Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  “How awful,” said Bee, glancing at Kemal.

  “A maze of mirrors will always confound the Hunt,” the headmaster went on. “I rescued Kemal by this means, but I had found him too late. He had spent so many years in a human body believing himself human that he was too old to learn how to change.”

  Kemal stared at his hands as if trying to pretend we were not talking about him.

  “Your Excellency, just now on the shore, I saw one turn into a hawk and fly away,” I said. “What will happen to it?”

  “It will live a hawk’s life and die a hawk’s death. It is impossible to find those of our children who are lost in this way. These examples illustrate how important it is that we be the ones who greet our own children and welcome them to this world. If they do not know we are what they can be, then they will never know and are lost to us regardless.”

  “Can the rest of you change shape at will?”

  “Yes. All except Kemal.”

  “Then why do you live in human form, Your Excellency?” Bee asked.

  “As your kind spread across the lands and began to discover our young ones and kill them out of fear, we discovered our best camouflage was to walk in the world in human form, and to live among you.”

  “How do they know whether to be male or female?” I asked.

  His smile reproved me. “It is not the same for us as with humankind. When we hatch in the spirit world and swim in the Great Smoke, we are grubs, neither male nor female. When we come ashore in the mortal world, we become male.”

  “How do you breed and produce nests, then, if you are all male?” Bee demanded.

  “Would I ask you such a intimate question? Do not presume to ask it of me.” The brown of his eyes flashed with the spark of emeralds, as if his control of his human shape was slipping. He spoke in an edged tone I had never before heard from the man who had famously not once lost his temper at the academy. “I am weary, and growing restless. Is there some favor you came to ask that you believe I can help you with?”

  Bee twisted her hands together. Her hesitation surprised me, as did the way she chewed on her lower lip as if nerving herself to speak.

  “Your Excellency.” Maestra Lian appeared at the door. “They are clothed and settled in the upstairs room for safety. A fifth claimant has arrived.”

  He leaped to his feet with such a hiss that Bee and I both jolted back. I grasped the basket, wondering if I would need to throw the skull at him.

  “We are done here,” he said in a hostile tone that killed the interview. “You must go.”

  Bee sucked in a huge breath and let it out all in a rush.

  “Your Excellency, how do I stop dreaming?”

  “Bee!” I whispered, shocked by her words.

  He shrugged his shoulders uncaringly. “How do you stop dreaming? In the same way you stop breathing. You die.”

  “We must leave now,” said Kemal firmly, waving us out. “I will escort you to the gates.”

  We walked out of the grand house in silence.

  Once on the drive, Bee spoke. “Maester Napata, how many people know that dragons roam the earth in the guise of human beings?”

  “In this part of the world, I should be surprised if anyone knows, for we keep ourselves hidden.”

  A coach passed us, driving toward the house. A distinguished man of middle years stared at us from the coach. Was this the fifth claimant? Certainly he was an adult, not a hatchling. What crown was he challenging the headmaster for?

  At the massive wrought-iron gates, the two guards cast sneering glances toward Kemal but allowed in an insulting manner that Bee and I might pass through the gatehouse. After a formal courtesy she and I departed.

  “The guards must be dragons, too,” said Bee. “They were very rude to Maester Kemal.”

  “You are his champion now! I wonder if any of the attractive men at the academy college in Adurnam were secretly dragons. How does it feel to know a dragon is infatuated with you?”

  “It’s nothing to joke about,” she snapped. “Imagine being orphaned in such a way, and never even having a single memory of your parentage or what you truly are! You of all people should feel sympathy for the young man’s plight.”

  “Blessed Tanit! This is a change of heart! I am sure it was you who first conceived of calling him the headmaster’s dog back in Adurnam.”

  “I am sorry I was too selfish to remark on the sorrows and griefs of others. People must do better in being kind to others, for I am come to see that the temperament that looks suspiciously on any person who does not wear the garb they believe is proper, is the temperament most apt to punish the unfamiliar and least apt to see justice done. Do you not think so?”

