The coachman raised his whip in salute.
I jumped awkwardly down into the pit, shifted the heavy bag on my shoulders, and with my sword in hand walked forward after my sire. The pit had become a resplendent plaza crowded with hungry courtiers. They slipped and slid about so much I could not count them, but I began to think they were far fewer than I had first believed. They just took up so much room and never stopped grasping and moving. Eager to get their drop of the rich feast, they parted to make a path for us that led straight to the dais of glittering salt.
On the dais stood four chairs beaten out of gold and four stools carved from obsidian. As my sire approached, human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: they who ruled as the day court and the night court, for the spirit world was washed by both light and dark. What manner of people they were I could not tell: Were they spirit creatures who had begun to lose the ability to change and had thus become more and more solid? Ancestors who craved a rigid sort of immortality? Elders who stood in relation to humans much as dragons did to the feathered people? I did not know, and right now I was not going to find out.
The courts awaited the sacrifice. Chains like whips lashed my sire to his knees before them. He knelt, but he did not bend his head; his lips were drawn back as if he wished to growl. The Hunt stirred with myriad hisses and chortles and howls and snarls.
“Give us what is ours.” The voice of the courts thundered, many in one. “So you are required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”
They ignored me, so I walked past him and planted myself in front of the dais, facing up to their chairs.
“Peace to you,” I said with my friendliest smile. “Does this night find you at peace?”
A vast and horrible silence smothered the world. Their golden eyes chained me with a will as heavy as eternity. I fell into the rip current of their gaze, into the breathing heart of the ice.
At their deepest levels, the worlds vibrate. A force flows through every part of existence. Cold mages can redirect this flow; fire mages energize and disperse it. As for what exists in the spirit world beyond our ken, courts and dragons are just names we give to powers we do not comprehend and cannot escape.
Because I was my father’s daughter I could make a story of it, a way to understand and put words to something far bigger than I was: In the worlds there is an ancient and unending duel between dragons and courts. In the Great Smoke, the mothers of dragons dragged innocent girls into the ocean of dreams, using mortal women to midwife their fragile hatchlings.
Thus the duel tipped to favor the dragons, and so the other side had fought back.
In the old village tales written down by my father in his journals, the Wild Hunt did not take blood. Death comes to all things in the mortal world, and the Wild Hunt rode on Hallows’ Night to gather in the souls of those fated to die in the coming year.
Perhaps the cold mages had come to the attention of the courts because powerful cold magic caused changes in the flow and ebb of energy in the spirit world. Perhaps mages shone so brightly and their blood tasted so sweet that, once one had been taken to bind the Wild Hunt the very first time, the courts developed a taste for their blood and then a need for it and then a desperate craving. By drinking the blood of mortals they had in the end become what we called ghouls: creatures who devour the essence of others in order to live.
I did not have to devour the essence of others in order to live. I could live perfectly happily working in a humble office with my dear cousin, building up a respectable business that involved spying and sneaking, although obviously I would be first to volunteer to do the most dirty, adventurous, and strenuous work. I could sleep perfectly happily on a mat on the floor with the man I loved, even though obviously I would prefer to lie in a bed he had built for us, because it was more comfortable. I was eager to teach my brother to cheat at cards, to nurse Vai’s mother through her weak spells and nurture Vai’s sisters into women, to hope Luce survived the war, to get to know Doctor Asante, and to write about everything to Professora Alhamrai, and maybe even to return to Expedition someday to visit the people I had become so fond of. I wanted to introduce batey to Europa. That would be something, a ballcourt in every city and town!
The courts tried to hammer me flat under the crushing cold of the ice, they wanted me to be afraid, to give up, to give in. But I braced myself on my sword and warmed my hands on my locket. I answered the polite greeting they had not made, for they did not know how to reciprocate in the traditional way.
“I have no trouble, thanks to my power as a woman. I just want to clarify two things. There is one sacrifice each year. There cannot be another, and it is this sacrifice that binds the Wild Hunt and indeed all your servants for another year. So you all agree and accept me as the sacrifice?”
