Cold Magic (13 page)

“Maestra,” she said at last, an utterance that offered neither question nor answer except to remind me bitterly that I was now a married woman, with all that implied.

She left me sitting on the edge of the bed with a bowl of light to keep me company. Heat drifted up from the floorboards. My toes were warm, and my heart was cold. In all the years I remembered well, I had never gone to sleep without Bee beside me to whisper to before slumber overtook us. Now I was alone.

The light dwindled, and when its glowing dome dulled and collapsed into a wisp, I tucked myself under the bedding.

I lay there in dread for hours, hearing the rumble of carriages gradually fade as the city fell into its late sleep, hearing the occasional cry of the night guard on his rounds: “All quiet! All quiet!” I recognized the droll bass of Esus-at-the-Crossing and Sweet Sissy’s laughing alto as they sang the changeover, the death of the old day and the birth of the new. The beat of festival drums rolled faintly and was quickly stifled, or perhaps that was when I fell asleep and dreamed of happier times, dancing koukou.

I woke from an uneasy doze with my forehead wet with sweat. Somehow, the chamber had grown horribly warm. I got out from under the heavy covers, swung my feet to the floorboards, and padded over to the shutters. I found the clasp, turned it, and pulled the shutter aside, then unclasped the expensive paned window and opened it to take in a lungful of blessedly cold air. Then I coughed, having sucked in a huge breath of wood smoke, coal dust, and sewage stink. My eyes stung as I caught a whiff of ammonia.

The door behind me opened.

I gasped, turning, my hand still grasping the window’s handle. A figure moved into the chamber; light formed into a luminous globe beyond his left hand. After a moment of complete incomprehension, I realized I was staring at my husband.

My husband! Come at last and very late to the marriage bed. Possibly drunk. Probably appalled at the necessity of consorting with an unwanted and unfashionable wife. I wanted to throw myself out the window, only I remembered Aunt’s parting words:
Go with your husband
.

My duty was clear.

Strangely, he was fully dressed in practical traveling clothes that were dirty and torn. A moist substance streaked his cheek. He looked as if he’d been in a fight.

“Catherine, close that window,” he said in an angry voice, as if by opening the shutter I had done something to personally offend him. Me! Torn from my home, hauled through the city, and then starved and left to cower like a beaten dog in a trap!

There came on the wind a sound, or maybe just a tremor in the air, a bitter kiss on my lips. My Cat’s instincts flared. I turned to the window, wondering if I really was going to have to throw myself out and run through the garden to get away from his cold fury, now sparking.

“Down!” he shouted.

A huge explosion flashed mere blocks away, and the entire inn shuddered as the boom hit. Glass cracked; panes shattered. I was flung backward and lay stunned on the floor as I watched through the window, now above me, sheets of flame rise into the night sky above a bedlam of screaming men and barking dogs.

“Get up! Get dressed! Riding gear, if you have it.”

He made no move to help me. Instead, he strode to the doorway and called impatiently back into the parlor. “No! You must
all
leave. You should have left already, as your masters have evidently abandoned you. Hurry.”

I staggered up and stumbled to the dressing closet. His mage light followed me but he did not, so I had light and privacy as I stripped out of my nightdress and fumbled into fresh undergarments, a chemise and a soft wool tunic that fit close against my torso, and after that a split-skirted riding skirt and a blouse. I hurried back into the bedchamber, buttoning my jacket so fast I came up with one extra at the top and the jacket askew.

The conflagration rumbled like thunder that never faded. The reflection of flames flickered in the shards of broken glass strewn over the floor. Acrid smoke made my eyes water. There was blood on my hand, but I felt no smarting cut. I swiped my eyes and began to undo the buttons.

“Leave it!”

In the inn’s courtyard, a cacophony of voices howled in concert. A splintering crash raised shouts of triumph. Then a woman screamed, but the sound was brutally cut short.

“Out the window.” His voice was curt. “If they catch you, they’ll kill you.”

“Won’t they kill
you
first?” I retorted.

A weight thudded against the closed parlor door, throttling my anger into fear. I bolted for the bed, yanked off the coverlet, and threw it over the lip of the window to protect against splinters and glass. I swung my legs over. The inn was raised considerably off the ground, so I had to jump, but cats land neatly, knees bent.

