Cold Fire

by Kate Elliott

  “Cat, you and I don’t know who our sire is.”

  “I meant, my father who raised me, not the male who sired us. Bee and I will join you after we hear the poet’s message. We can’t stay at the academy anyway, so we won’t be far behind you. Then you can tell me everything you know about dragons.”

  “I just told you everything I know,” he said indignantly. “Do you think I’m keeping secrets from you?”

  I searched his face. Was he really my half brother? His eyes and hair were so very like mine, and yet he was not human but a wild creature, nothing tame. Yet I trusted him with my life. “No, I don’t think you’re keeping secrets. But it has to be this way. Promise!”

  As if the words were forced out of him, he muttered, “I promise.”

  I released him. “Ask on the street for Old Temple, and then the inn. Tell people the militia roughed you up during the riot. They’ll help you. Use your charm.”

  “Oh!” he said, distracted by the thought of using his charm. “I am cold and hungry and thirsty. I could use some petting, too.”

  “I don’t need to hear about that kind of petting.” I wiggled fingers into the hem of my jacket’s sleeve, fished out the last of my coins, and pressed them into his hand. “Buy yourself clothes and shoes, but try them on first, then haggle over the price, and make sure you get correct change.”

  We ran down the path together. Kemal waited at the tophet gate.

  “Tell me, Maester,” I said as he chained and locked the gate, “did the headmaster save you from the Wild Hunt?”

  His hand paused as he was turning the key. He did not look at me. “Yes.”

  “How?”

  He slung the key, on its chain, over his neck. “It is not my place to speak of it.”

  “Is he a dragon?”

  As if goaded beyond measure, he met my gaze. “The headmaster of the academy is a man.”

  “One just like you?” I demanded, for I sensed a riddle in his words.

  His smile twisted scornfully, which startled me, for I had thought him a passive young person. “In the empire of the Avar, every albino child like me”—he touched fingers to his pale cheek—“belongs to the emperor. It is a crime punishable by death to hide such a child from the imperial governors. So I would answer you, ‘No.’ He is not a man just like me.”

  “I take it that is all I am to hear on the matter.”

  So returned the diffident exterior, like a shell covering vulnerable flesh. “My apologies, Maestressa.” He inclined his head with a polite bob of his shoulders and followed his master.

  Bee and the headmaster were making their way slowly up the hill, the old man leaning on his cane and she with a hand beneath his elbow quite oblivious to his desire to eat either of us. Rory watched the headmaster’s back with a hooded gaze that did nothing to hide his wish to pounce.

  “You promised,” I said.

  “Yes, I promised.”

  I gave him simple directions based on the bell towers and the high plinth that marked the site of the ancient village founded by Adurni Celts. I kissed him on either cheek, to seal our agreement, and waited at the tophet gate as he walked away down the main thoroughfare, lugging the bags. The wide avenue with its shops remained deserted, everyone in hiding.

  I watched until he walked out of sight. Then I hurried up the hill, catching the others as they passed the old Kena’ani temple complex that was the original structure built on Academy Hill centuries ago. All that remained of the old complex was the walled sanctuary dedicated to Blessed Tanit and a grove of votive columns in commemoration of the holy trees felled during the Long Winter of 1572 to 1585. The gate into the sanctuary stood open. Within, a man wearing a heavy coat swept the porch of the priests’ house.

  “The gate is always open,” the headmaster was saying to Bee, “due to an agreement made during the Long Winter, when the priests kept the gates open to provide warmth and sustenance to the destitute. It was that, or have the entire complex be burned down.”

  “But it was destroyed anyway,” said Bee.

  “Much of Adurnam burned at that time. Do you know what saved the city?”

  “I do,” I said. “The arrival of the refugees from the empire of Mali. Certain of the refugees had secret magical knowledge, and they found common cause with the Celtic drua. From that union sprang the cold mages. With the rise of the cold mages, the Long Winter was vanquished. Or at least, that is the story we learned at the academy, Maester.”

