Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  So we are told.

  But of all the great powers in this world, one thing was certain.

  No one could screech as loudly as Bee when she was truly outraged.

  “LET. HER. GO!”

  Thumps hammered its body, small fists pounding the leviathan’s massive flanks.

  “How dare you? After I almost died unearthing a nest, is this how you repay me?”

  Then she kicked him.

  I wasn’t sure how I knew she had done that, only that I was spat out amid a rain of pebbles. After a moment the hail ceased. A dog crept up to me, ears down, and apologetically licked my face.

  “Pah!” I shoved the animal away when it looked as if it meant to lick me again. Grabbing my cane, I staggered to my feet and spun to face the monster.

  Bee sat on a bench beside the headmaster as Kemal Napata hovered anxiously behind. The headmaster had his hands on his knees, looking winded. His seamed black face and tall, slender frame looked exactly as I remembered them from Adurnam: those of an elderly man of Kushite ancestry with a scholarly demeanor and a calm heart. Sparks of green lit his eyes before fading into brown. The hounds swarmed over to press close to his feet.

  Bee was in full spate, like the spring flood.

  “I don’t care if her sire is the Master of the Wild Hunt and if the spirit courts are the most ancient enemies of your kind. I never asked to walk the dreams of dragons! Someone else decided on my behalf! Furthermore, when you tricked me into crossing into the spirit world, I almost died to save those hatchlings! And after all that, I am meant to watch while my dearest cousin is eaten?”

  “Maestressa, you cannot speak to the noble prince in such a tone,” said Kemal, aghast, for Bee was leaning toward the headmaster as if her next move would be to punch him.

  “What do you mean, I can’t speak to him in that tone? I am speaking to him in that tone, now that I know he is not a prince of Kemet at all but rather an impostor slithering about the world with some manner of secretive plot in hand that involves the death of perfectly gentle, mild, and blameless young women!”

  By the angry flush mottling his cheeks, Kemal appeared as if he might be reconsidering his infatuation. Trying to gather up enough breath to speak, I wheezed my way into a coughing fit.

  Bee ran to me. She patted my face. “Dearest! Are you going to live?”

  “Really, Bee,” I said in a hoarse voice, “I was quite impressed by that diatribe until you described yourself as gentle and mild.” I eyed the evidence of the broken branches.

  The headmaster got to his feet. Bee and I jumped back. I raised my cane defensively.

  “Maestressas, might we retire into the house for a cup of tea? The warm fire would be welcome to my old bones.”

  Bee squeezed my hand. “Surely you can understand that we may be reluctant to enter a den within whose walls we may be devoured at your leisure.”

  “I fear you have read too many lurid tales, Maestressa,” he said in so kindly a manner that I began to think he must have reached the little grove of trees just in time to banish the monster, for this harmless old man could surely not have been the monster himself. “You will be safe within the house. I do not eat human flesh.”

  “I heard half of your manservants have died,” Bee said rudely. “Did you eat them?”

  He sighed. “Yes.”

  Bee opened her mouth and then, after all, could grapple no words onto her tongue.

  I pushed her behind me and swashed with my cane. “Back away slowly and we’ll make a break for it,” I muttered.

  “Yes, I ate them,” he repeated, “but they were not men.”

  “What were they, then?” she asked. “Trolls? And why did you try to eat Cat?”

  “I did not try to eat her. I hoped she might see a memory in the tides of the Great Smoke.”

  I had always respected the headmaster because his easy demeanor and impressive erudition stood in such contrast to my Uncle Jonatan’s short temper and small-mindedness. I didn’t truly know what sort of older man my father Daniel would have become, had he lived, but I had liked to believe he would have been something like the man who had patiently satisfied all factions whose children attended Adurnam’s academy college, without giving way to any one.

  Only evidently he was no man.

  “How can we trust you?” I asked.

  “A reasonable question, Maestressa. I apologize for our unfortunate way of meeting just now. You surprised me at a vulnerable moment.”

  “Are you a dragon?” I asked.

  “I find I am rather weary. Will you take tea on this cold day?”