“Move!”

I ran into the garden, looking over my shoulder in time to see him drop to the ground. He pulled the coverlet down behind him. Cloth ripped where it caught on jagged glass, but he shook it free. Trampling through dead flower beds, I raced toward the far wall, measuring its height with my gaze. It was too high to clamber over, so I scanned for footholds or anywhere I could grip with my fingers. A tree grew next to the wall with a bench resting beneath the canopy. I jumped up on the bench seat, gathering myself to make a leap for the upper branches.

“Don’t,” he said, grabbing my wrist to stop me. He wasn’t looking at me; I followed his gaze with my own.

Sweet Tanit in her bower!

A man with a rifle stood framed by the broken window, taking aim.

I tried to make a sound; at first no word came out. Then they flooded. “That’s a
rifle
! Those are illegal!”

My husband raised his other hand as though flicking away a fly.

I tugged, but he did not release. He just stood there, as if we were poised in a park on a peaceful night to breathe in the scented air. “Rifles are far more accurate than muskets, or didn’t you know that?” I pointed out.

“I’m surprised you do, since rifles are illegal.”

I have good vision, even in the dark. The man in the window tensed and released. Fire!

There was no sound. No flash. No percussion.

The man turned and shouted into the interior. “We’ve got a mage! Bring the crossbows!”

“Up,” my husband said.

I clambered over a big branch like I was mounting a horse. He shoved the mass of the coverlet, now shedding feathers, into my face.

“What—”

“Take it! Must you question everything? While it’s true the rifle won’t fire, I likely won’t survive a crossbow bolt.”

I took it. He climbed after me. A pair of men appeared in the window, lifting crossbows to sight. On the branch, now at the same height as the window, he ripped the coverlet from my hands and, just as the men released the bolts, flung it outward as if rich fabric and the feathers of a rumpled and now-dirty coverlet, however finely made, could stop two iron bolts.

The coverlet billowed open and began to unravel along the rip. I stared as the cloth unwove, becoming a cloud of threads, some racing out in front while others lagged behind with the mass of downy feathers, all of it slowly drifting toward the window as if on unseen wings. As the two bolts pierced the cloud, they unaccountably slowed and began to wobble. Surrounded by the cloud of feathers, they simply dropped heavily to earth, all their momentum sucked clean away. The threads and feathers meanwhile accelerated toward the men hurriedly cocking new bolts into place, as if they had fed on the speed of the bolts and turned it into their own energy.

A yank on my braid pulled my head around.

“Move!” He went up.

I scrambled after him, easing out on a thick branch to the top of the wall. As he swung his legs over, the branch he was on snapped off and it—and he—dropped out of sight with a thump into the alley. Straddling the wall, I looked back to see the men in the window flailing in a storm of down.

“Catherine!” He was rising, dusting off his clothes with one hand as he raised a cold bubble of illumination in the other.

I lowered myself until I hung from my arms and then let go. Naturally, I landed with perfect grace and straightened immediately to scorn the hand he offered, since he had been expecting me to tumble to earth as clumsily as he had.

“Who are they?” I asked. “Why do they want to kill you?”

“Why do you suppose it is
me
they want to kill?”

My heart was racing and my thoughts were churning and my mouth lost that tight leash Aunt Tilly had bound it with. “How much time do I have to answer the question?”

He took a step back from me. “I was warned that Barahals would have little conversation and fewer manners, coming from a clan of spies and mercenaries. Can we go now? Or must we duel in the Celtic style with more pointless insults?”

On the other side of the wall, men shouted orders. No doubt they were sending men the long way around to cut off both ends of the alley.

“Which way?” I asked.

