Cold Magic (31 page)

“The Hallows fire is being lit,” remarked the old woman.

“There is no place for me at a fire’s lighting,” he answered curtly.

The drums fell into a shared rhythm, one that made my shoulders twitch. I recognized the measure of the drum, calling “koukou,” which we’d learned from friends in the city. The sound came closer, as at a procession winding through the compounds of the village.

“Best you wait until dawn to greet your mama. No good for her will come if she is woken now that the medicine has taken effect, for they dosed her before dusk. You may as well go on to the celebration. Let the old and ill take their needed rest while the young dance.” The procession’s clamor lessened as it moved away through the village. “If you go to Kayleigh now, she’ll fit you with proper clothes.”

He lifted a hand to touch his fine, elegant jacket with a self-conscious lift of his chin. “Is Kayleigh well, Mother? Is there any trouble for her?”

“No soldiers have trampled through our village’s fields since you went up to the House seven years ago.”

He ducked his head as if the words pinched him. “But they will. There’s worse, Mother. The mansa himself told me today that he intends to take Kayleigh to his bed, to see if more magisters can be bred out of our bloodline. What am I to do?”

“What can you do, Vai? The magister who sired your father on me did not ask my permission. The magister’s gift—if indeed it came from him—lay quiet in your father, but it has woken in you.”

“More curse than gift.”

“Truly, Andevai, if you could be shed of it, would you?”

“No.” He cupped a hand over his eyes to shield his face. “Even to what I endure at the House, I will suffer it in order to learn.” When he lowered the hand, his expression was knit of iron. “It would not matter even if I wished. I belong to Four Moons House, as does this village. I must obey them, or it will be the worse for all of you.”

“Has the mansa threatened you?”

“That he chooses today to inform me of his plans for my sister? That he reminds me that without the medicine provided by the House, my mother will die? That he mentions this village’s obligations to the House? Are these not all threats? Because I failed to properly do what he asked me to do? Maybe there is nothing I can do to make it right no matter what happens. But my only leverage—as the Greeks would say—is to gain enough favor in their eyes by doing what I am required to do. Then, perhaps, the mansa will, one time, allow me to spare Kayleigh being dragged off to suffer his attentions.”

“I doubt it.”

He hissed in a breath. “I am trapped. What is one life set against all that?”

“A question you will have to answer.”

“They despise me, Mother. Whatever stories I may tell my mama so that she does not worry, you know the truth of it. I am nothing to them, only they cannot waste me because I am too powerful.”

“Is there no other House where you can go?”

“They dare not cast me out, because they know another House will take me. They will not trade me away because I am too valuable. Even if I ran away, no other House will shelter me. They wouldn’t dare risk the mansa’s enmity should he discover where I was hiding. Anyhow, if I were to leave my teacher on bad terms, what other teacher would take me in?”

“Is there no life for you outside a mage House?”

“Why do you even ask?” he cried bitterly. “Do you think I would be better off an outlaw starving in the hills? No princely house can take me in, because the mage Houses would turn on it and destroy it. No guild will take me, for the same reason. And, anyway, what guild would admit a poor village man with no guild connections, no property, and no craft? I suppose I might walk to a city and seek work as a laborer. No cold mage survives for long outside the protection of a House. People fear and resent us. My own father’s other son fears and resents me! Even a magister cannot stay awake always. You know the saying: Saber-cats, wolves, and mages can be killed when they sleep. But, anyway, let’s say I could. I might be able to escape them. Let’s say I could travel to Qart Hadast or into the Barren Lands or across the ocean to Expedition. I have skills, and I have power—then what? I could hunt, maybe. I remember what hunting magic I learned from Fa before the cold magic bloomed and the House took me away. But do you think I would abandon you and my mother and sisters and my kin and the village to the mansa’s anger? Because he will punish you to get back at me. So even if I could walk free, you cannot.”

Even wrapped in my fur-lined cloak, I was by now shivering where I crouched. Crystals of ice skinned the surface of my uneaten porridge as the sorcery of winter radiated from him, released by his emotions. The fire was laid but not alight, and the elderly woman had vanished.

