Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  We went upstairs to the first-floor parlor, where we had profligately lit the stove with the last of the coal and the chamber with our last two beeswax candles. We settled in the window seat, she with her arms hooked around her bent knees, tucking them close to her chest, and me with my father’s journal, number 46, on my lap. The knit bag, now our only possession, sat on the cushion, its bulge enveloping her sketchbook, the singed copy of Lies the Romans Told, and the journal Uncle had given me last night.

  “I was thinking,” she said.

  “Dangerous at all times, and with a tendency to cause pain in those who are unaccustomed to such exercise,” I remarked.

  But then I opened journal 46 to the end, to the conversation between the young natural historian and the lieutenant while the aurora borealis played its changes across an arctic sky. Knowing now what I knew, the words fell entirely differently. How could I have missed the hints in their chance comments and asides? They had known each other before this; it was so clear from their joking manner, the quick rejoinders, the shared knowledge of things they shouldn’t have known so easily about each other. A new perspective gives a person new eyes. Knowing what I now knew about Andevai—

  “Cat! Are you paying attention? You look a little flushed. I said, perhaps we’d be better off to go to the academy and throw ourselves on the mercy of the headmaster.”

  Startled, I retreated behind a glower. “The one who handed you over to Legate Amadou Barry? I think not.”

  She sighed. “No, I suppose not. I’m just exhausted by thinking of having to haul Uncle Daniel’s journals across Adurnam.” Abruptly, she sucked in breath so hard I looked up and followed her gaze out the window and over Falle Square. “Fiery Shemesh! What’s this?”

  A black coach rumbled down the west side of the square, pulled by four horses as pale as milk. My heart leaped in my chest, or it would have, if I’d had a heart, which Bee so often accused me of lacking. But after all, it was not the coach I thought it was: This vehicle bore a crest of four moons—crescent, half, full, and new—and its coachman was a heavyset man with black skin and its paired footmen a matching set of blond Celts. The horses were ordinary horses with brown specks flecking their gray coats. Their hooves fell solidly on stone. I wondered if I would ever see the eru and the coachman again.

  Four Moons House had come to claim its new property the moment the festival was over. The coach drew up before the house, and the footmen hopped gracefully down to open the door and pull down two steps. The man and woman who climbed out were not cold mages but wore the serious garb and tidy demeanor of accountants and housekeepers, stewards come to take possession and take inventory. Seeing them emerge, I felt a dull ache in my heart. Was it sadness at losing the only home I remembered? Selfish disappointment that Andevai had not come himself? Relief that I did not yet have to figure out what to say to him?

  We rose as the stewards were shown in. They were reserved and polite.

  “I am Maestra Fatou,” said the woman, “and this is my cousin, Maester Conor. We are come at the mansa’s order to take over the running of the household. Also, he did not think it appropriate for two young women to live alone without older female companionship.”

  “Of course,” said Bee. “Our thanks. We’re a little nervous of the soldiers, I admit.”

  “Have they shown you any disrespect?” she asked sharply.

  “No, no,” said Bee in a tone that suggested otherwise. “We have been locking ourselves in here at night. We sleep here, for no fires will light on the second floor, with the magister sleeping up there. If you don’t mind, could we wait until morning to show you the house? You may take the cook’s room downstairs, by the kitchen, where there’s a fire, or bunk with the soldiers in the dining room below us.”

  They left, and we made ready. We sat in darkness and silence and warmth, waiting for the midnight bell. When the lonely tenor cried the night watch across the city, I took Uncle’s keys and unlocked the door into his private office. We padded in, and I unsheathed my sword and sliced through the cold magic that bound shut the latch. We paused, listening, but no alarm stirred the house; the magister was asleep and would, we hoped, note nothing until he woke. Bee positioned herself by the window where, weeks ago, an unwanted visitor had climbed in unannounced and unasked for, slipping through the protective cawl. I went downstairs in my slippered feet, carrying a lantern lit with the last beeswax candle. I pretended to trip and stumble as I came to the back door.

  The mage House soldiers were well trained. They were perfectly awake: two inside and two outside. I held the lantern up right into their faces, to confound their night vision.