  “So it is. It makes you wonder, does it not? Is there some link between cold magic and the more clement weather of our time? For according to history and the evidence of old Roman ruins found north of Ebora in the uninhabitable Barrens, the climate was less clement, and the ice more advanced, two thousand years ago. What causes these changes?”

  “There were no cold mages in the times of the Romans,” said Bee. “Were there?”

  “Not as we know them, no. Ah, here we are.”

  His chief steward waited on the front steps of the academy entrance.

  “Owain,” said the headmaster as he paused at the top of the steps to catch his breath, “the academy remains closed to all callers for the day. Admit no one.”

  “As you command, Your Excellency.”

  A cascading boom cracked outside. Whoever was shooting off muskets and field cannon was nowhere near the hailstorm. The hum rising off the city reminded me of maddened bees being smoked out of their hive. I hurried after Bee and the headmaster, who had already crossed the wide entry hall.

  Surrounded by buildings, the central court lay quiet under its glass roof. No one was around. Midwinter festival wreaths of mistletoe and pine withered atop a trellis arch. The trellis covered the grated shaft of an ancient sacrificial well. A hundred years ago, a now-famous labyrinth had been laid out as a paved walkway spiraling around the well, ringed by stone benches.

  I followed the others upstairs to the headmaster’s office. The circulating stove set into the hearth gave off glorious warmth.

  “Please,” said the headmaster. Bee and I took off our coats and draped them over the back of a red leather chair. His assistant closed the door and took the headmaster’s coat.

  The headmaster’s office had the odd quality of seeming larger than it was because mirrors hung on the backs of the doors. I saw everything twice: the wall of windows, the ranks of bookshelves reaching from floor to the crown moldings, the wide table with paper and books covering its entire surface, and the severed head of the poet and legal scholar Bran Cof atop a pedestal. The headmaster was watching me in one of the mirrors. I could see things in mirrors that others could not, threads of magic like the fine lines of spiders’ webs. In the mirror, he looked like a perfectly ordinary old man. No threads of cold magic wove around his form as they did around Andevai. No vast winged shape billowed from his slender frame. He looked as solid as the furniture.

  “Natural historians speculate that mirrors reflect the binding threads of energy that run between this world and the unseen spirit world,” he remarked, as if he had divined my thoughts. “Do you suppose that is true, Maestressa Barahal?”

  I glanced down at my scuffed and muddy boots. The ends of the laces had been chewed up as by hungry mice. The longcase clock ticked like the pacing of ethereal feet.

  “My apologies, but we don’t have time for speculation,” said Bee. She walked to the corner where the head of the poet Bran Cof rested like a stone bust. I broke into a prickling sweat. I could not bear the thought of those eyelids snapping open, yet I could not look away no matter how much I wanted to. “When did the head speak? What did he say?”

  The headmaster smiled enigmatically. “The very questions I meant to ask you. It was at dawn. I was seated here at my desk reading aloud, as is my habit. This day it happened to be a monograph on the salt plague which I recently received from one of my correspondents at the University of Expedition. Perhaps the same words will waken him again.” He glanced at a printed pamphlet lying open on his desk. “‘Acc
ording to report, if a human is bitten by a ghoul, the onset of the disease is so swift and implacable that the victim will become morbid in less than seven days. However, if a human is bitten by a plague-ridden human, there are three distinct and slower stages through which the disease progresses, although the disease remains invariably fatal.’”

  The head remained fixed. Bloodless lips kept their disapproving pinch. The lime-whitened spikes of his hair and the luxuriant droop of his mustache made his features look younger than what the heavy crow’s-feet radiating out from his deep-set eyes told of years and trials. Three scars like ritual marks formed a column beneath his right ear. Maybe the head was just stone after all.

  Maybe it was all a mistake.

  “If you have something to say, Bran Cof, speak now.” Bee’s voice rang above the whispering crackle of the fire burning in the circulating stove. “My cousin and I cannot wait forever.”

