Cold Magic (35 page)

“None at all.” He clasped one of her hands, then let her go, still looking at me as if he expected me to vanish. “You laid a bright trail.”

His companion, wearing the livery of a House servant, pulled up a length behind him, mounted and leading another horse. He was no villager.

“You betrayed me,” I said hoarsely as I grasped the hilt.

Kayleigh looked at me across the gap between us. “I bear you no ill will. It’s only that he is my brother, son of the same mother, and I would do anything for him.”

“You would go willingly to the mansa’s bed?” I cried with all the scorn I could muster. “To bear the mansa’s bastard children who may be taken away at any moment to be raised in the House and not by you?”

“If I must, and if it will aid Vai, then I will do that,” she said with no tremor in her voice.

I could not fault her loyalty.

All I could do was draw my sword.

Because I expected him to come at me on the horse, using weight and height against me, I glanced to either side, trying to gauge where the land was most rugged, where I had the most chance to bolt while the horse would have trouble following in the half-light. As if he guessed my intent, he dismounted and strode forward so quickly I scarcely managed to wrestle the bundle from my back and fling it at him. He danced aside as the bundle sailed past him to smack on the dirt. I skipped back to place the stone between me and him.

He attacked.

He thrust. I parried. He cut; I caught his blade on mine, the steel singing where it met. Twisting away, I slashed back; he ducked left out from under the blade, which sliced across his right shoulder deep enough to catch in fabric, penetrate flesh, and cut free.

With a harsh curse, he stepped back to catch his balance. I grinned, too wildly, I am sure, for in a battle for one’s life, one learns to treasure each reprieve and indeed each breath. The standing stone covered my back, but being at my back, it also limited my movement. I leaped sideways, onto the path, and he charged after me.

I was lighter and quicker and my technique was cleaner, heritage of a childhood spent training with the sword, but he was bigger and stronger, and he had reach. All he needed was reach. Cold steel in the hands of a cold mage needs only to draw blood in mortal flesh to cut spirit from body. How easily he could kill me!

Because I was left-handed, I backed around, keeping the stone to my right shoulder. While he had the grace of a man who knows how to dance, he did not have my fine-tuned control or, evidently, my ability to read in his body his next move. I made sure the stone got in his way more than it got in mine. I thrust, prodded, and slashed; he parried too easily, for I was already tired, and he had ridden while I had walked and was therefore fresher. If I ran, he would catch me. All I could do was fight for my life.

I shifted preparatory to a more desperate attack, but he fell back to test his right shoulder where my blade had cut. A thread of blood seeped through. I’d taken first blood, much good it would do me: Cold steel in my hand did not sever spirit from flesh with first blood. Yet because he was right-handed, the injury might give me an opening. I measured his stance for an opening.

“Look out!” shouted Kayleigh.

Blessed Tanit, I was wearying fast. The old trick caught me: I glanced toward her. His blade flashed forward. Instinct carried me; I slammed right, my shoulder meeting stone, trapping me. My blade shivered against his, my strength not enough to hold him off as he pressed forward. He halted as our hilts caught, so close I could have kissed his lips, which were slightly parted with intense concentration as he stared into my face. My trembling arms and exhausted body were about to fail me.

“Blessed Tanit,” I murmured, “accept your daughter’s spirit with love.”

His expression changed, flooding with an emotion I could not name.

“No,” he said, not to me. He jerked back, pulling his sword out from the tangle between us. Giving way. Giving up.

Somehow in the breath of his retreat, the edge of his cold steel caught under my chin and parted my skin as gently as a summer’s breeze parts the petals of a blooming rose with the merest flutter as it passes.

Such a weakness of limb and heart assailed me that I sagged against the stone.

He gasped, eyes widening with an expression I could not possibly interpret or comprehend as he leaped out of range.

Languid, I raised my right hand and with its back brushed my glove against the curve of my jaw. When I lowered the glove, a moist line glittered on the smooth leather.

“Catherine,” he cried. “Your
blood
!”

