Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  “I understand you may not be in charity with the terms of the settlement that were forced upon you thirteen years ago, but please do not attempt another bald-faced lie. I know she is in the house. In fact—”

  I heard an even tread mounting the grand staircase. A chill mist exhaled from the surface of the mirror. Bee was ahead of me, farther up the stairs, so I braced myself, hoping my body would hide hers. For on the very first day I had come to live with Aunt and Uncle, Aunt had solemnly told me that I was to look out for my little cousin Beatrice, even though Bee was only two months younger than I was and already, at six, a complete hellhound with a temper just as bad as Uncle’s and a mean sting that she hid behind her honey face.

  You know we love you for yourself, Cat. You’re never to think otherwise. This is your home now. But I lay this charge on you, that you must protect Bee, if there comes a time when she needs your protection.

  Right now, with that Four Moons personage and his powerful magic climbing the stairs, with the mist rising, I was certain those words had been meant for this day out of all days.

  Shiffa took a step back from the railing and raised her hands theatrically, like a dido sighting her warrior hero onstage. “Blessed Tanit! Such a good-looking young man!”

  He marched into view, framed by the fading gold wallpaper on one side and the polished black balustrade on the other.

  He wasn’t as handsome as he clearly thought himself to be. He was just well turned out, nothing you wouldn’t expect from a pampered son of Four Moons House. Also, he was much younger than I had taken him for from his voice.

  When he spotted me, his eyes widened as if he were astonished, likely by the regrettable dullness of my soberly unfashionable dress. I shoved Bee up another step, hoping she would bolt for the door to the attic, and I took each step down with a drawn-out measure worthy, I am sure, of the great principessas of the theater.

  “Yes, Aunt! I’m coming,” I said brightly. “I do apologize for taking so long to dress. You know how I’ve been wanting to attend a lecture as engrossing as one on the principles of aerostasis! Especially since we just this morning were fortunate enough to listen to a lengthy lecture on aerostatic aircraft by the very same esteemed professor we are engaged to hear tonight. Perhaps it will prove to be exactly the same lecture delivered verbatim! I can’t believe that it’s finally time to leave. Oh! I beg your pardon, Magister. We haven’t been introduced.”

  We hit the first-floor landing at the same time, he coming up and I coming down. He said, “Don’t try your luck at the theater, maestressa. You may have the looks, but you don’t have the skill.”

  He had a mustache and a beard trimmed tight along the line of his jaw, and he kept his hair cropped short against his dark head in the manner of professional boxers. It was the kind of style you saw in paintings brought to life fifty years ago when the scions of the House had ruled fashion. There was something very bad about a young man who dressed in such an old-fashioned and overdone style and who had such a particular way of looking down his nose at a well-brought-up girl whose lineage was acceptable in polite company, even if her family could not move in elite circles because of a few problems with money.

  I opened my mouth to retort with scathing words that would cut him to the heart, figuratively speaking, when Bee, the utter fool, bumped up against me. Anger streamed off her like heat. I stuck my hands to my hips, elbows akimbo, to stop her from grabbing a sword off the rack and skewering him.

  Red-faced, Aunt reached the landing behind him. As she halted beside the personage, she smiled in an absolutely false way. My tongue smarted, as if I’d just licked a block of ice.

  “Come down, girls,” she said, and I knew then that she’d known all along we were hiding in the window seat. The house was hers, after all; very little escaped her notice. “Are Hanan and Astraea with you?”

  Bee popped out beside me, and I grabbed her upper arm and held on like I meant it, which I did. She loosed a glare at me, but she stayed where she was and fulminated.

  “I’m sure the little dears are asleep,” I said. “They were quite exhausted from their day’s studies, for we are a studious family here, are we not? Are we leaving soon for the academy, Aunt?”

  “I haven’t much time. I’m late already,” said the personage in the very same arrogant voice I had heard earlier today in the headmaster’s library.

