by Kate Elliott
The coachman cracked his whip, and horses and coach swerved off the road. I braced myself for a jolting fall, but rather than crashing down into a ditch, we rolled along two dirt strips with grass grown between that cut through the pinewoods. The air grew abruptly colder. Under the dark thatch of branches, the rain ceased prattling on the roof. We scraped along dry ground that hadn’t seen rain this day and shortly afterward jerked to a halt.
He opened the door without waiting for the footman, leaped out, and strode away. I sat shivering. When nothing happened except for the horses stamping and slobbering, I slid along the seat to the door and jumped to the ground. The dense pinewoods lay behind and somewhat below us. I gazed onto a landscape empty of human presence, a rolling, open countryside of smooth-shouldered hills and a single high beacon of a hill—Brigands’ Beacon, most likely—rising where a pale chalk track wound up its grassy slope. He was walking up the slope toward the crest of the hill.
The carriage rested near a fire circle, a neat ring of stones within which lay the charred remains of branches and, beside it, a small byre sheltering stacked firewood. The coachman walked among the team, offering the bucket to each beast in turn, and although the liquid was clear as water and sloshed in a waterlike manner, I could not help but think there was something strange about the way the cloudy light glinted in the drops that spattered from the horses’ muzzles after they’d had their drink.
I had to walk, because I was so very cold, and as I paced, I watched my husband vanish over the hill’s horizon. It was as if the sky had swallowed him. Not an unpleasant thought, now that I reflected on it. Yet what would become of me then? How far did our chained marriage actually bind me?
The coachman finished rubbing down the horses and went to the circle, stacking wood and kindling and, with flint and steel, sparked a fire. The flames caught. The wood burned.
No cold mage, he! Nor creature of the breathing ice, like the eru. Fire did not come to their hands, and their presence killed it.
I crept close to the blessed warmth. “Heat is a glorious thing, is it not?” I said. “When winters run long and cold, as winters do, a fire is the best thing of all.”
“Maestra,” he said, unsmiling but not unfriendly.
He wore his short hair in the lime-whitened spikes traditional to Celtic warriors in ancient days, according to the records of Kena’ani traders and Roman generals. The style had come back into fashion a generation ago among the soldiers fighting for Camjiata and his Arverni-Iberian army during Camjiata’s attempt to unite—or, as others said, conquer—Europa. In recent years, the fashion had spread throughout the north among laborers and the poor, even into the territories of the western Celts who had fought hardest to halt the Iberian Monster’s advance. After all, now that the threat of war was past, humble laborers who toiled for harsh masters might recall that Camjiata’s revolutionary legal code had offered hope for a measure of emancipation.
After a moment, the coachman walked back to our vehicle and dug into a storage space under the driver’s box. Seen from this angle, in the pearlescent light of a cloudy day, the damage the carriage had taken in the night showed vividly: The box was scarred with pits and gouges and was spittled with mud and debris flung by angry hands. Just who the mob hated most I could not be sure: the princely clans that had ruled and feuded, and feuded and ruled, in the eight hundred years since the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the powerful mage Houses that had brought down the Iberian Monster and exiled him to an island prison thirteen years ago.
The coachman walked back to me with a heavy wool coat draped over one arm. “You might wish for this, maestra,” he said, offering it politely. “He’ll not like its look, but it’ll keep you warm.”
If the coachman had not already been wearing an outdoor coat, I’d not have accepted it, but he was, so I did, and spoke grateful thanks as I pulled it on over my riding clothes and buttoned it up to my chin.
He stripped the gloves off his own hands. “These, too, maestra. Your hands look like they’re turning to ice.”
“I can’t take those!”
He paused in the act of offering, and I knew the shame of having insulted another person who was trying to give me a gift.
“I meant, I can’t take the gloves off your hands when you’re out of doors driving. Thanks to your kindness, I at least can now curl my hands up inside these sleeves.”
He wasn’t a smiler, but the skin around his eyes wrinkled. “Best you do take them, maestra. The weather’s turning. I’m accustomed to the cold.”