  Bee said, “You choose, Cat. I’ll do as you say.”

  I had seen what I had been too young to understand at the time, that I had survived because I had accidentally fallen into and out of the spirit world.

  “I think it is safe to go,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Strangely, I am sure.” I could forgive a lot for having been given the chance to see the loving way my parents had smiled at me and at each other, the way I had looked at them with such wholehearted trust. The way my mother had tried to hold on to me.

  The house was a stately lord’s home with two wings and three stories plus tiny attic windows. It was set near the river’s edge flanked by a second band of trees. The gravel drive led to the imposing front entry but we walked around to the side, where a man took charge of the dogs and chivvied them away to a kennel.

  We made our way through the house to a pleasant library. Bay windows overlooked a field of sheep-mown grass that sloped to the bank of the Rhenus River. A door opened onto a garden alcove. In the little garden, rosemary surrounded a flat granite rock where a sun-loving creature might bask in summer.

  The walls were lined with bookshelves and enough mirrors that every part of the room could be seen within a reflection. There were two hearths instead of one, both fitted with the most modern circulating stoves; the room was too warm for my liking. Worktables were heaped with scrolls, books, and ridges of stacked letters, the usual detritus of a scholar. The chamber looked nothing like the study in Adurnam.

  The headmaster sat in a chair situated by the windows and gestured toward a couch placed opposite. He shifted restlessly, as if he wanted to leap up again. Cautiously we sat. I saw no point in pleasantries, given everything that had happened. I asked what I needed to know.

  “How did you drive off the Wild Hunt and save Kemal?” I asked.

  He lifted a hand to indicate the nearest mirror. “In mirrors we can see the threads of magic woven through the worlds. Because of this, mirrors can be used to confuse and conceal.”

  My hope crashed. He could not save me any more than a troll maze could.

  “Ever since the day you and your cousin arrived at the academy, I saw that the threads of both worlds run through you,” he added. “I have always known what your cousin is, but I long wondered why your blood and bone are mixed of both mortal and spirit kind. The day the head of the poet Bran Cof spoke, I realized your sire must be a powerful spirit lord.”

  “You had no idea before?” I asked.

  His mouth parted as if he were about to hiss, but he coughed instead. “I know less than you might think about the spirit world. I cannot walk there.”

  “But you hatched there,” said Bee.

  “I hatched there, although I have no memory of the event. We have no thinking mind until we swim through the Great Smoke and come to land in this world. The creatures of the spirit world live in their place, and we live in ours. The two are not meant to mix.” He examined me as he might a curiosity. “Before I met you, Maestressa, I would have said someone like you could not exist. Everything you are and can do rises out of the mingling of two worlds in your flesh.”

  “Not everything, Your Excellency,” I said. “I was given love and strength by the actions and example of the mother and father who meant to raise me and were killed because of me. I know affection and constancy because of the loyalty of my dear cou
sin Bee. My aunt and uncle fed and clothed me in the same manner they fed and clothed their own girls, so I learned fairness from them. We girls were taught deportment, fencing, dancing, and sewing, as well as how to read and write and do accounts and to use herbs to make the last of winter’s store of turnips and parsnips taste palatable. So I learned both a trade, and how to make do. I refuse to agree that everything I am is due to my sire breeding me on my mother. I am not a horse or a dog, to be described in such a way. Even horses and dogs can be raised poorly, or well.”

  Perhaps, becoming heated, I had raised my voice.

  “Passionately argued.” A faint smile calmed his face. “Very well. Your actions and your loyalty to your cousin have convinced me you are not a servant of the spirit courts, they who are our implacable enemies. I believe you have earned the right to have a few of your questions answered.”

  Bee touched clasped hands to her lips, then lowered them. “From everything I have learned, it seems your people somehow bred or created the women who walk the paths of dreams. Your people infested us, if you will, with the curse of walking the Great Smoke in our dreams. You did so because you want us to walk into the spirit world and unearth a nest and guide its hatchlings into the mortal world.”

  “That is correct.”

