Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  There were other people here. I just could not see them, for the courtyard looked exactly as it ought under the cloudy afternoon light.

  A slap of wind huffed down over the courtyard with a spray of ice so strong that it hammered me to my knees. As I twisted the hilt to draw cold steel, the basement door was flung open. The wind and ice ceased, to reveal the courtyard walls lined by turbaned mage House soldiers, their crossbows fixed on the carriage house doors. Not yet drawn out of its sheath, my sword withered back into a cane as the cold magic that had been holding the illusion in place vanished and a man spoke.

  “Bring them inside.”

  16

  An old man in one of the voluminous robes called a boubou appeared at the open door. The gold earrings he wore marked him as a djeli, a poet who spoke the tales of history and also a person who could handle and chain the energies we called magic. In his right hand he held a mirror, angling it to catch my image. Within the mirror he could see the threads of magic, so he could see me.

  “There you are, Catherine Barahal,” he said.

  I spun, ready to bolt, only to see Bee being marched through the back gate from the alley. Soldiers emerged from the carriage house carrying the three packs and the chest.

  “We met before, as you may recall,” continued the djeli, in kindly tones.

  “Bring them inside, Bakary,” repeated the other man, the one I still did not see.

  As they brought Bee up, I let the threads of shadow drop. The soldiers exclaimed, swinging their crossbows around. I was relieved when the djeli led us into the house.

  The mansa of Four Moons House sat in a chair in the kitchen. The wide sleeves of his indigo robe swept over the arms of his chair. He had concealed himself within a perfect illusion of an empty kitchen. I had thought Vai a master of weaving cold magic into illusions, but obviously I had not properly understood why the mansa ruled the mage House.

  He was a physically imposing man of middle age, old enough to be my father but not old. He had the girth of a person who eats well and remains active. His Mande heritage showed in his black complexion, while his tightly curled dark red hair spoke of his Celtic ancestors. His presence made the kitchen seem shabby. We stood before him like supplicants. He examined us, then glanced at our gear, which his soldiers had set on the floor by the unlit stove. Finally he gestured to the djeli.

  “Where is Andevai?” asked the djeli.

  “He is not in Adurnam, Mansa,” I replied, for the djeli was speaking for the mansa, not on his own behalf.

  “Yet here are three packs, for three people to carry,” said the djeli.

  “He is not in Europa, Mansa. You yourself sent him to the Antilles to spy for you.”

  With the tip of his ebony cane, the mansa fished one of the dash jackets out of the chest. The intricately tailored garment was sewn out of a bold blue-red-and-gold fabric printed with an elaboration of Celtic knots so complex it hurt my eyes. His gaze on me fell as cold as the sleet he had called down. He spoke with his own mouth instead of through the djeli’s words.

  “Do you think I do not recognize these clothes? Andevai’s penchant for fashion started as mockery, so we observed in the House. He wore more and more outrageous clothes to belittle the other young men and their pretentious styles. But of course he always looked good in them.”

  “We came to enjoy the anticipation of what he would appear in next,” added Bakary, amusement making his tone light.

  The mansa tossed the expensive dash jacket carelessly over a chair, where it rested in folds and wrinkles. His resonant voice deepened, steeped in disgust. “Do not lie to me regarding his whereabouts. You belong to me because of the marriage chained between you and Andevai. By law, I have power over your life and your death.”

  “Cat is many things,” interposed Bee in a tart voice, “but one thing she is not is a liar. If you wish to know where your spy is, then you must answer to yourself.”

  “I am puzzled by your impertinence. You are but two girls from an impoverished family of mercenaries. One of you is a bastard. Both of you serve your clan’s business by acting as spies for the Iberian Monster. Those cursed Hassi Barahals cheated us twice over. Not only did they give us the wrong girl, but they had already placed her in the service of the general so she could spy on us once she was inside the house. A cunning and unscrupulous plan.”

