Cold Magic (4 page)

“You’re going to tell me what he
asked
about
me
,” she murmured without looking up or ceasing her drawing, “because otherwise I will pour a handful of salt into your porridge every morning for the next month—”

“Catherine! Beatrice! The Hassi Barahal cousins are again demonstrating their studiousness, I comprehend.”

Distracted by the sound of Beatrice’s voice, I hadn’t noticed the proctor’s slithering approach along the back aisle. She came to rest right behind us, close enough that her breath stirred the hair on my neck. Her gaze swept the balcony. The other female pupils were all intent on recording the formula V(1)T(2) = V(2)T(1), which was shedding chalk dust on the board as the venerable professor repeated Alexandre’s law:
At constant pressure, the volume of a given mass of an ideal gas increases or decreases by the same factor as its temperature increases or decreases.

The maestra grabbed my schoolbook off the table and flipped through its blank pages. “Is this a new schoolbook, maestressa? Or the sum total of your knowledge?”

Cats always land on their feet. “Flammable air is fourteen times lighter than life-sustaining air. It can be produced by dissolving metals in acid. Gas expands as its temperature goes up. No wonder the mage Houses hate balloons! If it’s true that proximity to a cold mage always decreases the ambient temperature of any object, then wouldn’t a cold mage deflate any balloon sack just by standing alongside it?”

Her narrowed gaze would have flattened an elephant. But the gods were merciful, because instead of sending me off to the headmaster’s office for impertinence, she turned her attention to Bee. My dearest and most beloved cousin hastily set down my pencil and attempted to close her sketchbook. The proctor slapped a hand down, holding it open to the page where Bee had just sketched an impressive portrait of a personage obviously meant to be me. With a cackling death’s-head grimace and denarii for eyes, the caricature gazed upon an object held out before it in a bony hand.

“I see you have been paying attention in anatomy, at least,” remarked the maestra as icily as the draft that shivered over us through the high window slits. “That is a remarkably good likeness of a four-chambered heart, although is a heart not meant to reside in the chest cavity?”

Bee batted her eyelashes as her honey smile lit her face. “It was a moment’s fancy, that is all. An allegory in the Greek style, if you will. If you look at the other pages, you’ll see I have been most assiduously attending to this recent series of lectures on the principles of balloon and airship design.” She kept talking as she flipped through the pages. The babble pouring mellifluously from her perfect lips began to melt Maestra Madrahat’s rigid countenance. Buoyed up by a force equal to… gases expand in volume with…

Soon pigs would fly.

“Such fine draftsmanship,” the proctor murmured besottedly as Bee displayed page after page of air sacs inflated and deflated and hedged about with all manner of mathematical formulae and proportional notations, balloons rising and slumping according to temperature and pressure, hapless passengers being tossed overboard from baskets on high and falling with exaggerated screams and outflung arms—

The maestra stiffened, breath sucked in hard.

Bee swiftly turned to a more palatable historical sketch of the Romans kneeling in defeat at Zama before the newly crowned queen, the
dido
of our people, and her victorious general Hanniba’al. And she kept talking. “I am so very deeply anticipating our outing to the Rail Yard next week, where we will be able to view the airship for ourselves. How incredible that it propelled itself all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from Expedition to our fair city of Adurnam! Not a single human or troll lost in the crossing!”

“Imagine,” I added, unable to control my tongue, “how the cold mages must be celebrating its arrival, considering that the mage Houses call airships and rifles the reckless tinkering of radicals who mean to destroy society. Do you suppose the mages mean to join the festivities next week as well? It’s said half the city means to turn out to see the airship, if only to stop the Houses from attempting something rash.”

Every pupil sitting near enough to overhear my words gasped. Hate the Houses if you wished, or kneel before them hoping to be offered a trickle from the bounteous stream of their power and riches and influence, but everyone knew it was foolish to openly speak critical words. Even the lords and princes who ruled the many principalities and territories of fractious Europa did not challenge the Houses and their magisters.

The proctor snatched Bee’s book from the table and tucked it under an arm. “The headmaster will see you both in his office after class.”

Half the girls on the balcony snickered. The other half shuddered. The twins kept taking notes, although I didn’t know them well enough to say if they were that oblivious or that focused. Maestra Madrahat took up her guard post at the entrance, her keys hanging in plain sight to remind us that no one could sneak out and down the stairs and that no venturesome young male could sneak up and in. None of that
here
, in the abstemious halls of the academy.

The headmaster will see you both.

“Oh, Cat, what have we done now?” Our hands clasped as we shivered in a sudden cold wind coursing like a presentiment of disaster down from the high windows.

Bee and Cat, together forever. No matter what trouble we got into, we would, as always, face it as one.

When the lecture ended, we all dutifully snapped fingers and thumbs to show approval. Afterward, some students stood to offer praise, one male pupil raising a song while a chorus, scattered through the hall and balcony, clapped a rhythm and sang the response:

To the maestra of learning, heavy with wisdom.

On this day we greet you.

Our ears like maize grow ripe with knowledge.

On this day we greet you.

Bee hummed and tapped along, offbeat and out of tune. The academy’s head of natural history offered a mercifully brief speech thanking the eminent visitor for gracing us with her presence and illuminating insights, and afterward reminded the gathered pupils of the academy-sponsored trip to the Rail Yard to view the airship, coming up next week, and the public lecture to be offered on this very evening by the very same visiting scholar on the very same subject.

