Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  Bee nodded, stroking my arm. “What now, Cat?”

  I flipped through the pamphlets to give my hands something to do. The writings ranged from broadsheets in simple verse to Professora Nayo Kuti’s lengthy tracts. “It was insupportable living in the mage House as the heir’s wife with nothing to do or look forward to except—”

  “You need not describe the whole,” said Bee quickly.

  “But I won’t let the mage House have him. I love him too much to let them ruin him!”

  “Only you could. Honestly, Cat, sometimes I don’t know how you put up with him.”

  “No doubt I learned how to love annoying people by growing up with you!”

  Rory snorted.

  Without the least furrow of irritation, she smiled at Brennan in a gentle way that made her look as radiant as a kind goddess standing in a heavenly beam of light. “I suppose you did.”

  She glanced toward the archway as the two trolls and Kehinde came into the room. Chartji held aloft a candle lantern. Her taloned feet clacked as she walked in the oddly rhythmic glide trolls had. She bobbed to acknowledge me.

  Kehinde came forward with hands extended to grasp mine. “Cat Barahal! I am so pleased to see you. May your heart be at peace.” She looked at our expressions, and raised an eyebrow in inquiry. “What news do you bring?”

  I drew myself up. “I’ve glimpsed the mage Houses and their princely and Roman allies from the inside. I’m now convinced the general is the only one who can overthrow their grip on power. But Vai will never support Camjiata as long as the general is allowing James Drake to use fire magic to fight his battles. Nor should he. So I am going to infiltrate Camjiata’s army and kill James Drake.”

  Before anyone could respond to my bold and dramatic declaration, a shrill troll whistle sounded outside, followed by a cascade of human whistles. The rumble of voices from the chamber ceased so abruptly that for an instant I thought I had gone deaf.

  “Here come the authorities!” said Brennan with a glint in his smile that got my heart pounding, and not in a romantical way. He looked like a person spoiling for a fight. “Kehinde, you and Bee go swiftly now. You, too, Cat.”

  “I am an accomplished swordswoman,” said Bee.

  “We need your voice most now,” said Kehinde. “Come along.”

  To my surprise Bee meekly followed Kehinde and the trolls into the passage. The silence in the far room was replaced by the trampling of feet as people hurried to rescue the press.

  Brennan shoved the table against the thick wall and climbed up on it to open one of the deep-set windows. “Cat! Go along after them now.”

  My stormy despair was overtaken by a desire to punch someone. I jumped up next to him. “Give me a leg up. I can fight dirty in ways you never imagined.”

  “Cat…”

  I met his eye. “If you say because I am a woman, I am best away from the fight, I will lose all respect for you.”

  “Let her go first,” said Rory. “You won’t regret it.”

  With a shrug he made a basket with his hands. I shimmied through the window into a light well and up to the courtyard. A quick survey revealed many handy coils of rope on the wagons. Tying an end to a post, I uncoiled it across the paving stones to the far wall. When men wearing marshals’ uniforms ran into the courtyard carrying muskets and flourishing halberds, I yanked on the rope with all my strength.

  As I slammed back into the wall, the rope popped up tautly to waist height. None of them saw it coming, for they could not see me. The force of so many men pushing into the rope at the same time jerked me forward so hard I had to let go, but the men in front stumbled and the men behind bumped into them. Into this confusion I waded with my cane, whacking men in the back of the neck so they turned around to chastise their comrades. I grabbed muskets and halberds out of their hands and flung the weapons as far as I could. I trod on feet. Their boiled leather helmets made excellent balls to be tossed high, so they had to throw up their hands to protect themselves as the helmets crashed down. Flailing hands struck and pushed me. A burly man with stinking onion breath bumped hard into me, so I dropped to a crouch and he smacked heads with the man next to him. By sticking my cane between the legs of staggering men, I tripped four in a row before they thought to start kicking.

  Laborers swarmed out of the building on all sides. I snatched up as many muskets and halberds as I could. Now mostly unarmed, and surrounded by men bearing hammers, adzes, and axes, the marshals shrank back into a defensive group.

