Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  I brushed my cheek against his short-shorn beard, the hair just long enough to tickle instead of scratch. “You must spend hours getting your beard to look just this decorative way.”

  When he looked at me with a smile of tenderness and mischief mixed so sweetly, I could scarcely breathe, much less think. “Why, Catherine, you were watching me all that time, weren’t you?”

  The currents ripped me away from him just as I realized I was dreaming the night we had consummated our marriage. I flailed and kicked, for I was determined to get back to him, but a whirlpool dragged me down into the crushing abyssal deeps.

  Like a gull hovering in the wind, I floated over a rocky path strewn with boulders and pocked with ice. A towering cliff of ice studded with rocks filled the horizon: It was the wall of a vast ice shelf. A gray sea lapped a narrow strand of stony beach. In the shelter of a shallow cave, two longboats had been overturned out of reach of the waves and covered with canvas staked to the earth. Three men with ragged gloves fumbled with stakes and canvas, uncovering one of the beached boats and its treasure of oars and oilcloth. The wind was coarse and unforgivingly cold. They worked frantically as the howls of approaching wolves grew in volume.

  On the path that led up a steep incline to the crumbling foot of the glacial shelf stood a hatless woman. She wore a rumpled, dirty uniform and grasped a bloody falcata in her gloved left hand. Her dark red hair was pulled back into a braid and pinned in a coil at the back of her head. Fresh red welts marked a sun-weathered face brushed with freckles. Blood oozed down her cheek and neck. Someone else’s blood was splashed across the front of her uniform coat, and drying blood soaked her knees, as if she’d knelt in blood. Her right sleeve was torn to ribbons, exposing a bleeding shoulder and arm. Her ragged breath came in gouts of mist in the freezing air.

  Behind her a man with curly black hair as lush and thick as Bee’s knelt to crank back the ratchet of a crossbow. He had two bolts remaining in his quiver but no other visible weapon. Four dead dire wolves littered the path, marking the trail of a pursuit. About fifty steps above lay a dead man in a soldier’s kit. His corpse was mottled crimson, his belly slashed open and spilling guts. A dying wolf twitched beside him, pink spume riming its muzzle. A falcata had been thrust up to the hilt into its right eye, the tip sticking out through the back of its neck.

  High up on the path, three shaggy wolves nosed into view, sniffing the air.

  The woman spoke. “More are coming.”

  The man looked first at her and then higher, up the trail, to the wolves. Both had muzzles smeared with viscera, as if they’d been eating. With the loaded crossbow, he rose to stand beside her. She was tall, big-boned, and confident in her strength even in the face of snarling death. He was a little shorter, with a build meant to be stocky but made lean by privation.

  I recognized them. His youthful, smiling face adorned the portrait in my locket: Daniel Hassi Barahal, the man who considered himself my father. I had never seen any likeness of Tara Bell, but despite the dark red hair and blue eyes, she looked so like me that I knew she had to be my mother.

  “If it’s necessary to hold a last rear guard to get the boat out, you and the others must leave me.” She spoke as a shopping woman with many more errands ahead might remark that the family could afford fish for supper but not beef.

  “I think it unlikely we shall do so.” I admired the warmth of his laugh. He had deep lines at his eyes, the mark of a man who would rather joke than scowl. “Who will mend our clothes if we don’t have you to do it for us?”

  She actually rolled her eyes, and her lips twitched even as her gaze tracked the wolves. “You must be tired, for that’s not your cleverest jest. As if you cared one jot about your clothes, except that they not fall off and expose your shapely arse.”

  “So you did notice! I thought you were asleep.” He added, with a laugh more reckless than amused, “You’ll not shake me loose. If you’re pregnant, we will face it together.”

  When she caught his gaze, my child’s heart wept. Was that love in her expression? Loyalty? Exasperation? I knew so little about my mother, but right then I knew she trusted him.

  “If we escape, I will return to my regiment. I honor my obligations. My oath belongs to my commander. I cannot abandon my comrades. You know you are not the only one I love.”

  “I do not ask you to abandon anyone, Tara, nor to choose me above any other. I only ask you to remember the oath I make to you now.”

