In a low voice she said to Titus, “We cannot make an enemy of the mansa of Four Moons House. He can destroy Autumn House if we anger him.”
“I thought the matter was taken care of and all negotiations proper and closed,” he said in as even a tone as he could manage. All the attention focused on him by so many strangers roused in him an enraged sense of humiliation. “I had no idea there was a prior claim beyond the attempts of Belenus Cissé. If I had known…”
Hearing his voice start to rise, he closed his mouth.
“I confess I have erred.” Kankou spoke as if the stares and devastating blunder did not trouble her at all! “Maestra Selva misrepresented her situation. Serena’s kind heart did the rest.”
Of course this trouble was the fault of the young woman! He had known all along it would be a mistake to bring her. And yet even still Kankou—and thus by extension the mansa of Autumn House—defended the girl!
The sobbing Selva was helped out of the second carriage by her elder son. She swooned when she saw the elders.
“I will accompany the twins to Four Moons House myself,” the potter said. “The other two will return home with my brother. As for you, Selva, you may take yourself off as you so clearly wish to do, if these mages will have you, which I doubt. For you have proven yourself disloyal on top of everything else.”
The youth dropped to his knees, a hand pressed to his heart. “Please, Mamamuso, do not send our mother away from us, her children.”
The elder blacksmith said, magnanimously, “Selva may return to the household. She is still nursing the baby, after all.”
To which the potter replied, “But we will have no more of this foolery from the likes of you, Selva.” She herded the stricken twins to a waiting carriage.
The toddler was taken by the elder blacksmith—held tenderly, Titus was relieved to see—and Selva roused enough to stagger after the baby, leaving her elder son to carry the worn bag and the precious drum. Thus were they enfolded back into her deceased husband’s clan.
The blacksmiths took their leave in the most rude manner imaginable, as if Titus and his people were nothing more than common folk who could be passed on the roadside without a glance or greeting. It was getting dark, and as if in direct insult, they lit torches that Titus’s frail cold magic wasn’t strong enough to quench. He wished his anger could douse every hearth fire in the ferry crossing.
“It’s so sad,” whispered Serena to Kankou. “She was desperate to escape. They haven’t been kind to her.”
“Sentimental women!” Titus muttered.
A man trotted up, wearing the chain of the ferryman’s assistant. “Magister, my apologies, but the ferry has halted for the day. There will be no crossing on Imbolc, so you’ll have to take the first crossing in the morning of the day after tomorrow.”
A headache of pure thwarted rage assaulted Titus, causing stars to burst in his eyes. His manservant Orosios hurried over to him, aware of the signs, and soon Titus sat in a comfortable chair in the parlor of an inn, sipping at a tisane of feverfew. A bowl of hot water scented with drops of lavender oil sat at his elbow so he could inhale its soothing properties.
He had hoped that the women would show him enough respect to allow him the parlor to himself. But although Kankou had banished Anwell and Bala, she and Serena sat side by side on a couch, chatting companionably, as if Serena’s rash decision hadn’t brought disaster down upon his reputation. Kankou carried a bag of beads with her, and she was threading a bracelet as Serena embroidered the neckline of a shirt.
“What should I have done differently, Aunt?” Serena’s voice never trembled or wept. She was simply too self-possessed for him to believe in her naïve protestations. “Her tale reminded me in some parts of my own.”
“It is a hard thing,” agreed Kankou. “I do not like to leave women in such situations, nor should we ever turn our backs if we can do something. But I fear it was a misstep. Your kind heart overwhelmed my prudence. Although I do not blame you for it, after what you went through.”
“Will Four Moons House seek revenge on us, if the blacksmiths tell them what happened?” the girl asked. “Might they come here to accuse us or charge us with a crime? I studied the maps carefully before we left, and many of the villages south and west of this crossing owe clientage to Four Moons House.”
“That is true,” replied Kankou. “Their main estate is not so far from here, not that we of Autumn House have ever been invited to visit such a grand establishment.”
“Could we send a letter to their mansa with our regrets for causing an incident?”
“No, indeed, we could not!” Titus interposed, setting down his cup. “A man of his status, reputation, and power could ruin us with a few words. It’s better if we not remind him or anyone at Four Moons House of this debacle.”
“As I was about to say,” Kankou continued with a stark glance whose disapproval caused him to close his hands into fists, “we are beneath the notice of such a princely mage House. I doubt the blacksmiths will mention the matter to them because this little misadventure reflects poorly on them as well. That their precious son fell in love with an uneducated rock hauler’s daughter, for one, and that she outwitted them enough to almost escape. Imagine if they had to tell the mansa of Four Moons House that they had lost their own children and didn’t know where they had gone.”
She chuckled. A smile chased across Serena’s face.
Titus decided he was not after all hungry enough to eat supper with women who could find humor in a man’s dishonor, so he went to bed and suffered through a dream-plagued night.
* * *
—
He came downstairs the next morning feeling slightly better, only to find Serena and Kankou in the parlor before him.
“May I pour you tea, Uncle?” Serena said. “I am sorry for what happened. I have ordered the porridge that you like for breakfast.”