“We accept.”
They were so hungry and impatient and greedy that they threw their chains off my sire and onto me. Their touch tore at my skin as a hundred sharp nails of ice, a net of barbs poised to puncture me and drink me dry.
“That being so, you take my mortal blood. Is that not right? Mortal blood seals the contract by which you first bound the Hunt and all your other servants?”
They answered by tightening the chains. A bloody seam opened on my breast right above my heart. So rich and sweet blood streams, alive with the salt of life and the spice of power. They suckled the air to suck me dry, to use the salt of my life to yet again chain those who served them.
Blessed Tanit! It hurt.
My soul was being torn from my body, all life and love and courage and strength pouring through the gash.
But I still had a tongue.
I still had breath.
I had a plan.
“My mortal blood I sacrifice. But only my mortal blood. You have no right or claim to my spirit blood, the blood I inherited from my sire. So if you have taken even a drop of my spirit blood, then the contract is broken.”
48
The festive cacophony twirled on unceasing as I took in a breath and let it out, as I moistened my bone-dry lips. My legs and arms trembled, but I did not fall.
The throned presences leaned forward as if suckling on a suddenly dry teat. Stretched toward me a little more, as if puzzled. Then probed with talons and knife-bladed teeth. The sharp planes of their human-like visages wrinkled as they sniffed the air, as they tugged on the chains and, in increasing frustration, shook those chains to try to force the blood to flow.
But the chains no longer bound me because there was no possible way to separate my mortal blood from my spirit blood.
“I invoke rei vindicatio.” My voice rang clear above the hissing whirl of the courts as the chains slithered off my body and wilted like withering vines on the ground. “Without my blood to seal the contract, we reclaim ownership of our own selves.”
Insubstantial chains make no sound as they shatter.
What you hear are the defiant shouts as we rise.
My sire laughed with the howl of a man who has had to keep his contempt hidden for far too long. He sprouted eru’s wings, unfurling them to their full majesty and making ready to fly. The Wild Hunt scattered with a boisterous roar, fleeing the courts.
“Sire!” I cried, although it was surely hard to hear me in the clamorous storm of its departure. “Sire! How do I get out of here? How do I get home?”
Like the ungrateful, manipulating creature he was, he flew away without a backward glance.
The plaza erupted in a blizzard of chaos. Daggers of ice burned my skin. The dais and its thrones dissolved in a shrieking wail whose punch was like a spear of thwarted greed and rage that drove me to my knees. Agony raked through my chest. But I could not faint. I could not falter.
The courts swelled like vast wings unfurling. Wave upon wave of furious beings pounded against me as storm waves thrash the shore. I drew my sword and frantically parried, deflecting their freezing bite
and icy grip. But my strength was ebbing fast.
This was the one part of my plan I had been able to devise no answer for, the reason I feared I might not survive. I had thought to fight my way to the gate and through to the salt mine, where I might hope and pray to find enough water in the desert in order to live and travel a long road back to the ones I loved. But as the wrath of the courts rose like a flood tide around me, I realized I was going to drown before I could ever cut my way to the mortal world.
“Hsss! Hurry!”
A door swung open in the air above me. I shook off the bag of coins and heaved it into the coach, tossed my sword in after, and hooked an arm through the steps. Claws raked through my skirt and petticoats. Teeth fastened on my boot. I kicked until they fell back.
They were only gathering themselves for another, more ferocious assault. But the brief respite was all I needed to pull myself up, roll inside, and slam shut the door.
Gale winds tossed the coach up and down and sideways as it bucketed away from the palace. Where we went I did not know. I clung to my sword. The bag of coins slammed into my belly, winding me. Where the chains had bitten into me to take the first taste of my blood, my chest throbbed like fire. The pain of that wound deafened and blinded me and I just lay there panting in the hope that oblivion would claim me soon. All I could do was tighten my hand around my locket and pray that if I had just been infested with the salt plague, then the disease would consume me quickly and with less agony than this.
