Cold Magic (41 page)

“You’re pacing,” he said with another yawn.

“What are we to do?”

“I say we eat, for I’m powerfully hungry.” He snagged cloth, hoisted it, and swung out his bare legs to pull on—

“You can’t wear those! Those are women’s drawers.”

“They’re soft. They feel good.” Without the least idea of modesty, he wiggled out buck naked from under the cloaks and pulled on the drawers over slim hips. “I like them.”

“You don’t wear women’s clothing.”

“Why not?”

“You’re impossible!” I separated men’s garments: drawers, stockings, trousers, shirt, waistcoat, and the jacket in a dreary brown fabric that was nothing a fine blade like Andevai would ever be caught dead in. “It seems impossible that five entire weeks have passed while I told a few stories!”

He fingered the man’s drawers. “I don’t like these. They’re not as soft.”

“The ones you have on are meant for
me
to wear, you disgusting beast. I’m going to turn my back, and you’re going to take off
my
drawers and dress properly. Five weeks! How can it happen?” I walked back to the window. Through the open gates of the inn yard, I could see a slice of the main street and the gate, empty of traffic as dusk strangled the winter day.

How should he know why time flowed differently there from here? He was a saber-toothed cat, by all that was holy! A spirit man, the villagers would have said, walking out of his beast’s body and into this one as a man. His mother was a cat, and his father was, evidently, a cat.

I tried to imagine having a saber-toothed cat as a sire, a spirit animal who had walked into this world as a man and had congress with my mother. Did I really believe it, with no evidence except Rory’s word and the cats coming to protect me?

Trembling, I leaned my head against the dense whorls of glass, feeling the cold seep through. The eru had called me “cousin.” She had seen the spirit world knit into my bones when even the mansa, despite his immense power, had not guessed. But the djeliw had known.

What had Daniel Hassi Barahal known? Was my bastard parentage why he had handed me over to the Barahals to sacrifice in Bee’s place? I considered the story Bee and I had been told. He had fallen in love with an Amazon from Camjiata’s army. They’d fled together to make a new life but had tragically drowned in the Rhenus River, leaving behind an orphaned daughter.

Was
any
of it true?

“Why are you crying?” Roderic’s gentle tone, with a slight scratch like the lick of a cat’s tongue, opened the vein of my grief. I began to sob. He came up behind me, suitably dressed at last, rested hands on my shoulders, and stood quietly until the river ran dry.

“You still stink,” he said as I wiped my eyes.

“Let’s go down,” I said as I turned to face him. “And… thank you.”

He touched his nose to my cheek, not quite a kiss, but the gesture heartened me. I had kin. I wasn’t alone. And furthermore, the mansa’s soldiers and seekers would be looking for a solitary woman, not one traveling with a man.

Good hot soup and thick ale followed by a hot bath, however humble the tub, and the pleasure of clean drawers and shift did much to strengthen my resolve. When I returned to the common room, I discovered Roderic seated on a bench with his long legs outstretched and a mug of ale in one hand as he embellished the tale of our altercation with brigands with the delight of a born liar. No longer was it a half dozen brigands but thirteen or twenty, hard to count in the muddy light of a cloudy dawn. Certainly his audience had swelled from the innkeeper’s infatuated daughters to an appreciative crowd, including the very Emilia we had met by the well, a ruddy-faced girl with red-gold hair.

As the tale unfolded, I realized he was retelling in altered form one of the episodes from Daniel Hassi Barahal’s journal I’d related to Lucia Kante.

“There’s been trouble with roaming bands of young men these last two years,” interposed the cousin of the innkeeper. She wore a scarf in muted tones wrapped over her gray hair. I wondered if she had come over to see how Roderic filled out her dead son’s clothes. Was she, too, grieving for what she had lost? “Lemanis’s council and Lord Owen have sent pleas in plenty to the Cantiacorum prince, but in his proclamation he blames radicals for stirring them up. He says he can do nothing until we police our own. Last year, Falling Stars House sent soldiers to sweep through the Levels, rounding up outlaws and villains. Some of our lads joined up just for the summer. We thought our boy would be home after Hallows, but he never did come back.”

“My condolences on your loss, maestra,” I said politely.

Someone in the back muttered an imprecation, and people shook their heads with a frown.

