He was not, I suppose, a man accustomed to having his will crossed.
I tightened my grip on my cane, yet I could see no means by which I could force a way through for us, not even if it were night and my sword alive in its spirit form.
As chaff parts where a current flows, the laborers shrank away from their stations to huddle against the wall. In such circumstances, what could they hope for except to behave as rabbits caught in the open by a roving hawk: freeze, and pray to the gods to let the predator overlook them.
Bee and I stood alone in the middle of the shed to face him and his attendants: the djeli, Bakary, who looked more weary than victorious; two men in nondescript clothing who might have been House seekers, and a pair of cold mages. The older cold mage I had never seen before, but the young one was the man who had attacked me at Cold Fort. Six soldiers escorted them.
There was one more. There was Andevai, pushing to the front to stand next to his master.
He had betrayed us after all.
A dull, dead emptiness engulfed me. Bee’s hand tightened on my fingers, but the pain of her grasp could not rouse me out of this soul-sucking extremity of despair. I had allowed myself to hope, but he, too, had betrayed me
Who had I been, to think I could defy a mage House? Me, whose name was not even a true name, for I was not a Hassi Barahal; I had scant memory of my mother, Tara Bell, and had until a few days ago no knowledge at all of the creature who had evidently sired me, a father who had never acknowledged nor shown the least interest in me. I was nothing more than an afterthought, a piece of refuse to be glancingly tossed to one side. At least as a sacrifice I had some use in the world. I shook off Bee’s hand and stepped in front of her.
“Here is the eldest Barahal daughter at last,” said the mansa with more gravity than anger, in the tone of a man who regrets the necessity of creating an unpleasant scene but accepts that the situation is one that has been forced upon him. “We are not too late. Andevai, kill the other one.”
“No.”
I thought a machine had exhaled or that the steam engine in its housing beyond the shed sighed a last protest. Yet in the world beyond these walls, no voice cried, no wheels rumbled, no child laughed or wept.
The mansa looked at Andevai, and the temperature in the shed dropped precipitously.
“No,” said Andevai calmly in answer to whatever command he had seen in his master’s gaze.
A voice—impossible to tell who or where among the onlookers—sobbed softly.
“No,” Andevai said for a third time.
The mansa looked astounded.
“Andevai,” said the djeli, in the tone of a schoolmaster, “consider what words you speak before the mansa.”
“I have considered them. If we prosper only through the suffering or death of another, then that is not prosperity. I will not do it.”
The mansa’s anger crashed over us. Wires snapped; a windowpane cracked, although no shards fell. Not yet. And yet, I was no longer afraid.
“What is this defiance?” asked the djeli. “The slave does not command the master.”
“It is wrong to kill her. I won’t do it, and I won’t let you do it, Mansa.”
When the mansa spoke, he did not shout. Likely that would be beneath his dignity. “The child of the children of slaves cannot know the taste of wisdom. His kind do not know wisdom, because they gave up their honor long ago.”
Andevai said, “I am no longer ashamed of where I come from, although the House made sure to tell me over and over again that I should be grateful to be allowed to enter where I was not wanted. I should never have been ashamed. I just did not see that before. You need me, Mansa.”
The young mage sniggered but swallowed his laughter when the mansa raised a hand.
“Do not believe for even one breath, child of slaves, that I need you more than you need me. I brought you in when you were a ragged, barefoot, ignorant youth.”
Suddenly every person in that wide space was slammed to their knees as though felled by a hammer blow. Every one, even the other two cold mages. All, except the mansa, and the djeli. And Andevai.
“Strong,” remarked the mansa. “But not strong enough.”
I knelt on bruised knees, not sure how I had come from standing to kneeling, for the blow had hit so hard I had no memory of it. Bee gasped for breath beside me.