  I was sure it was the same voice—hard to get quite that much biting pride into such otherwise innocuous words—but his clothes were less traditional and more fashionable. Because I hadn’t seen his face in the library, I examined him dubiously. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that a magister, scion of a prominent mage House, would have entered the very academy of natural historians and scholarly philosophers that the cold mages were known to scorn and distrust.

  My expression, meant to be disdainful, must have impressed him, if not in a good way.

  “She is the eldest Hassi Barahal girl?” he asked, indicating me. How he stared!

  “She is the eldest of the girls,” agreed Aunt, indicating me.

  Uncle puffed up beside her, looking as enflamed with anger as Bee, and at these words he cast such a look at Aunt that I knew something was up. Something bad. Something very, very wrong.

  8

  “You are the eldest Hassi Barahal girl?” the personage asked me, an odd question given that he had just asked Aunt the same thing.

  “So I have always been told,” I retorted.

  “Cat,” murmured Aunt warningly. “Silence is better than disrespect.”

  He ignored her and glanced almost slightingly at Bee. Bee was shorter, dainty with a plumpness that made her seem a year or two younger than she really was, and, of course, she was beautiful. His gaze fixed back on me. “It must be asked and answered three times. You are the eldest Hassi Barahal girl?”

  Aunt sucked in a sharp breath. “Catherine!” she said warningly.

  Uncle shut his eyes.

  I just found the cold mage irritating. “As we said twice already. I am the eldest.”

  “So be it. The contract was sealed with magic. You cannot lie to me.” He stared at me a moment longer, gave an abrupt, infinitesimal shake of the head as with utter disdain, and turned to Aunt. “The clothing she is wearing is simply not acceptable. You need pack only a small trunk for the journey. The House will provide all she needs once we arrive.”

  “Once we arrive where?” I looked at Aunt for clarification, but she was quite deliberately not looking at me, so I looked toward Uncle instead, but he wasn’t looking, either; he’d already steered Bee toward the stairs.

  “Darling, up you go. It’s well past bedtime.”

  Bee caught my gaze, but we kept our mouths shut. That was the code of Bee and Cat: Keep your mouth shut and don’t say anything until you know what’s going on and how much trouble your cousin, who is also your best friend in the world, is in.

  Aunt sailed past me and kissed Bee on the cheek. “Yes, darling, just kiss Catherine good night and be gone.” Trembling, Bee gave me a kiss on each cheek while Aunt kept talking to the personage. “The dear girl may wish to choose some of her clothing for herself, what she likes best. You know how girls are. They like to have special things with them, very sentimental—”

  The magister whistled sharply, a piercing sound that made us all flinch. As Uncle pulled Bee away, she twisted off her bracelet and thrust it into my hand. Then Uncle dragged her up the upper stairs, him hauling with the desperation of a man in pain and she stumbling up backward as she watched me. I didn’t move. I was too stunned, her bracelet the only solid weight that fixed me to earth. The personage set a hand on the railing. A wisp of mist rose from the polished wood as he leaned on it, canting head and shoulders to look down into the foyer.

  I wondered what would happen if I shoved him over.

  “Bring him in,” he called to an unseen servant, perhaps to the footman who had been riding beside the coachman.

  Aunt tried again. “I am sure sh
e would like to bring a few chosen items with her, if you would just let her go up to her chamber and choose—”

  He turned back. “She will not leave my sight. You will supervise the packing of a small trunk, as I have indicated, and she will remain on the landing with me until the trunk is packed. That way she can’t vanish.”

  I am not a Cat for nothing. I’m really very friendly, but there comes a time when people cross a line and must be put in their place.

  “You are being rude, Magister. What gives you the right to speak to my—”

  “Catherine! That is enough.”

  I flinched. Aunt’s tone was just as proud and snappish as his, only hers hurt, for she never spoke to me that way.

  “Catherine, you’ll mind your manners and remain silent while I’m gone. Shiffa, come with me.”

  Head lowered, Shiffa followed Aunt up the stairs. I clenched my hands and breathed in and breathed out and said nothing, for so Aunt had commanded. Silence I would keep if I was held over a fire and my toes roasted. Nothing would make me talk now.

