Cold Magic (36 page)

I took off both cloaks and tied them like a bedroll, making sure my gloves were secure. I did not think of my husband, not at all. It was not that I cared for him in any manner, because I did not and could not, but the thought of any person being mauled and devoured made me feel sick. Ought I wish I owned a crueler heart, one that exalted in death and savage vengeance? I could not, even though he had been commanded to kill me.

Blood drawn by cold steel in the hand of a cold mage ought to have cut my spirit from my flesh and dropped me as dead as dead. Instead, my blood on the stone had opened a pathway into the spirit world.
My blood.
An eru called me cousin. A djeli said I wore a spirit mantle. An aged, dying hunter had said that the spirit world was knit into my bones.

Maybe I was dead.
I brushed impatiently at tears and squinched up my face. Was this Sheol, that he should pursue me into it? That made less sense than anything else.

I sucked in balmy air, moist and flavorful in my lungs, ripe with green and growing things, and forced myself to think things through, to pretend I wrote in a journal as a means to form order out of chaos. Wasn’t that what Daniel Hassi Barahal had done? He had recorded his observations for the family, as was his duty. But behind the words the Barahals might sell for profit lay another layer of his thinking: He was trying to make sense of the world he observed by setting it down in sentences—not to capture it, for the world can’t be captured and caged, but to see if he could discern a pattern beneath the bewildering variety, the confusions and contradictions and the beauty and the ugliness.

I was flesh and blood; I never doubted that. While I had no evidence that the Amazon Daniel Hassi Barahal had married was actually my mother, I had equally no evidence she was not. So if Tara Bell was my mother, then who was my father?

What if my father was a denizen of the spirit world?

The woman I believed to be my mother had said
Don’t tell anyone what you can do or see, Cat. Tell no one. Not ever.
If the spirit world was knit into my bones, didn’t it make sense she would want me to keep it a secret?

There. That wasn’t so hard, no matter how absurd and impossible it seemed, or how numb the thought made me feel, or how my hands began to tremble.

Had Daniel Hassi Barahal truly believed he was my father? Had Aunt and Uncle not known? Had they thought they were giving Four Moons House the right girl, against their will? Had Tara Bell lied to all of them? Could I never stop questions from chasing around my head? To distract myself, I offered an apple to the horse, who snuffled it appreciatively out of my hand.

“I suppose you have a name already,” I remarked.

She flicked an ear and raised her head. She was a big mare, and I suspected she had an even temper and a bold heart to take in stride crossing with her master into the spirit world. Her master, who was either being eaten or had fled back into the mortal world to consider his next course of action. I had to find a place to cross back. I considered the stirrups and had shortened one when the horse shied. I grabbed the reins and she stilled, eyes flaring and ears flattening.

I turned.

One of the cats had followed us. The big cats wore summer coats more shadow than sun, and this one had a pelt as dark as sable. It walked long and lithe, more of a lazy stroll, but halted at a reasonable distance just as if it could gauge the horse’s degree of panic. The cursed thing sat on its haunches and set about licking a paw, but I knew it was eyeing me.

“You’ve already had your dinner!” I shouted, and then clamped shut my mouth as I wondered if it were licking
Andevai’s blood
from its claws.

A cold shudder ran right down through my body.

“Horse,” I said in a level voice to my new best companion, “it is time to go, slowly and quietly, without fuss.” I led her to the path, and once on the path, I shortened the other stirrup and then mounted. All the while, the saber-toothed cat washed its paw and watched me as if I were a large and plump and exceedingly tasty deer it was gathering up the effort to chase. My steed and I commenced a steady walking gait, not too fast and not too slow, and cursed if the cat did not rise gracefully and pad after, keeping its distance but always keeping us in sight.

To be slaughtered in the spirit world. What did that mean for Andevai’s spirit? How awful one’s last moments must be. If he were dead, then I was free, but I could not precisely rejoice.
It is easy to admire what you must not endure
, so Daniel Hassi Barahal had written. If it was done, then it was done. I had only defended myself, and Bee.

But how on earth, then, had he managed, or even thought, to shout after me about his cursed horse?

