Cold Magic (27 page)

Wouldn’t it be easier to be dead than alone? Yet my heart beat too strongly to give up. What I felt was not precisely anger, nor was it blinding grief. It was something deeper, and more ancient, as determined as rock and as rooted as the great trees whose spirits animate the forest.

I would not die for their convenience.

White spun in the air. It had begun to snow. I could be snow. I drifted with the flakes onto the graveled court spreading like a pool beyond the granite escalade. No one would expect such a bold ploy. In front of the eyes of watching soldiers, I paced the measure of lazy snow, and they did not see me.

But someone else did.

Hooves made a crackling din as a carriage rolled around the curve of the drive. The coachman dragged the horses to a stop a stone’s throw from me. The footman leaped down from the back and flung open the carriage door without lowering the steps.

From away behind the kitchen wing, dogs yipped and set up barking, released to the hunt. What was concealed to their sight they might track with their keen noses. Against dogs, I had no chance.

The eru looked at me, captured my gaze. “The bonds of kinship demand I aid you, if I can.”

The coachman did not look at me—his gaze gathered in the soldiers and servants crowding expectantly on the escalade, some of whom were staring curiously at the carriage and others lifting their gazes in search of the approaching dogs—but the invitation was clear.

“You must obey them if they command you to hand me over to them,” I said hoarsely, “for you are servants of Four Moons House.”

The coachman snorted.

“Are you so sure our situation is what it has seemed to you to be?” asked the eru.

The soldiers stirred, parting to make way for the djeli. No glamor I possessed would shield me from the djeli’s sight, his handle of power whose chains reached into the spirit world.

I leaped up into the carriage. The eru shut the door behind me as shouts rang from the stairs and the carriage began to move. My cane was laid across one of the padded seats. I grasped the hilt, feeling the sword’s power through my palm.

“Halt!” cracked a command, and the carriage jolted to a stop as if it had run into an iron wall.

Was that the mansa’s power?

The carriage rocked beneath me as a moving body jostled it, and a whispery sound tickled my ears with unseen feathers. There were two doors in the carriage: the one Andevai and I had always entered and exited by, and the other one, the one whose shutters he had told me I could not open. Could not, or must not?

The unopened door latch shifted now, clicking down, just as a hand jostled the latch of the door behind me that I had entered through.

“I saw a shadow enter the coach,” cried a male voice, not one I recognized, “right after the footman opened the door.”

“Open!” commanded the djeli.

Fear hurts behind your eyes, like bright sun shining. I licked my lips as the other door, the door Andevai had forbidden me, cracked to let in a skirl of wind that cut with knives. I felt my skin opening, blades slicing shallow cuts as blood oozed like tears, but when I touched my cheeks, they were dry.

“Hurry,” said a voice on that wind, the eru’s voice, deep and strong. “Until the mansa’s hand is forced by stronger chains to release this carriage, we cannot move.”

As one door opened behind me, I plunged out onto the other side. A blast of wind slammed shut the carriage door behind me.

The carriage and I rested on a rise within an ancient forest of spruce, the wheels of the carriage fitted perfectly within a rutted track that cut away through the trees. Far away, down the direction Andevai and I had come earlier in the day, I saw a single stone pillar, surely the same one where we had poured an offering. The managed orchards and deciduous trees of the estate were missing. In my hand, in daylight, I held a sword whose blade had the hard sheen of steel. In this place, it looked perfectly ordinary, although in the world I knew it appeared as a sword only at night.

Impossible as it seemed, I had crossed over.

In tales and song, the spirit world exists in perpetual summer. Not here.

Here I stood in a landscape etched so hard by winter that the trees seem scratched on a copper plate against a sky whose grayish white pallor made me wonder if the blue had been drained from it as one might drain water from a tub. No sun’s disk was visible in what I took for a cloudless sky. As my eyes adjusted to the glare, I realized the track had a shimmer as fine as if silver thread were woven into the earth, a trembling current of magic coursing along its length.

“Cousin, run down to the pillar. There, speak these words: ‘As I am bound, let those bound to me as kin come to my aid.’ Quickly. We’ll pick you up there. Whatever you do, do not leave the path.”