  “Bee!” I cautioned.

  “And furthermore,” she continued in the tone of an Immortal Fury who has just remembered an ancient slight and means to pursue vengeance to the ends of the Earth, “if you are really bound between this world and the spirit world as it is said poets and sorcerers and djeliw and bards can be—which I admit seems quite unpleasant, for wouldn’t it be rather like being forced to stand in a doorway all the time, neither going nor coming? Anyway, if you are so bound, then I wish you would not be so coy about it. I know you are a very famous legal scholar, one of the Three Even-Handed Jurists of the old Brigantes Confederation, so I would hope you would show us consideration now we are come before you, at your request. Yes, I am aware we are required to defer to poets, whose words reveal the world in ways we who are not poets could not otherwise see. And your fame as one of the Three Silver Tongues of the western Celts is naturally enough to awe and impress humble students like ourselves. But I must say, the constant references to women as roses with thorns seems a bit much. Men torment women far more than women torment men.”

  Did the sun escape a cloudy veil outside? A gleam shuddered within the reflecting angles of the mirrors like the spark of fireflies. A cowl of silvery light writhed around the head of the poet Bran Cof. Color washed the pallor of his face. There crawled beneath his skin a straining like insects swarming or a trapped prisoner trying to claw its way out.

  She rolled blithely on. “I can’t endure these constant protestations about the chains women bind on men. In truth, the chains all bind women at the feet of men.”

  His eyes opened, corpse-still one moment and full of ire the next.

  “Bold Taranis spare me from the complaints of virgins!” His voice was resonant, as lovely as a caress, even in anger. “Especially ones whose black hair is a snare to entwine the helpless and whose dark eyes provoke the tenderhearted to grief. How I despise the beauty of women!”

  “Only because you feel entitled to something you have no natural right to possess!”

  “Your words dance like sun across ice, but their cruelty is sharper than the winter wind. You must be aware that whatever I might wish for in the Three Matters of Desire has long since been severed from me. You stand there, out of my reach.” He looked younger when he was angry. As the cut of his lips softened, he seemed to age. “A kinder woman would kiss me.”

  “A kinder woman might well! I am not she. Anyhow, Your Honor, the last man I kissed died soon after.”

  His gaze took her in from head to toe. “That I can well believe! An axe may be forged with all the cunning of a master smith. It may be decorated with the skill that draws the unwary eye as a lure coaxes a hapless trout. But an axe’s purpose is to sever the living heart of trees. Why are you here if not to persecute me with the promise of the sweet pleasure I can never again taste?”

  “We were told you have a message.”

  “You are not the one I bear a message for.”

  “Perhaps my dearest cousin Cat is.”

  His gaze did not waver from her bright face but something very unsettling happened in his eyes. It was as if his gaze turned inward.

  “Yes, yes, you’ve interrupted me,” he said irritably, yet with an edge of fear. He was speaking to someone we could not see. “Of course you may speak. How am I to stop you?”

  His eyes rolled back in their sockets until they showed only white. Shadows—not from this room—settled a curling pattern of insubstantial tattoos across his skin. His craggy features remained the same, but Bran Cof was no longer the personage looking out from those wintry eyes. The gaze studied Bee, then caught on the headmaster with a narrowing like a bow bent but not released. An arrow stabbed my heart. Maybe I gasped. Maybe I moved, shaking with apprehension. Maybe I made no sound and no movement and it did not matter.

  Because the head of the poet Bran Cof looked at me. White ice eyes without pupil or iris fixed on me. My chest felt as hollow as if a killing claw had just torn out my beating heart to suckle dry its rich red blood.

  The mouth spoke with a sharp, deadly voice.

  “So after all, Tara Bell’s child survived and grew, as I had hoped. Your blood spilled on the crossing stone woke the bond between us. As I am bound, so must those bound to me as kin come to my aid. That is the law. Come to me, Tara Bell’s child. Now.”

  9

  “Who are you?” Sheer rushing terror propelled me three steps back.

