Cold Magic (59 page)

I could not bear to look at him. Instead, I spoke to the wall. “I know you did what you thought you had to do. I know you did it out of concern for Bee, and you may even regret the pain it has caused me. But my parents would not have drowned if you hadn’t driven them away. I’m not ready to forgive that yet.”

“How like Daniel you are,” he muttered. “So intransigent.”

“Is she like Uncle Daniel, or not like him, then?” Bee’s gaze had a regal scorn that surprised even me. She looked so calm and spoke so evenly that it was difficult to see how furious she actually was. “You cannot have it both ways. You betrayed not just Cat, not just your brother and my aunt Tara, but also me. You betrayed the Barahal daughters, all of us, and sons, too, the ones you never had. You betrayed the honor of our house. You acted just as the Romans always claimed we Kena’ani did. I’m ashamed.”

“We were forced into a corner. We only did what we thought we had to do. What else would you have had me do, Beatrice?”

She shook her head. “It’s done. Now all you can do is go to Gadir. Take better care of Hanan and Astraea than you did of Cat. For Tanit’s sake, Papa, don’t let Astraea get away with being such a little brat. And take Callie, if she’ll go. For she’s alone here.”

“Callie?” he said, so startled at this request he forgot his tears.

“Do you want to go?” Bee asked Callie. “I know you’ve nowhere else to go.”

With her flyaway pale hair pulled back severely but wisps straggling everywhere, and a mended shawl pulled tight around her narrow shoulders, Callie looked fragile, but she was not weak nor was she stupid. “I don’t know what to expect in Gadir, truly, but I’ve been cold and starving on the streets of Adurnam, and I never want to be so again. But if you and Maestressa Catherine must stay, then won’t you be needing me here?”

“There will be other arrangements,” said Bee. “You must go with him. And now, I admit, I am terribly hungry, and I would like to eat.”

With a halting step, Uncle left the kitchen.

Callie took the bowls, ladled more soup in, and set them down with a cup of mead. She checked the lamps and retreated to her stool. I did not ask her to leave. This was her room, not ours, and, anyway, it was warm and removed from the cold mage and the soldiers. I heard them moving about in the front parlor and entry hall, speaking in low voices. Bee picked up her spoon and ate her soup. Then she drank the mead, first her cup and, after a while, mine.

I stared at the journal.

Long I stared. Hope tasted of ashes in my mouth.

I had come too far to give up now.

I untied the ribbon, and I ran a hand down the creamy leather and, with a held breath, opened it. I knew his writing, with its long tails and flowing curves. So easy to read.

I read as the lamps burned, and as Bee watched me, and as Callie waited, for servants must learn to wait, it being their duty to do so whatever their personal wishes might be.

Tara has risked much and never faltered in her duty. She has seen awful things. She has blood on her hands. She is scarred by the wars.

He did not mean only physical scars.

I will protect Tara always, however I can. What happened on the ice does not matter. The child will be my child. I will protect her no matter the cost. I have promised Tara that, and even if I had not, it would make no difference, for my little cat is my sweet daughter, the delight of my life. How I wish I had known far earlier how one can lose one’s heart to something so precious.

My tears fell on ink long since dry. He had written this so many years ago.

Tara lost one arm to cannon fire, and the other is crippled such that she cannot really care for the baby. She makes light of it in front of others—soldiers’ humor—but I am the one who holds her at night when she screams, reliving the battles in her dreams. I am the one who reassures her that the child will love her for the courageous and beautiful woman she is, not for her two arms or her two eyes.

Blessed Tanit, do not let my heart break.

That ass Jonatan came to me with a disgusting proposition, which I absolutely will not countenance. Giving up my girl for his, as if mine were worth nothing, which I am sure she is to him. I protested. I offered ways to bargain with the magisters. I even offered to steal the cursed documents back. He threatened me in that unctuous way he has. Said the family would turn us out if I don’t cooperate. “Is some other man’s bastard worth this to you?” he asked me. So despite Tara’s condition, despite the health and vigor she has regained simply by remaining in one stable place for so long, we must leave. It is a mercy that Camjiata has been captured and his army dissolved. I am not sure where exactly we can find refuge, but at least we can hope to travel there safely.