“These are harsh chains,” said his grandmother in the same gentle tone she had been using all along, “although even you cannot say for certain what the mansa will do.”

“Please say nothing to Kayleigh of what I learned! Let her have peace for as long as she can.”

“Go on, Vai. You have friends who have missed your company.”

He left.

After the door closed behind him and the fire spurted up with a flicker and licked along the wood with gathering strength, I leaped out from my corner. I gulped down the last of the cold porridge before I set the bowl down on the chest at the foot of her bed and let her see the sword; although out of courtesy, I kept it in its sheath.

“I thank you for the food, Grandmother, and your kind words, but I have to leave. I’m sorry for his troubles and for yours. I am quite sure that it is wrong for an entire village of people to be held hostage and in such an indenture for so long with no recourse, but I will not offer up myself just because—”

“Why does the mansa want you dead?”

Her question compelled me. It was as if she had ensorcelled my tongue. “Andevai married the wrong woman. He was sent to the Barahals to marry Bee, but he was tricked by Bee’s parents into marrying me to save Bee.”

“You were party to this deception?”

“I knew nothing of it! The Barahals deceived me, too. They lied to me, just as they lied to him! I am expendable, to the Barahals and to the mansa.”

“So you mean to run for the rest of your life, never able to rest?”

The weary, horrible prospect unrolled before me like a path overgrown with vicious brambles. I would run and run and be torn until at last I collapsed with the wolves at my throat breathing death into my face. And yet even so, I could not accept defeat.

“If I can survive until the winter solstice, then they might still wish to kill me, just for the revenge of it. But as soon as Bee reaches her majority, the contract expires. So she has a chance if I can find her before they do. I’ll never let them take her. Never.”

The door opened. I whirled while pulling the sword half out of its sheath. Three elderly women entered, and by the time I accepted that these were not the mansa’s soldiers, several older men had entered as well, including Mamadi. I retreated to the foot of the bed with my back to the wall as the men set out the benches. Eight men and seven women of advanced years took a place, men on one side, women on the other. Last, Duvai entered, supporting a bent and frail man who could barely walk. He looked as old as the tiny woman in the bed, yet I guessed he was her son. He wore about his neck and had pinned to his clothing many amulets, and in his rheumy eyes I saw blindness.

Duvai brought him to me. He traced the air around me without touching me, and a shiver of power crawled along my skin. Duvai helped him sit on the first bench. Still holding on to his nephew, the old man spoke to the assembly in a voice as hoarse as a frog’s spring croak. “The spirit world is knit into her bones. But she is not a spirit woman. Hers is true human flesh. Therefore, she did not deceive us in asking for guest rights. It is a serious matter to consider handing over one we have promised to shelter.”

“The mansa will punish us,” said one of the women, “if we do not turn her over.”

“Give her to Andevai,” said a man, “and let him do what he must.”

“To kill in the village on Hallows Night,” said Mamadi, “is a very dangerous thing. Spirits will flock to her blood. That they would enter this village would be a very ill thing for the village.”

“Then hold her prisoner,” said that first man, “until Hallows Day has passed. Let her be taken back to the House, or have her throat slit beyond the stockade. We’ll be rewarded.”

“Rewarded as we were before,” asked another woman, “to see our noble son snatched away by the mansa?”

“Will we be rewarded for offering guest rights to a traveler who asked properly and then breaking our word?” demanded another woman. “What troubles will rain over us in the years to come, because we have done a wrong thing? She must be released to go on her way. If the mansa’s hunters track her down later, then it will not be on us that she is dead.”

“If we do not tell Andevai,” said another man, “then how will he know she was here? If he does not know, the mansa does not know.”

They discussed the matter while I stood there pressed against the wall, amazed so many spoke in my favor. Or not in my favor, precisely—I never felt they cared much for me one way or the other—but in favor of a code that safeguarded guests. This was not about me, but about the integrity of the village.