  “Catherine,” he said. “Catherine Hassi Barahal.”

  I slanted a withering glare at him, but he wasn’t looking at me or trying to speak to me. He was only trying out the name, as the schoolmaster at the beginning of term repeats the names of new pupils in order to remember who he has in his class. If I knew what was going on, it would be so much easier to keep my mouth shut, but I had to trust Aunt and Uncle and do what they told me. They had never treated me differently from their own three girls, not even considering how my uncle and father had fought before my parents’ untimely death. I knew my duty. I knew they loved me.

  He measured the scalloped wallpaper, the spindly legged sofa in the Galatian style set against the wall, the gilt ornament painted on the lintels over the doors, and the parquet flooring, with its mosaic pattern meant to echo the mazelike stone mosaic of the ground floor, where visitors were supposed to stay, blocked by the pattern of the stones from ascending to the upper private floors where the family resided. He fingered the dwarf orange, and the green leaf at once frosted as if caught in winter’s grip. It cracked into dust against his skin. With a grunt of disgust, he rubbed his fingers, then blew on them. White flakes drifted to the floor. He sighed as though to say that every passing breath endured in this plebeian house was more than he could take.

  In the flecked depths of the huge first-floor-landing mirror, I studied him. His height, his dark brown complexion and symmetrical features, his hands and that part of his throat revealed above the embroidered collar of his jacket: all matched in the mirror the way he looked on the landing. His magic was hard for me to see, although faint tendrils snaked out from him. Either he was so powerful that magic exhaled from him, as misty breath is expelled from the lips on a winter day, or he was actually using his magic to search the house, as if he sought to uncover our secrets. How could he just march into this house as if he owned it? I wanted to claw that disdainful expression off his face. But I did not. Because he looked into the mirror and saw I was watching him.

  “What do you see in there?” he demanded.

  “Your boots are scuffed.”

  Men who stand in that arrogant way with their backs straight, their shoulders tight, and their chins lifted the better to sneer at those lower than them can be neither comfortable nor happy. But that doesn’t mean they know it. His gaze flicked down to his polished, perfect boots, then up again.

  He said, “You have no idea of the privilege and honor being shown to you this day. You are ill prepared and ill mannered and ill suited. But a contract is a contract, sealed, bound, final. I will do my duty, and you will do yours.”

  He rapped his cane twice on the floor. A chill wind gushed in from outside. Another presence entered the house, one that wheezed as it mounted the grand staircase step by effortful step until an old gray man climbed into view, leaning heavily on the balustrade. He wore gold earrings, the mark of his profession as either a bard or a djeli, although in these days the two were often indistinguishable. He was otherwise dressed in a threadbare dashiki in the old style, loose and ankle length; he had thrown over it a humble clerk’s long wool coat. No fashionable flares added dash or mystery to its lines, and it was patched at the elbows. Snow dusted his shoulders and the silver coils of his hair. When had it begun snowing again?

  The old man looked at me, looked at the personage, and heaved a sigh as of grief. He saw the mirror at once, of course, but the mirror did not see him. Bards and djeliw had the ability to manipulate and respect the essence that flows through the spirit world. For them, so scholars believed, mirrors were a conduit into the spirit world that lies intertwined with our own. I was shocked at his lack of vitality and the poorness of his clothing. Bards and djeliw were often feared and sometimes only grudgingly tolerated, but it never paid to scant on the offerings you made to a person who could mock you in the street for your miserliness.

  “You can use that mirror,” said the personage.

  “It will do, Magister,” said the old man, “for you can be sure I can make use of any mirror. Naturally a man of your exalted inheritance—child of Four Moons House, descendant of the sorcerers and their warriors who crossed the desert in the storm, those from whom Maa Ngala, Lord of All, removed all fear so they could guide and protect the weak and the helpless—knows what he is about, and he has decided already what it is he means to do. Is this the one?”

  “Heard you a lie in what they said?” demanded the personage with an edge to his voice that made me shudder.