  I caught her hand. “Bee, do you really wish you could stop dreaming?”

  “Of course I do! What has it brought me except trouble?”

  “Is that why you wanted to see the headmaster?”

  “The most pressing reason, yes. But it was a foolish question, wasn’t it? Even if there were a way for me to stop dreaming, no one would ever believe me if I said I had stopped. So I may as well keep my gift and learn to use it for our purposes, not theirs. Why should we be theirs to command? We belong to ourselves!”

  At the hostel we shared a supper of thin gruel with a turnip for garnish. I offered a bit of turnip to the skull, then dug in. The appearance of the skull merely made our hosts think us visitors with arcane powers, for severed heads had a peculiar mystery and importance among those of Celtic lineage.

  We hadn’t the extra coin to pay for a tallow candle, and without Vai we had no cold fire, so we retired to our tiny room at twilight. Bee and I sat cross-legged on the bed, facing each other with knees touching and heads bent together. Rory stretched out beside us clad in trousers and shirt. Bee wore a practical night shift, and fortunately the women of White Bow House had gifted me with a pretty night shift decorated with lace, although this was the first night I had worn it. I was fretful, worrying about Vai. Did mage Houses have some secret means by which to imprison rebellious sons? Iron shackles and iron bars could not contain the most powerful of their kind. What could?

  Bee twined her fingers through mine. “I miss Mama and Hanan and even Papa and wretched little Astraea. I miss the quiet life we had in Falle Square. Can you even believe I’m saying that? When I was there, all I could dream about was having a wealthy and handsome prince rescue me from the dreary poverty of our lives. Now a quiet life doesn’t seem so ill-favored.”

  “It wasn’t as quiet as you remember. Aunt and Uncle were always scrambling to make ends meet. Not to mention the constant trouble they were in for buying and selling information. I expect they found the life more wearying and anxious than quiet, whatever it may have seemed to us. They kept us very sheltered, Bee. As I am discovering!”

  “I wish I could have spoken to the hatchlings. I feel I am their midwife. All this time dragons have lived among us and yet we have never known.”

  “I could have told you,” muttered Rory. “I expect the only reason the dragon didn’t eat you is that you taste sour, not at all to his liking. But who ever listens to me? Besides Vai, I mean.”

  “Andevai listens to you?” Bee said with a snorting chuckle.

  A board creaked in the passage. Fingers tapped lightly on the door. Rory rolled off the bed with unseemly haste, and slipped out. I heard the husband’s murmur, and they padded away.

  “Does he do this everywhere he goes and every place he stays?” I asked.

  “Yes, he’s incorrigible. But you know, Cat, he’s right. Andevai does listen to him in a way you and I don’t. Simpering Astarte, they’re actually rather sweet together, just as a man and his wife’s brother should be. Rory makes Andevai likable.”

  “Vai’s not likable with me?”

  She laughed. “Watching you soothe his ruffled feathers amuses me, considering if it were anyone else you would cut him to pieces with your tongue.”

  “I tell him what I think!”

  S
he squeezed my hand. “Yes, dearest, and he adores you for it. Still, I expect Andevai particularly likes Rory because he has discovered Rory can tell when you are fertile and when you are not. A useful sort of person to have around, don’t you think? Given that you don’t want to get pregnant yet but wish to enjoy sexual congress.”

  “Blessed Tanit! Now that you mention it, Vai has conversed upon that subject more than once since he and Rory met. I ought to have suspected. Anyway, Rory has the knack of flattering people in exactly the right way, so that it’s true but not condescending.”

  “Yes. It’s like he’s hunting for the kill, only the kill in this case is winning people over to like him. He always seems to leave them in better spirits than when he arrived. Don’t you think that is a rare gift, the ability to make people happy?” She sighed.

  “Haven’t you been happy as a radical? Sleeping with the infamously handsome Brennan Du?”