“Blessed Tanit,” I murmured, “please bring me home.”
My blood seeped onto the floor of the coach, moistening and melting into the coach’s substance. Blood makes the gate.
I fell through.
The goddess caught me in her arms. She cradled me like a newborn, her brown face smiling down at me. Tears wet her cheeks. A crescent moon shone above her head to light the path for those who must walk into darkness.
“Choose, little cat. For you may have peace now if you wish it.”
“I just want to go home.”
Home is the people you care for, the ones who care for you in return.
Her kiss woke me back into the world. When I opened my eyes I found myself kneeling in a garden lush with pomegranates and ripe grapes and cascades of purple flowers. Before me rose a stone statue of the goddess wearing her lioness head, she who protects women but also gives them the strength to protect themselves.
The horns of a crescent moon sank into dawn. Pain pooled at my chest. Sticky blood oozed down my body to be swallowed by the damp soil. I blinked. A winter wind rattled through bare branches, for I now found myself huddled not in a summer garden but all alone and abandoned in an empty sanctuary. The air had a bitter, angry bite. Someone had stabbed me in the heart and then eaten out my head. I pitched forward onto my face.
A familiar and beloved voice spoke my name. “Catherine. My sweet Catherine, wake up.”
A familiar and beloved hand took hold of mine. “Cat, wake up! What on earth got into her to wander off to Tanit’s sanctuary when she ought to have been hiding inside like every other sensible person? I thought I was going to die of anguish when we got back and she was gone!”
“I should like to know what miscreant stabbed her in the chest. She’s fortunate it is such a shallow wound.”
“Look how her skirts are torn. I can’t leave her for a single day without her getting into trouble!”
Warm lips brushed my forehead. “She’s feverish. Let’s get her home.”
I dreamed I was turning into a pillar of salt, grain by grain. I was thirsty all the time, and hot, and uncomfortable, but there was always someone to wipe me down with a damp cool cloth or lift me up to spoon broth down my parched throat. I could not get enough salty gruel to eat.
Sometimes Rory licked my face with his rough cat’s tongue, rumbling softly as he guarded me in his cat shape. Sometimes Bee held my hand and sang to me, off-key, or combed out and rebraided my tangled hair. Sometimes Vai slept beside me in the bed he had built for us—although I had only slept in it once, I recalled its contours with intimate precision.
Obviously I was hallucinating, because I also saw Kayleigh sitting with her mother in attendance on my sickbed, and it was intriguing to watch how animated Vai’s mother was with her eldest daughter compared to the stiff formality she offered her only son. For what seemed like hours Vai would sit on the bed gently stroking my hands or hair while talking softly to Kofi about the latest radical pamphlet by Professora Nayo Kuti or the setbacks the radical efforts had met with in the Veneti dukedoms under the hand of their overlord, the Armorican prince, and his pregnant daughter who would act as regent if she bore an infant son.
Kofi’s laugh heartened me. “I reckon it is as well we happened to come when we did, for I thought sure I should have to tie yee to a chair lest yee burn down the entire building for the way yee lost yee head. Not that yee can burn things, fire bane! Peradventure yee shall have an easier life of it, Vai, if yee stop and think before yee panic.”
“I did not panic!”
“You did,” said Bee, for I just then realized she was sitting on the bed at my feet, her pencil scratching across a page.
“No more than you did, Beatrice!”
“Is this how it shall be, yee two always bickering?” demanded Kofi. “Because if it shall be this way, I can go back to a more restful domicile in Expedition and likewise not have to suffer this frightful cold.”
“You only think this is cold because you’ve not yet experienced winter,” muttered Vai so peevishly that Kofi laughed again, obviously teasing him, and I realized it was Kofi’s willingness to joke with him that had likely won Vai’s trust when the two men first met.