  Brennan sauntered into the gap between the two groups without the least evidence that he feared the muskets pointed at him. He rolled back his sleeves and put up his hands. “I challenge you all to put down your weapons and settle this as real men do, with our fists. Who will be first? It is sure not one man of you can outlast me.”

  Onion-breath man shoved past his fellows. “Let’s see what ye have got.”

  They circled in the manner of men putting on a show in a boxing ring, but by the scowl on the marshal’s face and the measuring gaze of Brennan, the fight was deadly serious. The marshal broke in to throw a blow that was easily parried by Brennan, who followed with a jab that landed square on the other man’s nose. Blood gushed like a pungent iron brine. I thought it prudent to back away lest I betray myself. Other men bolted forward, and the courtyard dissolved into a mass of men slugging each other. I backed up to the cellar windows and dumped muskets and halberds into the window well. Rory watched the fight with a lazy smile.

  “Aren’t you going in?” I asked. “To prove you’re a real man?”

  “I’m not a man. I need prove nothing. If there’s trouble, I’ll pounce.”

  “That’s not trouble?” The roil of the fight echoed against the walls.

  “The marshals in Lutetia are underpaid and recruited from the plebeian class. They don’t like to arrest men who share the same grievances they do. But they have no choice but to obey orders even though they chafe at them. Now they can say they fought.”

  Above, windows on the second story were thrown open. Bee stood framed in the opening.

  “Enough! Those who oppress us feast on the blood we spill for them when we fight each other! Who is our true enemy? Our neighbor whose children cry for bread in the evening? Or the lord who throws the leavings from his heavily laden table to his pigs?”

  As the fighting men paused to look up, women moved into the courtyard and thrust pamphlets into the hands of the marshals.

  “What d’ye mean me to do with this?” shouted Onion Breath, shaking a pamphlet toward the upper windows. “D’ye think I can read?”

  “If you cannot, then whose fault is that? The lord’s children can all read. They who hold the lash do not want you to know you are not alone in speaking against its cruel bite! Why do you think they hate printing presses or any person whose voice spreads the news of a declaration of rights? Why do you think they fear a civil code whose laws will demolish the privileges of the few? Why do you think they send the likes of you to arrest printers and smash presses? Not for your sake! They aren’t protecting you! Go on, then! Go, but remember that you are our brothers. Remember that we fight for you.”

  She stepped back into the gloom as Rory tugged on my wrist. Abandoning the weapons, we passed through a carpentry shop smelling of sawdust and hurried by diverse passages into a hidden staircase and thus out onto another street. Brennan strode up with Bee. He had a scuffed chin and an abrasion on his right cheek. His trousers were ripped at the left knee.

  “I’m getting slow,” he said. “Invincible Andraste! How did you do that, Cat?”

  Bee shook her head to indicate that whatever else she had told Brennan, my secrets had never passed her lips. “It’s a Hassi Barahal secret,” she said.

  “Where are the others?” I asked as we set out.

  “Taking down and moving the press,” he said. “That was a spectacular diversion, Cat.”

  “My thanks.” My heart was still pounding, and I had barely caught my breath, yet I
felt alive as I had not for weeks now. Indeed, I was scarcely thinking of Vai constantly at all.

  “Diversions are her specialty,” said Bee with a laugh. “Dearest, I can’t imagine how Andevai could ever imagine you would tolerate being closed within stultifying walls, whatever attentions he might think to assuage you with.”

  “Even I would get bored, no matter how good the petting was,” said Rory.

  By the time we reached the tavern I had worked up an impressive hunger. The Tavern with Two Doors was made up of two squares of buildings, one for human people and one for feathered people. Each had a central courtyard, linked by a shared wing. This central wing housed the kitchens, one for each courtyard, and other service rooms. Part of the ground floor, beneath the upper floor, lay open as a wide portico. Because it was summer, tables were set here, where rats from one side and trolls from the other could congregate as they wished. We took a table here. Men strolled up, a few to flirt with Bee but most to argue the serious business of radical philosophy. People spoke of rising up against the prince in order to open the city gates to Camjiata’s army.

