Cold Magic (48 page)

“The patrician Valerii?” I cried.

“Not only that, the Valerii Messalans.”

“By the way you are steaming from your ears, I believe this term means something to you that it cannot mean to me,” remarked Roderic languidly.

“Descendants of the Roman consul and commander who obtained the only significant victory Rome ever claimed over Qart Hadast,” I said, pressing my hands to my breast. “They are the worst enemies of the Kena’ani. Also, they never marry outside their patrician clans.”

“It seems they do. Amadou’s mother was born into a princely Fula lineage. His father’s father was also of noble Fula birth. They are bankers, too, hugely wealthy.
He
is the one who married a Roman woman of the Valerii gens. But I don’t really care about that, Cat. The war with the Romans happened so long ago. His aunt made it very clear, in so very kindly a manner, that we Barahals were
beneath
them. Any alliance between us could not be contemplated. And then he…
he
... Later he found me, and he spoke such ardent words to me that I became quite dizzy. He offered me a flower marriage, as if I would entertain for a single moment the idea of sleeping in his bed for one year only afterward to be cast off like a common prostitute, for you know that is what people think of us Phoenician women. I told him just what he could do with his insulting offer. Then he apologized most profusely and spoke most bitterly of how unforgivable his own behavior had been and how he had never meant to offer me an insult but was only overcome by his feelings for me.”

“Oh, Bee,” I whispered.

Roderic whistled softly.

“There. I’ve said it, and I did not die.” She choked on the words, wept gustily, and finally began to laugh in the way crying people do, who cannot help but find their own sobbing ridiculous. “Oh, Cat. Then the worst thing was that the next night, I dreamed about you and Cold Fort. I had informed Legate Amadou Barry that I certainly would never again speak one single word to him beyond what was absolutely necessary to the customary pleasantries of greeting and departing. I had to eat my words and go to him and ask him for such a tremendous favor, to ride off on what he must have imagined was a pointless chase after a cloud-headed girl’s stupid dreams.”

“And he said?”

“How I hate men! He said yes instantly and asked if there was anything else he could do to serve me if only to make up for the insult he had not meant to offer me. But now you are here, and that is all that matters. So, I’m done. Do you have a plan yet? What happened to you?”

I nodded at Roderic. Like a soldier taking an order, he rose and went to lean against the door so no one could barge in to interrupt our cabal.

“The mansa’s troops are after me; it’s true. I think the best thing to do is let the Barry family shelter us until the solstice. Once you gain your majority, Four Moons House has no contractual hold on you.”

“If they want me that badly, they’ll find a way to get me, don’t you think?”

“Yes, and we’ll need a plan for that, too. But maybe after the solstice, the mansa won’t feel obliged to kill
me
, which prospect I selfishly admit pleases me no end. If the Barry family will shelter Rory and me with you, then we have two days to rest—”

Roderic raised a hand, beckoning silence. His lips curled back and his shoulders tensed, as if he were about to hiss. “Cat, this doesn’t smell good,” he murmured.

I looked at Bee, who was still at the window. Her brows twitched down. I slid over to the door beside Roderic. We had entered the house through the front door onto a long entryway similar to the design of the house in which I had grown up. Indeed, we’d left our coats and cloaks there. I pressed my cheek against the door and heard the front door shut and an exchange of surprised greetings in the entryway.

“I expected you sooner than this, Marius!”

“So I would have come, had my cousin not detained me. I don’t like it, Amadou. My cousin says we are required to give Four Moons House what they want in this matter.”

My blood ran cold in my veins.

“We must hand both young women over to the magisters?” asked Amadou.

“There’s terrible news. Camjiata has escaped his island prison.”

Bad news can strike with the deadly precision of a knife stabbing up under the ribs. In the entryway, Amadou Barry gasped aloud.

“The story goes that the girl may be crucial to efforts to track him down before he calls together a new army,” continued Marius.

“Catherine Hassi Barahal?”

“No. The other one.”

“But Four Moons House is trying to kill Catherine Barahal.”

