by Kate Elliott
“Oh, Bee,” I whispered.
Roderic whistled softly.
“There. I’ve said it, and I did not die.” She choked on the words, wept gustily, and finally began to laugh in the way crying people do, who cannot help but find their own sobbing ridiculous. “Oh, Cat. Then the worst thing was that the next night, I dreamed about you and Cold Fort. I had informed Legate Amadou Barry that I certainly would never again speak one single word to him beyond what was absolutely necessary to the customary pleasantries of greeting and departing. I had to eat my words and go to him and ask him for such a tremendous favor, to ride off on what he must have imagined was a pointless chase after a cloud-headed girl’s stupid dreams.”
“And he said?”
“How I hate men! He said yes instantly and asked if there was anything else he could do to serve me if only to make up for the insult he had not meant to offer me. But now you are here, and that is all that matters. So, I’m done. Do you have a plan yet? What happened to you?”
I nodded at Roderic. Like a soldier taking an order, he rose and went to lean against the door so no one could barge in to interrupt our cabal.
“The mansa’s troops are after me; it’s true. I think the best thing to do is let the Barry family shelter us until the solstice. Once you gain your majority, Four Moons House has no contractual hold on you.”
“If they want me that badly, they’ll find a way to get me, don’t you think?”
“Yes, and we’ll need a plan for that, too. But maybe after the solstice, the mansa won’t feel obliged to kill me, which prospect I selfishly admit pleases me no end. If the Barry family will shelter Rory and me with you, then we have two days to rest—”
Roderic raised a hand, beckoning silence. His lips curled back and his shoulders tensed, as if he were about to hiss. “Cat, this doesn’t smell good,” he murmured.
I looked at Bee, who was still at the window. Her brows twitched down. I slid over to the door beside Roderic. We had entered the house through the front door onto a long entryway similar to the design of the house in which I had grown up. Indeed, we’d left our coats and cloaks there. I pressed my cheek against the door and heard the front door shut and an exchange of surprised greetings in the entryway.
“I expected you sooner than this, Marius!”
“So I would have come, had my cousin not detained me. I don’t like it, Amadou. My cousin says we are required to give Four Moons House what they want in this matter.”
My blood ran cold in my veins.
“We must hand both young women over to the magisters?” asked Amadou.
“There’s terrible news. Camjiata has escaped his island prison.”
Bad news can strike with the deadly precision of a knife stabbing up under the ribs. In the entryway, Amadou Barry gasped aloud.
“The story goes that the girl may be crucial to efforts to track him down before he calls together a new army,” continued Marius.
“Catherine Hassi Barahal?”
“No. The other one.”
“But Four Moons House is trying to kill Catherine Barahal.”
“Do you know what my cousin, the prince, said to me? For you can be sure I said those exact words to him. He said”—here Lord Marius’s voice changed, as an actor’s does when playing a different role; in this case, he spoke in a reedy, nasal tenor meant as a satire—“ ‘one death cannot count against the tens of thousands who will come to grief if Camjiata rises again.’ And do you know what I said to him, Amadou?”
“You said,” interrupted Amadou, “that someone else could marry Beatrice who could keep her safe and secure.”
“I certainly did not! The sooner you purge yourself of this infatuation, the easier you’ll sleep at night. I said, that accepting the need for a mage House to secure the lass through magical binding, don’t they have other cold mages in their house who can marry her without having to kill the first one?”
I grabbed Roderic’s wrist and tugged him over to Bee as I spoke. “I’m coming to think this business of marriage is tremendously dangerous for young women. We have to get out of here.”
“Oh, good,” said Roderic. “I was getting bored. I can cause a distraction.”
Bee set her hand on the latch. “What manner of distraction?”
“You won’t believe it,” I said.
“You’d be surprised what I would believe,” she retorted. “I have actually read your father’s journals, you know.”
“He’s not my father.” I did not mean the words to come out so defiantly.
She looked at Roderic. “Be spectacular, Cousin.” The latch opened easily. Like everything in this house, it was well crafted and fastidiously tended. In the entryway, the two men were still arguing in low voices. From outside came the tik-tik of bare branches disturbed by a rising wind. Dusk, and then night, would hide us, but it would also become bitterly cold.
“We’ll draw attention without cloaks or coats,” I said, fingering the handle of my cane, now trembling with the hidden hilt of the ghost sword as night approached. “I have coin left, but what use is that to us if we freeze?”
Bee secured the sketchbook in her bodice. “Callie showed me where there’s a night market for cheap clothing. I also know how to get over this garden wall.” She swung a leg over the sill. “Let’s go.”
I looked at Rory.
“I’ll track you down,” he said.
I took hold of his hand. “They are soldiers.”
He smiled, looking supremely satisfied with himself. “So were the others.”
“Don’t kill him,” whispered Bee hoarsely. She grasped Rory’s hands with her own. “Please don’t…”
“Little cousin,” he said, “if it displeases you, then I would not dare.”
Bee nodded, slipped over the edge, dropped into the garden, and ran for the shelter of the nearest hedge.
“Rory,” I said, but the words were like whetted steel, too sharp to speak.
