Cold Magic (7 page)

Maester Amadou emerged from the dining hall at a slow walk, supporting an elderly serving woman. The old dame was clearly rattled and unsteady on her feet; one of her hands was streaked with blood from where she had taken a gash.

He guided her across the room toward us. Bee became practically refulgent. No trading vessel’s captain could have appeared as ecstatically delirious at seeing land in the wake of a mastripping storm.

But he was not looking at
Bee
.

“You are just the one to know what to do, Maestra Madrahat,” he said in a mild accent tuned with a musical soporiferousness. “The ancilla needs medical attention. She has cut her hand on the crockery.”

The old woman turned a glazed look up to his face. I wasn’t sure if she was infatuated or in shock from blood loss. Yet, after all, she looked old and weary and pale, and if Bee had known what I had just been thinking, she would have kicked me and I would have deserved the kicking.

“If she had not clumsily dropped the tray, she would not have cut herself,” said the maestra ungraciously.

Maester Amadou smiled the comment into oblivion. “While it was indeed she who dropped the tray, it was not the ancilla’s fault, maestra. I had a leg stretched out in an inconsiderate fashion. The ancilla stumbled over my rude foot.”

The old woman gave him a startled look, which only I noticed because both Bee and the maestra could not take their eyes off his smile. He was not a particularly tall young man—he was barely taller than I was, although it was true I was tall for a woman—and he looked extremely well in his fashionable clothes, a tailored dash jacket of indigo cloth and a patterned kerchief tied at his neck in the informal style known as “the Buccaneer.”

“If a physician could be called, maestra? Perhaps someone to sit with the ancilla until the physician arrives so she does not faint? I would do it, but I think it is not allowed for men to enter the kitchen, is it not?”

“It is not, indeed!” said the maestra. “To mingle so freely! Well, I will just take her back there and let one of the cooks sit with her until a physician can be brought from the women’s hospital.”

“In recompense for my inconsiderateness,” he added, “my family will reimburse any fees required by the physician as well as the cost of replacing the broken dishes. I am sure the ancilla will be back at work as soon as she is able and that her position will be held open for her given that the fault was all mine.”

Bee sighed audibly.

The serving woman flushed to the roots of her silver hair.

Even I was mildly impressed by this daunting performance, beneath which Maestra Madrahat was entirely drowned. She retreated as if on an inexorable outgoing tide, bearing the injured ancilla with her.

Maester Amadou politely addressed his comments to both of us.

“Are you coming in?” he asked without a trace of self-consciousness in the face of Bee’s smile, which would have rendered unconscious any other young man. “There is room at the table with my sisters, if you would have in your heart the willingness to share our benches with us.”

I saw by Bee’s blush that we would accept and we would be pleased and we would eat our luncheon sitting at the table of Maester Amadou and that afterward, for the next week at least, I would hear his praises sung and spoken all day and whispered of into the late hours of the night in our shared bed until clawing off my ears would seem a less agonizing fate.

However, as I was the eldest Maestressa Hassi Barahal, even if by a mere two months, it was my place to accept or reject the invitation on behalf of myself and my dearest cousin.

“How kind, but”—Bee’s dainty foot pressed down on my left slipper and began to really squish my little toe—”ah! Of
course
we would be delighted to join you.” She eased off. I forced a smile as my toe throbbed. “Is there still yam pudding? It’s my favorite.”

Bee was floating, and I was brooding, when we departed the academy midafternoon after our seminars. My shoulder ached under the emotional weight of the purloined book within the schoolbag. Its pages were silent because closed, but my mind was howling with questions.

Did my father write this monograph on lying Romans? And if so, why had no one ever told me of it? Why was there no copy in our house? But these were only stepping-stones to the brink, where the edifice on which my tender life trembled as on a knife’s edge. One question rose time and again whenever I was troubled enough to brood over the man whose miniature portrait nestled in the locket I wore at my neck and whose journals graced his brother’s parlor, or over the woman who had left no portrait and only a handful of remembered words in my heart.

