Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  “I don’t have the leisure to be troubled.” I hopped off the wagon and hailed an older man with an avuncular face. “What happened here, Uncle?”

  “The Tarrant lord Marius and his troop made their last stand, is what happened. Too bad, for he fought well.”

  “Is the lord dead?”

  “How should I know, lass? I heard he was chopped to pieces, and I heard he was wounded and carried off by the Iberians. This is no place for lasses on a night when men are drunk with blood and victory.”

  “I’m looking for my husband.”

  He sighed. “May the Three Mothers aid you in your search, then. Good fortune.”

  As he trudged away, I called after the wagon. “Rory! Bee! Bring the lantern. We’ll know a cold mage is close if the flame dies.”

  “I can’t smell anyone in this nasty stench,” muttered Rory as he handed the lantern to Bee. “But maybe I can find him by his clothes.”

  “Blessed Tanit! How many dead there are!” Yet Bee gamely brandished the wrought-iron candle lantern over corpses laid in neat ranks like firewood. “Wouldn’t it be easier to go to the manor house and find the cacica?”

  A hundred paces away, soldiers were searching through a roadside ditch. “Ah! Curse it! The cursed sword bit me!”

  “Here, stand aside, you prickless worm. Let me—Ah! Curse it! It burns!”

  With drawn sword I ran to their lamps. “What have you there? Let me see.”

  “Oo! What pretty girl assaults us…?”

  I bared my teeth at their insolent grimaces. Something in my demeanor made the men retreat. The sword lay grimed by dirt, but I knew it as Vai’s cold steel instantly. I snatched it up with my right hand. Such a black tide of wild anger swept me that for a moment I went blind.

  Rory shouldered up beside us. “Cat, best we move out of here before there is trouble.”

  “I’ll cause trouble,” I said, taking a step toward the men that made them hurry away.

  Bee and Rory pulled me back and led me along the drive to Red Mount. Wounded men lay on the gravel of the two courtyards, packed like fish in a barrel. The awful stink blended with their cries and groans. Surgeons and healers worked by lamplight, assisted by soldiers and by elderly women bringing water for the injured. Mostly men just lay there, awaiting some distant hour when an exhausted doctor would finally take a quick glance at them.

  “Cat, what about the cacica?” Bee repeated. “I tried to say this before, but you don’t listen. If you can talk to her in a mirror, perhaps she can see the well of Andevai’s power and lead you to him.”

  Blessed Tanit! Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  I swayed, leaning on Bee. “Rory, go and fetch our things. We’ll meet by the well. Bee, you look through the sheds. I’m going to see if I can find Lord Marius. I give this sword into your hand, Bee, into your hand only, until we find Vai again.”

  Holding her breath she touched the hilt with a finger. When it did not spark or sting, she slipped it out of my hand. “Cold steel! Does this mean I need only draw blood to kill?”

  “No. Only if you are a cold mage. But no weapon will shatter this one.”

  She tested its balance, then both she and Rory hurried off.

  With shadows drawn tight around me, I crept into the stone house to see if I could find Lord Marius. He was still alive, lying on a couch in a sitting room with eight wounded officers. To my surprise Marshal Aualos was seated in a chair beside the couch, joking with Lord Marius as they shared a bottle of whiskey. Lord Marius’s color was sallow, and his eyes glazed with pain, but he could still laugh as the Iberian officer told a lewd story about a man who had mistaken his wife for a sheep. Lord Marius’s left arm had been mangled into a pulp.

  Doctor Asante and her attendants entered. She spared only a glance for Marius’s arm before she examined the other wounded officers. “Your arm will have to come off, Lord Marius. Marshal, please leave. I prefer to do my work without an audience.” As the marshal and his aides left, she examined each man. “This one is dead. Take him out. Those two I cannot help and this one…”

  Lord Marius had not the strength to heave himself up on his good arm but he watched her with a keen gaze. “Doctor, is there nothing you can do for my aide, young Butu? He’s not sixteen. My cousin’s son.”

  “My apologies, Lord Marius, but his belly has been opened. I have no way to heal such an injury. However, with some luck and a little cooperation, you may recover.”