“Do you know what my cousin, the prince, said to me? For you can be sure I said those exact words to him. He said”—here Lord Marius’s voice changed, as an actor’s does when playing a different role; in this case, he spoke in a reedy, nasal tenor meant as a satire—” ‘one death cannot count against the tens of thousands who will come to grief if Camjiata rises again.’ And do you know what I said to him, Amadou?”

“You said,” interrupted Amadou, “that someone else could marry Beatrice who could keep her safe and secure.”

“I certainly did not! The sooner you purge yourself of this infatuation, the easier you’ll sleep at night. I said, that accepting the need for a mage House to secure the lass through magical binding, don’t they have other cold mages in their house who can marry her without having to kill the first one?”

I grabbed Roderic’s wrist and tugged him over to Bee as I spoke. “I’m coming to think this business of marriage is tremendously dangerous for young women. We have to get out of here.”

“Oh, good,” said Roderic. “I was getting bored. I can cause a distraction.”

Bee set her hand on the latch. “What manner of distraction?”

“You won’t believe it,” I said.

“You’d be surprised what I would believe,” she retorted. “I
have
actually read your father’s journals, you know.”

“He’s not my father.” I did not mean the words to come out so defiantly.

She looked at Roderic. “Be spectacular, Cousin.” The latch opened easily. Like everything in this house, it was well crafted and fastidiously tended. In the entryway, the two men were still arguing in low voices. From outside came the
tik-tik
of bare branches disturbed by a rising wind. Dusk, and then night, would hide us, but it would also become bitterly cold.

“We’ll draw attention without cloaks or coats,” I said, fingering the handle of my cane, now trembling with the hidden hilt of the ghost sword as night approached. “I have coin left, but what use is that to us if we freeze?”

Bee secured the sketchbook in her bodice. “Callie showed me where there’s a night market for cheap clothing. I also know how to get over this garden wall.” She swung a leg over the sill. “Let’s go.”

I looked at Rory.

“I’ll track you down,” he said.

I took hold of his hand. “They are soldiers.”

He smiled, looking supremely satisfied with himself. “So were the others.”

“Don’t kill him,” whispered Bee hoarsely. She grasped Rory’s hands with her own. “Please don’t…”

“Little cousin,” he said, “if it displeases you, then I would not dare.”

Bee nodded, slipped over the edge, dropped into the garden, and ran for the shelter of the nearest hedge.

“Rory,” I said, but the words were like whetted steel, too sharp to speak.

“I will keep them busy only long enough so you have space to run. Then I’ll run, too. But, Cat, if they were to cut my spirit from this flesh, I am not sure if I would perish in truth or merely return to my own land. You must not regret this. We are kin. I am bound to help you. Now go quickly.”

I kissed him on each cheek, then slipped over the sill and, ghost sword in hand, dropped down onto a graveled strip that ringed the house. How long ago that night seemed when I’d clambered over broken glass at the inn. Clearly I was fated to be spending an inordinate amount of effort escaping out the back through gardens.

I did not look back as I dashed into the shadow of the hedge where Bee was waiting for me. At the yew trees, I laced fingers together and made a brace for her foot; she climbed. Once she braced herself in a perch, she pulled me up after. Branches dragged at my clothes. Leaves like the kiss of thin, cold lips pressed against my cheeks. As we surveyed our next move, a clamor erupted from the house.

She climbed up on my shoulder and heaved herself to the top of the wall. With her own weight as counterbalance, she hauled and I scrambled up beside her. Poised on the wall’s crest, we scanned the dim expanse of the garden behind, the garden before, and the buildings—stables below and loft above—that abutted the mews.

If you can’t go back, you have to go forward.

She braced herself across the wall, and using her arms as leverage, I lowered myself into the adjacent garden; she dropped, and I caught her. Within shrouding trees, a dog barked twice; a pair of mastiffs came whining out of the blur of night and sniffed at our hands.

“Which way?” I asked as she rubbed them behind the ears, and they whimpered in ecstasy.

“Out through this stable, across the mews, into the stable, and through the house opposite. They won’t expect that.” She touched her blessing bracelet to her lips. “Blessed Tanit, protector of women, be merciful to your humble and devoted daughters, and open all doors in our favor.”

“Selah,” I echoed. One of the big dogs turned its head to smell my outstretched hand, then dismissed me as a person of no interest because Bee was there to slobber over. “It’s fortunate that dogs love you.”