Bee broke in. “I think the worst was when we were searching and those men at the coffee shop said they had seen a young woman answering to Cat’s description drinking coffee with the horned hunter god Carnonos on the street!”
“People will see anything in shadows when they’re frightened,” said Vai, “but I admit it gave me a turn. For you know it’s exactly the sort of thing she’d have thought she had to do, sacrifice herself to save us.”
“It surely is, and it makes me so angry to imagine her even thinking of doing such a thing to us! Never telling us, sneaking off… well, she didn’t, so all’s well.”
All’s well, until you become a salter with sightless eyes, trapped inside a deathless crystal body with your own dying thoughts and a craving that will not go away.
I tossed and I turned, for the ground was rumbling and thumping beneath me. As in a restless dream a woman with feathers and shells in her hair entered the room. Her gentle hand traced my navel; her lips touched my forehead with a kiss that snaked through my body to kindle my blood. She spoke: “She is clean.”
Clean was all very well, but I needed to be able to talk!
Rory touched a finger to each of my eyes. “Cat, I swear, you talk constantly even in your sleep. It’s safe to wake up. I never gave them the letters, so they don’t know anything.”
I opened my eyes. Rory sat in a chair next to me. I lay on the bed Vai had built for us, and strange it was to do so, for we had not had it with us before. A fabric-covered standing screen blocked my view of the rest of the room, its golden suns and silver moons smiling at me. By the quality of the light I guessed it to be mid-afternoon on a cloudy day. I heard the clatter and ring of utensils and cups as people ate at a nearby table.
“Why am I dreaming that Kofi and Kayleigh are here?” I demanded, although my voice came out as a hoarse whisper. “Have I been delirious?”
He rolled his eyes in an expression copied from Bee at her most aggravating. “That is one word for it. Kofi and Kayleigh and their baby and people arrived on Hallows’ Day on a ship from Expedition. The Assembly in Expedition has sent Kofi to be ambassador to Europa, only no one really knew where he ought to go, so they sent him to Godwik and Clutch to get his bearings. Then Bee and Vai returned with the others at sunset on Hallows’ Day. You can
imagine what happened when they found you missing! It’s fortunate we tracked you down as quickly as we did. I admit it was rather dramatic to find you just at sunrise in the goddess’s temple. Are you better now?”
Venturesomely I swung my feet out from under the beaver-pelt blanket and set them on the plank floor, which radiated heat, for evidently the hypocaust had been repaired. I wore the nightgown I’d been given at White Bow House, and my chest had a poultice on it, wrapped into place by linen strips. “How long have I been sick?”
“Eight days.”
According to report, if a human is bitten by a ghoul, the onset of the disease is so swift and implacable that the victim will become morbid in less than seven days. So the headmaster had read aloud to us the day Bee had argued with Bran Cof in his study.
Eight days! Well! This was encouraging! I stood, and my feet stayed under me. Holding on to Rory’s arm, I shuffled to where I could see past the screen and into the room.
The scene of a family dinner just come to its end could not have been more charming even had Bee sketched it. Vai’s mother was seated in the chair of honor, looking frail but aglow with happiness as she held the hand of her pregnant daughter, Kayleigh. Bintou and Wasa were fomenting mischief with a lad I was pretty sure was one of Kofi’s young cousins, brought with him from Expedition. Old Bakary was seated next to Bee, and to my surprise Beatrice was paging through her sketchbook while the djeli made comments. Over at a lovely new desk Chartji, Caith, Godwik, and the Taino woman I had seen in my delirium bent over a schematic Kofi had unrolled. The behica was explaining about good plumbing, drinking water, and cholera.
Vai stood looking at it, too. He held a fat baby with chubby brown cheeks and a chortling laugh. I had just decided that I had to be dreaming when he turned his head and smiled at me, as if he’d known I was standing there. He gave a half-wink as if to say that I ought to notice how handsome he looked with a baby in his arms and didn’t I want him to have one of his very own?