“Ach, nay, lass,” she replied, touching an amulet that hung from a cord around her neck. “He’s not passed. The House captain liked his measure and how he sat a horse, so they took him into the company. We hope for some good to come of the connection. He’s not been allowed to visit home yet, but he sent money and a steer for his sister’s wedding.”

“He said he’d send for me,” said Emilia tartly, “but I’ve not heard one word since he rode off all high and proud. I suppose he’s too good for the likes of us now.”

“The lad will do what’s right,” said the innkeeper sternly.

“Until the House soldiers run afoul of radicals and he finds himself staring down a musket held by one of his own kinsmen!”

“That’s enough, Emilia!” said an older man standing in the back. With an expression that betrayed how ill used she felt, she stepped back as he went on. “Lads will make promises to lasses. You know how it is. Drink, duel, and dally. And a bit of livestock raiding when they’re bored. I don’t suppose you lost any cattle, did you, Maester Barr?”

This lame joke forced a few chuckles.

“Only the horse,” replied Roderic. As his grin widened, I was sure he was about to say something that would annoy and embarrass me. “And a very fine and handsome horse it was, to be sure. A glossy creature, more brown than bay, and exceedingly well groomed and ornamented.”

He was laughing at me with his cursed eyes as my cheeks went up in flames, although I was sure I did not know why.

“That reminds me of a song,” said Emilia.

The women laughed; the men groaned. But the fire was blazing and the night was long, and folk will want entertainment after the tedium of a day’s work. Emilia’s song detailed the amorous adventures of a water horse who fell in love—if
love
was the right word—with a series of young women who passed beside the lake in which the creature dwelled and from which he emerged in the form of a good-looking young man of exactly the right sort to catch a young woman’s fancy. She had a clear voice and a pleasing timbre, and every local knew the chorus, whose euphemisms about mounting and galloping embarrassed me. We did not sing these sorts of songs in the Barahal house. Rory caught right on and sang the chorus as if born to it.

In the laughter and pounding of tables that followed, I said, to no one in particular, “I thought kelpies drowned and then devoured their victims!” The words, innocently spoken, only caused the gathered folk to laugh even harder until I am sure my face was as red as if burned.

I retreated to the bartender’s domain as Emilia—like Bee, she enjoyed being the center of attention—began another song, this one mournful and dreary and containing numerous references to summer rain, sodden flowers, and dead lovers. The bartender was a young man who smiled sympathetically as I rested against the bar. He slid a mug of ale down to me, and I sipped, savoring the brew. Two men with distinctly foreign features approached the bar and asked for a drink. They spoke, haltingly, the formal Latin of the schoolbook, hard for locals to understand here in the north where three languages had been thrown into the same pot and stirred. They were obviously not southerners like the woman Kehinde whom I had met with Chartji; she’d been from Massilia, and whatever other languages she might speak, she’d spoken Latin with the flawless casualness of the native speaker. So had the trolls, now that I thought about it. Only Brennan had used the local cant.

“
Salvete
,” I said to the men as I set down my mug.
Greetings.

“
Salve
,” replied the elder. The younger made a gesture of greeting, cupped hand touched to chest, but said nothing and kept his gaze lowered.

“You are come a long way,” I said politely, for they both had long straight black hair not unlike my own and complexions something like Rory’s, but with features so distinctive that I wondered where on Earth they had come from. They were not from around here.

“A long way,” agreed the elder. He seemed about to say more but stopped. From his expression, I thought it likely he was stymied by the language.

“You are from Africa,” I said to encourage him.

He shook his head. “From Africa, no. From Africa, we are not.”

“From beyond the Pale? In the east?”

“This I know not, this pale. My apologies, maestra.”

The younger addressed words to the elder in a language I did not recognize. Some of the words rang familiarly, but its cadence had a music of its own, entirely new to my ears.

The elder shook his head again, then turned to receive two mugs of ale from the barkeep. With a smiling nod to seal the end of our conversation, he took himself and his young companion away. I shifted to watch their progress and caught a glimpse through the crowd of a table half hidden by the big brick hearth in the corner of the room closest to the blazing fire. A clean-shaven and rather light-skinned young man sat there, hands on the table and a cap held in slim fingers; he had Avarian eyes, slant-folded, and an oval face with broad cheekbones. After a moment I realized, with a start, that he was a woman, older than I had first thought, with black hair cropped short and an old scar on her left cheek, and in all ways dressed exactly as a man.

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.