  “I am puzzled that you speak of unscrupulous spies as if you are innocent in this regard, since we have already established that you sent the cold mage to spy in Expedition,” retorted Bee. I could tell by her flushed cheeks and brilliant gaze that she was just getting warmed up. “Or do you mean to advance the argument that what is wrong for us to do is right for you to do? If we even were spies for General Camjiata, which we are not. I do not know what arrangements the Hassi Barahal clan made in the past with the general, but I assure you, Magister, that the day my parents handed Cat over to Four Moons House to spare me from being married off to a cold mage against my will, was the day I considered myself emancipated from their selfish affections.”

  His eyes narrowed. “A fine and affecting speech, but I must suppose that legally you are still bound to them because you are an unmarried woman and such maidens can never be guardians of themselves.”

  Bee laughed so sarcastically that everyone in the kitchen jumped as at a gunshot. “By which you mean to say, men like you do not wish such women to be guardians of themselves.”

  He ignored her in favor of measuring my body. “I must assume you seduced Andevai in the usual way. You have that look about you that may make a young man feel hunger.”

  At the boardinghouse I had learned to scold any man who ogled me in such an insulting way, and I usually succeeded in getting the other customers to laugh at him.

  Bee murmured, “Cat! Don’t!”

  But I did.

  “Rather, I would say that radical principles seduced him. Really, Your Excellency, you have only yourself to blame. Why should he serve an unjust system as if he were a horse placed in harness who has no choice but to pull lest he be whipped if he balks? Even so, Vai made you a vastly generous offer. If you would release the village of Haranwy from the clientage it has labored under for generations, he promised to serve you loyally. He would have sacrificed his own freedom and happiness to assure their liberty. You laughed at him.”

  “I did nothing so crude as laugh. I gave him his sister’s freedom, when in truth she ought to have been bred to see if more cold mages could be produced out of that family. It was far more than I needed to do!”

  “Kayleigh is not a brood mare!”

  His lack of recognition betrayed that he had no idea that Vai’s sister was named Kayleigh. “That I released her shows my appreciation for his value to Four Moons House. We may hope he will sire children on you who have some measure of the strength he has—”

  “I’m not a brood mare either!”

  “—but the genealogies sung by the djeliw tell us that cold mages with such deep roots rarely breed children who possess as much potency. To think how many advantageous matches the House lost now he is wasted on you! We might have sent him on a successful Grand Tour and afterward prosperously negotiated for three or even four wives for one such as him. Even if he does not sire powerful children, many Houses are willing to make the try for grandchildren out of such a mage. Each marriage creates a rope that binds us and makes us stronger for the coming war.”

  “Vai is not a stallion to be put out to stud!”

  “He is what I choose to make him.”

  Bee tapped me sharply on the forearm to shush me.

  “Are you saying your own children are not as potent cold mages as you so obviously are, Magister?” she asked with a sweet smile that startled the mansa and made the old djeli make a sign to avert disaster. “Have you no lofty sons to inherit your princely seat as mansa of Four Moons House? Are you forced to conceive the awful thought that the young cold mage best suited to become mansa after you is a humble young man born to people
who have been enslaved by clientage for so many generations that you cannot think of them as anything except lowborn inferiors whom you may breed like livestock? Yet think! The son of a prince may rule whether he do so wisely or well, and he shall have advisors and kinsmen to steady him. But the son of a magister who has no magic cannot be given magic, can he?”

  The temperature in the room dropped precipitously, making my eyes sting and my lips go dry. The mansa strode to the stove. With a look, he drove the soldiers from the kitchen. Accompanied by a horrible groaning strain, the door of the stove buckled.

  I kicked over the table and dragged Bee down behind it just as the thick iron door shattered like the hull of a boat shot to splinters. Bee screamed. Shards of metal thunked into the table so hard that a few almost pierced through, their jagged blades the visible threat of his astonishing power. My ears rang. My breathing was all torn to pieces.

  “Blessed Tanit shelter us,” whispered Bee, her complexion gone a sickly gray-white.

