Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

  I clambered over the moss-covered ruins of a fallen tree, raced along the trunk to the exposed roots, and jumped down, using the cane for balance as I caught myself in a crouch. Then I kept running, having gained two more breaths of distance between me and them, because they had to go around and furthermore were hampered by young trees and shrubs that had taken advantage of the opening in the canopy to steal light for growth. I saw and heard no sign of the others. Of what had happened to my brother I dared not contemplate.

  Abruptly out of the forest appeared three soldiers, bearing down on me with swords raised. Bright tabards wrapped them, marked with the four moons of their house: full, half, crescent, and new. Yet light glinted on their iron helmets; sun would not glint so beneath a canopy too dense to allow undergrowth.

  The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion. So Andevai had murmured in the carriage when he’d thought I was asleep.

  I ran straight into them, brandishing my cane, and where it slashed through the illusion, the hard glare of its cold steel blade shone. Cold steel cuts cold magic.

  A shout of anger chased me as I ran on. I scrambled into a gully and splashed across a stream whose eddying shallows were rimed with fingers of ice. I broke onto a path crowded with uncut bushes and winter-sleeping beech and ash, and lashed my way through to emerge into a long, narrow clearing. The ruins of an old rectangular building whose entrance was crowned by a Roman arch greeted me. Holes had been dug about the tumbled walls as though thieves were seeking buried treasure. I was for a moment alone. The holes made the approach to the arch and the ruins behind it a maze deadly to running creatures. Blessed Tanit watched over me, for there was a big hole somewhat triangular in shape, like her sigil, directly in front of the archway. I spread my other cloak over the hole and weighted the ends with bricks and kicked and flung leaves and debris to cover it. I heard the cursed magister’s mount snorting as he pushed past the thicket and rode into the clearing. I backed under the arch.

  He had the haughty pride magisters were famous for, the curl of lip, the spark of cold fire in the eye. He wore the fine clothes whose weave and tailoring were apparent even at thirty paces and carried a sword hammered out of cold steel in his right hand. Seeing me, he glanced over his shoulder, looking for his companions.

  “That’s right,” I shouted at him. “We’ve played you for a fool. You think your cold magic is so powerful, but you’re blind. A lowborn slave wields more power than you will ever handle or know. How it must burn!”

  Young men can be very predictable. If Andevai had endured such a difficult time in Four Moons House despite his ability and the benefit the mage House gained from it, then his age mates within the House, the aspiring magisters born to that status, must truly envy and despise him for what he possessed that they lacked.

  With a grimace on his dark face, he spurred the horse straight at me.

  I actually started to laugh, and that only made him more angry, and more blind.

  The beast plunged where my cloak gave way, stumbling to its knees into the hole. He lost his seat and slid over the side, grasping desperately at the saddle. I loosed a prayer heavenward: Blessed Tanit, do not harm the innocent beast. Then I lunged forward. I whacked the magister on the head, and as his body went limp, I dragged him free, wrenching his leg out of the stirrup. Grasping the reins, I hauled the horse out of the hole and led it a few paces, but its gait was smooth. It was spooked but uninjured. I mounted just as an actual soldier burst onto the scene. The magister moaned, crying out, and I urged my fine steed forward, past the ruins and into the woods on an overgrown track. This was a cursed good horse, strong and willing.

  “Go after her! There’s a reward if you bring back her thrice-cursed corpse.”

  A whistle shrilled, and answering whistles rose from the wood.

  I had a choice between two paths. I sent my steed down the leftward track, which soon opened into a decent trail. We went flying along past a farmstead and, not long after, a compound of a half dozen round houses fenced by a round palisade. A pair of children, standing outside, shrieked and called after me; they had brown faces, heads wrapped against the cold. A man, much lighter, appeared in the low doorway of one of the houses. He raised a hand as though to hail me; then I saw his gaze fix behind me. As I passed, he ran to grab the children.

  A wagon track offered a wider route. I turned right, heading for Cold Fort. The woods fell away into cleared fields, and another lordly house rose away to the right like a dollhouse. Beyond the cultivated lands rose the ridge, with at least two lighter scratches on the slope marking paths chewed through the turf to reveal chalk soil below. Away to the right, a road intersected this track. On it, heading my way, galloped four riders. The sight struck my breath right out of me as brutally as a sword cut to my chest. I crooned to the horse, asking for more speed, more heart. He opened up stride like a warrior, and we reached the intersection before them and hit the path up the slope.

  Naturally we slowed, and someone loosed a bolt at my back, but either his heart wasn’t in it or his aim was bad, for the bolt stuck, shivering, in the hillside. Three breaths later, a sting like an insect’s bite burned my right leg, and I looked down to see a bolt caught in the folds of my skirt. With a curse, I grabbed it and flung it away, but warmth trickled down my leg.

  “Up! Up!” I said, willing the gelding to climb. I looked down to see the quartet meet up with the single soldier. They conferred; then a trio started up the path behind me while the other two headed onward. Did they mean to climb to Cold Fort on another track and cut me off?