The eru blazed, a nimbus of bright orange and flaring blue roaring off her skin. Her face still wore a human shape, but her aspect was so bright she was difficult to look upon. Her third eye was the most ordinary thing about her.

“Run,” said the coachman. He looked no different than he had before, solid and imperturbable. The horses steamed exactly as a china kettle steams when water is boiling inside.

Grasping my sword more tightly, I cautiously emerged from behind the reassuring bulk of the carriage. Of the massive building itself, I saw no sign at all. According to the tales my father had recorded, it is life—spirit—that interpenetrates both worlds. Transparent wisps as fragile as the wings of ghostly moths flickered in the air, the souls of human beings alive in the physical world, soldiers and servants running to the escalade that existed only in the world I had just left. Farther back, within the space that would in the physical world mark his audience chamber, the mansa’s spirit blazed as brightly as that of the eru. He had not pursued me. Why should he, when he had others to hunt for him?

The spirit flames of other cold mages moved toward the front of the house at the call of horn and hounds. I could not recognize my husband’s spirit among the gathering cold mages. All I could tell was that threads of power laced them, knotting and tangling through the unseen barrier that separated the two worlds.

The threads pulsed as power was drawn out of the spirit world into their bodies:
The spirit world fed them.

No wonder they were so powerful.

Yet they were still blind. Cold mages cannot see through the veil between worlds.

But djeliw can.

The djeli stood at the other door, holding it open as he looked into the empty interior of the carriage. Like the coachman, he looked perfectly ordinary to my vision, just as he had in the mansa’s chamber, no glamor, just an elderly man wearing pale robes and gold earrings. He looked through. Somehow he looked past the closed door, and he saw me. He spoke to an unseen person behind him, but I heard nothing although his lips moved. No doubt he was alerting the soldiers and lesser mages, telling them to fetch the mansa.

They will not have me.

I ran.

My feet crunched on what I had mistaken for the glitter of magic but was actually a skin of frost atop the soil. Yet with each step away from the house, the brighter the frost shone, the harder the light became that illuminated the spirit world. A hawk’s high call pierced from the heavens like a spear in my heart. A body flashed within the trees, then another. Cold is not just a temperature; it is also fear. A pack of wolves coursed alongside me, loping parallel to the path, tongues lolling, their breath the only warm thing I felt. They were huge, shaggy creatures fit for the bitter winters, fashioned to drag down the great beasts who roamed the barren land. My father had written in his journals of watching dire wolves cut out and run to death a woolly rhinoceros.

Were the wolves pacing me in aid of the mansa? Running me to death? Or were they merely denizens of the spirit world, eager to eat a weak creature like myself who had strayed across? To feed on her, as the cold mages fed on the spirit world.

One lunged for me, and I yelped and stumbled sideways. The weight of my flight pressed against a curtain of air, almost enough to halt me. But my left foot came down off the track and at once, impossibly, a wolf appeared there to snap at my exposed boot. I have good reflexes, and good training. I jerked that foot back onto the path and at the same time unsheathed the sword and slashed at the wolf’s muzzle, the tip of my sword grazing its jowls.

With a yelp, it twisted away from my stab. Blood welled in its fur. It tensed, ready to lunge in for the kill. My breath came in bursts, a mist like the tremor of my spirit with each panting exhalation. I raised my sword between us. The wolf did not leap after me onto the track. They waited, crowding close, every cruel gaze fixed on me. They could not cross onto the path.

A shrill whistle jolted me. I threw a glance over my shoulder to see a vast shadow roiling down the track like the approach of a storm. I could see no sign of the place I had started running from, the ground where the mansa and his retainers had crowded very like the wolves waiting to rip out my heart and eat my entrails. I saw only the surge of a storm bearing down on me.

I ran. I was so frightened I felt almost as if I had sprouted wings, I ran so fast.

The storm raced at my back, a thundering gale made cacophonous with the howl of wind, but there was also a shrieking wail like a tortured spirit being whipped forward. The ground beneath my feet began to sprout flakes of ice as sharp as obsidian, cutting into my boots. The stone pillar rose before me, an obelisk like a nail of stone spearing up into the heavens and so tall I could not discern its point.