  She released my hands. “Yes, as for adventure and the admiration of men swept off their feet by my brilliant rhetorical abilities, I would say that the last nine months have been eminently satisfactory.”

  “Goodness, Bee! Were there other men?”

  A smack of sound against the windowpane startled me; someone was throwing pebbles at our room. I got off the bed and peered down to the street. With clouds overhead, no moon or starlight limned the street, and although the houses on this lane had night lamps burning on their porches, not a single flame now illuminated the dark. I recognized the shadowy form from the drape of his winter coat over his shoulders. Alarm leaped like a deer bolting from the scent of wolves.

  “It’s Vai!”

  I crept downstairs, unbarred the door, and let him in. In the back of the house the fire in the kitchen stove, sealed for the night, groaned with a resigned huff as the presence of a powerful cold mage sucked all combustion from the flames. We tiptoed upstairs.

  “Andevai!” Bee whispered as he shaped a spark of cold fire into the shape of a candle. “Why are you here? What went wrong?”

  He shook off the coat. He was wearing a rough workingman’s jacket and trousers we had smuggled into Five Mirrors House as cushioning for the cacica’s head, which he had pulled on over his other garments.

  “I told them it wasn’t the first time you had run away from me, which statement has the added benefit of being the truth. I spent all day nagging at them to find you, thinking that would relieve their concerns about me. Then they paraded four women in front of me and asked which one I wanted in my bed.” He sank down on the bed and rubbed his head as if it hurt. “They were so insistent, reminding me of how every magister owed it to the vigor of the Houses to do his part. The only way I could get rid of them was to reduce them all to tears by enumerating their flaws and shortcomings at length.”

  “That can’t have been difficult for you, Magister,” said Bee with a sting in her smile.

  He looked up so quickly I thought he meant to cut her with an edged retort. She braced herself, ready to give back what she got.

  “For over seven years I worked to become the magister they would accept in Four Moons House, so I could prove I was more powerful than them, smarter than them, better than them. It was so easy to become him again. But I don’t want to be that man.”

  Bee’s mouth parted in astonishment. Mercifully she said nothing, for above all things I could not imagine Vai accepting sympathetic platitudes.

  “Then you won’t go back, love,” I said.

  He looked away. “None of that matters,” he went on in a curt tone that another might have heard as a rejection but that I knew came from pride. “As I was leaving the parlor after getting rid of the women, I saw a messenger wearing the colors and badge of Four Moons House.”

  “The courier I saw leave last night can’t have gotten there and back so quickly.”

  He nodded. “Yes, it seemed odd to me. I followed, but I’m not a skilled spy. I never discovered what the messenger was there for because I was caught just as the steward was ordering the captain of the House guards to start a house-by-house search of Noviomagus to look for you, Catherine. I pretended I had come to insist on that very thing, and demanded to go with them. I slipped the laborer’s clothes inside my coat and changed in a tavern.” He laughed mockingly. “I pulled an old cap over my head and slouched out past them. They look only at posture and clothes. They didn’t even see me go past.”

  Sleet hissed along the roof. He glanced at the window.

  “I expect their magisters are bringing down a storm to keep travelers off the roads. It will take some time to search, but they’re bound to check hostels and inns first. We’ve got to go.”

  “Very well,” said Bee decisively. “We’ll return to New Academy and demand refuge. The headmaster was singularly unhelpful, but we are owed that much, surely!”

  “What about Rory?” I asked as I began collecting our belongings. “He went to the innkeepers’ chamber.”

  Vai’s amused grin was so rare a sight that Bee actually stared. “Ah. I take it he is out prowling. I shall fetch him while you dress.”

  As we dressed, he descended the creaking stairs. I heard the hard rap he gave on a closed door and his voice raised without the least embarrassment. “I beg your pardon, but I need Rory immediately, for we’ve had urgent news.”