  “But never fight again.”

  “Men battle with their minds far more than with swords. Do you mean to retreat to your country estate and never again involve yourself in politics?”

  “Are you an Amazon, Doctor? Why else would a woman walk the battlefield?”

  “I was an Amazon for many years, but now I am chief of the general’s medical corps.”

  “He has placed a woman in charge?”

  “I am a woman,” she agreed with the raised eyebrows of a person who has heard the comment once too often to be amused by the necessity of explaining one more time. “I also am a doctor. If you have some objection to my expertise, I can send another person to tend to you.”

  “No, no.” He chuckled although it hurt him. “I am sure you will treat me as tenderly as would my mother, were she still with us. The folk in our villages would come to her for lotions and compresses and such healing craft. I do not fear your touch. I am just surprised by the presence of women in the army. Women give life. It is not their place in the world to kill.”

  “Only to be killed? I do not like the sound of that conundrum, my lord. So I will ask you this: Does the she-wolf not hunt the same as her mate?” She spoke the words while staring straight at me, then crossed the room to the hearth where I stood out of the way. Setting her bag on a table, she pretended to look through it while speaking in a whisper. “What creature are you, that carries a spirit blade and waits in the shadows?”

  “You’re a fire mage,” I breathed. “Only trolls and fire mages can see my sword when I’m hidden.”

  “Sharp Diana! It is you, little cat!”

  “Why do you call me that?”

  “It is what Daniel called you after I had washed you and placed you yowling in his arms. Know this, Catherine. He loved you the moment he saw you. We all did.”

  “What happened? Who are you?” I whispered. “What is your place in all this?”

  She smiled affectionately, allowing me to glimpse pieces of a story Camjiata had never known and I had never suspected. “I loved your mother, and she loved me. But under the law you could only be claimed and protected by male guardianship, and we had to get Tara out of the prison quickly, for she was to be executed at dawn. Fortunately she loved Daniel also, and I trusted him. The general has promised me the new code will change the law so that women may stand equally in guardianship to men.”

  For the space of several breaths I had no words. But at length I murmured what abruptly seemed clear. “After Camjiata’s defeat and capture, they were coming to find you, weren’t they? When they died.”

  Truth is written in the face. Hers had measured suffering, others and her own, and she had kept walking to do the work she felt called to do even though she, too, had lost the ones she loved.

  “Yet why are you here, child?” she asked gently. “I sense you are come in some desperation. You may always apply to me for aid, little cat.”

  My heart beat so hard. “Some day, Doctor, I pray we will have time to speak at length. But right now I’m looking for my husband.”

  She nodded. “The cold mage whom James Drake hates so very much.”

  “Doctor! Why do you mumble? What am I seeing there, a sword and a shadow…” In his grievously wounded state, Lord Marius had slipped partway into the threads that bind the worlds. “Camulos’s Balls! It is Cat Barahal! Have you crept in to kill me? Is this what became of Amadou?”

  Doctor Asante’s two assistants were busy preparing the table for the surgery. I unwrapped the shadows and crossed to kneel
beside the couch. “I told you the truth about Amadou Barry.”

  “He was ever a fool about that girl,” he murmured, eyes rolling back at a stab of pain.

  The doctor said, “We need to operate.”

  Desperate, I grasped Lord Marius’s uninjured hand. “Please. I’m looking for my husband. I heard he was last seen going to aid some cold mages seconded to your battalion.”

  “Ah!” Was that a wince of physical agony, or had he seen a sight he dreaded to tell me of?

  My heart pinched until I could not breathe and thought I might faint. “Tell me!”

  “He never once drew his sword although I know cold steel in the hand of a cold mage need only draw blood to cut life from the body. His one concern was to kill fire, to save as many lives as he could. I think he must have spared twenty cold mages who would otherwise have been burned like torches by the enemy’s fire mages. He could have escaped into Lutetia, but he came after us because there were three young cold mages seconded to my troop, and he knew they would be killed or enslaved.” He winced. “He bore the brunt of magical attacks whose impact I could neither see nor understand. As we were surrounded and made our last stand, the truth is that he collapsed.”