“I will keep them busy only long enough so you have space to run. Then I’ll run, too. But, Cat, if they were to cut my spirit from this flesh, I am not sure if I would perish in truth or merely return to my own land. You must not regret this. We are kin. I am bound to help you. Now go quickly.”
I kissed him on each cheek, then slipped over the sill and, ghost sword in hand, dropped down onto a graveled strip that ringed the house. How long ago that night seemed when I’d clambered over broken glass at the inn. Clearly I was fated to be spending an inordinate amount of effort escaping out the back through gardens.
I did not look back as I dashed into the shadow of the hedge where Bee was waiting for me. At the yew trees, I laced fingers together and made a brace for her foot; she climbed. Once she braced herself in a perch, she pulled me up after. Branches dragged at my clothes. Leaves like the kiss of thin, cold lips pressed against my cheeks. As we surveyed our next move, a clamor erupted from the house.
She climbed up on my shoulder and heaved herself to the top of the wall. With her own weight as counterbalance, she hauled and I scrambled up beside her. Poised on the wall’s crest, we scanned the dim expanse of the garden behind, the garden before, and the buildings—stables below and loft above—that abutted the mews.
If you can’t go back, you have to go forward.
She braced herself across the wall, and using her arms as leverage, I lowered myself into the adjacent garden; she dropped, and I caught her. Within shrouding trees, a dog barked twice; a pair of mastiffs came whining out of the blur of night and sniffed at our hands.
“Which way?” I asked as she rubbed them behind the ears, and they whimpered in ecstasy.
“Out through this stable, across the mews, into the stable, and through the house opposite. They won’t expect that.” She touched her blessing bracelet to her lips. “Blessed Tanit, protector of women, be merciful to your humble and devoted daughters, and open all doors in our favor.”
“Selah,” I echoed. One of the big dogs turned its head to smell my o
utstretched hand, then dismissed me as a person of no interest because Bee was there to slobber over. “It’s fortunate that dogs love you.”
A musket went off, and then a second; each report made me flinch, but it was too late to help Rory now. Barking wildly, the dogs raced away down the wall. We trampled through fallow beds and fetched up against a tall and impenetrably thick hedge.
“Call those dogs in before the lady calls for them to be slaughtered!” a man called from the other side of the hedge.
“Yes, Maresciallo,” said a lighter, younger male voice.
Not ten paces from us, a gate opened and a figure strode through, whistling sharply toward the barking dogs, by now lost in the shadows at the end of the garden near the house. Bee and I grabbed the gate before it could swing shut. I peered across the open space on the other side of the hedge, where a single lamp had been lit and hung by the stable entrance. No one was in sight. We dashed to the stable.
The pleasant smell of horse manure, hay, and warmth wafted out to us through an open door. Two men were talking, but not close by. I slid into a dark space warmed by a pair of hearths and lined with stalls and the big breathing presence of horses. Bee followed me. We kept to the shadows and moved fast. The men were talking on the narrow stairs that led to the loft, only their trouser-clad legs visible. One called to someone above who was, evidently, trying to see into the house next door to discover what had caused the commotion and musket fire. The massive double-gated doors leading into the mews were closed but unbarred, and I pressed Bee back before she could grab the latch. Someone was on the other side. The latch moved, and we shrank back into the corner, Bee behind me and me nothing more than the shadows and the unswept straw and the plaster of the wall as a young man dressed in servant’s livery charged in from outside, yelling.
“Nothing in the mews, Maresciallo. But a fierce lot of noise!” He trotted past us to the stairs.
We slipped through and out into the dark mews and straight across without pause to the stables on the other side. They were shut tight, and when I pressed my cheek against the latch, I could feel they were chained. There was no way in.
Bee was already moving toward the dead end of the mews, and just as she reached the next stable entrance, one of its doors was flung open. She flattened herself against the wall as a man strode into the mews and crossed to the stable entrance of Amadou Barry’s aunt’s house. It was all the chance we needed.
We slid inside and sped through the musty stables, where we felt the presence of not a single living thing, not even a rat. Just as we coursed out the door that led into the garden, a voice from the loft spoke, inquiringly, in a lilting and somewhat nasal language I had never before heard. Emerging into the garden, we heard shouts, but they were not close by. They weren’t on our trail yet. I heard no more musket shot.
A straight path graveled in white pebbles led from the stables to the back of the house. On a modest portico lined with four slender stone columns, glass-paned doors, shuttered and locked, faced the garden. Bee pulled a pin from her hair and coaxed one to open. We entered a paneled sitting room, its furniture shrouded in muffling covers, the air bone cold and the fireplace so dead I could not taste any memory of fire and ash. The room had two doors.
“I can’t see,” Bee murmured.
I guided her through the maze of furniture to the door opposite the portico and leaned against it. In the chamber beyond, no fire burned, but I felt a shallow breathing presence so faint that if both rooms had not been so quiet, I would have missed its tremor.