  The old man merely shrugged as he looked at me and then away. “I heard no lie.”

  “Then do what you were hired to do. Certainly you’ve been recompensed handsomely enough.”

  “So I have, Magister.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a ball of yarn.

  Once or twice in your life the iron stone of evil tidings passes from its exile in Sheol into that place just under your ribs that makes it hard to breathe. That makes you think you’re going to die, or that you’re dead already, or that the bad thing you thought might happen is actually far worse than you had ever dreamed and that even if you wake up, it won’t go away.

  Uncle trudged down the stairs with shoulders bowed. He wouldn’t look at me. Aunt sailed down in his wake with her head high and her expression so drawn I knew she was trying not to cry. Shiffa halted at the top of the stairs beside a trunk.

  In the mirror, the humble ball of yarn appeared not as yarn but as a glimmering and supple chain of gold. Now I was shaking. Aunt walked up to me and embraced me tightly, pressing her lips to my ear and mouthing words in an unvoiced voice I alone could hear.

  “For now, you must endure this. Speak no word of the family. Say only that you are eldest. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.” She drew back, kissed me on each cheek, and said audibly, her voice a tremolo, “My dear girl.”

  “You’ll stand as witnesses for her,” the magister said to Aunt and Uncle.

  “Legally, you are required to provide two competent witnesses as well,” said Aunt, her expression sharpening as with hope of a reprieve. Uncle said nothing. He would not even raise his head to look at me. “As you have no witnesses, the ceremony cannot proceed tonight. Very well, feel free to return tomorrow—”

  He rapped his cane on the floor three times. An echo resounded, the house throwing the spell back at him, but it wasn’t any use. We heard a tramping and stamping before the door burst open and slammed against the wall.

  “Gracious Melqart protect us!” Evved croaked from below.

  Up they thumped as my heart galloped until I became dizzy with dread. And just as quickly I was crackling with indignation, for he had summoned his coachman and his footman to be his witnesses. The coachman was a burly fellow with white skin and spiky white hair, and the footman, who rode in the back and opened the door for his master, was a perfectly ordinary man of Afric origins.

  Then I looked in the mirror, and all my indignation v
anished, even my dread. I was simply too stunned to feel anything.

  There stood the coachman, exactly the same. But the footman was not a man at all, not when you could see what I could see in the mirror. He was a woman, first of all, so tall and broad-shouldered and powerfully built that a glamor disguising her as a man would be easy to bind. In the mirror, she was limned by a phosphorescent glow, bright orange and flaring blue, and she had a third eye, a mystic eye of light in the center of her forehead, that allowed her to see from this world into the spirit world.

  An eru she was, for the evidence in the mirror told me she could be nothing else.

  My father had transcribed in his journals the tales old people told him in their villages. He recorded the words of scholars as they debated what they knew and did not know. He observed; he described; he speculated. The eru were servants of the long-vanished Ancestors. They were powerful spirits that could cross from the spirit world into this world and back again. They were born out of the ice and, like winter, were too potently magical for any mere human to control. The eru were masters of storm and wind; they need bow before no mere earthly creature.

  So how had an eru come to serve humbly at the beck and call of a cold mage?

  “Is there any further objection?” asked the personage with a kind of weary sarcastic scorn.

  “There is a matter of documents we were forced to place in the keeping of Four Moons House as a surety,” said Uncle hoarsely.

  “I have them.” He beckoned to the old man. “Do as you are bound. Make it quick! I’m late already!”

  Scholars distinguish between three kinds of contracts: a flower contract composed by a handshake and a few words, that blooms and dies according to the will of the makers; an ink and vellum contract written and sealed with the force of the law courts behind it; and a chained contract, sealed by magic and never lightly undertaken because it cannot be broken or altered except by death. Bards and djeliw, the masters of speech, can thread words of power into the webs of seeing that are the essential nature of mirrors, and by this action can chain certain contracts into the spirit world itself, making of them a binding spell, an unshakeable obligation, an unbreakable contract.