Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  Fortunately we then were called to the front of the house to eat our dinner of porridge, turnips, and a stew of fish, onion, and tomato. Afterward we helped settle the children and elders into the wagons that would convey everyone to troll town for the Hallows Festival. The household was going to spend the night and day within the maze of troll town, hidden from the Wild Hunt. The children were as excited as hornets.

  Bee took my hands. “It seems unfair you cannot shelter in the troll maze as the rest of us do. I don’t like to leave you alone.” She bent a too-wary gaze on me, forehead all a-wrinkle. “Are you sure you’re well, Cat? I swear to you there is a tone in your voice that makes me wonder if something is wrong.”

  I kissed her. “I do get to fretting on Hallows’ Night about you, Bee. Even though I know you are safe in the troll maze, I can’t help but worry. Don’t be concerned for me. I promised Rory I would spend the night teaching him how to cheat at cards.”

  “Are you sure, Cat? I just feel there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  The Blessed Tanit was merciful. The wagons were ready to go, so I did not have to answer. I kissed her again as my heart broke and my smile never wavered. Off they went. I waved until I thought my arm would fall off.

  “My sweet Catherine, you have avoided speaking to me all day.” He stepped up behind me, slipping his arms around me.

  “I thought you went with them!”

  “Without a kiss? I think not. After all, love, I think perhaps I shall stay with you—”

  “No!” My hard-won peace shattered. The boiling miasma of anger and terror and shame erupted like an engine that, after steaming along in such a delicate balance for so long, had at last overheated. “You have to go to troll town! He knows your blood! He threatened you!”

  “Love, love, that’s not what I meant. I will go to troll town and you will spend Hallows’ Night and Day at the law offices, as we agreed. I just thought how accustomed I am becoming to falling asleep each night and waking up each morning with you in my arms. It seems hard to face a night alone. So with everyone gone and nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon…”

  My pounding heart and ragged breathing slowly calmed. “Oh.”

  He chased me with kisses all the way back to the mansa’s study.

  Afterward we lay on the mat in the corner of the room in the corner of the quiet building, and he kissed me so tenderly I almost wept.

  “I know your secret, love,” he whispered against my ear.

  My breath faltered. I pressed my face against his cheek, shuddering, for I had no idea how I was going to get through this now.

  His smile brushed like love against my skin. “How many of my dash jackets did you hide?”

  The air went out of me. I shut my eyes. “Only six besides the four I set aside already,” I murmured hoarsely, as my mind whispered a prayer of thanks to the Blessed Tanit, protector of women. “We’d better go, Vai.”

  I dressed in the jacket I had made new out of what was torn. I buttoned on my spruce-green skirt that was so good for striding in, laced up my sturdy boots that had carried me through such a long journey, and set on my head the jaunty Amazon’s shako I had picked up on the battlefield from a fallen sister. I took only my locket and my sword. I twined my fingers intimately through his and savored the pleasure of walking hand in hand with him through the streets of Havery. A few people ran their final errands, but mostly the streets were empty as all made ready to shut their doors and light their candles against Hallows’ Night.

  “I do like it here,” I said. “Although Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse is still my favorite place. You have some other scheme in mind, Vai. What is it?”

  “We have two buildings,” he said, “so why not two schoolrooms? It seems wrong to me that those poor young fire mages were killed precisely because James Drake offered them a future they could not otherwise have. Cold mages were treated in the Antilles something like fire mages are treated here, with scorn and suspicion. Surely mages can work together as equals. What is to stop us from establishing an academy in which we see what may come about if we act in concert rather than in antipathy?”

  “People will fear the prospect of cold mages and fire mages acting in concert. They’ll fear they will set themselves up as princes and lord it over all the people of the land.”

  “People do that anyway.”

  “I did feel sorry for those young fire mages. Imagine thinking that the best choice you have is to believe what James Drake is telling you! You’ll have to answer people’s fears, though. Naturally some magisters will abuse the knowledge and power they gain. I suppose that’s what you talked about with the blacksmith in that little village when we were escaping down the river.”