I had to take them or compound the insult. The gloves fit tolerably well. At first my fingers smarted, and then they tingled, and then I began to feel my digits might survive the journey intact.
“You might want to stretch your legs,” he added. “We’ll not reach the next inn until nightfall.”
“Won’t you need to change horses?”
He glanced their way. “They’ll endure.”
Because maybe they weren’t mortal horses, but I didn’t say that aloud. “Why did we stop here at all, if it’s so far to the next inn?”
He looked toward the hilltop. “The magister must pay his respects.”
“Pay his respects to, ah, what?”
“His ancestors.” With a lift of his square chin, he indicated the fire. “I’ll brew tea.”
“I’ll walk, then.”
He was a man who could stand uncannily still and yet seem to be aware of everything around him. His gaze caught mine. He had the blue eyes known in the north as the mark of the ice. “I am obliged to inform you that a powerful spirit inhabits the hilltop.”
I looked at him and he looked at me. It was then I realized I had not seen the footman since I had emerged from the carriage.
“Who are you?” I asked.
His expression did not change. “I am a coachman.” With a nod, he turned away to his work.
We must be what we are. And right now, I was intensely curious. I strode up the chalk track, whacking at stalks of grass with my cane. The view from the top was astonishing. The crisp autumn air made the sprawl of hills seem as sharply delineated as the tips of cold-whitened grass brushing at my skirts. On the lowland plain to the south rose a faintly seen tower, likely Newfield’s famous Round Tower, beyond which the lowland plain fell steadily away toward the marshy Sieve. Just ahead, a steep escarpment marked the east-west line of the chalk ridge; far to the north, many miles onward, rose another high beacon hill. The line of the road speared between my feet and that distant landmark. Only where the pinewoods spread dense below me did a mist climbing through the branches obscure the view.
I saw no trace of my husband anywhere. Besides the grass, a ring of tumbled boulders patched with lichen was the only feature on the broad swell of the hill’s crest. At the lower limit of the stone ring partway down the steeper northern slope stood a proud oak that had not been visible from the fire circle. A tingling like the buzzing of bees trembled in the air as if an unseen presence did indeed reside here.
“There stood here once a shrine to Cernunnos the Hunter. In later years, it served also as an altar to Esus-at-the-Crossing, the Respected One, and another besides, whose name I cannot tell you. Yet now it sits neglected.”
The eru had walked up beside me. In daylight, her appearance as a perfectly ordinary—if quite tall—woman of Afric origins was so strong that I wondered how I had ever mistaken her for a man. I wondered if I had also mistaken the third eye seen in the mirror, or the sparks of her magic, or the storm she had raised. Yet it seemed unlikely that the Houses, with their strict adherence to tradition, would allow a woman to perform work they would consider fitted for men.
“I see only the one track. How can this be a crossroads?”
“Can that truly be all you see here?” As familiar as a family member, she rested a hand on my forearm.
The knife of sight cut through the foggy veil obscuring the pinewoods below. Another land lay beyond, smoky within the mist, a summer woodland vista of stately oak and pr
oud ash in full leaf. The trees grew along a shallow valley marked particularly by a small lake heady with reed beds on the shore and a grassy hummock jutting up from the glittering waters. Andevai, or a cloudy apparition very like him, stood on the lake’s bank. His right arm moved as if he were releasing something. A bright object flashed in the sun—where had sun come from?—and splashed as it struck the surface of the waters. Then it was swallowed beneath.
The footman removed her hand from my sleeve, and all I saw was fog rising in thickening streamers within the black pine.
“What was that place?” I demanded, out of breath, my heart thudding in my chest as heat flushed my cheeks.
“What do you think it was?”
“Was that the spirit world? Are you really an eru? How else could you see from our world into the spirit world?”
“Is that what you think?” she asked with a smile that annoyed me.
“Why did you call me ‘cousin’?” I asked.
“Why do you think I did?”
