Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  I looked over my shoulder. The young male cat sprawled along the other half of the length of my stone bench, ears twitching with cat dreams. All the cats were drowsing except for the big female, who watched with interest as I stirred. The sky had grown dark, as with night; the fire burned as it ever had; the djeli played her music.

  I sat up cautiously, not wanting to startle a saber-toothed cat. The music ceased as the djeli pulled a flourish out of her bow and lowered the fiddle. Fire and shadow flatter women, so it is said, but her rosy youth was not the fire’s flattery. I recognized her as the same djeli who had been here from the very first, only now she looked a mere decade older than I was.

  The cat stirred, rolled, and with its weight pushed me right off the stone. I shrieked and, without thinking, shoved it back, and it batted at me, claws sheathed. It did not know its own strength. The paw, connecting with my shoulder, sent me spinning, but I laughed and steadied myself against the brick wall surrounding the fire. This hearth was a center point set equidistant from the three exterior points of oak tree, dun, and well. A triangle, in fact. Bee, with her mathematical mind, would have seen it from the first. Andevai had clearly understood it when he’d dragged me back into the shelter of the oak to escape the tide. This place was warded. Beyond the wards of oak, tower, and well lay the spirit world in all its danger and beauty; here, one might rest without fear.

  “Why did the cats not kill him?” I asked. “When we first crossed over, they leaped on him. I see now they were protecting me. But why did they not kill and eat him?”

  She frowned. “Marriage does not stop at two. A woman and a man may marry, but they are not alone, her and him only. His family and her family also are bound by obligations and rights. To have devoured him just like that would have shown very little respect for the relationship, don’t you think?”

  “You’re saying these cats are my kin.”

  The young male yawned, showing his teeth, but the gesture offered no threat. He was just slow to wake up. He leaped—more like a flow of muscle and flesh—down off the stone.

  “And how,” I continued, as questions like rain fell into my head, making a great deal of noisy splash, “did you even know Andevai and I are—were—married?”

  “How could I not know? It breathes in the air between you.”

  I bit my lip. Maybe she had not meant desire. Andevai and I had been chained into a contract by magic, a chain anchored in the spirit world. It was likely the denizens of this place could recognize such bindings even if they seemed invisible to me.

  “What does it mean to walk the dreams of dragons?” I asked.

  “Like you I am curious.”

  I laughed. “Spoken truly. How are you come here?”

  “I bide where my chains bind me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone has troubles.”

  I nodded, respecting her limits. It was time to go. “How do I cross back into the mortal world, maestra?”

  “There is a door, is there not?”

  A door! I looked at the dun, with its closed door and shuttered window. A forbidding place because of its air of emptiness. But it might not be empty. It might be full. An entire world might lie inside the dun.

  I laughed bitterly as I made ready to depart, layering on my cloaks, the humble covering the fine. Hidden in plain sight, like a sword that appears to be a cane in daylight. I tied bottle and coin pouch to my belt, fixed my sword so I could draw it easily, and drew on my gloves.

  “May your day pass well, maestra,” I said to the djeli.

  “And yours. May your journey go well.”

  “And your fire burn strongly.”

  One could go on in this way for a while, both coming and going, but she released me.

  “May we meet again when it is proper to do so,” she said, and put the fiddle to her chin and played such a sprightly tune that my feet wished to walk. I hurried across to the dun. I eased the blade from its sheath just enough to make a tiny cut on my little finger. Sweat prickled on my back and neck as a drop of blood welled from the skin. I touched it to the latch, then pushed. It clicked down with a resonance as deep as that of a struck bell, ringing long and low through the stone. The door swung easily open.