“Am I not falling dead quickly enough?” I cried. A spark of such fury roused me that I was determined to drive him back until I stuck him through and pierced his selfish, vain heart.

Blood dripped from my jawline to spatter on my glove. Without meaning to, I flinched, and so the next drops falling split the air with the heat and life that abides in the blood of all living things. They fell like raindrops onto the base of the stone against which I still leaned, and when the drops splashed, too faint to be seen and yet thundering like a storm across the heights, the stone turned to mist against my shoulder and I fell through.

Into summer.

I broke into a sweat. Birds warbled and chirped and shrilled around me in a melodic uproar, and a huge crow fluttered down to earth a sword’s length from me. It tilted its head to peruse me first out of one eye and then the other in a way that reminded me oddly of the troll and solicitor Chartji, from the Griffin Inn. As I climbed to my feet, it cawed loudly and flapped away. I paced a circle around the standing stone to take in my surroundings.

That I had landed in the spirit world I did not doubt. Hillside rolled away on all sides into a green summer forest dense with trees I could not identify, although I recognized beech and ash. Was that a river glimmering far off to my left? I supposed that direction to be the east, but I could not be certain, because although the sky was not precisely cloudy, the heavens were veiled by a strange haze that concealed the sun. Yet the air held as much heat as if the sun were shining. Birds flitted over banks of flowering shrubs and waving grass that carpeted the open ground between the crest, where I stood, and the beginning of forest fifty or more paces below. Butterflies bright with blues and yellows and reds made the air seem alive with color, and the place
smelled
so overwhelmingly of life that I wondered if I might choke on it.

I stood on a path paved with grains as white and fine as salt ground by mortar into sand. It gritted under my boots as I shifted my weight. My chin stung. I stripped off my gloves and cautiously touched a pair of fingers to the wound, a petty, inconsequential cut still oozing blood. I ought to be dead. Maybe I was dead. Didn’t dead souls pass over into the spirit world? I pinched myself, and the bite of my fingers hurt, so either I lived or the dead felt pain.

Movement at the corner of my eye alerted me. An indistinct shape stalked the forest’s edge, shadows rippling. My hand tightened on my sword’s hilt, but when a pair of saber-toothed cats emerged from the trees, I felt as cold as if a winter’s wind had blasted down from the north. Cold steel offered no defense against such massive beasts. I looked both ways down the path. In the direction in which I was reasonably sure I had been walking, a change in the color of air marked where the hills fell away, and hazy, deep greens and muddy blues marked a lowland marsh. The Sieve was nothing more than a vast marshy wilderness, some of which had been drained and penned off into levels where crops could be grown. Last night—indeed, how had it become day?—I had glimpsed a burr of fire that surely identified the old Roman-founded market town of Lemanis.

Beyond the standing stone in the mortal world waited Andevai and his sword and loyal sister and attendant servant. The two cats ambling gracefully along the tree line below did not approach. A third, the one whose shadow I had first spotted, trailed behind them.

Stay on the path, the eru had told me.

I still had to warn Bee.

After tucking my gloves into my belt and loosening the tight chain of the heavy winter cloak so air could circulate around my back, I started to walk. I settled into a pace neither so fast it might appear as if I was running, a temptation even to lazy predators, nor so slow that I might seem weakened or injured, for every natural historian knows that hunting beasts are most attracted to those in the herd who lag behind. The hunt culls the sick, so it was always best to look strong no matter how exhausted one’s legs were and how the burden of running was beginning to weigh on one’s heart.

Blessed Tanit might protect me if she willed, but natural historians suggested that the gods were merely a story devised by humankind to explain the mysteries of heaven and earth. Even if that were not true, Fiery Shemesh, whose glorious, blazing disk I could not see within the silvery haze that made the sky, was likely no god of
this
world. The cats were this world’s creatures, beautiful, deadly, and aloof. They did not glance my way, but I knew they knew I walked the path. I had no food, no water, nothing but winter clothing, beneath which my flesh became slick with perspiration. Nothing but my determination, Bee’s bracelet, and a sword that had been given to me by an eru.