  “We forgot to take a chamber pot upstairs,” I said. “I’ve got to use the latrine.”

  They opened the door, and I quickly shone the lantern light in the faces of the outside pair. I made a business of exclaiming over the bitter cold, and my slippered feet, and how I had forgotten my cloak, and should I go back and get it, and on in this vein as I listened for the faint creak of Uncle’s office window opening above and the fainter creak of the stout branch on which Bee was climbing out to the wall. We’d climbed that path before. We Barahals were trained to be spies, after all.

  When I was sure she had gone, I used the latrine and made my way back to the first-floor parlor. I locked myself in, pulled on boots and coat, secured the knit bag with its books around my torso, stoked the fire, and made up lumpy figures beneath the feather bed we’d thrown over the window-seat cushion. Then I went into Uncle’s office and locked the door between office and parlor. The office door leading onto the landing was already locked from inside. If we were fortunate, they would not think to break down the doors until morning.

  With my ghost sword slung tightly over my back, I climbed out and crouched on the wide branch to close the window behind me. Some instinct or training or sound alerted the guards standing out back, and they glanced around and up, but I was part of the tree, nothing more than a skeletal winter branch, a little stouter than most, but nothing to notice. Nothing to see.

  Bee and I met in the mews. We avoided the gaslit thoroughfares and made our way through the cold winter night, me at the front with my good eyes and my ghost sword to mark the path, Bee following tightly in my footsteps with an ordinary cane of her own to sweep the street for obstacles. We found our way to the Blessed Tanit’s temple near the academy, whose gates remained unlocked in every season and at all times of the day and night. Three bags, Callie had been instructed to give them. One was full with the last of the grain from our larder, given as an offering for the priests. The other two held my father’s journals and a few other items crammed in with them: four silver candlesticks, four beeswax candles, and some stockings, shifts, and underthings that had been left by Aunt Tilly when the family had fled. What coin we had, we’d sewn into our bodices. The priests slept soundly in their winter cottage; I had no trouble retrieving the two bags, except for their weight.

  It was a cursed long and struggling walk hauling them across the dark city. Winter’s cold deadened the night. Fortunately, no festival debris littered the streets to trip us. The balloon rides, the ice fair with its food booths and games, the processions to the temples, the public banquets at which beggars snatched from the filth of the streets would preside over the only good meal they would eat all year, all had been canceled due to the riots. The prince’s curfew kept criminals and rogues at home this night. Militia patrols, however, were out in force. We would hear the clop of hooves and see yellow torchlight gleaming around a corner, giving us time to shrink back into a shadowy alcove or rubbish-strewn alley to hide.

  “I feel like someone is following us,” Bee said in a low voice as we crouched on the steps of a locked and barred chandler’s shop, waiting for a clot of six Tarrant soldiers to decide that they did not want to loiter in the intersection ahead. “Do you really know how to get there? We’ve never been to that part of town before. Are you sure they’ll help us?”

  A cold wind chased
down the street and kissed my nose and lips like a flirt. Or a cold mage. “I’m not sure of anything,” I said, shivering. I was tired and much too chilled, and my arms hurt even though we were swapping off carrying the bags. “But I know the radicals have no love for cold mages or princes. If anyone can help us now, surely it’s lawyers.”

  “You set your sights too low,” said a male voice.

  We both started up to our feet, and I had my sword unsheathed in an instant. The blade’s faint glow was enough to illuminate a young man leaning insouciantly against the shuttered windows next to us, his shoulders bracing up the wall and his arms crossed over his chest as he watched the mounted patrol down the way confer by the light of their blazing torches.

  “Rory!” I said, and although I whispered his name, the swelling in my heart was more like a shout.

  “Don’t pet me until you put that thing away,” he said just before I meant to fling myself at him for a celebratory embrace.

  “Cat,” murmured Bee, “I thought you were exaggerating about your cane turning into a sword. Also, the blade gleams.”

  “It’s cold steel,” I said, sheathing it with the mysterious twist that sheathed the blade as into a sheath that existed only in the spirit world. Then I hugged him. “Oh, Rory, I was afraid I’d lost you. But I didn’t. And you even found clothes!”