  I sucked in a breath of suddenly raw, cold air and braced myself for the temperature change. Just as I stepped through, a shadow leaped from behind and knocked me forward and down to my hands and knees. I felt the hot tremor of a monster’s breath on my neck, and with my heart thundering in a panic, I scrambled forward through rubble until I slammed my knee against a jumble of stone blocks and the pain brought me up short. A dusting of snow covered the ruins of an ancient dun, its walls standing only head height with the crumbling courses resembling teeth with gaps between. The sun shone in splendor, but no heat touched the frozen earth. My nose turned to ice. The air I sucked in was so cold it stabbed in my chest. My fingers had already begun to stiffen. After a dazed moment of paralysis, I floundered out of the ruins through cold-whitened grass.

  Ahead stood a venerable oak tree so ancient that its trunk was as vast as a house, and it was actually bulging, almost as if two trees had grown together to become one. A faint buzzing tingled on my tongue; I could almost taste the sound.

  “My pardon, maestra! Where did you come from?”

  I turned.

  A young woman stood beside a humble well ringed with stones and covered with a thatched roof. Bundled in heavy winter clothes and a man’s long wool coat, she looked used to hard work and to laughter between times. Two empty buckets sat at her feet; she held a pole in her right hand, ready to whack me.

  “Ah,” I said wisely. I staggered a step sideways and caught myself on the tip of my cane. In daylight, in the mortal world, my sword appeared again as a simple black cane. “I was just… in the ruins. I’m traveling, and I had to stop and… ah… relieve myself.”

  “You don’t want to be stopping here.” She did not lower the pole. “There was a jelly buried in that oak a hundred years ago. She haunts this place still. They say she was a powerful and wicked woman, Lucia Kante, and that she eats children. That’s what my mam told me when I was wee and inclined to go wandering off. I’m sure it’s not true, because only the savages who live in the Barren Lands eat babies, and they’re not civilized enough to have jellies. But it’s still better to keep your distance. You know how jellies and bards will mock you if you don’t give them what they want.”

  “Oh,” I said, displaying my gift for fluent and clever speech. The buzzing of bees spiked until it rattled in my head, then ceased as abruptly as if a door had shut.

  Suddenly, it seemed I had got my bearings and could see beyond dun and oak and well. Some paces past the well ran a road. A pair of wagons, one coming and one going, rolled along, their occupants paying no attention to us. The road led to a town sprawled from the height down a gentle slope that led to the flat Levels below. A very old stone wall contained the town, and even from here I marked its arched gate with the name LEMANIS carved across the lintel.

  “I’m Emilia,” she added, lowering the pole. “It’s cold weather to be traveling.”

  “Well met,” I said, “and the gods’ blessings on you. I’m called—”

  She shrieked.

  A striking young man sauntered out of the ruins. He had a reddish brown cast of skin; his coal-black hair, straight and lovely, fell unbound halfway down his back. That he was lithe and long, well muscled and well proportioned, was easy to see since he was stark naked.

  She stared for one long breath, then grabbed the buckets and ran away toward the gate.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “Cat,” he said, looking quite put out. “How can you say such a thing? You know me.”

  “I’ve never seen you before in my life. How do you know my name?”

  “Have not seen me before in your life? None of that mattered, that we came when you called? Tracked you down far out of our normal range so we could protect you from th
at high-strung pretty boy prancing around in all his flash and conceit? That means nothing to you?”

  I groped for and found solid stone. I sat. Hard. “You’re looking pretty flash right now yourself,” I choked out. “You’re naked.”

  He did not even have the decency to look down at his exposed body. “I’m not naked. I’m in my skin.”

  I untied my outer cloak and threw it at him, and he caught it and flung it around his shoulders with a grin, as if he enjoyed the fabric’s rippling flare.

  “Who are you?” I demanded again, as my heart sank like a stone cast into the sea. The cursed creature had followed me over from the spirit world. This could not be a good thing.

  He had a pout that would make your hair stand on end, a look that accused you of not doing exactly as you ought to know was right in regard to his comfort.

  “Cat,” he said, with a sigh that shuddered through the length of him and contained the entirety of his disappointment in my stubborn blindness, “I am your brother.”