I tapped her shoulder, and she crept with me along a carpeted runner to the other door. As I set my hand on the latch, it turned. The door caved open, and we faced a woman holding in her right hand a five-branched candelabra with all five candles alight and, in her left, a small book, pages open. She had the most interesting features, Avarian in the length and fold of her eyes but with a round, moonlike face and eyes so dark they seemed black. Indeed, she looked something like the scarred foreign woman I had seen in the County Members inn in Lemanis, only she had age on her shoulders, a grim set to her mouth, and wore spectacles with one lens of clear glass and another that looked so frosted as with the crackle of ice that she could not possibly see through it.
“Oh!” said Bee, clapping a hand to the top of the sketchbook as if she had meant to theatrically pound fist to bosom. “You frightened me, la! I came to see the maester. He invited me, you know.” She tittered inanely. “We met at Surety Gardens, for you know they say a man is sure to meet an obliging woman—”
The woman closed the book with such a snap that both Bee and I jumped. She gestured imperatively, imperiously, and as if ensorceled, Bee and I meekly followed her to the next door, which was already open and leading into the chamber I had just avoided.
The walls, lined with shelves, were insulated with books.
There was no fire in the hearth, but despite this, the chamber was perfectly warm, its heat the splendid calm of sun-warmed rock. Three dogs lay on a rug, alert but eerily silent as they watched us enter. A pair of lamps set on side tables burned sweet oil, their glow illuminating an upholstered chair in which sat an ancient and very frail man. He wore a light red and gold silk jacket over loose trousers and a pair of black house slippers. His white hair was bound in a braid that trailed over his shoulder. His face was thin, and his hands were as bony as claws. Indeed, he looked far too weak to rise, but when he looked up at the pair of us trembling on the threshold, his gaze stunned us into immobility.
With a sharp inhalation, Bee stiffened, her fingers tensing on mine. “I recognize you,” she said in a low, almost pained tone. “I saw you—I saw this library—in a dream.”
“Of course you did,” he said in a labored hiss, as if gruel had filled his lungs and made it hard to breathe. “I have waited, all these years, as all creatures wait for death to approach them.”
As he spoke these words, he looked away from Bee to me. His blue eyes had the blaze of fire, like echoes of the lamps but far more penetrating, able to pierce the stygian depths. Then he blinked, and I staggered and caught myself as from a fall.
He said to Bee, “I knew you would come.” His words were like a spell. She walked as in a trance across the carpet to his chair.
“Bee!” I said, although I could not move, not even to lift my cane, which suddenly weighed like lead in my hand. My eyes watered as though I were standing too near a bonfire.
To my utter and heart-stopping astonishment, she knelt before his chair. He kissed her forehead as gently as a father kisses the brow of his child when he sends her out into the cruel world, knowing she will meet bitter disappointment and sharp pain before she has any hope of finding happiness and peace.
She looked up, her face aglow in the lamplight, so beautiful that it was as if he said the words out loud—“so beautiful”—only I heard no utterance. He bent farther yet, and for an instant I saw a different face, a younger face so wild and strong and striking, as if years and decades had unwoven from his skin.
He touched his lips to her lips, scarcely more than a butterfly’s kiss. A touch. A breath, given from him to her. He drew back. Bee’s eyes flew wide and she collapsed in a faint.
“Bee!” I cried, but I could not move.
On the floor, Bee took in a hard breath; she rose to her feet, staring at him, but she said nothing, as if he had stolen her voice.
“Now I am released,” he said. “I have given you my heart’s fire to help you walk your dreams in the war to come. Go quickly. Take Montagu Street to Serpens Close. There, at the back past the well, you will find a stair that will lead you under the old guildhall to a path alongside the Duvno Stream. After that, you are on your own, for beyond that I cannot see. When the soldiers and mages come calling, as they will shortly, my servants will have departed, and I will be dead.”
The servant’s candelabra dipped before us, as with a bow, and we stumbled away down the hall to the front door. The woman opened it, and when we passed over onto
the threshold, she shut it behind us without a word. Bee and I stood shivering on the steps, his words like knives in our hearts. A clatter of feet and hooves drummed a swift rhythm as, away behind us, the pursuit began in earnest. Blessed Tanit. What had happened to Rory?
I groped for and grasped Bee’s hand. “Who was that?” I whispered.
She drew in a shuddering breath and found her voice.
“I don’t know.”
29
In the confines of Serpens Close, we discovered a stair that led, just as the old man had said, to a path along Duvno Stream, a bricked-in sewer whose stench was leavened only by the steadily dropping night temperature. We hurried for some way along this path and left it to make our way through deserted streets to humbler districts and eventually the festive sprawl of the winter market on the shore of the Solent River. Here we bargained for winter coats, the kind worn by women who must work out of doors through the fierce winter chill, and cloaks to go over them to double as blankets. Bee traded her elegant frock for sturdier garb, and we stood in the cold street and shivered, heads bent together and my hand on the hilt of my ghost sword in case anyone accosted us.
“We need legal help,” I said. “What about those trolls I met?”
She looked askance at me. “You met trolls? Spoke to them?”
“I liked them, Bee. So would you have. But I don’t know where their offices are. We can scarcely go searching this time of night. We have to find somewhere to hide until the sun goes down on solstice eve. Tonight, tomorrow day, the next night, and the next day. That’s all.”
