Cold Magic (58 page)

When his party left Falle Square, there were still soldiers waiting at the house, but I ignored them. I crossed the street, my feet crunching in a dusting of snow. I opened the gate into the park and walked to the stone stele, the votive with her full lips, broad nose, and braided hair. I knelt, although the ground beneath my knees leeched all warmth from me. I raised a hand to touch the sigil the guardian held in her carved right hand: the sigil of Tanit, protector of women. I had nothing to offer except my thanks for our deliverance, but on this night, that was enough.

“Cat!”

Uncle’s voice made me stiffen. Without looking at him, I climbed to my feet and took in an unsteady breath as I found that sudden rage blinds more easily than darkness.

“Catherine,” he said, his voice breaking on my name, “I beg you, forgive us.”

I said nothing. I heard Bee’s silence beside him.

“Or if you cannot forgive us, then at least allow me to tell you what happened thirteen years ago. Let me tell you what we felt was best kept secret for all these years.”

I was not sure what I would have done if it had not been so dreadfully cold, if it had not been the dead of night on the longest night of the year, and if I had not been so very, very hungry and thirsty, and filthy on top of all else. If I had not just kissed a man who had told me I was the other half of his soul. But winter, and kinship, binds chains on you. It is not so easy to turn your back on everything you once thought you knew.

He said, “I have his final journal. The one we kept hidden from you.”

Such simple words, to hurt so much. I covered my face with my hands.

Bee said, “Come inside, Cat. Just to get some hot soup and a change of clothes at least. Those really stink. A heavier coat, and your good gloves. A bath, which you need. A fire and mulled wine. A warm bed just for tonight. Please. I’m sorry I said those stupid things.”

I had done it all for her. Who else did I have to do anything for?

But weren’t these very thoughts a lie? A saber-toothed cat roamed the city. An eru had called me “cousin.” I still had my ghostly companions:
Daniel Hassi Barahal, Tara Bell, and child.

I walked past my uncle and accompanied Bee back into the house, back into the magnificently warm kitchen where Callie greeted me shyly. I heard the soldiers enter to take possession of the ground-floor parlor and the front and back entry. The magister announced his intention of taking an upstairs bed so they could light fires in the chambers below. Fortunately, they stayed out of the kitchen. They left us alone.

We sat down at the heavy wooden table where we had often helped Callie and Cook prepare food. I took a spoon in my hand and began to eat the comforting soup, broth of chicken flavored with leeks, parsley, turnip, carrot, and precious chunks of meat. My uncle sat down on the bench on the other side of the table. I could not know what he saw in my face. His was drawn gray with anguish. His black hair was uncombed and undressed, an untidy mop of tight curls. I had never had curls. My long black hair was as straight as if it had been ironed. Just like Rory’s.

In the end, as if reluctantly, he began to speak.

“We were never close, Daniel and I. He was only two years younger, but we could not have been less alike. He was always quarreling with everyone, challenging them, questioning every remark and all the proper ways we had of doing things. He was restless, difficult, nothing like me. It made sense for him to travel, gathering information. I just wanted to make the family prosperous and secure again, and to be secure myself. I married Tilly at the family’s urging, in order to consolidate lines of connection between the Adurnam branch and the Havery branch of the Hassi Barahals. She and I have always worked hard. We get on well together. I did my duty to the Barahals, and so I waited in expectation for Daniel to do his duty, as all of us are meant to do. Then he came home with
her
.”

“Her?” asked Bee quietly.

“She was hideous. A monster.”

I kept eating, because I had to eat to be able to listen without screaming at him.

“Hideous?” asked Bee in a tone both high and strained. “What ever can you mean?”

“She was a soldier, one of Camjiata’s Amazons. A terrible, brawny woman with uncouth manners. She had injuries—terrible injuries. Her left leg was damaged, so she limped everywhere and supported herself on a cane. I suppose it must have bothered her, who was once strong enough to march from the Mediterranean basin to the Baltic Ice Sea. Her left arm ended at the elbow in a stump with a flap of skin sewn together. Blown off by artillery, so she told us. She joked about it! I cannot even bear to repeat the japes she made. The left side of her face was mangled. Her eye was missing, scarred shut. Burn marks and scars down her cheek and jaw. And yet she would stop and stare at herself in every mirror she passed. She had no sense at all of what was appropriate.”