The biggest cat suddenly raised its head, and with the most astonishing grace imaginable, bounded up the slope toward me, head level and gaze intent. My throat tightened until I could scarcely breathe, and my heart stuttered,
galump galump galump
—only those heavy beats were not my pulse pounding in my ears but an actual drumbeat.

I glanced behind.

I did scream, then, or perhaps it was a shout of fury. Tears spill not only from sorrow. Sheer bloody outrage can make you cry.

The djeli Bakary had told me that he could see into but not walk in the spirit world, while cold mages neither see into nor walk there. Yet here came thrice-cursed Andevai on his horse, riding after me as if he crossed into the thrice-cursed spirit world as easily as snapping his fingers.

What choice had I? I turned, planted my feet, and made ready. I would have one chance to kill him before he cut me down.

The cat’s roar shattered birdsong. The horse skittered sideways; Andevai hauled it back onto the path, but two more cats—were there five now?—came running up on the opposite side, keening and roaring as they raced, muscles bunching and stretching. Their beauty was so startling that a person might smile at the terror of beauty before death closed in a pounce.

They did not touch the path, and it was clear Andevai knew they could not, but the horse could not know. He battled it as it shied and reared and, finally, dumped him sidelong off the path onto a stretch of grass. Relieved of his weight, the horse ran at me.

“Blessed Tanit, do no harm!” I croaked as the great cat rippled across the grass and with a leap came down on Andevai’s chest just as he was trying to get up. He was slammed back by the force of its weight.

I flung up the arm holding my sword to hide the awful kill. The horse broke sideways at the flash of steel and clattered to a halt, reins dangling and eyes flaring, not three paces from me. The cats had not pursued it. They were circling the cold mage.

He was not dead. He was not even bitten or clawed. The saber-toothed cat simply stood on him, pinning his sword arm and chest. It slewed its lovely head around to stare at me. Was it deciding which morsel looked more delectable? Or asking my permission to eat him?

“Oh, no,” I said, voice quavering and heart trembling. “Don’t look at
me
! I don’t want to be eaten. And I can’t… I can’t…” Even after everything, I could not say,
Kill him.

I lowered my sword and whistled softly and wished I had an apple as I slowly, very slowly, reached for and took hold of the reins. The horse came gladly to a steady hand.

Aunt and Uncle could not keep horses, as they were too great an expense, but the scions of a mercenary house must learn to ride in case they are called away to travel in the service of the family. I knew how to set my foot in a stirrup and swing onto a saddle, how to gather reins in hand and brace myself awkwardly because the stirrups were set for a longer leg than mine. I used thighs and the pressure of my seat and a clucking sound made twixt tongue and palate to suggest to the equine that it ought to walk. A well-trained horse will move without much urging, especially if it is near to large predators and believes that moving will take it away from them.

We started down the path, but I turned in the saddle to see what was going on behind me.

He raised his head. His voice had a strength I admired, considering the position in which he currently found himself. “You can’t steal my horse!”

A second cat ambled over and kneaded its sheathed paws gently on his torso, while the first lowered its huge head and licked his face. He swore in a string of curses.

I laughed as I rode away. Maybe I wept, too, or perhaps that was only sweat seeping down my cheeks. A shrill cry cut the air, and I felt my heart contract as with a fever, but after all I spotted a hawk gliding that had surely made the call. Surely it had been no human agony.

I put the horse through her gaits and settled on a shog that jolted me to my bones but seemed not too tiring to the horse, breaking it at intervals with a walk. After some time had passed and when I spotted a stream not too far afield from the path, I reined my doughty steed aside and let her water and graze while I made inventory.

One excellent horse. Two saddlebags, the first containing a very fine suit of fashionable clothing rolled up within heavy canvas, as well as various and sundry necessaries such as an exceedingly sharp razor, a spoon and knife of excellent polished silver since no doubt nothing available in rustic inns encountered on such a country path could ever touch the lips of a proud magister, and a hoard of coins. The second bag held provisions: dried meat, a half round of cheese, a leather bag filled with nuts, and apples, perhaps to sweeten the horse.