Andevai and the mansa faced each other like two men embarking on a duel of honor. Magisters wield cold as blacksmiths wield heat; this secret they have held to themselves for generations. Already the temperature in the room was bitter, but now it plunged, and the metal of the machines groaned. The windows shattered with a snapping crash, and their shards rained like edged ice onto the silent looms and the sobbing onlookers, poor trapped souls. Bee’s teeth were chattering, and her lips were white. I tried to rise, but a bone-deep numbness pervaded my bones, and I could not move.
Tides of cold magic pulsed and ripped around us. Invisible to the eye, they throbbed in the air like unvoiced thunder until I could only hope for lightning to strike and put me out of this misery.
But it did not. Something else happened instead. In my left hand, the hilt of the sword bloomed.
Cold magic had woken it. Cold steel cuts cold magic. I twisted the hilt and unsheathed the sword. Its glittering edge flared, as bright as snow under the glare of the winter sun, almost blinding. Bee gasped, and then choked, as if she’d been stabbed, but it was only the cold striking so deep it would soon kill.
Neither magister moved. Rigid, they fought in a realm outside ordinary vision.
With cold steel in my hand, I rose and cut my way forward through the currents of magic. Icy swells slapped me, made me stumble, made my mouth ice and my feet lead weights, but my blade sliced a path, and I drove forward into the maelstrom.
How it felt to them I could not know; I was not a cold mage. But the mansa looked up, looked over, looked startled. His hold loosened. There came as in the eye of a violent storm an eddy as his attention shifted briefly away from Andevai.
Andevai glanced toward me. He raised a hand in a gesture copied from the mansa, and he said, in exactly the same preemptory tone he’d used in the inn in Adurnam on that long-ago night when we had first met, “Down!”
I dropped to my knees and ducked my head.
The cold hit like an ax blow, flattening me with a single, brutal cut. My chin slammed against the floor, and all breath was punched out of my lungs.
After a moment of stunned incomprehension, I discovered myself lying flat on the cold floor, pain lancing through my chin. Therefore, I was still alive.
A stunned silence muffled all sound except for a vague muzzy humming, half heard as in the distance. I raised my head cautiously as the cold eased. Only two men still stood: the djeli and Andevai.
The mansa had been driven down to his knees.
Andevai’s voice was cool, almost conversational. “You brought me in when I was a ragged, barefoot, ignorant youth because you could not ignore what I am, Mansa. I have been reminded every day in Four Moons House of where I came from and exactly who my people are and how my village stands in relationship to the Diarisso lineage. All that is true. But you will be better served by me if I am a willing magister than an unwilling one. There are other Houses. Are you sure I am not cold-blooded enough to abandon my village? For I think it must be clear to you now that if I decide to go, you cannot stop me. You want what is in me, since none among the other young men are what I am. And I want what you can teach me. So we each have something the other wants.”
The mansa climbed to his feet and, with a composure I had to admire, brushed off his robe before addressing the djeli. “My canoe has run to ground on the sand. Yet he is brash and insolent, and speaks out of turn to his elders.”
“Steel cuts steel,” remarked the djeli. “Do you wish the sword to rest in your hand, Mansa, or be held by another?”
The mansa’s silence seemed answer enough. He could not bring himself to say what must
be obvious to everyone: that Andevai’s display of power had surprised even him. For all I knew, it had surprised Andevai himself.
Rising to hands and knees, I looked behind me. In fact, I had come barely four steps although it had seemed like a mile. Bee was crumpled on the ground, her face an awful ashen color, as if she was close to fainting. I scrambled to her, but she pushed up with unexpected strength and sat back on her heels, resting her forehead in one hand while she gestured with the other to show she was all right.
“Show your generosity and magnanimity by letting Catherine live,” continued Andevai. “Negotiate a new contract with the Barahal family on what terms you and they think fair for what protection you can offer and what gain the eldest daughter may achieve thereby. Show that Four Moons House can be a true ally, not a power that forces its will on others because it can.”