I kept eating, one spoonful at a time. I remembered how strong her arm was, and how I always thought that she smelled as I supposed a soldier would: determined, a little sweaty, and fierce in a way that had always comforted me. That, and her words of warning. That was my mother.

“I could scarcely manage to look at her, and yet Daniel treated her as if she were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.”

“Maybe because he loved her,” said Bee.

“Oh, I am sure he did. He liked sentiment. He loved nothing more than looking noble.”

I choked on a lump of soggy carrot.

“Did she love him?” Bee asked in a toneless voice.

“A good question! Camjiata’s Amazons were required to be celibate. Absolute fidelity to the general. So when she turned up pregnant, she was arrested and imprisoned. The penalty was that she should remain in prison until the child was born. Then she would be executed and the child raised in an orphanage or, if it was healthy and comely, fostered out.”

Trembling, I set down my spoon.

“Daniel was in Lutetia during the big council called by the general to write that radical civil code he meant to impose on Europa. She must somehow have gotten a message to him, asking for help. She knew him from that cursed ice expedition. And from before as well.”

“From before when?” Bee asked.

“They first met when they were young, before she went into the army, before Camjiata was a general, when he was just Captain Leonnorios Aemilius Keita fighting in a war between feuding princes.”

How was it I had never heard this tale?

“I think that’s why she begged Daniel for help, because of the history they shared. Tilly said Tara adored Daniel. I never saw it myself. Perhaps the bards and jellies would sing of it and call it love, if love is a tragedy.”

“It’s
djeli
,” I said. “I wish you people would use the word correctly.”

“You just said you could scarcely bear to look at her, Papa,” said Bee, more softly than before. She glanced at me. “So maybe you did not see what you did not want to see.”

“I am not a sentimentalist. Does it matter, anyway? Only to Daniel, who almost destroyed the family by agreeing to help her. He took her to the Hassi Barahal house in Havery first, you know, right after she gave birth to Catherine. They made him bring her to Adurnam, because it was farther from the front lines. Camjiata’s war had by then engulfed Europa. It was dangerous to shelter a deserter. Either Camjiata’s agents would get wind of it and come to fetch her back for trial and hurt some of us in the process, or the authorities would get wind of her presence and accuse the family of spying.”

“But we are spies,” said Bee. “The Hassi Barahals have always been spies.”

“We are not spies. We began as travelers. Like all of our people, we had to make a living, so we became merchants in the field we knew best—that of gathering information and passing it on. To be accused of harboring a spy is very different in the eyes of the authorities. It makes it look as if we have taken sides.”

I picked up the spoon with a trembling hand. I hadn’t finished my soup yet. I had to finish my soup.

“Aren’t we supposed to take sides in such a case,” demanded Bee, “by supporting your family no matter what?”

“Tara Bell was not our kin! The child she gave birth to was not even Daniel’s child! He admitted as much, for you can see Catherine looks nothing like us!”

I raised my eyes to his face, and he looked away. I stared at his face, so familiar and even in its way beloved; he was the man who had taught me how to read. He was not a particularly affectionate man, but I had always thought him a good one: loyal, hardworking, funny at times, faithfully devoted to the Hassi Barahals.

I was not wrong about him. I was just not a Hassi Barahal.

“What happened then?” I asked hoarsely.

“Then Camjiata’s dreams of empire came crashing down around him. The Houses destroyed his wife’s mage House for turning traitor to their kind. His army was defeated. The allies took him prisoner. They dared not kill him, for that might have further inflamed a discontented populace. So they imprisoned him in a secret place rumored to be an island in the Mediterranean. Then Four Moons House came to us with proof that we had sold information to Camjiata’s army.”

“Had you?” Bee asked.

“There exists no proof that we did anything of the sort,” he said.

“Because you burned it,” I whispered. “Andevai handed over the proof in exchange for me. You burned it right then as he was driving away with me.”