  He smiled to let me know that no word of the conversation he had had with the blacksmith would pass his lips. “I also remember what the cacica told me. She said that the Taino believe every person is born with a kernel of power. Some waken it, and some never do. You were right to say that every child should have a chance to learn. Do you know, love, Beatrice and I are talking all the time about the things we want to do. All this work is going on for what she and I are hoping and planning for. But you never talk about what you’re thinking about. You must want something, Catherine. You can’t be happy merely to go along with our schemes.”

  “I do want something.” I smiled, for I loved him and Bee so much, and all the rest of them, too. “Just don’t let Wasa get up to mischief. She has such a rascal spirit. I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow night.”

  It was almost twilight as we reached the gates of troll town. The mirrors and shards of glass that surrounded the district flashed so agonizingly that I turned my back before the pain ripped through me. I kissed him and sent him on his way. The drums called him. They were already dancing, the strangest rhythm I had ever heard, for it was shot through with the whistling and clicking of trolls. It was a new song being born.

  I smelled liquor, and the fresh fragrance of the traditional crossing buns filled with plum jam or yam custard. A rollicking party was already under way, as the sailors would have it.

  Another sound rose out of the earth like mist and filtered down from the sky like rain: the horn calling the Wild Hunt to ride.

  I ran the short distance to the harbor office of Godwik and Clutch, for I had promised Bee and Vai I would sit in a room with four mirrors until the danger had passed. Rory sulked on the stoop, seated on the stairs with a morose eye turned on me as I came up.

  “I can’t believe you never told them,” he said. “Even Chartji left for troll town without knowing. How could you, Cat? And making me go along with it, too. It’s not right.”

  “What good would it have done? You know them, Rory. They would have insisted on trying to hide me, or fighting the Wild Hunt, or something equally foolish and pointless. They would have spent the last two months so unhappy and grief-stricken and miserable. It’s better this way.”

  “I’m not sure you have the right to choose for them.”

  The horn’s cry rose a second time, gaining strength.

  I sat next to him, holding his hand. “It’s done now. Rory, this is your last chance to cross back over in your own body, for once I am gone you will only cross over by means of death. Do you want to return to the spirit world?”

  He pressed his face into my shoulder, then shook himself, and tugged on my braid, and pushed me as a brother teases his sister. “No. My home is here now.”

  The third call licked the air like fire and breathed all the way into my bones. I heard the clip-clop of hooves and the scrape of wheels on cobblestones.

  Rising, I pulled four letters from inside my jacket. “This is for Bee, this for Vai, this for Doctor Asante, and the last is for Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan. You know what to say to Chartji. Now you’d better go before he sees you.”

  His lips were curled into the beginnings of a snarl as he snatched the letters out of my hand. “I’ll see you off. Someone ought to.”

 
Along the avenue, the lit Hallows’ candles set in windows went out one by one. The coach rolled out of the gloom, the four horses gleaming like moonlight. The coachman tipped his hat in greeting. The eru leaped down from the back of the coach. Clouds scudded over the bright stars and thunder rumbled like the feet of the leashed Hunt troubling the sky as it waited to be released.

  I glanced at the heavens, and then at the door as the eru opened it and bumped down the steps so I could climb in. She nodded, a spark of blue flashing on her forehead.

  “I take it that a willing sacrifice need not be torn to pieces and have its head thrown down a well,” I remarked as I entered the coach.

  “No reason to do that unless they try to escape or fight back.” My sire sat at his ease, one leg crossed elegantly. He looked past me at Rory, on the stoop. “Is that your brother? I do lose track, for there are so many of you.”

  The door closing cut off the view, but regardless my gaze had been caught by the large, gleaming object on the bench next to my sire. I had last seen the bronze cauldron in the temple of Carnonos watched over by my grandfather. The face of a horned man shone in the polished surface.