  But I had made my decision and chosen my path. I had lost Rory, maybe forever. I had to reach the temple and hope I could cross into the spirit world, where they could not follow. My leg was beginning to throb. At least, I thought bitterly, I had blood already drawn to open a gate onto the other side.

  My horse, as befitted the mount given to a son of the House, was superior to theirs in courage and conformation. He was magnificent, a princely horse eager to show me his mettle. We reached the ridgeline having gained on our pursuers. Wind cracked over us. The land spread away below: the yew wood; a lordly house with gardens and corrals and a stockade within which a surprising number of cattle, as small as carved playthings, crowded despite the late season when normally most would have been slaughtered.

  I turned my mount toward the massive earth ramparts of the old hill fort. Pillars and a roof marked a temple within the ancient walls. As I rode along the undulating ridge slope, I spotted figures atop the ramparts, signaling. Did priests live in the temple year-round?

  Behind me, the trio was closing, and on the road below, the pair had dismounted and, leaving their horses, climbed on foot. Farther away, I saw a dozen riders converging in the area from which I’d come, maybe in the hamlet where the man had gathered in his children. As if called by sorcery, six horsemen appeared in the earthwork’s narrow front gap.

  Fiery Shemesh! They had reached Cold Fort before me. I saw no sign of Rory.

  Only one direction was left to me, a rash run down to the west where the town of Mutuatonis sprawled by the River Ouse with a hazy cap of smoke rising from its busy hearths.

  “Catherine Hassi Barahal!” A man’s voice called from the soldiers waiting at the gap.

  So they would lure me in with hearty cheer and false promises before they cut my throat!

  “Catherine!” the man repeated, gesturing to get my attention.

  Before I plunged down the slope on my final doomed run, I hesitated. I knew that voice.

  “Brigid’s luck!” interposed a stentorian tenor. “I did not believe you, brother. Yet here she is, just as her cousin said she would be!”

  The men at the ramparts were not wearing the livery of Four Moons House. They wore the green-jacketed uniforms of the Tarrant militia. The officer in charge was a tall, lean Celt with a thick mustache, a clean-shaven chin, and short hair stiffened into lime-whitened spikes. Fou
r troopers flanked him, two with hair stiffened and lightened in the same manner while two kept black hair clipped tight against their heads. The sixth man seemed slighter than the others, although equally martial in his tailored military garb. He beckoned with a wave of his hand.

  “Maestressa Barahal! It is you! Come on! Come in! Beatrice told us to meet you here, to bring you in to safety.”

  Blessed Tanit.

  For the soldier who called me in was none other than Amadou Barry, the academy student Bee was so currently infatuated with.

  27

  The officer was the cousin of the Prince of Tarrant. After offering me a soldier’s cloak to drape over my shoulders, he sat me down on a bench beside a brick hearth sheltered by a slate roof. There, warming his hands at the fire, he introduced himself as Marius.

  “ ‘Marius’ because,” he explained with a chuckle, “I was destined to be an officer in the Tarrant militia from the day I was born. That’s what we younger sons do: train for war, go to war, die in war, or limp home to our hearths to await our next raid. Not that we do any raiding these days. Although my neighbors have some cursed plump cattle that could do with a little exercise.”

  Plump cattle made me think of Rory. Was he dead, or had he gotten away? Despite the crackling fire and a mug of mulled wine brought by one of the temple priests, I could not get warm. Negotiations had begun at the ramparts, where Amadou Barry stood in heated conversation with the furious cold mage whose face, I was glad to see, was stained with dried blood. Twelve crossbowmen stood on the earthworks above, weapons trained on the mage. The angle of the gap and the outer ridge of ramparts hid the House soldiers from my view.

  “Amadou will set him right,” said Lord Marius, following my gaze. “There is not much a magister dares do to us in such circumstances, although I dare say he might try. But we outnumber his forces. My lads are certainly better trained and more experienced.”

  “He’s carrying cold steel. He could kill Maester Amadou or any of you by only drawing blood.” As he might already have dispatched Rory.

  “I suppose he could. But would he? There’s your question. A runaway bride—if that is indeed what you are—is scarcely worth angering the Prince of Tarrant, much less… Well, never mind that. The princes and the Houses have learned to cooperate when they must and leave each other alone the rest of the time. Is that the husband you’re running away from?”

  “No!” Heat scalded my cheeks; yet for what possible reason need I blush?

  “Good fortune for you, then. He looks a singularly unattractive fellow.”

  The parlay broke off as the cold mage gestured angrily with a gesture so obscene I covered my mouth with a hand as I gasped. Lord Marius chuckled. Maester Amadou shrugged with a careless ease I admired and turned his back on the magister and his cold-steel blade.

  As he walked back toward us, I said in a low voice, “I thought Maester Amadou was a student at the academy.”

  Lord Marius was a laugher. Everything seemed a joke to him. “Amadou Barry is older than he looks. I very much doubt he is what you may have thought him to be.”

  “Then what is he?”

  “Och, lass, that’s not my tale to tell, is it?”