“You know nothing of the situation,” said the mansa impatiently. “The girl is a danger, but hers is also a necessary gift in such disordered times. We must possess her so others cannot take her. For you can be sure there are others who have agents seeking her.”
The steady hum had begun to resolve into a melange of voices, coming from outside and growing louder. Back by the walls, laborers lay on the floor, trying to remain unnoticed as the light withered and the shadows grew. At the doors, the soldiers brushed themselves off with commendable briskness, as if they were accustomed to being hammered down every day and almost killed with marrow-sucking cold. Of the two mages, the older one was shaking his hands as if flicking off unseen beads of water, while the younger, who had recovered more quickly, wore a remarkably sour expression as he stared resentfully toward Andevai. For his part, Andevai stood with his head slightly bowed, showing the humble respect of a student for his teacher—although the lift of his shoulders suggested a more complex stance.
In my hand, my sword had returned to its daylight state. A whisper of breeze stirred like the memory of summer. From my knees, I eyed the two doors and the shattered windows, wondering how we could make a break for it.
A crow came to rest on the lip of one of the broken windows, claws gripping the frame. It dipped its inquisitive black head and peered in with its bright black eyes to see what it could see.
Bee, looking up, saw the crow. Her expression and color changed, as if she’d just recognized something. She rose as stiffly as might an old woman, shook herself, and set her lips together in the determined frown that always presaged her worst explosions.
“Bee!” I said fiercely.
She faced the mansa as the didos once faced the hated Romans: proud and queenly.
“I am not mute.” Her clear voice filled the space. “If you have business with me, Mansa, then speak or be silent.”
I tightened my grip on my cane, sure that this time she had gone too far.
The mansa shifted his gaze from Andevai, with his bowed head, to Bee, with her challenging stare. She met him look for look, and the grim press of his mouth softened. His eyes crinkled to reveal unexpected laugh lines. Then the cursed magister chuckled in that condescending way older men do, who are amused by the antics of downy goslings or who find young women attractive.
The light overhead changed consistency, or maybe that was just her look darkening as a familiar stormy expression transformed her face. “How can you imagine I would stand by while my beloved cousin’s life is threatened? While she is pursued through no fault of her own merely because you are angry that you did not get what you wanted? Am I to think this is the act of a man who wishes to do what is right in the eyes of the gods, or rather the act of a man who is angry that he did not get what he wanted the instant he wanted it?”
“Maestressa,” began the djeli hastily, “to address the mansa without an intermediary—”
“No, Bakary. I’ll speak to her with my own mouth.” His smile faded as he, like all of us, heard the growl of a crowd approaching, shouts raised in a chorus I had heard before:
“Away with the oppression of princes and mages! We’ll rule ourselves!”
“Take your choice. Freedom or fetters!”
Bee said, “My cousin and I are leaving. These laborers will go with us, unmolested.”
The mansa looked torn between amusement as at a charming child’s antics and annoyance at her defiance. “No one here can interfere. Four Moons House has a legal contract, made by your elders, that gives your person into our House should we at any time choose to take possession of you. Any court and any jurist will rule in our favor.”
From far away, farther it seemed in that moment than the remembered days of a childhood whose happy security I could never again embrace even in my memories, I heard Adurnam’s bells speak. The bell guarding the temple of the god Ma Bellona, who is valiant at the ford, raised his voice as herald to the crossing from day into night. The sister bells by the river, at the twin temples of Brigantia and Faro, sang out a response in their sopranos.
Bee’s smile flashed triumphantly. “But the gods have ruled otherwise. The bells ring in sunset, and therefore the solstice. I am now twenty, Mansa. Your contract is void.”
32
In the icy twilight, the mansa called cold fire, its eerie glimmer making monsters of the bulky machinery that surrounded us. The laborers caught inside with us murmured in fear.