  “But we can also glimpse meeting places in the future.”

  “Your visions allow you to find a nest. All the rest is coincidental, not of importance to us.”

  Bee’s expression sharpened to her axe-blow glare, and I was sure she was about to say something cutting, but instead she sat back. “Surely nests hatch without our help.”

  “They do. And they have across the passing of many generations. Understand that we are far older than your kind. It is the way of my people that our mothers live in the Great Smoke. They lay their eggs on the shore of the spirit world. The eggs hatch in the spirit world, and hatchlings seek water, through which they fall into the Great Smoke. After a time swimming there, those who survive surface into this world, for it is here we must grow to maturity. Thus the cycle starts over. But in recent ages, our ancestors began to notice that fewer and fewer were reaching this world. We came to believe that the creatures of the spirit world were deliberately devouring the hatchlings in the hope of eating them all and thus causing us to die out completely.”

  “Why would they want your kind to die out?” Bee asked.

  I said, “Probably so there will be no more tides. That’s why the eru and other spirit creatures build warded ground, so they won’t be changed when a tide sweeps over the land.”

  He smiled as he once would have at the academy, approving a pupil’s correct answer. “That is what we believe. We can only know what we have learned from humans who have walked there.”

  “How did you make the dream walkers?” Bee asked.

  “Only the mothers know. I do not.”

  Kemal held open the door to allow a woman to carry in a tea tray. As she set down the tray on a worktable and poured, I recognized her. She had been the housekeeper for the dying man we had stumbled on while escaping from the Barry household, an old man who had exuded heat, sheltered loyal hounds, and asked Bee for a kiss. Now she was working for the headmaster.

  “You may go, Maestra Lian. Kemal, you may also leave us. I will ring if I need you.” When the door had closed, the headmaster took a sip of tea. “For a very long time now our numbers have suffered, and we have become few. We have come to expect at best three hatchlings to survive from a mating swim. Two days ago, on the equinox, eleven hatchlings swam ashore from the nest you unearthed, Beatrice. They were all brought safely to the house. Quite astonishing, and a reason for us to hope our numbers may increase.”

  I thought of how many had been eaten and crushed in their race through the spirit world. Truly, few if any would have survived if Bee had not been there to shepherd them into the river.

  “Why would they only be coming ashore now when it was so long ago that Cat and I dug them up?” Bee asked.

  “While they are swimming in the Great Smoke, hatchlings cannot sense the mortal world. However, here in the mortal world, a male announces his readiness to crown by marking a river’s shore with a scent. That mark attracts any rivals who wish to challenge him. The scent is so strong that it penetrates the Great Smoke as well. Hatchlings follow it into the mortal world.”

  “What does it mean to crown?” I asked, for I could not help but wonder if the word was a euphemism for mating.

  With a frown, he glanced out the window as if to suggest I had been rude for asking.

  We sat in an uncomfortable silence. I did not know what to say, and Bee did not speak.

  “Can it be?” He sat forward abruptly. An unexpected grin brightened his expression, and he rose. “What rich bounty showers on us! Yet more arrive!”

  He limped into the garden and down the lawn. Bee and I ran to the window.

  A spout of water swirled up from the river like an unraveling thread pulled off the fraying hem of a piece of cloth. The water poured into the headmaster. His human shape changed. I suddenly understood that his human form was nothing more than an elaborate illusion. The body absorbed the water and grew into a glistening dragon, one with a mouth large enough that it could eat me in one gulp. The slippery texture of its black scales swallowed light. Its head had a whiskered muzzle, and a shimmering crest ran down the length of its spine, waving like grass in the wind. Its body tapered into a flat tail more like a fish’s than a bird’s. Yet despite the creature’s perilous aspect and daunting size, it waddled in a remarkably ungainly way down the sloping ground.

  A roil of movement stirred the river. Creatures surfaced.

  “They’re mine!” Bee’s face had the shine of a mother’s smile. “Don’t you recognize them?”

  She ran outside.