  “Hush,” said Rory. “They’re still hunting me.”

  We waited in silence until the patrol rode on. Then we started to walk, and in truth, I felt much stronger and less cold now that the three of us were reunited.

  “How was the pug dog?” asked Bee tartly.

  “Too fatty,” he said, “and the peahens had all those feathers. That was nasty. It never bothered me before I wore this skin. By the way, Cousin Beatrice, as I promised, I did no lasting harm to either of the fine lords. Or to any humans, really no more than I had to.” He touched right hand to left shoulder.

  “You’re hurt,” said Bee. “You need tending.”

  I could not see him grin, but I knew he grinned; the flavor of the air changed. The night felt brighter and the bags less heavy.

  “You want to lick the wound?” he asked.

  “You’re disgusting!”

  “Why is that disgusting? Doesn’t everyone do that?” He looked at me. “And don’t think for one moment I’m carrying either of those bags. What do you have in them? Stones?”

  “Books,” said Bee scornfully. “Books, books, books.”

  “Not a single one I am willing to part with,” I retorted.

  Even had we trudged without the burden of books, Fox Close was quite a long way south and east across the city, close against the excise office and the customs embankment and near the quays. It was in a district inhabited by people who would not have been welcome to live in the houses around Falle Square: foreigners, radicals, technologists, and solicitors. The cocks had crowed by the time we staggered onto Enterprise Road, although the brilliant gaslamps lining the street—the very latest in design—still burned with a remarkable cheer that lifted my spirits and fed a flare of hope to my weary heart. Bee stared and stared, for there were a lot of trolls—and men, and a few goblins not yet burrowed into their daylight dens—coming and going into offices and coffeehouses and shops, all of which were already open and bustling, as if to make up for lost time after yesterday’s festival closings and the riots the day before.

  “There is Fox Close,” I said, indicating a humble lane tucked away between a tavern and a coffeehouse but equally busy if one judged by the foot traffic pouring in and out of its throat.

  As we made our way down the lane, the gaslights began to hiss and fail, but it was day’s arrival, not that of a cold mage, that shuttered them as the gas was turned off. Ahead, on the right side of the lane, hung a newly painted sign, visible in dawn’s light. The script painted on the sign was pin-perfect, orange letters shining against a feathery brown backdrop: GODWIK AND CLUTCH.

  “I hope this works,” Bee muttered.

  We hauled our bags up to the stoop and earned a few curious looks but no offers of help. I plied the knocker. We waited. Rory sighed, looking ready for a nap. I licked my lips, and then was sorry I had done so, for my lips were so dry and cracked that my tongue released a smear of blood. Bee adjusted the fit of her gloves on her fingers. I untangled my cane where it had gotten caught in a fold in my skirts.

  The door opened, and a troll looked at us, cocking his head first to one side and then the other to get a good look with each eye. He wore a drab jacket that set off astonishing scarlet and blue and black plumage and crest, truly spectacular.

  I found my voice from the pit where it had crawled in to hide. “May the day find you at peace,” I said, a little hoarsely. “My name is Catherine Hassi Barahal. This is my cousin, Beatrice, and my brother, Roderic. We’re here to see Chartji. The solicitor.”

  “You’re that one,” he said in words so eerily without accent they did not quite sound proper. “Chartji warned me.”

  “Warned you?” I could not get a full lungful of air in, for my chest had gone numb.

  “ ‘Let her in quickly shall she come standing at the door.’ ” The troll hopped back and gestured for us to enter, baring his sharp teeth in a manner that made Rory yawn threateningly and caused Bee to take a step back. By which movement, she revealed our luggage.

  “Oo!” He bent forward and peered at the two bulging bags with their brass clasps. “Things!”

  “Who’s at the door, Caith?” Brennan came out from a back room, wiping his hands on a grimy cloth. He saw me and grinned. “Catherine! And your charming cousin, Beatrice. And another companion, I see.”

  “My brother, Roderic,” I said.

  “Well met, indeed! Did you tell them to come in, Caith? Give them a cup of water?”