Bee did not tremble. “I have by law attained my majority. I am thus released from the contract Four Moons House forced on the Hassi Barahals. However, by the laws of my own people, I remain under the guardianship of the Hassi Barahal family. If you wish to discuss a new contract, then you may send representatives to the mother house in Gadir to open negotiations for some manner of agreement between them, you, and me.”
“Pretty words from a pretty girl, but they are foolish as well as ignorant.” His words fell heavily. “Do not doubt, daughter of the Barahals, that you will be pursued by people far less merciful than I am. Do not doubt that there are more people in the world who suspect you exist than you can possibly know. Others will discover you soon enough. The Barahals cannot protect you. You cannot stand against both prince’s court and mage House.”
Bee drew her sketchbook out of the knit bag and held it in her right hand, and his gaze fixed on the book, and his eyes widened as if he guessed what lay within. She spoke. “You are not my master, and you do not rule over me. Nor do you know what I have seen. Do you think you can force me to talk?”
“There are ways to enforce compliance.”
“Yet you might more easily negotiate in good faith. Whyever would you not, when that avenue is open to you? Put me in a cage, Mansa, or sit me across a table. I think you can imagine in which chamber I will prove more cooperative. I can go on a hunger strike just as the poets do. As the Northgate Poet has, in the council square, to force the Prince of Tarrant to listen to his words and to listen to the grievances of the populace. What makes you think I’m not courageous enough to do the same thing?”
Our audience of laborers raised their heads at these words. The soldiers shifted restlessly, for the threat of a public hunger strike was enough to make any powerful lord anxious. Outside, the rumble of the crowd grew more ominous, a few voices crying out, “Burn them!”
The mansa’s cold fire burned more brightly, as if fueled by his anger. But his voice remained soft. “What makes you think the Prince of Tarrant and I cannot simply sweep you up and haul you away? That we will not, for the good of all people?”
“You hear the crowd gathering outside. Do you think they will let me be taken prisoner so easily? The people in that crowd will favor my cause over yours. Do you doubt it?”
“The mob will trample you an hour after they raise you up. If they raise you up and do not simply swallow you whole.”
She raised her chin. “And how, Mansa, is that different from how you and your allies intend to treat me?” Turning, she gestured imperiously to me. “Catherine, come. We are going now.”
I glanced toward Andevai, who looked up to meet my gaze. Something in his look made my hea
rt race, or perhaps it was only the realization that Bee truly meant to defy the mansa, to dare him to stop her in front of witnesses he could easily have killed afterward. No one need ever know what transpired here except his own loyal followers. And Andevai.
She turned her back on him and marched, head high, to the far door in the shadows. Andevai nodded at me, as if to say he would protect our backs. My heart was thudding, like repeated hammer blows; I was almost dizzy with them, with him. I was unsteady, but I gripped the hilt of my sword. And I followed Bee. The soldiers stepped back from the door as if she had commanded them to open a path for her. The mansa said nothing.
Not until we reached and shoved open the heavy door.
“Very well, maestressa.” He did not raise his voice. He had so much power that he need never shout. “My soldiers will escort you to your family’s house, where your father bides. They and the prince’s militia will guard the house so none disturb you. This night and tomorrow are festival days, not an auspicious time to engage in negotiations. On the day after solstice, the Prince of Tarrant and I will call to begin discussions. Do you think that a reasonable compromise? Ah. Listen!”
The thunder of horses’ hooves and the hallooing of cavalry guardsmen announced the arrival of more soldiers. The growling voice of the crowd began to shatter into a hundred voices as their resolve crumbled and people began to scatter.
The mansa’s smile mocked Bee’s brief triumph. “As I expected, the prince’s militia has arrived to disperse the crowd.”
I covered my face with a hand, bracing for the sound of terrible mayhem, but instead the rush of shod feet sprayed in every direction as people fled into the drowning night. The militia rode up and took places surrounding the mill. I uncovered my face. Flakes of snow drifted down through broken windows overhead like the last drowsy remains of lint.