  I was shaking. “You couldn’t have known. Stay down!”

  As I rose, I drew my sword on the shimmering backwash of his magic. The cold steel glittered as if coated with burning oil, making the gloomy kitchen blaze with light.

  “I cannot kill you, Your Excellency. Nor do I wish to. You lost Andevai not because I seduced him but because you refused to respect him as a man.”

  The djeli had survived the mansa’s display of power unscathed, for he had his own secrets. He turned on me now. “Maestra, keep silence.”

  “I won’t keep silence! You speak of fruitful alliances and breeding rights, but Andevai and Kayleigh are people the same as you.”

  The mansa frowned. “Of course they are not the same as me! Their ancestors disgraced themselves and thus put their honor in chains.”

  “Easy to speak of honor when you get to choose whose honor to champion. Is it the gods who foreordain our birth and position in life, or only chance? What if things had been different, if the history of the world had fallen out in another way? What if your people had been forced into chains? Would it not be wrong that a man of your power be whipped as a common laborer all his life just because of a chance of birth? Would it not be wrong that a man of your dignity be bound to a master who does not respect him and can use or discard or kill him without penalty? What then of your power and majesty? Why do you deny to Andevai what you assume for your own self?”

  “You are a fatherless bastard. For you to believe you can lecture one such as me is not just absurd but unnatural. Andevai belongs to Four Moons House. As do you. Understand that I can kill you, and take no legal penalty for doing so.”

  “Yet you have not done so!”

  A spark of cold fire winked into existence, then expanded into a globe of light. “I admit to curiosity about a girl who can vanish and reappear at will. A girl who can walk into the spirit world and return to this one. A girl who can tell me where Andevai is.”

  Footsteps rapped along the passage. A magister wearing a fine indigo dash jacket under an unbuttoned winter coat stepped into the kitchen. I had seen him before; he was the mage who had unsuccessfully pursued me at Cold Fort, the one whose horse I had stolen.

  He made a clipped courtesy to the mansa. “Uncle, we found this man—”

  The mansa smiled triumphantly at me. “Ah. My nephew has found him despite your efforts to shield him.”

  Rory sauntered in, toying with the end of his long braid. “Cat? Do you want me to—?”

  “No!” I exclaimed, just as Bee said, “No!”

  The mansa stared, startled by Rory’s appearance. The djeli tried to catch Rory’s image in the mirror’s slippery surface, but all he saw was a saber-toothed cat. I studied the young magister, tracing the family resemblance between him and the mansa.

  The young man caught me looking. “Caught you this time, haven’t we? You’ll not escape my uncle now he has taken an interest in you himself.”

  I offered him a courtesy, to mock him. “My apologies about the horse.”

  Despite my sword, the fool took a step toward me, a hand raised as if he believed he could slap me.

  “Enough, Jata,” said the mansa. “Do not touch her.”

  The young mage turned away from me at once. “The village boy is close by, Uncle, I’m sure of it. He doesn’t have the wit to hide, thinking himself so much better than he is.”

  “Your envy serves you ill, Jata,” said the mansa. “Go out and look again. Find him.”

  The nephew’s eyes flared with anger, but he made no retort. Instead, he tramped out.

  The mansa gestured toward my sword. “However curious I am about you, Catherine Barahal, I will order my soldiers to kill you and your companions if you cannot bring me Andevai.”

  Rory’s lips curled back. Bee took a step toward me.

  I was not a fool. I lowered my blade. “Andevai is in the spirit world. Perhaps with your help, I can get him back.”

  The mansa laughed, but the djeli did not.

  With a frown, the mansa reconsidered. “Bakary, is she telling the truth?”

  “A mirror is the water that allows me to look onto the other side, Mansa,” said the old man. “It should be possible to discover if she lies or speaks truth. Especially since the mirror in this house is the mirror through which their marriage was chained.”

  I had been racing down one path, thinking I might convince the mansa to convey us to Haranwy. Like a noose at my throat, the djeli’s words yanked me to a halt.