  I ate my way through three platters of meats flavored with sauces, but more than that I relished the talk, the laughter, the freedom to say what I wished or to get up and take a turn around the trolls’ courtyard had I the desire to do so, which I did more than once before the trolls went to bed at nightfall. Kehinde appeared late, having conveyed the components of the jobber press to its next hiding place. Rory slipped off to talk to the young man I had seen him with earlier.

  I ate an entire tray of mouthwatering pastries while everyone else was debating the question of whether women could bear the burden of having the same rights as men, because if I had not kept my hands busy I would have punched every man who argued that women simply could not have any independent legal capacity separate from their fathers, husbands, or sons. I could have sat there all night, listening to Bee and Kehinde eviscerate them, with Brennan tossing in the occasional joking remark to assuage male vanity. We almost did sit there all night, talking under the gleam of lanterns because the Parisi prince, in concert with Two Gourds House, had forbidden the installation of gas lighting anywhere in the city or its outer districts.

  The first birds chirruped a dawn song as we staggered to our rest. Brennan and Kehinde had taken a narrow room above the kitchens whose window looked over the trolls’ courtyard. Here rooms were cheapest, since the trolls made many people uncomfortable. Chartji and Caith slept elsewhere.

  A screen divided the room to create privacy. On the side where Kehinde and Bee slept was a bed just wide enough for two, supplemented by a narrow pallet, which Bee set on the floor as Kehinde took off her shoes by the light of a candle.

  “Let you and Cat share the bed, Bee. I shall take the pallet for as long as Cat is with us.”

  “Are you sure, for we surely do not mind taking the pallet,” Bee said with such solemnity that I gaped at her downcast gaze and folded hands. Tension bled between the two women, yet their polite respect toward each other seemed sincere.

  “There are two of you. It is unreasonable of me to take the larger space.” She glanced at the door as Brennan came in, looked our way, then vanished behind the screen. He whistled as he fussed around getting ready to sleep. A chair clacked as he shifted it. Ropes squeaked as he lay down. The tilt of Kehinde’s head made me think she was blushing.

  Bee slanted a portentous glance my way. “Cat and I will be glad to share the bed.”

  “Where is Rory?” I whispered as I settled onto the bed in my shift.

  Kehinde chuckled. “He takes care of himself.”

  As Bee snuggled down between me and the wall, the professora pulled off her tunic and lay down in trousers and under-blouse.

  I whispered. “Kehinde, if I may ask, I heard you were arrested by the prince here and had to return to Massilia. Isn’t it risky for you to come back now?”

  After a silence in which I thought I had perhaps offended her, she said, “The work must be done despite the risk. It is more important than one life.” She blew out the candle.

  Brennan coughed.

  Bee and I lay side by side in the old familiar way, holding hands.

  “After the war, we’ll set up a little household together, you and me and Rory,” she whispered. “Men can come and go if we approve it or wish it, dearest. We don’t need them to live.”

  “Yes.” My shattering despair subsided to a weary throb. “I can manage anything as long as we are together.”

  It was almost midday when Bee and I woke. Kehinde still slept, a hand gripping the end of one of her locks as if she had never let go of a child’s habit. Brennan was gone.

  We dressed and went out to wash our faces in a trough. The sun burnished the ebony of Bee’s curls as she rubbed shadowed eyes. “Blessed Tanit! Cat, why did you let me drink so much?”

  In late morning most of the tables were empty. We settled where we could look over the trolls’ courtyard but also see into the courtyard of the other half of the inn. There we saw Rory laughing next to his friend. Bee tended her hangover with a mug of beer and a bowl of broth. I devoured a splendid spelt porridge garnished with butter and a creamy pear sauce.

  “Whatever happened with Kemal?” I asked.

  She swirled the dregs of the ale in the mug. “Once we reached Havery, I sent a letter to the New Academy. After some weeks I received a reply. He wrote all manner of pleasing words, but he reiterated that he cannot leave the hatchlings until he is certain of their safety. I cannot fault him for the sentiment, but I felt obliged to reply that I could not visit him in Noviomagus given the current unpleasantness wracking Europa. I have my work, too, you know! Speeches to declaim! People to scold into behaving better! Blessed Tanit! Perhaps after all this he has reconsidered his partiality for me now he has come into his full power.”