  He stole a kiss, pressed lightly at the corner of her mouth. Briefly she caught him with an answering kiss, then she pushed him away, and he stepped back with a smile.

  Her gaze tracked the wolves. “They will never stop hunting me.”

  His smiling expression vanished. “My oath is this. If we get out of this, if you need me, then you need only get word to me. I will come for you, and for the child if there is one. No matter who or what hunts you.”

  The men at the longboat cried out in triumph as they found it seaworthy and its equipment intact. Shouting, they called three names—Tara! Daniel! Gaius!—and I realized they did not yet know the man on the path above was dead, for they could see nothing of what had occurred in the rear guard.

  With her bloody arm, my mother pulled him against her. She kissed him with the passion of the condemned. When she released him, he was so stricken by astonishment that she had taken several steps away before she realized he wasn’t following her.

  “Daniel! Don’t make me regret that.”

  Beneath the cruel face of the ice, he laughed, looking like the happiest man in the world.

  “You would laugh at a time like this,” she said with a smile that made her look like a woman who knew how to jest in a tavern over drinks. “Let’s get out of here before those cursed wolves get down the path.”

  They strode toward their companions and the boats, but she abruptly halted, dragging him to a stop. “Did you hear something?”

  He looked up at the face of the ice. “Just the wolves and the wind.”

  “No,” she said. “Something else.”

  The wolves began to descend.

  “Cat! Wake up! You’re howling.” Bee was shaking me, trying to jostle my head off a cliff.

  “Ouch! Let go, you beast!” Then I remembered everything. I sat up just as we jolted on such a bump that I was slammed into the side of a wagon. “Ow!”

  Bee and I were crammed into the bed of the wagon with Vai’s chest, the Taino basket, and a dozen crates heaped with glistening oysters. The crates jostled with each jounce.

  A man looked around from the driver’s seat. He was a white-haired, light-skinned elder with a pipe in his mouth and his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal sun-weathered forearms corded with muscle. “The lass wakes! I thought sure she was drunk as a lord and would sleep it off ’til teatime. Especially with that howling. Thought it was dire wolves, didn’t I? Or a pack of women cast off for their unsightly looks and scolding tongues!” He cackled at his own jest.

  Fiery Shemesh! What nightmare was this?

  “Bee, where are we?” I whispered as I rubbed my bruised shoulder. “Where is the dragon?”

  “The dragon cast us out on land,” she whispered back.

  The road was a cart track, two ruts cutting through damp earth. Mud slopped with each turn of the wheels, but we were high and dry. The two oxen pulling the wagon had the stolid pace of animals who can walk all day without stopping. Around us lay green hills ablaze with spring flowers. I shivered, for although the wagoner was content in his shirtsleeves, it seemed deathly cold.

  Rory was sitting up next to the driver, wearing one of Vai’s best dash jackets, the fabric red, gold, and orange squares limned by black. He took a puff on the pipe and coughed violently.

  The old man chortled again. “You smoke like a woman, lad! No doubt comes of being forced to attend on your sister and cousin all these months, as you say. I’ll teach you to be a man.”

  The sight of Rory wearing the dash jacket distracted me. “
Bee! How could you let Rory wear that particular jacket? That’s the one Vai wore the morning after we…”

  Her foot poked me to silence. “How could I have remembered that!”

  “He’s already got a smudge on the elbow!”

  She gazed past me, steadfastly mute. Back the way we had come rose the roofs of fishermen’s shacks next to a small marble temple whose pinnacle was marked with the chariot of a sea god. A sleepy strand gave way to rocky shallows where men raked for oysters. Beyond lay an islet prominently marked by a stone pillar and a tree so large I could tell it was an oak even from this distance. The gray-blue waters of the sea soughed in the brisk wind, chipped with foam. Out on the water it was raining, but up here it was dry and sunny. It looked a cursed lot like the land I had grown up in.

  Bee tugged down my skirt, which had gotten ruched up past my knees. “You slept through most of the journey. It’s as if you had actually been stunned.”

  “You were stupefied,” added Rory helpfully, turning to address me. “Then you started making smacking noises like you were trying to kiss someone, or had turned into a fish. You didn’t start howling until you reached dry land.”