  “What do you mean, Honored One, that a mirror is the water?” I asked.

  “It is not solid, like stone, and yet not lacking substance, like air. Therefore, it is water, for we djeliw can see through it to the spirit world which lies both beneath and above us.”

  I caught Bee’s gaze with my own, looked down at the packs, and back up to her. Her brow wrinkled as she grasped and considered my unspoken plan. I was playing a very deep game of batey, about to try a hit whose arc would pass right over every person near me with but a small chance of reaching the stone eye that was the goal.

  Upstairs, the front door opened and closed. Footsteps approached.

  A soldier appeared at the kitchen door. “Mansa! The legate has arrived.”

  With a sucked-in hiss, Bee closed her hands into fists. We managed to grab the packs before soldiers herded us up the stairs after the mansa. The chest, with most of Vai’s dash jackets, had to be left behind, but fortunately no one seemed to notice that my sword was still unsheathed. I wondered if they could see the blade now that the mansa’s magic had faded.

  In the entry hall the mansa greeted Amadou Barry and Lord Marius, speaking with his own voice to equals. “It is good you came quickly. I have momentous news. I received word this morning that General Camjiata has landed at Gadir.”

  Bee and I glanced at each other as Lord Marius exclaimed, “At Gadir! He has returned to Iberia! That is the news we feared most!”

  Amadou Barry marked us as we climbed into view. His red-and-gold half-cape glistened with raindrops, and made him look quite dashing. “Beatrice! I knew you would return to me!”

  Bee’s expression was one of the queenly pride that we of Kena’ani upbringing call the Dido’s Fury, a womanly emotion associated with the famous story of the dido and Aeneas, when the queen realized the untrustworthy Roman soldier of fortune had been seeking to rule over her through marriage.

  “Legate Amadou Barry! I did not expect to meet you here! Nor, indeed, was any meeting with you a thing I desired, not after our last unfortunate encounter and the condescending insult you offered me. I realize that a man of your exceedingly high position in the world and your exceptional wealth and standing must look at a young woman such as myself with disdain. You may consider my impoverished circumstances and Phoenician connections to be marks against me which you are gracious enough to overlook. But I assure you I am proud of who I am and where I come from. I was sorely mistaken in what manner of man I thought you were. I now understand you are not the so
rt of man on whom a vulnerable young woman is wise to cast her hopes.”

  Every man except Rory was staring at Bee with expressions so broad that only actors playing in a farce would have used such gaping mouths to express shocked surprise. I choked down a laugh as I nudged Rory with my hip and indicated he should take the packs to the stairs.

  “Indeed, I am done with all of you lordly men!” Bee’s gaze flashed sideways to note Rory’s movement, then back to her audience. “You believe you have the right to own me merely because you wish to possess me. Some of you desire to control me because I walk the dreams of dragons and others because you consider me beautiful. But I am not your property to be handed about or exchanged according to your desire rather than my own. Be sure that I realize you are all far more powerful in this world than I am, for I am only a young woman whose household has neither wealth nor noble status to raise it into the ranks of those who stand on high and look down upon the low. Be sure that I realize you could kill me, or arrest me, or forcibly assault me, or purchase me from the elders of Hassi Barahal house if you offered them a rich enough inducement or a frightening enough threat. We who are not protected by wealth and high station are so vulnerable in the world, are we not?”

  “You cannot be Beatrice Hassi Barahal!” Amadou Barry looked as if he had seen a poisonous snake unexpectedly rearing up out of thick grass. “You are some manner of malevolent spirit who has taken the form of an innocent girl.”

  “Not as innocent as you would wish, Legate!” she said with a smoldering gaze that made his face pinch as she looked him up and down in a frankly sexual way. “Did you not murmur in the greenhouse that you wished to instruct me in the music of sweet pleasure? That I would be an ‘apt pupil’ if only I let you take command of my heart and my more intimate parts?”