I rode the rest of the day, husbanding my strength and that of the horse. Once we passed a boundary stone, but I avoided it and kept moving. The summer day seemed peaceful, and to think of crossing back into the teeth of winter made me wince. The cat still followed us, and twice when I had glanced back, I glimpsed a second cat, but later it vanished, leaving only the one. How easily you become accustomed to a fear that merely buzzes your shoulder but never alights. It was curious, that was all—a curious cat.

So it was that in the lingering summer twilight, half asleep in the saddle as I rocked in rhythm to the horse’s smooth gait, I came down into low country as flat as if it had been ironed. The chalk path gave out in a tangle of scrub vegetation, with thick forest beyond. The loss of a vantage point made me feel small. As I tried to decide what to do next, a hoarse cry like that of an anguished monster bellowed from deep within the forest. Twilight certainly had begun to draw a cloak over the world, and a chorus of frogs, of all things, rose from an unseen pool. The sable cat circled us and flowed over in its lazy way to stand before a wild blooming thicket with flowers strung like tiny bells from drooping branches. As the wind brushed through them, did they
tinkle
?

The cat yawned in a catlike way that happened also to display to great advantage its impressive saberlike canines, which measured the length of my forearms. I began to think the creature—it was male and probably young—was showing off. It vanished into the shrubbery with a flick of its tail. I pressed my mount forward enough to identify an overgrown track leading into the undergrowth and thence beneath the trees.

I could follow it. But a moment later, I spotted a thread of smoke away to the right, barely visible against the hazy sky. Smoke meant fire. Fire, I deduced, suggested a being not related to a cold mage. I turned away from the thicket and rode parallel along the flats beneath a line of ragged cliffs held together by clumps and tufts of grass.

I soon realized I had misjudged the fire: Whatever hearth expelled the fire came from the cliffs north of me, not from the flats. The twilight hung as though suspended, and it was not yet dark when I spotted a round stone tower, very like an ancient dun although as stout as if it had been built yesterday. I dismounted and led the horse up a track scraped into the earth to reveal chalk. As I came closer, panting at the steep climb, I heard fiddling. At the height, I paused under the canopy of a vast oak.

A bent old woman sat on a flat stone bench with a fiddle set to her chin. She sawed a mournful tune while a fire burned merrily within the confines of a circular hearth constructed of the same flat stone used to build the dun. The dun had a door, closed, and three high windows, shuttered, and an air of being entirely deserted, like a corpse whose spirit has fled. Beyond the fire and almost lost in the darkness stood a stone trough and next to it a well ringed by a waist-high wall of white stone and capped with a hat of thatch from whose supporting pillars hung a rope and a brass bucket. The horse whickered, smelling water, and the fiddler ceased in midsong and lowered the instrument.

Without looking around and in a voice that sounded much younger than her stooped form appeared, she said, “Peace to you on this fine evening, traveler.”

Hearing the village speech here in the spirit world surprised me, but I managed a reply to her back. “Peace to you. I hope there is no trouble.”

“No trouble indeed, thanks to my power as a woman. A fine afternoon and a fine day it has been.” She still did not turn around. “How does it find you?”

We ran down through an exchange of greetings until I finally asked, “My pardon, but is there some reason you keep your back to me, maestra?”

“Is there some reason you are unaware it is foolish to look any creature in the face in the spirit world before you are sure what manner of creature it is?”

“It is?” I blurted.

She laughed. “Na!
Come.
Into the light,” she said, by which I recalled my surroundings enough to realize that night had fallen and the spirit world breathed in darkness while her cheery fire alone lit the world. There was no moon, and there were no stars, yet neither did the haze that blinded the heavens feel like clouds. Here beyond the aura of light, I began to think the forest below the cliffs had begun to breathe and actually
move
. A twig snapped.

I led the mare out from under the oak and, staying well back, circled the hearth until I came around to stand behind another stone bench. I faced the woman across the fire.