  The baby woke and began sobbing disconsolately. Rory made apologetic fare-thee-wells as Bee and I got everything ready. We had a lot to carry, a bag each plus Vai’s carpentry apron, which he wore under his coat. Foul weather dogged us as we strode miserably along the road beneath a biting sleet that made my nose go numb. Not a single soul braved the road except for us. The night lay as dark as if pitch had been poured over the world, but Vai’s mage light lit our path.

  Wind tangled in the trees with a rush like wings. Between gusts I heard hoofbeats. Bobbing lights approached from the direction of town, not lantern light but cold fire. Mages pursued us, riding with soldiers. Ahead the impenetrable hedge gave way to the academy gates, where a real lamp burned. We reached the gates before the troop got sight of us. A burly guard with a bored expression slouched out from the gatehouse. The gate lamp burned steadily despite Vai’s standing next to it.

  “You must let us in!” Bee cried.

  “You can’t enter.” The guard eyed Rory with a look that made Rory curl his lips back. “The master is dueling the last challenger. After that, the winner will banquet on the remains. Go away, and be grateful I do not eat you, which I do not do solely because of the nasty stink of your flesh.”

  “Who do you think I am, that you speak to me in such a dismissive way!” Bee exclaimed. “What of all those youthful hatchlings for which I am sure your kind ought to be grateful, lest you otherwise die out like ash on a dead fire? Do not condescend to me. Take us to Kemal at once.”

  “That hapless worm!” He grinned to show his teeth. I could not help but think of Chartji, whom I liked so much better! “He is no man. Or I should say, he is a man. A sad creature that makes him, so shrunken and weak he cannot become his own self.”

  Bee lifted a fist, ready to slug him. He hissed at her in a way that made Rory snarl and me grab for my sword.

  Vai stepped between them. “If you do not wish your master to be disturbed, you do better to hide us than to let the soldiers find us. If they do catch us here, we will tell them everything. Then the entire mage House will descend upon you.”

  This argument, delivered with Vai’s magisterial self-confidence, so struck the man that he hustled us into the gatehouse and out the back way onto the grounds just as the troop rode up. We hid in the dripping shadow of the hedge as soldiers tramped through the gatehouse and back out again while the guard complained vociferously at being rousted from his warm hearth.

  Soldiers and mage continued south, still on the hunt. Without waiting for permission Bee ran down the drive toward the house. That the guard did not chase her made me hasten after.

  “We must be cautious, Bee,” I called, trying to grab her sleeve. Sh
e could really run when she wanted to. She slipped out of my grasp as she put on a burst of speed despite the pack bumping on her back. Rory was lagging behind, reluctant to press on, and weighted down with a bag in each hand. Vai had dropped back to prod him forward. They faded into night’s gloom. Ahead twin lamps burned.

  A large shape passed so close over my head that I ducked instinctively. An exhalation of smoky mist spilled fiery sparks above my head. A second shape, bigger than the first, swooped down. I tackled Bee. Rising to my knees, I twisted the hilt of my sword to draw it, but the weapon hung inert in my hand, as heavy as lead.

  “Down!” I cried.

  With a dreadful smacking thunk, the second beast slammed into the first one and smashed it to the earth a stone’s throw away. The impact shuddered through the ground.

  Bee staggered to her feet. “We’ve got to get to the house!”

  Thrashing and roaring, the beasts rolled toward the drive. Claws and teeth flashed as deadly daggers, moist with fluids. A scaly tail thwacked down on the gravel drive no more than three body-lengths from where I was gaping like a lack-wit. Coming from out of nowhere, hands dragged me backward.

  “Run!” Vai shouted.

  “Where’s Rory?”

  “I sent him back to the gate. We’re cut off. Bee! Move!”

  We abandoned our gear as we bolted for the safety of the building. A harsh shriek scraped the air, curdling my blood. So frightful was the sound of teeth crunching bone that I staggered, for the vibration of the noise ground through my own bones in sympathy.

  Dying.

  I am dying.

  My blood is hot and harsh, pouring into the throat of my remorseless rival. The strongest has won the right to the crown.