  Bran Cof  ’s eyes rolled down, the return of blue as startling as a sweep of piercing blue sky seen after days of snow. For all he was a cantankerous old lecher, his gaze had a keen intelligence that made me uneasy, for he knew things he wasn’t telling. “What message did my lips speak?”

  I took another step back, thinking fast. “I’ll tell you, if you’ll answer a legal question.”

  “Ah. A bargain. Done.”

  Surprised, I took another step back to steady myself. “I want to know if there is any way to unbind a marriage sealed by a magical chain of binding.”

  “Yes. Your turn.”

  “I mean, besides death!” Why must my voice tremble so?

  “Your turn.”

  Curse him! “You said, ‘As I am bound, so must those bound to me as kin come to my aid. That is the law. Come to me, Tara Bell’s child. Now.’”

  “Bad fortune for you, lass. In pity, I offer this: Only death can unchain a chained marriage. But there is one other way.” He attempted a coaxing smile that made him look grotesque. “I can tell you. But a poet has his price. A kiss from you, the girl whose eyes are amber, whose lips are the red of berries, a promise both succulent and sweet.”

  I cringed away.

  His smile broadened lasciviously. “I will have the kiss that already softens your mouth. You are waiting for a man to claim its honey.”

  I flushed with utter, obliterating embarrassment.

  He chuckled, enjoying my consternation. “He must be young and very handsome.”

  I choked.

  Bee said, “I’ll kiss him for you, Cat. I have experience kissing lecherous old men as well as young and very handsome ones.”

  “You will not!” His bushy eyebrows shot up, and the corners of his lips spiked down. “I will have no kiss from you, serpent!”

  “How can you stop me, stuck there on your pedestal?” She took a step toward him as I took one back. “I may kiss you however and whenever I please! I’ll suck all the life from you—such as you have life—and keep it for myself !”

  He squinched his eyes and lips shut, and I thought the head would harden back to its slumbering stone state without ever answering my question. Yet still the veins on his neck throbbed as with anger…and how could that happen, since he had no heart?

  “I’ll be gentle.” Bee took another step toward him.

  To my amazement he laughed with an unexpected flowering of charm. “Alas for the men trapped by her love! Alas for the men set free! She is the axe that has laid waste to the proud forest. Where she treads, desolation follows.”

  “Enough!” I cried. “I’ll kiss you, if you’ll just answer my question.�
��

  His eyebrows rose to a peak. “I was not finished declaiming! It is always so. The young lack manners, and the women like crows cannot stopper up their chatter!”

  Imagine all this time I had been in awe of the famous head of the poet Bran Cof !

  Bee offered a mocking grimace. “It’s me, or no one. Anyway, Cat, I don’t think he knows. All those stories about how he mastered the Three Paths to Judgment. How his tongue silenced birds and humbled princes. He isn’t really a legal scholar. He’s probably just an old drunk.”

  “Shame, girl! I’ll have you know there are three forms of marriage commonly recognized in the courts of the north. How the Romans and Phoenicians do things is a different matter, but I’ll come to that afterward. A flower marriage flourishes while the bloom is still on it and dies when it withers. It may bloom for a month, a season, or a year, depending on the verbal agreement between the two parties involved. A contract marriage is a business arrangement signed in the law court between two houses, clans, or lineages. A chained marriage is a binding marriage sealed by arcane keys known only to the wise, to the drua and the bards, and it draws a chain of binding magic around the couple. When there is a question of possible treachery, or a treaty or other obligation at stake, it binds the couple so there need be no concern among those who arranged the marriage that another party will default or there be trouble later. Thus, the only way out of such a binding marriage is the death of one of the parties involved. But do not forget that without consummation, there is no marriage. Has the young man had sex with you yet?”

  The headmaster had politely turned his attention to the monograph. The assistant stared at the motion of pendulum and weights behind the glass door of the longcase clock, a blush curdling his white complexion.

  Bee said, “Cat, you look like a fish. Close your mouth.”