“My mother’s people are the Belgae. They live in the far north, in the Barrens. My father wrote that you can see the ice from their villages. The Romans fought them. The mage Houses civilized them. So maybe her forebears had congress with those who live on the ice.” Certainly my mother had known there was something a little different about me. She’d warned me to keep quiet about it, as if she thought I had something that must be hidden. “Although as far as I know, my mother was perfectly human.”
“That seems likely, looking at you.”
I laughed, exhilarated, because I felt I was dueling with forces I did not understand. I could not understand it, but I did not fear her, not at all. “And I am the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter. My father’s lineage came out of Qart Hadast in the north of Africa. His people are Kena’ani sea traders, who in ancient days battled the Romans to a standstill. So that explains nothing. How are we cousins?”
“How are we not?”
“That’s not an answer! Isn’t it said the servants of the night court answer questions with questions?”
“Do you believe the courts exist?”
“How would I know? I know a lot of village tales about a day court and a night court that rule in the spirit world. I heard a distinguished lecturer once say that the courts are a metaphor, in the Greek style. That they’re simply a way for people to explain the cycle of winter and summer. Or that they’re a story about the natural reversals of fortune people experience over the course of their lives.”
“That is a story,” she agreed.
“Do you believe the day court and the night court exist?”
“Do you think I can answer that question?”
“I do think so, but I think you won’t. Scholars say the reason they have not been able to explain magic through scientific principles is because those who handle magic are so secretive.”
“To which I would answer, trust what your eyes see.” She wore no coat, only a flared jacket over loose trousers, all clean and neat and evidently without any susceptibility to the chill air that had now begun to seep even through the wool coat and into my bones because I was standing still.
“Everyone knows House magisters use sorcery to create illusions that appear real. And you’ve now appeared to me as a man, as a woman, and as an eru. How can I trust what my eyes see? Even you are not what you at first seemed.”
“We must be what we are,” she said with a laugh. “I have never been anything but what I seem. It is the chief gift of my people.” She tilted back her head and shut her eyes, as if listening.
“What do you hear?” I asked.
“Do you not hear the djeli?”
I looked around but saw no one, nor did I glimpse any figure striding below on the misty edge of the pinewoods with a ball of thread or a kora, a bell, or a fiddle in hand.
She left my side and approached the ruined shrine. I did not follow her. The place made me uneasy, and I did not want to enter sacred ground. These were not my gods. Untying a leather bottle from her belt, she poured a clear liquid over the stones. Maybe she said something; the wind chasing the height tore away her words. Then she walked back, her stride easy and loose and strong. Grass rippled as a cold breeze combed through the clearing. Branches swayed in a silent dance. I felt in my bones the disturbing sensation that maybe there was a djeli or a bard imprisoned within the oak tree, its final burial place.
She walked past me. “Time to return. The magister will be finished.” She laughed again, finding her comment amusing.
Although I walked as fast as I could without breaking into a run, which would make me seem as desperate as I actually was for answers or for sympathetic company, I simply could not catch her as she descended the hill. When I strode up, panting, to the roaring comfort of the fire, two brass mugs placed on the stone wall greeted me. I was gripped by such longing for a drink that no nagging thoughts of mist-shrouded vistas and glittering lakes mattered as much as the chance to raise a cup of hot tea to my lips. It was a pungent brew, redolent of distant shores and saturated colors. There was bread and cheese, too, neatly cut and laid out on a brass platter, and I wept a little, eating it, because I was so very hungry. As I drank and ate, the coachman and the footman inspected the carriage and checked the horses’ hooves, making ready to depart.
I was just licking crumbs off my fingers when my husband appeared on the track, striding down from the top of the hill to the fire circle and the waiting coach. The rumbling strength of the flames weakened to a lick along the logs, rather as a rambunctious dog cowers under the table when its harsh master enters the room.
“That coat is appalling,” he said as he came up. He frowned at the remaining mug and, with evident reluctance, picked it up and sampled the tea.