  A tear seared my cheek. “Dead?”

  “He was never hit by any physical weapon. More like he collapsed from exhaustion.”

  “Blessed Tanit!” I murmured. “Too much cold magic for too long with no rest.”

  “Then I was wounded,” mumbled Lord Marius in a fevered recollection. “The red-haired fire mage took him. Threw his limp body over a horse and rode off with his company.”

  My heart stopped.

  “Where?” I cried.

  “I did not see…” He passed out.

  “If I do not amputate the arm, he will die.” Doctor Asante took my arm, then kissed me on the forehead, as a mother might. Finally she released me and turned to her patient.

  In a daze I walked to the door. In the passageway I leaned against the wall. My legs had stopped working. Out of the sitting room issued the grinding scrape of a saw punctuated by the grunts and gasps of a man trying not to scream. Driven on as if lashed by a whip, I staggered back to the north courtyard and there sagged against the well in utter despair and confusion. Despite everything, I was so exhausted that I fell asleep.

  Bee tugged me awake. “You can’t believe who I found.”

  I bolted up. “Vai!”

  “No. Juba!”

  “Juba? Haübey!” The spark of hope dimmed, then flared. “Has Rory returned yet? What if he couldn’t find the basket?”

  “Calm down, dearest.” She pressed her forehead against mine and bent her will to soothe my heart as her gaze pinned mine with bitter intensity. “Calm down.”

  She led me into the barn. Rory was sitting in a quiet corner, holding the hand of a dying man. He smiled, indicating the basket and satchel at his side. Bee grabbed them and made me follow her farther in.

  Haübey worked by lamplight in a stall carpeted with straw. An oil lamp held by a Taino soldier made a shimmering splendor of the trickling streams of blood oozing across the chest of a wounded man. With a precise stitch Haübey was sewing up a frightful gash that ran from the man’s shoulder to below his breastbone. Despite the urgency that nipped at my heels like wolves, I had the decency to wait.

  The Taino prince Haübey, called Juba by Europans, resembled his brother Caonabo in every particular except that his black hair fell only to his shoulders rather than halfway down his back. His air of intensity sat in marked contrast to Caonabo’s reserved demeanor. Also, Haübey had a fresh scar over his right eye. I had forgotten he was a healer. Although not a fire mage like his brother, he had been trained in a behique’s knowledge even if he had not the full store of a behique’s power.

  Bee’s gaze was fixed on Haübey as if judging where to aim her axe blow the best to split his head in two. “I haven’t shown myself to him yet. I felt no fear in confronting the general, yet I hesitate now.” Her fingers crushed my hand until I grunted in pain.

  Finishing, he rose as he wiped blood off his hands. He nodded curtly, if absently, at me, then looked again. “The fire bane’s lost woman! I had heard you walked with the general.” His gaze tracked past me, and his eyes widened. “Beatrice!” He uttered her name so throbbingly that, had I not been heartless, exhausted, and desperately in search of my beloved, I should have blushed. “Why are you not in Sharagua with my brother?”

  An incandescent anger transformed Bee’s lovely features. “Did you plot it between you?”

  He wiped his bloody forehead with the back of a hand. “I do not understand you.”

  “You understand me perfectly well. I have had a lot of time to think. Was Caonabo looking for a pretext to divorce me? One that all of you hoped would force me to return to Europa with the general? Would he have crafted some other reason for me to leave if this one had not come to hand? From the moment you discovered I walk the dreams of dragons, you’ve been plotting to use me, haven’t you? You, your brother, your mother, your uncle: all of you. I thought you were better, that you cherished dreamers, but the Taino court connives no differently from the rest. You want cold mages for whatever war is brewing between you and your rivals. If the general won—with my help, of course!—he agreed to dismantle the mage Houses and give you first pick of the captive cold mages, didn’t he?”

  “First pick!” I exclaimed. “Was he intending all along to hand Vai over to you?”