When all had made their arguments, the old hunter spoke again in his frog’s whisper. “If she has been offered guest rights, then we risk a worse thing if we turn her over to the mansa. If other villages should hear—and they will hear, you can be sure—then how can we expect them to greet our hunters and our women out gathering if they are caught betimes needing shelter? The mansa may fine us, add to our burden, even kill some among us, but his power is limited to this world. If we go against what the ancestors and the gods have told us is right behavior, then we offend a deeper power. And trouble will come down much harder on us, and on our children and on their children.”

Last of all, Andevai’s grandmother spoke. “If we prosper only through the suffering or death of another, then that is not prosperity.”

It was agreed by a nodding of heads, some resigned, some reluctant, but in the end no one objected.

Duvai said, as briskly as if he had been waiting eagerly just for this opportunity, “Vai cannot leave the village until dusk tomorrow. If I set her on her way at dawn, we can fairly be said to have given her shelter and not left her vulnerable or tried to trick her into being trapped by him later. After that, it is out of our hands.”

Silence followed his words.

Torn equally by shame, gratitude, and suspicion, I whispered, “My thanks to you.”

I did not know what reaction I would receive for these paltry words, but to my surprise, after Duvai left to make his preparations, they invited me to sit among them. They were curious about who I was and where I came from. They asked nothing about Andevai or how I had fallen into the trouble that currently engulfed me. Being an inland village, they had not heard of the Kena’ani, not even to call them Phoenicians, but they were interested to hear I was city born and raised, and they asked questions about where I came from and what life was like in a city. Duvai’s uncle, the best traveled among them, had been once to the city of Havery, when he was a young man, and he had never desired to repeat the experience. They might have kept me in the smoky little house all night had Andevai’s grandmother not intervened.

“Let the guest be fed and invited to the celebration,” she said.

The elders took their leave.

She said to me, “Trust can only be offered where it is also received.”

“I ask for your pardon, maestra. But I was raised by people I thought were kin, who I thought cared for me. They threw me to the wolves the moment they feared for their own daughter. Why should I trust anyone?”

Yet I had trusted the eru and the coachman. Why?

She gave a soft noise, more of a grunt than a laugh. “As you heard, no one argued to spare you for your own sake. Rather for the village’s honor.”

“You might have said all that in my hearing to make me believe I can trust you.”

“My hearing is weak. I could not hear what you just said.” The tenor of her voice made her point clear. I had insulted her and, indeed, the village. “You may walk where you wish, leave if you feel you must. No one will stop you. Duvai will await you at the gate at dawn.”

Thus was I dismissed, and I opened my mouth to speak, regretting what I had said, and then pressed my lips closed before I spoke words I was not sure I meant. To babble out meaningless assurances of my respect would only condescend. Maybe I ought to have been more trusting, but I dared not. The one thing I was sure of was that Duvai would be pleased to make his younger brother’s life more difficult. How far he was willing to go against the mansa I could not know. The villagers had no recourse if the mansa acted against them. The village belonged to the House.

Just as I did. But I did not have to live here, or stay here.

The elderly attendant gestured to show I had overstayed my welcome, so I took myself and my sword and my weary heart into the cold as she shut the door firmly behind me. Outside, the compound appeared deserted. Snow spun lazily. I ventured out the compound gate and stood against a wall, staring toward the structure at the center of the village, with its thatched roof and a railing built around under the eaves. Smoke eked from stone chimneys and heat radiated from the open doorways. Inside flashed movement; drums beat, accompanied by the stamp of feet and calls of encouragement. Drums have their own magic. My toes twitched, and my feet shifted as my shoulders hitched a little back and forth.

“Catherine?” Kayleigh stood at the compound gate, looking around without seeing me where I stood not ten paces from her.

I said nothing, and when she walked away, I hurried the other way. It was easy enough to remain unseen when it seemed the entire village had crammed into the festival house. Night is a friend to cats on the prowl. At the inner gate, I became air and walked right past the two young guardsmen; not so difficult in any case because they were diverted by the sounds of the celebration they were missing.