  He rose, and I did likewise, shaking out my rumpled and dirtied skirts. A priest brought another mug of warmed wine, and Amadou poured a few drops on the altar before coming over to join us. He sat. We sat. I stared sidelong at him, seeking signs of age in his face. I had thought him a year or two older than Bee and I, a polite, naive, spoiled, and privileged son of bankers recently arrived from resettled Eko on the coast of West Africa; I had thought he and his younger twin sisters were attending the academy because it was fashionable for wealthy, well-connected families to send their young people there for an education.

  “Was it even true, that story?” I blurted out before I knew I meant to speak. “About your family fleeing ghouls in Eko, and how you and your sisters were put into the water on a boat while your parents and cousins—”

  Shame blooded me as his expression changed.

  Of course it was true. No one could mistake that look of fractured grief.

  Then he smoothed it over with the ease of practice. “Yes, it’s true, but it was thirteen years ago. I was barely fourteen. My three sisters and I, and our mother’s sister, were the only ones to escape that terrible day. We endured a long voyage, with a Phoenician shipmaster and crew, I should note, fine sailors all, and came to family in the north. Poor shy Fadia was shipped off to marry this beast here”—Marius laughed as at an old family joke—“leaving me and the little girls with our father’s people.”

  “My apologies. I spoke as the alligator bites.” I spoke because of my own grief and fear, I thought, but I did not say that aloud.

  He smiled in a conciliating way that irritated me.

  “But if you were not a student at the academy, then why were you there?” I snapped.

  “If I had some other motive for being there, you will excuse me, maestressa, for not divulging that motive to you now, as it has nothing to do with our present situation. Let me just tell you that your cousin Beatrice told me you were in danger and that you would come riding up to the temple of Taranis Jupiter, Maa Ngala”—Lord of All—“on the fifteenth of December.”

  “How could she possibly know? I’ve not been in communication with her!”

  “Have you not? She seemed so very sure that I assumed you had sent her a message. When she described the temple, I recognized it as Cold Fort. Thus we are here.” He drank his wine, and one of the priests hurried over to fill his cup. “Do you mean to say you sent her no message?”

  He had the look of a man trained to coax out secrets by the expert application of casual questions.

  “Where is she?” I asked to deflect him. This might be another trap. I could not believe Aunt and Uncle had been so foolish as to remain in Adurnam, knowing Four Moons House would discover the deception. They had even tried to convince Andevai to come back the next day; Andevai had himself recognized that they hoped to run away with me. And if they wanted to run away with me, then surely they regretted what they had been forced to do.

  The sun sank toward the horizon, smearing a rosy glamor across the western sky. The troopers were setting up tents. Nearby, in a kitchen building whose shutters were all open to admit light, priests prepared a meal with the help of a few of the soldiers. Meat sizzled. How Rory would have loved that smell! I wiped a tear from my eye.

  “You are aware,” Amadou Barry said in the gentlest tone imaginable, “that your uncle—your entire clan—has been engaged for years as spies.”

  “Where are my aunt and uncle?” I asked, hearing how choked my voice sounded. Yet I was not about to reveal the whole of what I now knew. I had to hold something in reserve, should I need to bargain.

  “They left Adurnam on the day after you were sent off with Four Moons House.”

  “Then how came Bee to speak to you?”

  Lord Marius laughed again. I was beginning to find his laughter annoying, because it was obvious he was a man who had never suffered defeat or penury or even disappointment in love. The cousin of the Prince of Tarrant must be accustomed to having the world at his feet and Fortuna as his lover. If he had married Amadou’s older sister, he was also wealthy even beyond what portion he had received within his own clan.

  “She did not leave Adurnam with her parents and sisters and household. She stayed behind.” Maester Amadou was a very handsome young man when he lowered his eyes to give the impression of innocent embarrassment, but really, he was too pretty. It was that prettiness that disguised his years, that made impressionable young women—and others, too, I am sure—underestimate him, assume him to be something other than what he was. And I did not even know what he was; all my expectations were exploded.

  For then he added, his color changing, “When I discovered her situation, I offered her my protection.”

  My gaze sharpened. Maybe my claws came out. “What does that mean? Surel
y not—”

  He would not look at me. “I would not trifle with her. As for the other, it is impossible.”

  “He means,” interposed Marius, “that his aunt offered the girl shelter. So that’s where you will find her, biding securely and unmolested in his aunt’s house in Adurnam. As for the other, a man may be smitten, darling, but may otherwise be obliged to marry according to his family’s needs and wishes.”

  “You need not tell me that! I have become intimately acquainted with the chains of obligation.”

  “Yet you fled your husband and the mage House.”

  “The mansa ordered me killed!”

  Marius whistled appreciatively. “I couldn’t have made auguries on that!”

  Even Amadou looked surprised.

  I felt I owed them an explanation in exchange for saving my life. It’s never wise to leave debts unpaid. “Four Moons House wanted Beatrice, not me. My aunt and uncle gave me to the magisters instead, and afterward when the mansa discovered he had been…”

  “Cheated?” asked Marius with a hopeful chuckle. “Defrauded?”

  “Given the wrong female,” I finished with such a cutting glare that even the bluff military man barked out a surprised laugh and made a conciliatory gesture. “He was angry.”