  Haübey took the lantern and dismissed his attendant, leaving us three alone with unconscious men. “You cannot think the Taino offer aid to the general in exchange for nothing?”

  “He’s trading you cold mages in return for your support?” I repeated stupidly.

  “Why do you think I came to Europa in the first place two years ago?” Haübey asked. “Your wars and rivalries do not interest us. I came at the behest of my uncle to learn about cold mages. Instead I saw people living in unpleasant squalor. Children suffer hunger while others throw away food they cannot eat and will not share. People die of diseases any decently trained behique could cure. The streets run with filth, and there is no decent night lighting. The food is awful. And it’s cold. But the music and drumming is good, and many of the women are beautiful.” His gaze lifted to capture Bee’s. He trembled as on the edge of a kiss.

  She cut him with an angry frown. “Can it be that even to Caonabo I was nothing more than a tool to be used? Although I grant you that I was well handled and lovingly polished.”

  Haübey closed his hands to fists, although I could not be sure if it was her accusations or her insinuation of the intimacies she had shared with Caonabo, ones he had been denied, that upset him. “You see only the shadows that churn the Great Smoke, dreamer. You do not know what thoughts trouble a man.”

  Elsewhere a man groaned, begging for water. Rain began to fall with a steady drumming, and water dripped through the many scars in the burned roof to splash onto the wounded, who could not even cover themselves. In the stall next to us I heard Rory humming softly.

  “Blessed Tanit!” Bee said. “How is it come to this, that I think only of my injured heart?”

  I pulled the cacica’s skull out of the basket. Startled, Haübey took a step away.

  “Your Highness, at the request of your uncle and your brother, I deliver your mother’s head to you. With this cemi, Prince Haübey, your kinsmen give you permission to return home. They want you back to lead the Taino army.”

  He stared, looking first confounded and then pleased. “So I am answered!”

  “Just one thing first.”

  Digging into the satchel, I pulled out the sewing kit Vai had so thoughtfully given me. Of course it included a hand mirror, since I could not imagine that Vai could imagine existence without a mirror. I caught the skull in the reflection as I pulled the shadows around me. Haübey gasped gratifyingly when I vanished. Spun in my shadow, the skull shifted to the texture and weight of a living head and met my gaze in the mirror
.

  “Honored Cacica, my greetings,” I said.

  “My greetings, Niece. You have returned me to my son.”

  “So I have, honored one. As I promised.”

  She blinked to show her approval. “Your debt is paid, even if I cannot approve how my brother went about getting his way. We maintain righteousness because we hold to the law.”

  “The world changes,” muttered Haübey. “The old ways no longer protect us. My uncle understands that, even if you did not, honored mother.”

  The cacica had not struck me as an impulsive, emotional woman, but judging by her glare, she and her impatient, headstrong son had more in common than I had thought. “Those who cast aside the law will wither like maize under drought. And so will the land!”

  Haübey’s brooding expression was sharpened by lips pressed so tight I wondered he did not cut himself. “I have something to say about how you treated Caonabo all those years, favoring me and neglecting him! I always resented it! He will make a noble cacique, even if you never thought so!”

  This was really too much! I broke in. “The cacica is a wise and perspicacious woman! Do not speak to her so disrespectfully.”

  “How can Juba hear and speak to her when I cannot, except in the spirit world?” Bee asked.

  The cacica turned her gaze from her son to me. “To the dreamer give my greetings, Niece. We who have ears can speak to our ancestors, that is why. A pity my brother connived with my sons to send her away. She was a proper influence. Yet what troubles you, Catherine Barahal? For I see a shadow in your heart.”

  “I beg your pardon for my abrupt manner. James Drake has stolen my husband. Can you tell me in which direction they have gone?”

  “When a rot grows within the crop, it must be cut out quickly before it spreads its taint. Let me see.” A thread spun away into the darkness of the mirror. She first whispered words that sounded like the drizzle of rain and the moan of wind, then spoke again in the language I could understand. “North they ride. Straight north.”

  North. Drake was going to use Vai to sow terror and death through his Ordovici homeland. Dread opened a gash in me through which all my fears poured. But I remembered my manners.