She was old, with a crooked back, and as thin as if she had not had enough to eat for many months. But she held my eyes with the confident gaze of a person who is sure of her authority in the world. Her loose, comfortable boubou, the robe sewn out of strips of gold, red, and black cloth, appeared practical for journeying and easy to wear. Her skin was quite black, unusual in these parts, and a scarf wrapped her head, although it had slipped back to reveal twists of silver hair. She wore gold earrings.

“You’re a djeli,” I said. “A djelimuso.” A female djeli.

She opened a case and placed the fiddle and bow within, then closed it and looked at me. “What are you?”

“I’m Catherine,” I replied. The horse shied and snorted. I yanked down on the reins just as a pair of saber-toothed cats ambled out of the night and flopped down beside the well.

“Are these also your companions?” asked the djeli with remarkable calm. When she shifted her head to look directly at the big cats, her earrings caught strands of firelight and sent it shooting like arrows into the night, and then I blinked; after all, the earrings were only gleaming slightly, as any polished surface must do.

“Not my companions, but they seem to have followed me.” I did not see the sable male cat; these might be two of the ones I thought had stayed behind to guard… or to eat…

“Andevai!”

How any man could manage to look so haughty and offended while limping I could not say. And yet, infuriatingly, it was indeed Andevai who emerged out of the night, appearing very much the worse for the wear with his clothing rumpled and stained. Besides that, he looked immensely annoyed. Behind him strolled another three of the big cats, whose demeanors bore the smug satisfaction of a petted house cat that has just deposited a mouse before its surprised human. And I was very surprised.

With not even a polite by-your-leave, and ignoring the huge saber-tooths, he approached the roaring fire.

The djeli rose. “Peace, traveler. I hope the night finds you at peace.”

He pulled up so sharply that I laughed, for it was as if he’d been reined in.

“I have no trouble thanks to the mother who raised me,” he said politely. “May this night find you at peace.”

Honestly, they went on in this vein for far longer than I could ever have dragged out a greeting with my inadequate command of village customs. I thought they might wind down through the health of unnamed fathers and uncles and mothers and cousins into the well-being of the cattle, dogs, chickens, wheat, and barley and what troubles the vegetable garden might have seen since the two had last met, which, since these two had evidently never before met, would no doubt take a century to complete.

“Are you finished?” I demanded when there came a pause, rather embarrassed at my rudeness but really beginning to shake now. I could use fear if I turned it to anger. “Begging your pardon, maestra.” I drew my sword, and the cats rose as if in answer, yawning to display their ferocious teeth, although they stayed by the well. “I thought you were
dead
.”

He swung around to look at the cats, then back to face me. His own sword remained sheathed. “A more correct statement would be that you
wished
I was dead.”

“I
wished
no such thing. I am sure I hold no animosity toward you at all except for the small detail that
you
tried to kill
me
. Indeed, for all I know, you did kill me, and I am wandering here as in Sheol, with saber-toothed cats stalking my trail and you plaguing me. I suppose you intend to attack me again, perhaps by the light of this lovely—” I broke off.

The fire was burning without stint.

His presence was having no effect on the fire.

“I want my horse back,” he said wearily, paying no attention to this marvel.

“Why are you not extinguishing the fire?” I demanded.

“Because,” said the djeli, “while magisters draw their power
through
the spirit world, they have no power
in
it.”

The look he shot at her should have been a spear of killing ice, but the fire burned regardless and nothing happened to her for violating such precious secrets.

Fiery Shemesh! He wielded no cold magic here!

I snorted, and his gaze flashed to me as his lips curved into the supercilious frown I was becoming familiar with. But I also noticed how stiffly he held his right shoulder; dried blood marred the sliced edges of his coat.

“You’re strong and fast, but your technique is sloppy,” I said as I sheathed my sword with a flourish meant to challenge him. I was beginning to see that the angrier he got, the more he climbed the pinnacle of arrogance, but without cold magic to throw around, and unless he decided to physically attack me with his sword arm injured and within the aura of firelight under the gaze of the djeli, he could do nothing but listen. And I had a lot to say, words I had swallowed for too many days. “My question, though, is why you did not use the weight and height of the horse to your advantage but instead dismounted to attack me. No Barahal would ever make such a mistake.”