Women’s smiles did soften a man, especially a man who was both hungry and thirsty. A server arrived just then with bowls of steaming hot rice-and-millet porridge covered in milk and garnished with crushed peanuts and sugar. His headache had vanished, although the throb of anger remained, but he could wait to discuss the whole sorry episode until they returned home and brought the matter before their mansa. Anwell and Bala hurried in and sat down to eat.
That’s when it happened. A force slammed into him. He was buffeted by a magical storm like pounding hail brought down atop alarming gusts of wind. The deluge deafened and blinded him for several breaths, then cut off so abruptly that the first thing he wondered was if he had been taken by apoplexy.
Slowly he realized the normal sounds of life—the rumble of wagons on the road, a barking dog at the inn gate, and footsteps along the corridor—went on as usual. Except for a cry from the furnace room at the far corner of the inn that heated the hypocaust system.
“The fire has gone out!”
“What was that?” asked Bala, looking both startled and delighted.
Anwell said daringly, “Was that a bloom? I felt it!”
“That was surely too powerful to be the first bloom of a budding mage,” retorted Bala, giving Serena an accusatory look. “I hope some powerful cold mage hasn’t come to punish us.”
Serena looked at Titus. “What do you think, Magister? It was so strong, I’m not sure where it came from. It feels as if it came from everywhere.”
He sent his divination along the path of its residue, a trail that led back through the town and out into the countryside amid the sparks and tendrils of animals and plants. “The residue is fading fast but is still visible to my divining eye. It leads into the countryside.”
Kankou frowned. “As Serena mentioned last night, some of the villages hereabouts live in clientage to Four Moons House and thus would be beholden to a master too powerful for us to gainsay. Under the circumstances perhaps it is wis
est simply to move on.”
Serena stood with head tilted as if she was listening to the invisible threads of nyama. “The bloom was very strong, Aunt.”
“It was,” Titus agreed. Now that the stunning assault had waned, he could measure how startling it truly was. The chance to redeem this terrible journey made him bold, and reckless. Yet he chose his words carefully. “Surely there can be no harm if Serena and I investigate such an astonishing incident. It would be a shame merely to travel on as if nothing had happened.”
Kankou nodded with understanding. “You are correct, Titus. You and Serena should go. I am too old for a breakneck journey across rough paths, so I will stay here with Anwell and Bala to look after me.”
The young men’s expressions became almost comically outraged, but of course they could not protest what Kankou decreed.
She went on without acknowledging their distress. “Morcant will drive you. Take your manservant in case you run into any trouble. He’s got a strong arm. Leontia will act as Serena’s chaperone.” A sly smile peeped out, suggesting all the mysteries of the women’s wing to which men had only limited access. “She has a strong arm too.”
Soon the five of them were trundling south on a rutted wagon track. Titus’s manservant sat on the bench with Morcant, and the two women were seated inside facing Titus. Serena sat braced on the bench, seeming about to break into speech each time they were jostled and jarred. Each time the girl opened her mouth Leontia would press a gloved hand to the young woman’s skirt, right at her knee, some woman’s communication that men were not meant to fathom.
A particularly hard jolt broke Serena’s resolve.
“Did Belenus Cissé tell you his story to try to make you dislike me?” she asked so bluntly that Titus was appalled.
“Men will speak when women are not present,” he said repressively.
“Serena, do not taste the sauce when it is still boiling,” said Leontia warningly, although in a far more lenient voice than he would have used.
The girl sat back with a tense mouth and a proud lift of her chin.
In this uncomfortable silence they went on for some time. Finally the carriage halted. Morcant opened the door onto a landscape of broken woodland.
“Magister, we can go no farther. One of the horses can be ridden, if it pleases you.”
“We’ll walk. It’s not far.”
He and Serena set out.
“I smell smoke, and pine!” Serena said, inhaling enthusiastically as her earlier indignation seemed to slough off. She had a healthy stride and a vigorous appreciation of the country air.
“Find the tendrils of magic, which you should still be able to sense. Follow them as you follow the trail of smoke.”
He hung back, letting her take the lead, and only gestured in the correct direction when she hesitated. As they trudged through the winter-whitened grasses, he realized that both magic and smoke led toward the same place: a hollow marked by the presence of a holy oak tree. Beneath its mighty branches two men tended a campfire. The fire-pit held ash and charred logs as if it had been burning all night and gone out recently. The eldest of the men was attempting to nurse a flame with new kindling, without any luck.
A deer whose internal organs had been removed was hanging from one of the branches. Beyond the canopy another four men were field dressing two more deer. These were country men, dressed in wool tunics hung with charms and painted with the symbols used by hunters to protect themselves in the wild.
Serena reached out and grasped Titus’s hand, squeezing so tightly he would have protested if this simple expression of trust and kinship had not shocked him into silence.
“Look,” she whispered, pointing toward the hanging deer with her chin. “Magister, at first I mistook it for a tundra antelope, but it has a third horn. That is no creature of mortal earth, is it?”
He pulled out of her grip and walked forward to see better. The two deer having their organs removed appeared in all ways to be ordinary animals. But the other animal’s third horn was knit out of the silvery glamour of magic.