A musket went off, and then a second; each report made me flinch, but it was too late to help Rory now. Barking wildly, the dogs raced away down the wall. We trampled through fallow beds and fetched up against a tall and impenetrably thick hedge.

“Call those dogs in before the lady calls for them to be slaughtered!” a man called from the other side of the hedge.

“Yes, Maresciallo,” said a lighter, younger male voice.

Not ten paces from us, a gate opened and a figure strode through, whistling sharply toward the barking dogs, by now lost in the shadows at the end of the garden near the house. Bee and I grabbed the gate before it could swing shut. I peered across the open space on the other side of the hedge, where a single lamp had been lit and hung by the stable entrance. No one was in sight. We dashed to the stable.

The pleasant smell of horse manure, hay, and warmth wafted out to us through an open door. Two men were talking, but not close by. I slid into a dark space warmed by a pair of hearths and lined with stalls and the big breathing presence of horses. Bee followed me. We kept to the shadows and moved fast. The men were talking on the narrow stairs that led to the loft, only their trouser-clad legs visible. One called to someone above who was, evidently, trying to see into the house next door to discover what had caused the commotion and musket fire. The massive double-gated doors leading into the mews were closed but unbarred, and I pressed Bee back before she could grab the latch. Someone was on the other side. The latch moved, and we shrank back into the corner, Bee behind me and me nothing more than the shadows and the unswept straw and the plaster of the wall as a young man dressed in servant’s livery charged in from outside, yelling.

“Nothing in the mews, Maresciallo. But a fierce lot of noise!” He trotted past us to the stairs.

We slipped through and out into the dark mews and straight across without pause to the stables on the other side. They were shut tight, and when I pressed my cheek against the latch, I could feel they were chained. There was no way in.

Bee was already moving toward the dead end of the mews, and just as she reached the next stable entrance, one of its doors was flung open. She flattened herself against the wall as a man strode into the mews and crossed to the stable entrance of Amadou Barry’s aunt’s house. It was all the chance we needed.

We slid inside and sped through the musty stables, where we felt the presence of not a single living thing, not even a rat. Just as we coursed out the door that led into the garden, a voice from the loft spoke, inquiringly, in a lilting and somewhat nasal language I had never before heard. Emerging into the garden, we heard shouts, but they were not close by. They weren’t on our trail yet. I heard no more musket shot.

A straight path graveled in white pebbles led from the stables to the back of the house. On a modest portico lined with four slender stone columns, glass-paned doors, shuttered and locked, faced the garden. Bee pulled a pin from her hair and coaxed one to open. We entered a paneled sitting room, its furniture shrouded in muffling covers, the air bone cold and the fireplace so dead I could not taste any memory of fire and ash. The room had two doors.

“I can’t see,” Bee murmured.

I guided her through the maze of furniture to the door opposite the portico and leaned against it. In the chamber beyond, no fire burned, but I felt a shallow breathing presence so faint that if both rooms had not been so quiet, I would have missed its tremor.

I tapped her shoulder, and she crept with me along a carpeted runner to the other door. As I set my hand on the latch, it turned. The door caved open, and we faced a woman holding in her right hand a five-branched candelabra with all five candles alight and, in her left, a small book, pages open. She had the most interesting features, Avarian in the length and fold of her eyes but with a round, moonlike face and eyes so dark they seemed black. Indeed, she looked something like the scarred foreign woman I had seen in the County Members inn in Lemanis, only she had age on her shoulders, a grim set to her mouth, and wore spectacles with one lens of clear glass and another that looked so frosted as with the crackle of ice that she could not possibly see through it.

“Oh!” said Bee, clapping a hand to the top of the sketchbook as if she had meant to theatrically pound fist to bosom. “You frightened me, la! I came to see the maester. He invited me, you know.” She tittered inanely. “We met at Surety Gardens, for you know they say a man is sure to meet an obliging woman—”

The woman closed the book with such a snap that both Bee and I jumped. She gestured imperatively, imperiously, and as if ensorceled, Bee and I meekly followed her to the next door, which was already open and leading into the chamber I had just avoided.