  25

  “I have no brother.”

  The young man man drew a hand over his glossy hair exactly as a cat might preen. I thought he would lick his own hand, but he did not. “It’s true we weren’t birthed from the same womb, but the same male sired us. How am I not, then, your brother?”

  “You are either mad or deluded.”

  “It is so tiring to watch you being stubborn. And I admit, I feel a bit of a chill. Is it always this cold in the Deathlands? How does one cope?”

  “By wearing clothes, for one thing. In your current state of undress, you’ll be hauled in by the local wardens.”

  “How complicated this all is!” he said with a grin that, despite my shock, made my lips twitch. “How very exciting! Will I wear something like you have on? I thought maybe that was your skin, rather wrinkled and smelly, but you never know with creatures over here, do you?”

  “I am wearing women’s clothing. You will wear men’s clothing.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Yes. Now be quiet and let me think. Come over here by the oak so we can stand out of sight of restless eyes.” He followed me obediently enough and trailed a hand along the bark. I rested both hands against the trunk, palms flat, and shut my eyes, but all I heard was a buzzing sound, as if thousands of bees were confined within. The sound made my flesh tingle and my mind fill with insane thoughts.

  We came when you called. What had the eru had me do? Call for my kin at the stone pillar. I’d thought my call had somehow broken the mansa’s hold on the carriage, and maybe it had, but what if my voice had reached farther yet into the unknown expanse of the spirit world? What did I know of the chains that bind kin in the spirit world or how far they might reach?

  His face resembled mine, although his eyes had more of a yellowish orange tinge while mine were commonly described as amber. His hair was so thick and silky, as black as if swallowed by night, that it alone would capture people’s notice, as mine often did. His skin was darker than mine, but that was not uncommon here in the north where the progenitors and grandparents of siblings and cousins could range from the palest of Celts to the darkest of Mande and might include forebears of Roman, Kena’ani, or other ancestry as well.

  Yet looks are not everything. At this moment I felt rather massively annoyed by him in a way that reminded me of being annoyed at Bee. If I were a cat, I might have said he had the right scent, if by scent one embraces a larger concept having to do with smell, taste, heart, bond, well-being, and a sense of belonging.

  I stepped back from the oak. “For the sake of argument, let’s say I believe that you believe you are my brother. What am I to call you?”

  “ ‘Brother’?”

  “Haven’t you a name?”

  He pulled his long hair through his fingers as if surprised and delighted by a new toy. “I know who I am, but I can put no name to that. Others know me, but that relationship is not reducible to a word.” He dipped his head toward my ear and inhaled deeply, audibly, as if inhaling me and who I was. He winced and drew back. “Whew! You need cleaning.”

  “Why did you call me Cat? You cannot have known that is the pet name I’ve been called by my”—family—“by others.”

  “But you are Cat.” He clearly seemed to expect I would treat him in the manner of a long-lost relative, when in fact he was just another chance-met stranger on the road. “You don’t believe me,” he added. “Why else would we come to aid you, and be able to find you, if you did not call for us?”

  “We?”

  “My mother and aunt and sister and cousins and niece.”

  “I met your mother already?”

  “Of course you did.”

  “She was the djeli?”

  He laughed. “Cat, you are not stupid. So I wish you would not pretend to be.”

  I cast my gaze at the sky. Clouds softened the horizon; the sun sank, and soon it would be night and deathly cold even for a denizen of the spirit world masquerading in human form in the mortal world. The cold air congealed my words, or maybe I did not want to say them, because saying them would make it true. Or make me believe it could be true.

  “Are you saying you are one of the saber-toothed cats who came to my rescue?”

  He sighed as if, having told me all along there was a view to the outside, he was forced to confirm it by opening the shutters himself.

  “Are you saying my father is a saber-toothed cat?”

  He waved a hand dismissively. He had the most absorbing way of moving, like beauty made flesh. “Oh… him. What does anyone know about him? My mother once called him a… How would you say it?” He tapped his chin. “A tomcat?”