  “Rory and I had to drag you and the chest out of the Great Smoke and onto warded ground, right there on that little island. An oysterman saw us and brought a rowboat to help us to shore. This kind fellow agreed to convey us.”

  “That’s all very well, Bee, but it doesn’t answer my question.” My legs were sticky and my skirt was damp. Bee had gotten my wool jacket onto me, although she hadn’t buttoned it. I chafed my arms and hands, trying to warm up. I was exceedingly grateful for the sun, however weak its light and heat seemed compared to the blazing sun in Expedition. “Where are we?”

  “Why, dearest,” she said with a triumphant smile, “we’re on the road to Adurnam. We’ve reached Europa.”

  13

  The rain caught up with us as we reached the outskirts of Adurnam. By the time we reached Westmarket we were soaked through, and the downpour had left Bee’s curls plastered to her neck. Vai’s dash jacket was creased and sodden and, worst of all, Rory had burned the cuff with ashes from the wagoner’s pipe. I had begun shivering so badly I didn’t have the energy to scold him.

  The wagoner reined up at the edge of the bustling fish market just as the rain ceased. Wagons and carts trundled in from the marshy Sieve, the vast estuary of the Rhenus River.

  “This is as far as I come, lasses.” He cackled, tapping his hat against the driver’s bench to flick water off the brim. “You had me half believing those lively tales you spun about the foreigners over the ocean who allow girls to run about half naked kicking a ball. As if females wouldn’t just hurt themselves trying to play such games like men.”

  Irritation warmed me as I clambered off the wagon. “I was not making it up! The game is called batey. You don’t kick the ball, because it’s not allowed to touch the ground. Women play it in leagues, just like the men, and people come to watch.”

  “Folk come to watch, as if they were men! I’d say for another reason, ha ha! Women ruling and men bowing and scraping to stop from being scolded! I’m as likely to believe this tale of an Assembly of representatives voted on by every person in the city. As if a prince would allow that!”

  I spoke through gritted teeth. “There is no prince in Expedition.”

  “No, there’s a fancy-dressed queen instead!” He laughed as he wiped rain from his cheeks. “You’re killing me, lass!”

  Rory pulled me back before I whacked the man with my cane. To soothe me he groomed away tendrils of hair stuck to my forehead. “You’re not going to convince him of what is true if he believes it can’t be true.”

  Bee twisted a slender bracelet off one dainty wrist. “Please take this as thanks for your help.”

  “You don’t need to pay me. I’m happy to do a good turn…” The wagoner paused as Bee held up the bracelet. “Is that gold?”

  “Gold from the court of the Taino king,” she said prettily. “He was so overwhelmed by my beauty that he married me.”

  “If you want to call that marriage.” His gaze hardened. By the way his gaze flicked between us, I guessed he was reconsidering his estimate of what manner of young females we might be and whether Rory was truly my brother or rather our partner in crime.

  Bee’s diminutive stature led people to think her both mild and harmless, until she shifted her feet to a fighting stance. “We expect to be treated with the respect we have shown you,” she said in a voice thick with queenly grandeur. “Do not make me regret I thought you a decent man.”

  He relaxed. “I see you two girls is having me on. My thanks, then, and I’ll take the bauble gladly, as a keepsake of your mischievous ways. Now you get on to your sire, lass. Lest he get tired of waiting for you and come hunting you down. Listen, you can hear him coming now!”

  In the distance horns tootled and drums and cymbals clashed.

  “What festival parade is that?” I asked as we heaved the chest out of the carriage.

  “Tomorrow Mars Camulos has his feast. The mask associations have been practicing for weeks for the festival procession. You Phoenician girls won’t be dancing to that Roman horn!”

  With a wave and another cackle he drove into the narrow lanes of the market.

  “Mars Camulos!” said Bee with a dark frown. “That means tomorrow is the twenty-third day of the month of Martius. The areito to celebrate Caonabo becoming cacique took place on the first of Februarius. Which means we left Sharagua six weeks ago.”

  “Six weeks! And yet three months before that!” I cried, thinking of Vai, taken from me on Hallows’ Night.