The hunters straightened up from their task. The eldest gestured to the others to stay where they were and came forward to greet them. He wore his hair in many braids, each end tied off with a tiny amulet. His weathered face was enlivened by a steady gaze. Of all people, hunters had the least to fear from mages. People had hunted in the interstices between the mortal and spirit worlds long before cold mages had learned to pull tendrils of cold magic out of the spirit world and use them for their own ends in the mortal world.
“Peace to you, Magister,” the man said. “Does the day find you at peace?”
As Titus greeted him in the same manner, Serena took several steps to the right, surveying the land beyond the oak’s canopy. The hunters watched her with respect and did not move.
“Magister, look there,” she said, her tone so sharply edged that it grabbed his attention instantly.
On the opposite side of the tree from the fire, beyond the oak’s canopy, a youth was standing with a knife in one hand and in the other a dead grouse dangling from a leather cord. He had turned to stare at them, a bold lad indeed.
Titus’s first thought was at how fickle girls were: the youth was unusually good-looking, with an almost uncanny perfection of features. He looked a few years younger than Serena, perhaps sixteen, no longer a boy but not quite yet a man. In a few years’ time women—and men who were inclined that way—would no doubt be beating a path to his door. How shallow of Serena to have noticed a handsome face while ignoring the others.
Then he thought of his own son, who had been this age when he’d died, and the shadow cut straight through his heart.
Serena tilted her head to one side and blinked twice. At first he thought she mocked his grief, but she was just signaling.
The elder hunter had ceased speaking. None of the party looked toward the lad. It was as if they were pretending the boy didn’t exist in the hope Titus and Serena would not see him. Maybe they hadn’t felt the magic, or perhaps they feared what would happen next.
Titus let his awareness reach the boy. To his surprise he hit what in the mortal world would have felt like a pane of glass. The bloom of magic had exploded outward and then retreated hard, pulled as into a shell. Seeing that they were looking, the youth at once fixed his gaze on the grouse although nothing about the set of his shoulders made him seem the humble villager he surely was.
“Who is that boy?” Titus asked, loud enough that his voice carried beneath the cold weight of the afternoon’s cloudless sky.
“He is just a boy,” said the elder.
“We are diviners. We sensed a bloom of cold magic.”
The lad took several steps farther away from the fire. At once a wavering flame caught its courage and licked up a dry stick of kindling.
“Our fire did go out at a gust of wind,” said the elder, “but as you see, Magister, it is burning. There is nothing here for you.”
Serena caught Titus’s eye and shook her head. “The boy is a cold mage,” she said softly. “I think he knows but does not want to know, and thus is desperately trying to build a shield around himself. You feel that shield too, do you not?”
Titus thought of the intangible surface like an invisible pane of glass. “I do. It’s highly unusual for an untrained mage to be able to instinctively construct such a barrier.”
The elder nodded to his companions, and they went back to work, all except for the lad, who continued to watch.
“We are villagers in clientage to Four Moons House, Magister,” said the elder. “Out hunting for meat to feed our families through the end of winter scarcity. That is all.”
“That is not all,” said Titus, disliking the man’s evasiveness. “The bloom of a new cold mage may surge and ebb over several days or weeks or even months when it first flowers. And today is Imbolc,
an auspicious time for magecraft and the first hint of spring.”
Serena was still looking toward the youth. She said in a clear, warm tone, directing her words toward the lad. “A cold mage has the right to choose their own path. Even if those around them tell them they must obey.”
“Furthermore,” added Titus, “I am within my rights to make an offer to the boy’s clan by virtue of having reached him first.”
The boy said, “I’m a hunter. That’s all. Whatever else you might think isn’t about me.”
“Enough, Andevai,” said the elder. He again addressed Titus. “As I said, there is nothing for you here, Magister. Please—”
He broke off. They all heard the sound of riders. The hunters set down their knives as six horsemen emerged from the trees. Serena retreated to stand beside Titus. She self-consciously straightened her headwrap before clasping her hands at her waist with womanly modesty.
Four of the men were soldiers who wore indigo tabards. Titus himself never traveled with soldiers. He trusted in his status as a diviner to protect him, and anyway Autumn House could not afford the expense. But when he turned his attention to the other two arrivals, expecting to see diviners like himself come to compete over the lad, he realized his mistake. Only then did he notice the markings on the soldiers’ tabards: they wore House livery with four moons: crescent, quarter, gibbous, and full.
“Serena,” he said softly, in warning, but it was too late. The danger had crashed down on top of them.
The tall, heavily built man who dismounted from a big bay gelding was no diviner. A few years younger than Titus, he was a man in the full power of his maturity, and an intense aura of magic radiated from him—not visually, of course, but perfectly tangible to any diviner. He wore a knee-length jacket of indigo of the finest cut and cloth, a garment the mansa of Autumn House could never afford and certainly not as casual wear for an afternoon ride. His face was as black as Titus’s own, although this man had coarse, tightly curled dark red hair, a reminder that the ancestors of the mage Houses came from both the Afric south and the Celtic north.
The Book of Magic Page 55