I leaped up onto the squared base and sheathed my sword, tucking it firmly through the waistband of my riding skirt. I wrapped my arms around the pillar, turned my face into the carved face of the stone, and clung there with all my strength as the gale hit.

If I had fallen naked into a lightless pit and had barrels filled with crushed ice and red-hot razor blades poured over me, it would have been easier to endure. Was this the mansa’s power seeking to tear me free? To rip me from the path so his creatures could eat me and thereby consume my spirit and cause my death in the mortal world?

The cold was so profound, like the winter wind out of the barren lands that could freeze a man where he stood, that I could hold on only by falling in my mind into the stone, becoming stone, joining with the reliefs carved into the granite face. Impervious to cold.

Pillars mark crossroads, a branching of a track, a choice of direction.

Death lay behind me. What lay ahead or to either side I could not know. But I refused to die, and furthermore, I would not let Four Moons House get hold of Bee. Whatever else I knew—and that wasn’t much—I was absolutely sure Bee had never been involved in this scheme in any way, except as its victim, like me.

I would never let Four Moons House get her.

Never. Not as long as I had breath.

I flattened myself into the carvings, one grain among many seething within the spire like so many trapped sparks. Birthed in fire and crushed beneath the implacable weight of the earth, I was stone, immovable, untouchable. But I had a voice.

“As I am bound,” I said into the stone, “let those bound to me as kin come to my aid.”

Between one breath and the next, the carriage rolled up beside me.

“Cousin.” Within the scream of the storm, I heard the eru’s voice as clearly as I had often heard the bells ringing out over Adurnam in their nightly conversation. “We are here, beside you.”

I had trusted all my young life in the memory of my father, the bold adventurer. I had trusted the care and concern of my aunt and uncle, the generosity of the clan toward one of its daughters.

What allows us to trust? Kinship ought to, but it does not always.

What, then, causes trust to flower? A smile, perhaps. An offering of tea and bread to a hungry, chilled, and confused young woman, made without expectation of return.

Pillars mark crossroads, a branching of a track, a choice of direction.

I leaped down, groping. A strong hand met mine and closed over it, pulling. I slammed into the side of the carriage, found a latch, opened a door, and as the hand released mine, I crawled in, my skirt tangling in my sword. I fell hard onto one of the benches.

Opposite me, still and silent and calm, sat the djeli.

I wrestled the sword from my skirt, set my hand on the hilt.

The djeli raised a hand. “Listen,” he said, and there was that in his voice that expected one to stop and to hear. “I am no threat to you.”

I drew the sword but because I respected a man as old as he was, I let the blade rest lightly across my thighs and kept a wary gaze on him without staring him straight in the eyes. “You were coming through to get me.”

“No. I entered the carriage to speak to you. Unlike you, with your spirit mantle, I cannot cross into the bush. Just as the mansa cannot cross.”

“What do you mean, a spirit mantle?”

“You wear a curious mantle in the spirit world. I don’t know what to make of it, I admit. Do you?”

“How could you see me through the door of the carriage? You saw into the spirit world!”

“I can see because I would be no djeli could I not see. But I cannot walk there.”

“Did the mansa send those wolves to eat me? That storm to freeze me?”

“What magic the magisters wield, or their limitations, is not mine to know. My destiny is joined to that of Four Moons House because I speak the history of their lineage, the Diarisso lineage, and of an old war. Later, it becomes the tale of flight across the desert away from the salt plague. After this it becomes the story of those who joined hands and secrets and became the first cold mages.”

“But you also see into the spirit world. You are tracking me. What do you expect me to do? Give myself up to be slaughtered? Allow my dear cousin to be handed over as I was? I think not.”

On we rolled as a wind howled around the carriage but could not disturb the two of us sheltered within its confines.

He smiled, as the elderly can do, a complicated mix of amusement, sadness, wisdom, and calculation, and he had a crinkling at the eyes and a sympathy in the lips that made me want to like him. But I had not the luxury to like him. I shifted the sword on my skirts.