  “Things!” said Caith. “Even some shiny things. Two brass clasps and a sword.”

  Startled, I looked down. Daylight had veiled the sword, and even to me, in the first weak glimmer of dawn, it appeared as an ordinary black cane.

  Brennan said, “Please step inside at once. Caith, close the door behind them.”

  The urgency in his tone propelled us like a ball shot from a musket. We hurried in and dropped the bags in the hall as Caith shut the door and locked it with a pair of heavy chains.

  Brennan said to Rory, “I’m Brennan. Caith, did you remember to introduce yourself?”

  “Oo!” The troll shifted his fascinated gaze away from the brass clasps to look first at Brennan and then at us. His crest flattened and lifted and flattened again. “My pardon! Caith. Not my full name, but assuredly yours. I am what you would call it the clutch cousin sibling child…” His head swiveled uncomfortably far around, to beseech Brennan evidently.

  “Nephew,” Brennan said. “Not an egg sibling child, but a clutch sibling child.”

  “Ah, I see,” I said, although I had not the least idea of what he was talking about. Caith twisted his head back around to face me and displayed his teeth again. It was clearly an effort to mimic a smile, however disturbing he looked, like he was ready to eat us up. So I smiled in return and addressed him politely. “May you find peace on this morning, Caith.”

  Caith led us to the back. In what had once been a sitting room, Kehinde knelt among the pieces of her press, which were spread out in a pattern I could not read. She was so absorbed in moving pieces around to see where they fit that she did not even look up.

  Old Godwik was seated at a desk, pen in hand, but he looked up at once. “The Hassi Barahal in her mantle! What an exceptionally pleasant surprise! Let me crow on the rocks at sunrise! And this… the cousin, I presume. And…” He gave Rory an exceptionally piercing look. “Interesting. I’ve not seen one like you before. Well met. Please enter our nest.”

  Belatedly, surprised by his words, Kehinde looked up. “Catherine!” She smiled.

  Brennan lugged the two carpetbags into the room and set them against the wall. A moment later, Chartji walked in, claws stained with ink
and carrying a bowl of water in one hand.

  “Catherine!” she said. “And your clutch sibling Beatrice! And did I hear this one called brother? I thought you might come.”

  “We have a proposition to make you,” I said without preamble. “Our services, in exchange for yours. We believe that if anyone can help us get out from under the power of magisters and princes, you can.”

  “Drink first,” said Chartji. “That’s the proper way. Then we’ll talk.”

  As we passed around the bowl, a knocking came again at the door. Caith’s footfalls pattered down; chains rattled softly. The hinges creaked slightly as the door was opened.

  After a pause, he called in his uncannily pure voice, “Brennan! There’s a rat here who says you’re expecting a messenger. He says a rising light marks the dawn of a new world.”

  Brennan said sharply, “Get him in fast and shut the door.” Then he stepped out into the hallway. With a frown, Kehinde pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and followed. Bee, who had been drinking, handed the bowl to Rory. She grabbed my wrist and tugged me after them. We all spilled into the hallway to see Caith stepping back from the door as a pair of men surged in. I knew them! Hard to forget those faces: They were the two foreigners I had seen in the inn in Lemanis. They carried themselves very differently now. No longer diffident, they prowled like scouts, gazes ranging over our faces and up the stairs. The young man clearly did not recognize me, although he stared too long and too admiringly at Bee. The older man looked twice at me with obvious recognition, then frowned as Rory strolled with a threatening grace out of the back room, followed a moment later by a limping Godwik. On the stoop was the woman dressed as a man, the third foreigner I’d seen in Lemanis, but after glancing inside, she jumped back down to the street.

  A man walked up the steps and into the entry hall. He caught Caith’s gaze and gestured. Obeying this wordless order, the young troll closed and chained the door. The door’s lintel framed the newcomer: He was a tall, broad-shouldered, black-haired man about Uncle’s age, and he wore a shabby wool greatcoat and a faded tricornered hat rather the worse for the wear. The clothes did not make the man. He might have worn rags, or he might have worn robes of gold, and either way, he would be the first person in any chamber you would notice, no matter how large the crowd.