  Looking toward the stalls of fish, Rory eyed the nearest vendor as if gauging whether he could snatch a fish and run. “No wonder I’m so hungry!”

  “Rory, don’t do it.” Bee grabbed his arm, and he winced. She turned to me. “You’ve always said that time passes differently in the spirit world. It’s still strange to have it happen to us.”

  Rain started up again in a blowsy mist. My teeth began to chatter. “We need to find shelter and decide what to do.”

  “I have to speak to the headmaster, Cat. I think we should go there first.”

  Rory hunched his shoulders. “He’s a dragon. You can’t trust him. He will eat you.”

  “He won’t eat me, Rory.” Bee poked him in the arm. “He might eat you, though, and there are moments when you are so annoying that I must say I expect I would encourage him to do so.”

  Rory drew himself straight, lips pulled back. “I shall have you know, Beatrice, that I am never annoying. That you find me so is a reflection on your character, not mine.”

  “We need to scout out our ground first,” I temporized, for I sensed Rory trembling at the edge of rebellion. Also, I desperately wanted to dry out and get warm. “Let’s go first to the law offices of Godwik and Clutch. It’s a long walk across the city, I know. But if there’s anyone I trust, it’s the trolls… the feathered people, I mean. The Taino always use the more polite phrase.”

  “We need not imitate the Taino in everything just because they believe themselves to be superior to us!” remarked Bee in a frosty tone. “But I suppose it is wisest to go to the law offices first. Wait here.”

  She left Rory and me huddled with the chest under the eaves of a decrepit warehouse. Wagons lined up to offload their glistening catch into the baskets and crates of middlemen, merchants, cooks, and men guarding wheelbarrows. No one paid us any mind, for we looked exactly like an impoverished brother and sister who had no home and no means of buying our next meal, but I felt exposed and vulnerable.

  “Rory, what did you tell the wagoner about our sire? You ought to have been silent.”

  “It was while you were howling. I said our sire was the Master of the Wild Hunt. The benefit of telling the truth is that so few people believe you.”

  I laughed. “When did you get to be so wise?”

  “There was this woman I petted in the palace of the
prince of Tarrant that time I got trapped there after eating the pug dog and the peahen…”

  He regaled me with a story that made me laugh more than once, even if there were particulars I had to command him to skip over because I did not want to hear them. Having no shame, he had no idea there were private things a person did not tell other people. Just as he finished, Bee reappeared carrying three leather peddlers’ sacks and a wrapped paper bundle.

  Rory took the wrapped paper from her, brushed his cheek against hers, then held the paper to his nose and inhaled. “Fish! You brought me food.”

  “How did you manage that?” I demanded.

  “A noble bride receives a lot of gold jewelry. If she isn’t bountifully adorned, it’s shameful for her family.”

  “You had no family in Taino country.”

  An odd expression creased her mouth from a memory I could not share. “Let’s go. We’ll transfer the chest’s contents to these packs when we have a roof over our heads.”

  The chest was indeed an unwieldy burden. The coarse rope chafed my fingers as we trudged through the busy streets of Adurnam. The sky was heavy with clouds and gritty with coal smoke from the afternoon cooking. Dreary colors and pinched faces made me feel we walked through a foreign land. To mark the festival of the god who ruled over war, shopkeepers had already adorned their doorways with a red wreath pierced with the short sword known as a gladius or with a wooden mask depicting a ram’s head with massive horns. The drinking would begin at sunset, and tomorrow morning there would be a procession through the streets.

  We headed east toward the new districts along Enterprise Road. But our steps strayed toward the hills where the ancient Kena’ani settlement had risen long ago and where sanctuaries sacred to Melqart, Tanit, and Ba’al still stood. By unspoken agreement, Bee and I took a roundabout way that led us to the house where we had grown up.

  We halted on the edge of Falle Square at dusk. The small four-story town house was shuttered, its front gate padlocked. No thread of smoke rose from the chimney. No festival wreath marked the door, not that any manner of Roman adornment had ever hung there when we lived in the house. The mansa of Four Moons House had purchased the property from the Hassi Barahal clan after my aunt and uncle had fled Adurnam. He had meant to keep Bee and me prisoner there until he sorted out what to do with us, but we had escaped.