was a talkative fellow who told us far more than I had ever wanted to know about Emilia and her notorious ways. His gossip did make the miles pass, though. He then regaled us with the gripping drama of his escape from the Great Hallows Blizzard, as folk were calling it now. The storm had howled out of the north on the second day of November and not let up for five relentless days. He’d been on the road to deliver a wagonload of pig iron from a furnace called Crane Marsh Works in Anderida to the blacksmith in Lemanis, and had barely made the village of Rhydcerdin as the whiteout descended to blind him.

  “I heard the dogs barking and the temple bell ringing. That’s what guided me in.”

  I gestured toward a land barely dusted with white. “I see little trace of snow now. How can it have thawed off at this season?”

  “It weren’t a natural storm, lass. Some thought it was the Wild Hunt’s last gallop, but I am of the opinion it was one of them mansas taken by a rare fury. The snow came so deep that for weeks no one m
oved except from house to privy and privy to byre, maybe to the inn for a pint once a few paths were shoveled out. Then not seven days ago came such winds as were not natural winds. All the night they blew. I thought they would scrape the soil right off the bones of the earth. When we woke the next day, we came to find that the snow had been blown away, and to what place I am sure we will never know. I can’t say what spirit raised that wind, or if it were a withering of cold mages acting in concert what managed it. Were you caught out in the storm?”

  “We weathered it in a safe place.” But a sick feeling dug at the pit of my stomach, because I wondered if the mages of Four Moons House had called down the blizzard to kill me. “Did anyone die?”

  He glanced at Big Leon, who was scanning the countryside with the gaze of a man who sees brigands everywhere. As the sun rose, the clouds began to shear off to reveal a blue sky. We fell in beside a river, flowing west. “Not so I heard. How far does your brother mean to walk?”

  Rory wore a fur hat and a wide grin, striding with the easy grace of a man enjoying the novelty of the landscape. He did not look tired, as if staying up half the night carousing and engaged in other activities was as refreshing as sleeping.

  “As far as he wants,” I said. “How far are you taking this fish?”

  “To the Crane Marsh Works. This is what’s owed them for the pig iron. It’s part of the winter feed for those who work the furnace. I was meant to bring it weeks ago, but I’ve only been able to move out now.”

  In my thoughts, I paged through Uncle’s library of maps. West across the flats on a decent road, and thence up into eastern Anderida, home of mines and ironworks since the days before the Roman invasion. The Romans had left roads and paths aplenty to move the precious metal. The mansa had sent soldiers along this route first thing, looking for me. After six weeks, I hoped my trail was cold. Evidently Tara Bell and Daniel Hassi Barahal had chosen this route as well, going in the other direction, and their trail was not just cold but thirteen years dead.