Only they had not traveled safely. He and my mother had died. It’s just they hadn’t meant to. They had been running away to go make a life elsewhere. With me.

How many times must I repeat myself, I wonder, trying to explain it to people who do not want to hear? She is my daughter even if not of my breeding. What is breeding, after all, except a moment’s release? Isn’t the raising more important? I will cherish my little cat always.

But my heart broke anyway, and Bee put her arms around me, and I wept.

And so dawn comes, and it is bitter, and it is sweet. I had a father after all, even if he was dead. I had a mother whose courage was greater than I had ever imagined. They had loved me enough to try to make a life for me, even if it had not worked out, because Lady Fortune is more powerful than frail human plans.

But that didn’t mean Bee and I were ready to surrender.

Solstice day passed quietly inside the house. We heated water and bathed in the scullery, Callie standing watch. The magister walked a circuit of the upper floors. The cawl protecting the house had faded with Aunt Tilly’s departure, but the magister spun some manner of cold magic to seal the window latches shut. The soldiers kept to the ground floor, guarding the front and back doors. Uncle readied his single bag, weeping all the while. Callie we asked for a favor. At dusk, a hackney cab rattled up, the horse stamping in its traces.

“It’s here,” I said, for I had been watching for it.

A young soldier opened the door, trying to be polite or perhaps to impress Bee.

Uncle was entirely deflated, a balloon unable to stir as the wind rose.

“Beatrice,” he said despairingly.

“I’ll write every month so you know I am well. That’s all I can promise. Give my love to Hanna and Astraea. Best you hurry, so you don’t miss the tide.”

“Uncle,” I said, choking back tears, “give my love to the girls. Tell Aunt—” I could not go on. I had loved Aunt Tilly so.

I did kiss him then, after all, not in forgiveness but in regret for what we had lost. Bee offered a formal kiss to his unshaven cheek, like a dido showing distant favor to an unloved but hardworking courtier. With bowed shoulders and bent head, Uncle crossed the threshold with his bag. Callie followed him, carrying one light carpetbag and three heavy ones. We made our farewells, and she nodded at us to show that she understood her part in this: Once they had left the house, she would insist on stopping at Tanit’s temple to make an offering of grain to the priests, so they might pray for Tanit’s blessing and a safe journey. Not even Uncle Jonatan would refuse that.

The cab rolled away. The soldier shut the door, glanced at Bee, and then away.

We went upstairs to the first-floor parlor, where we had profligately lit the stove with the last of the coal and the chamber with our last two beeswax candles. We settled in the window seat, she with her arms hooked around her bent knees, tucking them close to her chest, and me with my father’s journal, number 46, on my lap. The knit bag, now our only possession, sat on the cushion, its bulge enveloping her sketchbook, the singed copy of
Lies the Romans Told
, and the journal Uncle had given me last night.

“I was thinking,” she said.

“Dangerous at all times, and with a tendency to cause pain in those who are unaccustomed to such exercise,” I remarked.

But then I opened journal 46 to the end, to the conversation between the young natural historian and the lieutenant while the aurora borealis played its changes across an arctic sky. Knowing now what I knew, the words fell entirely differently. How could I have missed the hints in their chance comments and asides? They had known each other before this; it was so clear from their joking manner, the quick rejoinders, the shared knowledge of things they shouldn’t have known so easily about each other. A new perspective gives a person new eyes. Knowing what I now knew about Andevai—

“Cat! Are you paying attention? You look a little flushed. I
said
, perhaps we’d be better off to go to the academy and throw ourselves on the mercy of the headmaster.”

Startled, I retreated behind a glower. “The one who handed you over to Legate Amadou Barry? I think not.”

She sighed. “No, I suppose not. I’m just exhausted by thinking of having to haul Uncle Daniel’s journals across Adurnam.” Abruptly, she sucked in breath so hard I looked up and followed her gaze out the window and over Falle Square. “Fiery Shemesh! What’s this?”

A black coach rumbled down the west side of the square, pulled by four horses as pale as milk. My heart leaped in my chest, or it would have, if I’d had a heart, which Bee so often accused me of lacking. But after all, it was not the coach I thought it was: This vehicle bore a crest of four moons—crescent, half, full, and new—and its coachman was a heavyset man with black skin and its paired footmen a matching set of blond Celts. The horses were ordinary horses with brown specks flecking their gray coats. Their hooves fell solidly on stone. I wondered if I would ever see the eru and the coachman again.