  “Not a very good likeness, if you ask me,” said my sire, noticing the direction of my gaze. “Imagine! He had the effrontery to pour water into it and watch me every Hallows’ Night. I put a stop to that!”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Kill him? Of course not! On Hallows’ Night, the Hunt gathers up the spirits of those fated to die in the coming year. We don’t kill them. You mortals kill each other, or you die of other causes. I only kill one mortal a year, and I do that because I am commanded to do so by my masters.”

  Strangely, the moment the coach arrived, all my fear had melted away like ice under heat. The coachman cracked his whip. I pulled the shutter back in time to wave at Rory as we rolled away down the street.

  “Then what did you do in the mortal world all these weeks?” I demanded.

  “Your mother piqued my curiosity. Tara had all sorts of interesting stories. She told me tales of what the mortal world is truly like, for of course I normally only catch a glimpse of it when I pass through.” He ran a hand along the curve of the cauldron, tracing the figure meant to be him. Like a cat, he rather relished himself. “So besides wanting to get hold of this cauldron, I had a hankering, a curiosity if you will, to make one grand tour.”

  I laughed.

  “Why does that amuse you? I do not understand your jests, little cat.”

  He was not like me or any human. When the river floods and drowns, it does not regret its victims. When a storm lays waste, it does not ponder the uses of power. Fire consumes and does not grieve. The ice gives no thought to what it crushes as it works its way over the land.

  But I did not have to like him. “That my mother told you tales, that’s all.”

  We turned the corner into a commercial district on the road leading out of town, lined with taverns and inns whose windows were ablaze with Hallows candles. These flames went out one by one as we rumbled along the cobblestones. The buzz of voluble conversation ceased, too, fading to an anxious silence that draped the street with its fear.

  The luscious aroma of coffee drifted to my nose.

  “Did you try coffee, Sire?”

  “No.” He sniffed. “Is that smell coffee? I wondered what that was but I didn’t know how to go about getting it.”

  I stuck my head out the window. “Stop here! Sire, do you have any money?”

  “Money? Oh! Yes, the stamped metal roundels.”

  He passed over a huge cloth bag so weighted with coins I had to set it on the floor, for it was too heavy for me to easily hold. I picked out a denarius by feel, hopped out, and dashed into a benighted coffee shop where men whispered in frightened voices about the suddenly extinguished lights. With so much confusion it was easy to place the denarius on the counter and take four full mugs back to the coach, one for each of us. I wanted to be wide-awake.

  As the horses stamped we stood on the street and drank our coffee.

  “My thanks,” said the coachman.

  “Sharp and nutty,” said the eru, “with a taste of sun.”

  When I had drained my cup, I wiped a finger along the bottom and let the latch lick the last drops off my skin.

  “Mmm,” murmured the latch. “I like that!”

  “What do you think?” I asked my sire.

  An owl swooped down out of the night and landed atop the coach, golden eyes unblinking.

  “I think it is time to go,” he said. “The courts are waiting.”

  I looked him in the eye. His amber stare was just like mine. “It’s what you made me for, is it not? To be the sacrifice.”

  A smile ghosted across his lips, then vanished as he glanced toward the owl and shook his head to remind me that the courts heard and saw everything he heard and saw, just as he could hear and see through the eyes of his Hunt. “All the others before you died. So are you trapped, little cat. You will never be free…”

  His voice faded as on words left unsaid, for there were words he dared not say within the hearing of the owl because he was not the owl’s master. The owl was spying on him.

  But I could guess. All the others before you died, because they failed. So you are trapped, because they could not understand and thus act. You will never be free unless I am also free.

  As a young man in the mage House, Vai had known in his heart all along that he might as a magister gain the power and glory granted him because of his magic, but he would not be free as long as his village was bound in clientage. A prince among slaves is still a slave. Freedom cuts in every direction. No one is truly free, if even one person lies in chains.