He measured the sky. I had no trouble seeing in the light made by the fire, hazy and red and tangled with streamers of smoke, but he seemed to be looking for something else. Temple bells came alive, first one and then the others joining in, ringing the fire chase:
Awake! Awake! Awake!
Their thundering rhythm drowned out his answer. With a grimace of annoyance, he gestured more broadly than necessary, as if he thought my vision was as poor as most people’s would be:
this way
. As he turned to run, he stumbled over the broken branch lying across the narrow alley. I snorted. Didn’t mages possess spirit sight, as I did? He took one dragging step, righting himself with a shake, and took off at a run for the eastern end of the alley, the one that lay farthest from the inn’s gated entrance. I ran after him. Maybe the Barahals
were
now spies and mercenaries, if you felt obliged to use those words, but that meant Barahal children, male and female, were trained in the family business. By the time we got to the end of the long alley, he was breathing hard and I wasn’t.

Not until I stuck my head around the corner. A mob of torches bobbed along the street, heading toward us from both directions. Men brandished shovels and clubs and swords; behind the front line, crossbows were being leveled. Voices chanted, but fortunately the bells were so loud I couldn’t make out what the crowd was screaming beyond “kill!” and “burn!” and “revenge!”—the usual furious shouts that come right before a mob’s victims are swarmed and brutally hacked to death.

Fear came in a rush so strong that for an instant I could hear nothing except an indeterminate roaring. It seemed I would choke on terror.

A howl cracked over the mob, muffling the peal of the bells. Every burning torch shuddered and snapped out. Just like that. An icy wind blew through, shattering tree limbs and dropping men as though they’d been punched. Through the crowd rolled the coach, ghastly where the twisting light of the conflagration, still burning strong, caught in its lineaments. The horses no longer looked like flesh-and-bone beasts; they galloped about an arm’s span
above the ground
, the white-haired coachman flicking his whip over manes as translucent as icicles. The other creature hung off the riding board in the back, looking no longer anything like a human being but rather a storm of cold magic so powerful it began to pelt ice along the street.

They pulled up alongside us as men wailed in fear, faces pressed into the ground. The eru leaped down from the back, flipped out the stairs, and opened the coach’s door, as precisely as would any humble footman serving an exacting household. My husband climbed in without looking back, but I stared at the eru, who paused in the midst of chaos and looked right at me.

“Greetings, Cousin,” it said in a voice that sounded so perfectly normal I should not have been able to hear it above the clangor of the bells and the wail of the storm winds and the cries of the mob. “I’ll offer you a gift, if you’re inclined to accept. For I think you may need this.”

It flicked an object off the rack on the roof where boxes were tied and tossed it to me, hilt first. I caught it instinctively, felt its weight and balance mold to my grip. If there’s one thing a Barahal knows, it is the sword. For it is true we are born to a lineage long scorned, if necessary, to the rule of the powerful: that of the hired swords and spies who across the centuries have done the dirty work of princes, bankers, guilds, and mage Houses. Djeliw and bards never sang praise to us, although we Barahals had always served honorably, paid the bitter price, and finished the job.

My husband called from inside the coach. “What is taking so long? We must
move
.”

The horses stamped restlessly. The cold cut to my bones, and my teeth chattered. The eru turned away, and only then was I able to drag my cold-heavy legs up into the coach. I collapsed onto the seat facing him. He slammed the door shut. The stairs thunked into place beneath the undercarriage. The coach jerked forward once, twice, and a third time, slamming me back each time against the box.

The coachman shouted, “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!”

Blue sparks spun, and then we were rolling with a grinding roar along the cobbled street. I had a blinding headache.

“I didn’t see you had a cane,” he said, so surprised he sounded neither irritated nor supercilious.

I gaped, for I still felt a sword’s hilt molded as if to my hand, but when I looked, it was as if with doubled vision: a ghost sword slim and straight and gleaming, layered within and around a fashionable ebony cane like the one my husband carried, an affectation of perfectly healthy and wealthy young men that Bee and I often mocked. Where was Bee now? Was she thinking of me, sleepless, in the room we had shared for over thirteen years? Had she noticed the distant fire in a far district of the city and wondered what it signified? If it would spread? If the entire city would go down in flames?

Hastily and awkwardly, I changed the subject. “Blessed Tanit! Surely that was a mage storm. I didn’t realize you were so powerful.” Yet I was shaking in the face of the immense power raging around us, for either he had raised that storm untrammeled and barely out of breath, or he had bound an eru, a creature of the dread ice, which had raised the storm on his behalf.