My parents had drowned during a river crossing along with a hundred other people, yet the only detail my uncle had ever given me when he spoke of the gruesome task of identifying their water-soaked corpses days later was that beasts had done damage to their features, so he had had to identify them by other means: the locket and greatcoat my father wore, my mother’s red hair still coiled in a single thick braid, and a silver brooch later sold to pay the burial costs.

But if that were true, how could we be sure those were
their
bodies? Lockets and brooches could be given away or stolen. Other people had red hair and coats. So how could we be sure they were really dead, not just run away, kidnapped, or somehow lost?

We hurried along the high street that led past the academy grounds and the adjacent temple sanctuary. Kena’ani temple gates never closed, no matter day or night, winter or summer, storm or fair weather, not that many people in these enlightened days ventured inside those gates except as sightseers. Every guidebook to Adurnam noted that this temple, dedicated to the goddess Tanit, was the ancient center of the Phoenician trading settlement founded two thousand years ago on the banks of the Solent River.

I glanced in now, as I always did when I passed, wondering if the goddess would summon me to the court of truth at which all my questions about my parents would be answered. Our ancestors marked sacred ground with a lustral basin for washing at the entrance, an arcade of pillars, and a marble altar whose ceiling was the blessed heavens. The sign of Tanit, protector of women, face of the moon, both bright and dark depending on Her aspect, was carved on the gates, on each pillar, and on the altar stone.

In one corner of the enclosure, a pair of elderly priests in shabby robes shivered on the raised porch of the winter house. A veiled woman stood at the base of the steps. She held a birdcage in one hand and a basket covered with a scrap of linen in the other.

Bee kept striding, but the woman’s tense posture drew my gaze, so I paused to watch.

The supplicant set the laden basket down on the porch. The priests accompanied her to the altar stone. Their feet squeaked on the afternoon’s dusting of fresh snow. Their shaven heads and exposed ears looked shiny with cold. The drape of the woman’s loose robes hid the identity of the bird, but when they reached the altar and withdrew a turtledove from the cage with gentle hands, I knew the woman had come to ask for the blessing of a child.

Their bodies blocked the brief ceremony. One of the priests would break the bird’s neck; his arm moved sharply as he afterward cut off the head. Blood would be spilling on the stone, but the wind was blowing both smell and sound away from me. Probably the cold air was already congealing the blood. Feathers, bones, and flesh would be consumed in fire, while the priests would eat as their evening’s meal whatever provender the supplicant had brought in the basket.

“Cat!” Bee had stopped lower down on the walk.

Four street sweepers worked on the intersection beyond her. As I hurried toward her, my hands began to stiffen and my lips felt blue.

“What happened to you?” she asked, falling into step as I strode up.

“A woman in the temple made a burnt offering. Probably hoping for a child.”

“She’d be better served asking her physician to examine her husband for signs of pox.”

“Who’s heartless now? My father wrote… let me see…” I dredged words out of my memory. ” ‘Until the scholars can fully explicate how our actions in this world echo in the spirit world, we ought to assume any action may have repercussions we can’t predict.’ ”

She glanced at me, then veered toward the street sweepers—thin children younger than Hanan and as ill dressed for the cold as I was—and pressed a bronze
as
into the gloved hand of each startled child.

When she caught up with me, she spoke in a low, firm voice. “I admit there are forces in the world we do not understand. But the priests of our people are relics of another time. Still, even relics have to eat. I suppose there’s no harm in the offering if it comforts her and feeds them. So, do you think Maester Amadou likes me?”

“Why do you even ask?” I demanded, laughing.

She flashed me a triumphant smile as she linked her arm in mine. Her cheeks were bright with the cold. She’d pulled off her hat to give to me, and her hair spilled in unruly black curls to her shoulders. The afternoon’s dusting of snow made our passage easier as we walked downhill, but without coat or cloak, I was, like the impoverished priests, shivering deeply.