  I halted in revulsion by the garden door. Eleven silvery-white eels the size of children humped up onto the shore, blowing and wiggling as they snuffled along the grassy bank. They were the ugliest things I had ever seen, except for their startling gem-like eyes. The dragon huffed a smoky breath that stopped them in their tracks and compelled their attention. Every pair of glowing eyes fixed on him.

  A twelfth grub squirmed unremarked onto the shore farther down the bank, beyond a small wooden pier to which a rowboat was lashed. A hawk dove down to investigate its movement. The stray hatchling’s sapphire eyes tracked the hawk’s flight as the bird settled on the bare branch of a tree. The raptor and the grub studied each other. Then the hatchling lunged forward. In the time it took me to suck in a shocked breath, not sure who was going to devour whom, it changed.

  As if the tide of a dragon’s dream swept its unformed body, it molted its ungainly larval form and rose as a large hawk, beating for the sky. The true hawk followed.

  I dragged my gaze away from the birds to see the eleven hatchlings molting their ugly grub forms. They transformed into smaller versions of the scaled beast. The air around the headmaster shivered as if rippled by a blast of heat. The shining black body of the beast turned in on itself and became that of the man we knew, thankfully in his clothes. A brief circle of dense rain splashed around him, as if he were raining away the water he had earlier absorbed.

  In a frenzy of imitation, the grubs also changed, although they did not change size.

  Eleven youthful persons stood dripping wet and naked on the shoreline, with no thought for modesty. They had the size and features of innocent boys who are no longer children but not yet grown. They surged forward to crowd around Bee, touching her, patting her, sniffing her.

  Maestra Lian came striding down the lawn. With brisk gestures and snapped words she herded them away from Bee and toward the house.

  Bee ran to me, her face so opened by joy that she seemed ready to fly. “Did you see, Cat? They know I’m the one who hatched them!”

  She glanced past me, and the brilliance of her gaze softened. I turned. Kemal stood in the garden door, watching the youths flock into the house. An expressio
n of unimaginable grief seared his pale features.

  “Maester Napata, I hope we have done nothing to disturb you,” said Bee in the same tone she might use to coax a wounded dog out of its hiding place.

  He muttered, “What have you not done to disturb me?”

  “Are you a dragon, too?” she asked, more lightly.

  He flushed, glancing away, then took in a sharp breath and faced her. “This is the only body I have ever been able to wear. Since it is a man’s body, can I then call myself a dragon?”

  Her frown usually presaged a scold, but she spoke in a mild voice. “If you hatched as these others did, out of a nest in the spirit world, then aren’t you a dragon regardless of what body you wear?”

  “The others say I am too much of a weakling to change,” he muttered in a low, shamed voice.

  “I hope they shall say no such thing where I can hear it!” she retorted. “I am sure there is some other explanation.”

  The headmaster walked into the garden alcove. “There is an explanation.”

  He ushered us back into the study. There he sat at the desk and sipped at his cooling tea as if our conversation had not been interrupted by the arrival of eleven—twelve—inhuman creatures out of the unseen smoke of the spirit world’s fathomless ocean.

  “As with all that is born into the spirit world, our essential nature is one of change. When a hatchling first emerges into the mortal world from the Great Smoke, it does not comprehend that it has a true nature, the kernel of its being. That is why we must meet our young ones at the shore, so we can shepherd them into their true shape. Kemal came to shore among humans. It is remarkable he was not killed the moment he breached the water, for that is usually what happens if a young one wades onto land where no kinsman is there to aid it. But he was not killed. For all his childhood he thought he was human. I am not sure if the family that took in the small orphan child did so because they felt pity for him or because they knew in time they would be able to receive a substantial pension from the emperor. In the Empire of the Avar, any child with the white skin and hair we call albino must be handed over to the emperor. Those who bring such a child forward are rewarded, while those who try to hide such a one are punished. I found Kemal in a sacrificial lot being made ready for the Wild Hunt. It is known among the Avar that in rare cases these albino children are dragons, although most such albino children are perfectly human. However, that is why the empire exposes them on Hallows’ Night, because the Hunt will always kill one of us if it can.”