  I knew what I had to do.

  As the coach rolled on I unbraided my hair and combed it out with my fingers. Let the courts be dazzled by its beauty! I pinched my cheeks to make sure they glowed, and moistened and bit my lips so they shone. My sire watched in silence, his expression a mask of ice.

  Feeling bolder, I opened the shutters on both doors and gazed out over both the mortal world and the spirit world. On Hallows’ Night, the coach traveled in both worlds at once.

  The spirit world flashed past in changing aspects, all the possibilities that might ever have been and every gradient between: a world in which the mansa ruled, and one in which he suffered an early death in the hold of a ship, and one in which he owned a shop and sold white damask to women who would take it away and dye it into all the colors and patterns they could dream of.

  In the mortal world we sped across the quiet waves of the Mediterranean Sea and past the spice-laden markets of Qart Hadast, the jewel of ports. The fields and trees of north Africa trailed away as bands of desert crept their fingers into the green. A long lonely stretch of golden rock and pale dunes passed beneath us until we reached a salt mine. The enterprising miners in the Malian Empire had broken through to an ancient gateway between the worlds and inadvertently unleashed the ghouls who craved the salt of mortal blood and being.

  Wind blew grit into the interior of the coach. The land was so quiet where once people had lived and worked and thrived, where they would do so again. The coach rocked from side to side, bucketing as we descended into the pit. Salt links the worlds. Each gate swirls with energy, the power of transition and transformation. These threads bind us all.

  The shutters slammed shut. I caught in a breath, the coach jolted to a stop, and all the air punched out of me. My entire body went numb.

  My sire leaned forward until his face almost touched mine. “You must be what I made you to be, Daughter.”

  “Yes,” I said, because I had finally understood what he wanted the day he had encased Four Moons House in ice. “After that, Sire, you will give up all claim to me and mine. For that matter, you will also give up any claim to bind any of your children who do not wish to be bound.”

  He extended a hand in the radical manner, and we shook to seal our bargain.

  “By the way, may I
have that big bag of coin?”

  “Yes. I have no use for it.”

  The latch opened the door; the steps bumped down although the eru had not disembarked. That the eru acted as footman was a courtesy for mortal eyes, for the coach was as alive as I was.

  My sire climbed out. I grappled with the bag of coins, slinging it over my back despite its distracting weight. No sensible young woman raised in an impoverished family walks away from a pot of gold, even if she may never get a chance to spend it.

  I took in and released a breath for courage, and I went out after him. With a hand braced on the threshold of the coach door and my feet still on the steps, I paused to survey my ground as a general may do before a battle.

  The palace of the courts lay before me, the realm of both shadow and light, as deep as the murkiest pit and as high as the brightest peak. What Vai had seen as a nest of starving ghouls determined to drain him of his blood, I had seen as a grand feast populated by elegantly clothed and peacock-feathered personages who had grown accustomed to their harvest. Hard to say which was true. Maybe they both were.

  The Hunt surged in the air as a mass of boiling black cloud, my brothers and sisters. I saw crows and spotted hounds, smart-mouthed hyenas and silent vipers. A cloud of wasps and a spinning web of spiders jostled against women with lions’ heads and men with the bodies of fish. Dire wolves prowled in their packs shoulder to shoulder with the tawny beauty of the big cats. Yet the hunters had been bound to serve not nature’s course but the courts’ desire.

  The coach and horses were not touching the ground. I was pretty sure they could not.

  I glanced back at the eru holding on at the back and ahead to the coachman sitting on the driver’s bench at the front. The eru regarded me with all three eyes. “This is as far as we can take you, Cousin,” she said.

  I smiled. “Whatever happens, I want to thank you for the trust you’ve shown in me and the trust I’ve been able to give to you. Should things fall out in such a way that you discover leisure to do as you wish at some later date, my solicitor can be found at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch in the city of Havery, where you picked me up.”