  “If you mean to say he roams around to satisfy his base desires, fighting with other males and impregnating females, then, yes, he would be called a tomcat.”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  “That’s not a flattering portrait of the man—the creature—who sired me!”

  “No,” he agreed without heat. No doubts or unmet dreams about his sire tormented him! “Didn’t your mother tell you anything about him?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh,”he said. “That happens here in the Deathlands, doesn’t it?” He broke off to eye the heavens with a squint, frowning briefly. “The day is not much longer meant to brighten us here, is it? Will it be warmer at night?”

  I glanced toward the road. The fields wore a cloak of snow, the kind whose surface has grown hard from days exposed to sun and wind and bitter cold. Traffic passed at intervals; on such a day, not many folk cared to be out and about. A man leading a laden donkey glanced our way, and a party of armed men dressed in tabards to mark their service to a nobleman’s household clattered past.

  “No, it will be colder, and we will freeze to death. So the first thing is, we’ve got to travel without drawing notice to ourselves.” How quickly I proceeded from “I” to “we.” I made the calculations in my head. I had to reach Adurnam and warn Bee. I was alone, and young, and female. He was male, definitely that, and it appeared he felt obligated to protect me. Also, I was beginning to really shiver. “We will walk into Lemanis. You will keep your mouth shut. I will find us a modest room in a modest inn. There, you will remain while I hunt clothing for you.”

  “Mama will approve of you. Out hunting for me already!”

  “Be serious! You must say nothing until I have devised a suitable story that people may not believe but will accept.”

  I started to walk, and I was relieved that, as he strode beside me, he had the prudence to keep the cloak pulled shut with one hand so as not to display any more of himself than he had to. His bare feet flashing below the hem looked frightful enough, padding across the snow. We reached the road and clambered up onto its pavement, an artifact of the old empire.

  “First of all, you must have a name.” I frowned at him. He did look like me; no one would think it exceptional if I claimed him as my brother. The most singular difference was in our complexions, mine l
ighter and somewhat golden, not uncommon among the Kena’ani, while he had that reddish brown coloring. “Roderic,” I said, “for your complexion. I’ll call you Rory for your pet name.”

  “I like to be petted.” His smile startled a pair of women beating rugs outside the gates. They simpered as he slowed to eye them very much in the manner of a tomcat thinking of going on the prowl.

  I elbowed him hard in the ribs. “Move on, you imbecile. Beyond anything, we must not attract notice.” With him sauntering beside me, it was too late for that.

  The surrounding gardens and fields and copses lay bare under winter’s hands. The view opened westward across the Levels to where the sun sank into the high country of Anderida.

  We passed under the unguarded gate. What was there to guard against? The princes and mage Houses kept the roads and towns at peace under their rule, and while a few cohorts of restless youth might ride in small bands in the countryside pretending to raid cattle, or hiring themselves out to a lord or a mage House for a season or two, most such bands had long since been absorbed into the great households of the noble and the wealthy.

  Lemanis bore the stamp of better days. Its streets did not bustle. Some of the stone buildings had fallen into disrepair, and gardens lay fallow in generous yards where, by the evidence of mounds of dirt and decayed piles of debris, other structures had once stood. A pair of competing inns always stand close by any town gate. Both appeared modest and reasonably clean. Trained by merchants, I felt no compunction in asking to see the available rooms in each establishment and then afterward playing the one off the other given that few travelers could be expected in this cold season to warm half-empty coffers. Young and shivering as we were, we might even have awoken sympathy in the breasts of these robust innkeepers. As odd as a barefooted and clothing-less man in winter would appear, the tale that he had been robbed and stripped of all his belongings, including baggage, carriage, and horses, while his beloved sister cowered in protective hiding behind a hedge of yew offered a fine incentive for luring in locals for a drink in the days after we had gone on our way.