Four Moons House had come to claim its new property the moment the festival was over. The coach drew up before the house, and the footmen hopped gracefully down to open the door and pull down two steps. The man and woman who climbed out were not cold mages but wore the serious garb and tidy demeanor of accountants and housekeepers, stewards come to take possession and take inventory. Seeing them emerge, I felt a dull ache in my heart. Was it sadness at losing the only home I remembered? Selfish disappointment that Andevai had not come himself? Relief that I did not yet have to figure out what to say to him?

We rose as the stewards were shown in. They were reserved and polite.

“I am Maestra Fatou,” said the woman, “and this is my cousin, Maester Conor. We are come at the mansa’s order to take over the running of the household. Also, he did not think it appropriate for two young women to live alone without older female companionship.”

“Of course,” said Bee. “Our thanks. We’re a little nervous of the soldiers, I admit.”

“Have they shown you any disrespect?” she asked sharply.

“No, no,” said Bee in a tone that suggested otherwise. “We have been locking ourselves in here at night. We sleep here, for no fires will light on the second floor, with the magister sleeping up there. If you don’t mind, could we wait until morning to show you the house? You may take the cook’s room downstairs, by the kitchen, where there’s a fire, or bunk with the soldiers in the dining room below us.”

They left, and we made ready. We sat in darkness and silence and warmth, waiting for the midnight bell. When the lonely tenor cried the night watch across the city, I took Uncle’s keys and unlocked the door into his private office. We padded in, and I unsheathed my sword and sliced through the cold magic that bound shut the latch. We paused, listening, but no alarm stirred the house; the magister was asleep and would, we hoped, note nothing until he woke. Bee positioned herself by the window where, weeks ago, an unwanted visitor had climbed in unannounced and unasked for, slipping through the protective cawl. I went downstairs in my slippered feet, carrying a lantern lit with the last beeswax candle. I pretended to trip and stumble as I came to the back door.

The mage House soldiers were well trained. They were perfectly awake: two inside and two outside. I held the lantern up right into their faces, to confound their night vision.

“We forgot to take a chamber pot upstairs,” I said. “I’ve got to use the latrine.”

They opened the door, and I quickly shone the lantern light in the faces of the outside pair. I made a business of exclaiming over the bitter cold, and my slippered feet, and how I had forgotten my cloak, and should I go back and get it, and on in this vein as I listened for the faint creak of Uncle’s office window opening above and the fainter creak of the stout branch on which Bee was climbing out to the wall. We’d climbed that path before. We Barahals were trained to be spies, after all.

When I was sure she had gone, I used the latrine and made my way back to the first-floor parlor. I locked myself in, pulled on boots and coat, secured the knit bag with its books around my torso, stoked the fire, and made up lumpy figures beneath the feather bed we’d thrown over the window-seat cushion. Then I went into Uncle’s office and locked the door between office and parlor. The office door leading onto the landing was already locked from inside. If we were fortunate, they would not think to break down the doors until morning.

With my ghost sword slung tightly over my back, I climbed out and crouched on the wide branch to close the window behind me. Some instinct or training or sound alerted the guards standing out back, and they glanced around and up, but I was part of the tree, nothing more than a skeletal winter branch, a little stouter than most, but nothing to notice. Nothing to see.

Bee and I met in the mews. We avoided the gaslit thoroughfares and made our way through the cold winter night, me at the front with my good eyes and my ghost sword to mark the path, Bee following tightly in my footsteps with an ordinary cane of her own to sweep the street for obstacles. We found our way to the Blessed Tanit’s temple near the academy, whose gates remained unlocked in every season and at all times of the day and night. Three bags, Callie had been instructed to give them. One was full with the last of the grain from our larder, given as an offering for the priests. The other two held my father’s journals and a few other items crammed in with them: four silver candlesticks, four beeswax candles, and some stockings, shifts, and underthings that had been left by Aunt Tilly when the family had fled. What coin we had, we’d sewn into our bodices. The priests slept soundly in their winter cottage; I had no trouble retrieving the two bags, except for their weight.