  I considered my empty spoon. “We are a sad pair.”

  “Dearest, what do you mean to do now?”

  “Camjiata’s skirmishers were last seen near the town of Cena. If I can find his army, I can sneak into his camp to kill Drake, and then return before Vai gets back from Senones and finds out I left. Then I’ll convince him to leave the mage House and fight for the general.”

  “That’s your plan? Do you think it will be easy to convince him to leave now that he’s heir? With his monumental vanity, he’ll believe he can change things from within. That the mansa made sure to bestow such an honor on Andevai’s mother makes me respect the man’s devious mind. Has Andevai been unkind to you? Is that what drove you away?”

  “Not at all. If anything, he has been overly kind.”

  “That being so, you might have chosen a more prudent and less dramatic and public way of expressing your discontent.”

  “I did express my discontent! He said that my being there made ‘all the difference,’ to him.”

  She laughed. “I can see how that would have rubbed you the wrong way. Yet even you must see Andevai will take this defection very ill.”

  “I just had to get out of there.”

  Rory slipped onto the bench beside me, winkled the spoon from my hand, and started eating my porridge.

  “Are you really willing to kill James Drake?” Bee asked.

  “You have no idea how willing I am.” My fingers clutched my cane so tightly that, had it been ordinary wood, I would have crushed it into splinters. “He means to kill Vai regardless, so I must do it to protect Vai. Even if I cannot live in the mage House and he cannot leave it and so we must be parted… at least I will know he lives and thrives in his chosen place.”

  Bee clapped one hand to her chest and the other, palm out, to her brow. “How affecting these maudlin ramblings are! I shall expire in their wake!”

  Rory pressed a hand to my forehead. “Are you feverish, Cat?”

  “It’s not amusing!”

  “What isn’t amusing?” Brennan strolled up, looking fresh and handsome without a trace of hangover-sodden eyes. No wonder he was famous
for his ability to hold his liquor! He glanced at Bee, then at Kehinde coming down the stairs from the upper floor with spectacles in hand as she squinted shortsightedly across the courtyard. After ordering porridge and ale, he sat next to me. Chartji and Caith joined us at the table. We exchanged morning greetings. Caith began picking through a heaping platter of nuts and dried berries, looking for the hazelnuts.

  “Chartji, I’m wondering if you could see that this letter is dispatched to Expedition.” I handed her the letter I had written to Kofi. “I know I have not a sestertius to my name, and that we must already be deeply in debt to the clutch—”

  “I have an idea about that,” said Bee.

  “—but if you can send it with your regular dispatches to the Expedition office of Godwik and Clutch, they will know how to get it to this person, because he knows your aunt and uncle.”

  Chartji’s crest flared with an emotion I could not interpret, but she took the sealed letter and tucked it inside her jacket. “It will be done. An interesting and important person he must be, this Kofi Osafo. The magister has already sent him six letters via my offices.”

  “Has he?” I asked, squinting as at a bright light. When was Vai writing to Kofi?

  “I have long been in correspondence with Professora Alhamrai from the university in Expedition, whom you know,” said Kehinde. “Recently we have been discussing the question of the ice shelves and whether they are shrinking or growing and how we might measure their extent. She has written about her theories of the properties of cold magic, which like all things”—here she spared such a jaundiced eye for Brennan that he laughed almost nervously, and she frowned as if she judged him a frivolous fellow—“can be explicated using the principles of science alone.”

  “Thus am I scolded,” he said with a lightly mocking smile. “But what I want to know is how any fire mage can survive if he has not been accepted into the guild of blacksmiths. Everyone knows that a person born to the flame will die young in a fire of their own making.”

  I said, “James Drake survives by channeling the backlash of his fire magic into living people. An ordinary person will die if so used, but cold mages can absorb most backlash without harm.”