Food and drink had fortified me. “Appalling it may be, if one considers decently clothed servants appalling, but it is warm. You may have forgotten that my entire stock of traveling clothing and more fashionable warm coats—however lacking in your eyes—had to be abandoned at the inn in Adurnam. Or was I meant to freeze to death before I reached Four Moons House?”
He stopped sipping, his eyes raised to mine with the rim of the cup poised at his lips. He blinked several times, as at light breaking suddenly in a dim room, and lowered the cup. “I am at a loss as to what may have precipitated this outburst.”
No one ever said I was wise. I had meant to keep silence, to be meek, to not extend my claws.
“Torn from my family with no explanation. My lineage and clothing insulted. Left hungry because perfectly good food and wine do not meet your ridiculous standards of taste. Almost killed by an act of sabotage that may have done untold damage to buildings and neighborhoods and for all I know to innocent people as well as precipitating, as far as I can tell, a riot whose mob might well have torn me limb from limb, and you besides, coincidentally. I had to be given coat and gloves by your coachman! Shall I go on?”
As the force of my words sank in, his lips set and his expression stiffened. The fire melted away to embers shuddering among the ashes. “I think that is enough.”
I took a step back from such a cold hammer of anger that I felt it like a blow. He set down the cup so hard that it shattered. Like glass. Liquid splattered. He stared at the remains with an odd expression, as if he’d startled himself. Then, without one further word, he walked away, leaving me trembling. What a fool I knew myself to be, recalling Aunt’s whispered words: For now, you must endure this. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on the family.
While it was true that the armies of the Second Alliance had battled Camjiata to a standstill outside the city of Havery thirteen years ago, it was Four Moons House and the seventeen mage Houses allied with them that had actually destroyed Camjiata’s budding empire. Four Moons House could destroy the Barahals as easily as a nest of mice could be crushed beneath a giant’s boot.
I collected my breathing. I wiped my brow and then pulled on the gloves, pretending I was dressing myself in armor,
a shell of control behind which I could hide.
“Maestra?” The coachman indicated the bread and cheese. “If you wish, you may finish what is left.”
“Don’t you and the… ah… the footman need refreshment?”
“We are already fed, maestra.”
Fear was a dull ache in my belly, as the stories would put it, but I was a Barahal, descendant of a long line of professional soldiers. You sleep when you can. You eat when you can. I ate it up quickly, for it was excellent bread and even more excellent cheese, sharp enough to make my eyes water. The coachman took away the platter and my cup and left the shattered cup beside the dying fire. The handle lay torqued in the dirt, warped by the power of his anger.
With a heavy heart, I trudged to the carriage, mounted the steps, and sat opposite him, next to a thick fur blanket someone had unearthed and tossed onto my seat. Warmth for the journey! I did not want to speak, but I knew I must.
“It is big enough to cover two,” I said, the words sounding thin and forced.
After a hesitation, he said frostily, “My thanks, but I’ve no need.”
He did not look at me as I wrapped the blanket over my lap and tucked it around my shoulders. The journey back to the road seemed even more jolting and jarring than it had coming in, but perhaps that was only the hammer of my heart as I waited for him to say something else.
Which he did not.
The road took a steep slanting descent down the northeastern slope of the chalk escarpment. We rolled into Anderida, the great chace: forest country marked at intervals by villages. In ancient days, the Romans had made charcoal in these uplands for the forges where they smithed their weapons of empire. We passed the rise of Greensand Camp with its old Roman posting station and signposts of a crossroads. The few folk out on the village street halted to watch us pass. Beyond the village, we passed men leading pack mules laden with wood.
We descended to lower ground and waited at the ferry crossing over the River Tarrant, whose name the princes of the Adurni Celts had taken as their title, so my father had written, in honor of the goddess once believed to dwell in the river. A prosperous village—I did not know its name—had sprung up around the ford but at this time of year, folk were busy in the dormant orchards and the withered fields, gathering in the last gleanings, stacking firewood, cleaning the privies, sweeping chimneys, and bringing in mast for the winter ahead. My husband watched this activity as if its rustic simplicity fascinated him, but in truth I could not guess his thoughts.