“We had no choice,” he said stiffly, “but to agree to the contract Four Moons House forced upon us, or we would have been ruined. Destroyed, like Camjiata. Why they wanted you, Beatrice, they never explained. When do magisters ever need to explain themselves?”

Andevai had explained himself. But he was not like the others.

“Have you ever heard the phrase,” Bee asked, ” ‘to walk the dreams of dragons’?”

He shook his head. “Is it from an old bardic poem? Or a jelly’s tale?”

I rose from the bench. “Why did Daniel and Tara leave Adurnam with me?”

The lamps hissed. The fire crackled. Callie sat on her stool by the hearth, not even pretending not to listen.

He met my gaze, and I suppose I had to respect his willingness to do so. He looked older than his years, and he looked weary, but I was no longer sure he was sorry about anything.

“Four Moons House came to us and demanded the eldest Barahal daughter. Bee’s freedom and life were at risk. So I went to Daniel. Tara was pregnant again, you know.”

I was frozen, unable to move or speak or even, really, to think at all.
Pregnant again
, with a child who would have been my younger sibling. A baby brother or sister I would never know.

“I took on the responsibility. The others were too afraid. I went to Daniel. I said, ‘You’ll have another baby, a child to love and raise. Let us take Catherine—she’s a bastard, anyway; she’s not even yours—and give her to the mage House in Bee’s place’. Next I knew, they had packed their things and left.”

My legs gave out. I sat, and fortunately, the humble bench held me as a mother surely holds its child, supporting it when it falters.

” ‘A bastard, anyway’?” said Bee in a hard, cold voice. “Is that really what you said?”

“Someone had to be willing to tell the truth! Make the hard choices!” He went on, shaking his head as if harried by the buzzing of bees or the anger of the whispering gods. “Next thing, we got word of the ferry accident. You were brought back alive, but they were dead.”

“Did you ever see their bodies?” Bee asked.

He stared at the fire. “Oh, yes,” he murmured, his voice a scrape where memory rasped. “The recovered bodies had been laid out in a warehouse. Daniel had an old scar on his shoulder. And Tara… well… there could be no mistake.”

He began to sob, as if the sight were as fresh as the day it had happened.

After a while, he wiped his eyes and blew his nose in a handkerchief. Then he fished in his coat and brought out a journal, perfectly ordinary, covered in bound leather and tied shut with a green ribbon. He set it on the table in front of me.

I reached for it but drew back my hand before I touched it. “What of the other missing journals? Were you hiding them, too?”

“We don’t know what happened to them. Not even Daniel knew. He did his best to direct them to the Barahals, but you never know what will happen on any journey, do you? Things get lost.” He stood. “I leave at dusk tomorrow. The tide turns at midnight, and we take ship for Gadir to join Tilly and the girls. I’ve been advised to sell this house. It has already been purchased.”

“By whom?” demanded Bee.

“By Four Moons House. The offer came at the Prince of Tarrant’s request, which means it is a command one cannot refuse. Beatrice, you’ll come with me, of course. And you, Cat. If you will come with us, we will ask your forgiveness and you will be part of us.”

I said nothing.

Bee said, “Papa, you seem not to understand something. The mansa and the prince do not intend to allow me to leave Adurnam.”

“How can that be? The contract is void!”

Bee’s expression was as blank as uncut stone, a smooth face that might conceal any object or emotion beneath if only a carver knew how to release what lay hidden within. “You really don’t understand, do you? That’s why they’re buying the house. To keep me here, in a familiar, comfortable cage. Don’t you see it? By sacrificing Cat, you didn’t save me. All you did was sacrifice everything she thought you and Mama meant to her.”

“I’ve asked for her forgiveness. Cat, do you forgive me?”

I searched for a voice and found one, although I was not sure I recognized it as mine. “Did she ever tell you who sired me?”

He shook his head with a grimace. “She never told anyone anything. To think of all that valuable information she must have had, for she knew Camjiata well, you know. And yet she refused to tell us anything, even though we could have sold that information and made our lives a cursed sight easier. Still.” He broached the words as if they were painful. “I suppose she felt loyalty of a sort, even to a commander she had deserted. There’s something commendable in that.”