Where we passed the remains of the ancient town walls, the land dropped away into a wide hollow. Now filled with buildings, in ancient times it had been a harbor and marshland shore. The eastern hills lay smeared with a smoky pallor of coal haze in the failing afternoon light, but I could easily see the triple spires to the west that housed three of the mighty bells whose music made the city famous. A single high plinth, visible across the distance, marked the site of the village founded by the Adurni Celts when they had come to do business with foreign traders on the marshy banks of the Solent River.

“Look!” shrieked Bee, pointing.

Other students, walking in the same direction, halted and stared, then began to clap and cry out to alert others. For there sailed the airship over the eastern district of the city, visible from here because of the contour of the land. Like a bird, it moved in the air without plunging to earth, but it had such an astonishing shape, not like a balloon at all but rather like a balloon caught at opposite points and drawn out to an ovoid shape. Half cloud and half-gleaming fish, it floated against the sky as might a lazy, bloated creature so well fed it has no need to look for supper. A huge basketlike gondola hung beneath, and to our shock and delight, lines were tossed—barely visible as faint threads at this distance—to unseen people below. We watched as, hooked and caught, it yanked up against the tautening ropes, and the process of winching it down into the Rail Yard commenced.

“Best we hurry,” said Bee. “You’re cold.”

We made our farewells to the other pupils and turned left at the high walls of the long-abandoned tophet, whose gates were always locked. A coal wagon rumbled past. Serving women walked with baskets weighing heavily on their arms.

“That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!” cried Bee. “I can’t wait to draw it! Only I’ll give it a fish’s eyes and a mouth and tail. As if it were really alive!”

From the main thoroughfare and its shops, we turned into a residential district populated a hundred years ago solely by families of Kena’ani lineage and built to their preferences: balustrades along the upper-floor windows and colonnaded front doors. These days, a diverse group of households with common mercantile interests shared the district. It was a clean, prosperous neighborhood, safe even in the evening because of the recent installation of gaslight on the major streets. Fenced parks with handsome trees and shrubbery ornamented the small squares, each centered around a carved stone monument. After a brisk fifteen-minute walk in which Bee remained oddly silent, no doubt distracted by her memories of Maester Amadou’s dark eyes and the magnificent airship, we arrived at Falle Square and home.

When we reached the gate of our once-grand four-story town house, we closed the wrought-iron gate behind us and climbed the steps to the stoop. The door opened before we reached it. Aunt Tilly ushered us in with kisses and, after dusting the baking flour off her hands, helped us shed our boots and Bee her coat.

“Your cheeks are ice! Cat, how could you be so foolish as to run out without your coat?” She gave me a grave look. “I discovered them in the parlor this morning before anyone else was the wiser. Well, you’re just fortunate you never get sick.”

She herded us past the public rooms, which we rarely used once the cold weather set in, to the small sitting room in the back over the kitchen. The stove shed heat through the floor. The abrupt change in temperature made me sweat. After stepping downstairs into the kitchen to ask Cook to heat milk for chocolate, Aunt returned and sat between us on the threadbare settee. She chafed our stiff hands between her own warm ones.

“You’re looking bright, Beatrice,” she said to her daughter.

“We saw the airship, Mama!”

“Did you? And you, Catherine? You look darkly menacing, as if you are tumbling sharp-edged rocks through that busy mind of yours. Did the airship please you not so well?”

“No, it was spectacular. Bee is going to draw it but call it an airwhale, a mythical creature of the heavens.”

“But that frown is still there. What subject has set you thinking so hard?”

I tucked my schoolbag against my legs, trying desperately to bring back the sharp, excited way I had felt on seeing the airship, but my thoughts were not air-bound but rather moored to the past.

“Lies the Romans told,” I blurted out.

Bee shot me a startled look.

Aunt did not even blink. “The academy directors fought for ten years over the proper syllabus to be used in presenting the history of the wars between the consuls of Rome and the didos of Qart Hadast. To broach so volatile a subject! I wouldn’t have expected that, now the controversy has died down.”

“There is a book written on the theme.”

“Is there?” Her sly grin was far more subtle than Bee’s honey smiles. “I must admit, it would take up at least three lengthy volumes, don’t you think?”