Bee sighed as she returned my pencil. “Father will make us go. It’s hopeless. We’re doomed to the dreary gray of Sheol for another evening of hearing the same lecture all over again.”

“I thought you’d given up believing in the afterlife after last year’s lecture series on natural philosophy.”

“Reason is the measure of all things. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume I will die of boredom if I have to sit through the same lecture all over again.”

“You just said that.”

“Exactly my point. I won’t even be allowed to draw.”

“Say you have a headache.”

“That was my excuse last week when the eminent scholar from the academy in Havery was speaking on the origin, nature, range, function, and persistence of ice sheets.”

“That one was actually interesting. Did you know that glacial ice covers all land north of fifty-five degrees latitude and once covered the land as far south as Adurnam—”

“Quiet!” She dropped her head into her hands, strands of black hair curling around her fingers. Her elegant silver blessing bracelet, given to her by her mother seven years ago when she made twelve, glimmered like a dido’s precious keepsake in the amber light. “I’m devising a desperate scheme.”

I slipped my schoolbook into my bag beside the essay and buttoned the pencil into its pocket, from which Bee could not easily steal it. We waited for the balcony to clear: The back-row students always descended last. When our turn came, we rose in order and filed out past Maestra Madrahat. The proctor still clutched Bee’s sketchbook, and I wondered if Bee would snatch it out of her hands, but the fateful moment passed as we pushed into the narrow stairwell, following the other whispering girls down the steep steps while the last of the row clipped at our heels. The gaslight’s flame murmured.

The young woman ahead of us turned her head to address Bee, who was in front of me. “Was that the book with the naughty drawings?” she asked.

“Yes.” Bee’s whisper hissed up and down the stairwell, and other girls fell silent to listen. “Ten pages drawn after the lecture on the wicked rites of sacred prostitution practiced in the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre according to the worship of the goddess Astarte.”

More giggling. I rolled my eyes.

“Those are just lies the Romans told,” said our interlocutor, who, like us, was the daughter of an old and impoverished Kena’ani lineage. Unlike us, Maestressa Asilita had been given a place at the academy college because of her genuine scholarly attainments. In addition, she had a remarkable gift for coaxing Bee off the cliff. “Like the ones about child sacrifice. Do you have drawings of that, too?”

“Bee,” I warned.

“Grieving parents wailing as they scratch their own faces and arms to draw blood? Priests cutting the throats of helpless infants and lopping off their tiny heads? And then casting their plump little bodies into the fire burning within the arms of the Lord of Ba’al Hammon? Of course!”

Girls shrieked while others, sad to say, giggled even more.

“What is that you said, Maestressa Hassi Barahal?” demanded the proctor’s voice from on high.

“I said nothing, maestra,” I called back as I ground a fist into Bee’s back. “I spoke my cousin’s name only because I was tripping on her hem and I wanted her to
move faster
.”

The light at the end of the stairs beckoned. We surged out and down the wide corridor in a chattering mass of young women soon joined by a chattering mass of young men. The actual children, the pupils under sixteen, were herded away to the school building in the back of the academy, but we college pupils spilled into the high entrance hall to await the summons to luncheon.

The academy had been erected only two decades before with funds raised from well-to-do families who resided in the prosperous city of Adurnam and its neighboring countryside, all ruled over by the Prince of Tarrant and his clan. Those families came from many different backgrounds, and some had fought bitter wars or engaged in blood feuds in the past. The prince had clearly instructed the architect to placate everyone and offend no one. Therefore, the inner stone facade of the entrance hall had been carved with a series of reliefs depicting plants: princely white yams, hardy kale, broom millet, poor-man’s chestnut, jolly barley, honest spelt, humble oats, winter rye, broad beans, northern peas, sweet pears and apples, stolid turnip, quick radish, and even the newcomers brought over the ocean—maize and potatoes. Something for everyone to eat!

“Luncheon smells so good,” whispered Bee, licking her lips.

Yam pudding. My favorite! The assembly bell rang.

She pulled me around the outside of the milling crowd, whose fashionable clothing brightened the hall with so many bold colors, including intense stripes of red that matched my mounting irritation at being dragged along like baggage.

“Bee!”

“We have to get my sketchbook back. Look! There goes the old basilisk. Blessed Tanit save me. She’s giving it to the headmaster! Cat, do you have any idea—”

“I have an idea that I’m very hungry. Unlike you, I missed my morning porridge.”

“He’s seen us!”

Maestra Madrahat saw us, too, and she beckoned like an angry Astarte, goddess of war, summoning malingering troops to battle. Bee hauled. I lagged. Why ever could I not keep my mouth shut?

The headmaster was a tall, elderly black man of Kushite ancestry who had a scholarly background in the newly deciphered hieroglyphics of ancient Kemet, which the Romans felt obliged to call Egypt. The headmaster was the one person who the various monied factions in the principality of Tarrant had all agreed would, like the plants, offend no one because of his impeccably distinguished and noble Kushite lineage. Even though the great wars between Rome and Qart Hadast—called Carthage by the cursed Romans—had been fought two thousand years ago, what Kena’ani mother would actually want a son of Rome teaching her precious daughters? Our ancient feud was far from being the only dispute or duel raging in the private salons and mercantile districts of Adurnam with its many lineages, clans, ethnicities, tribes, bankers, merchants, artisans, plebeians, and lords living all smashed together in the city’s stately avenues, crowded alleys, busy law courts, and the narrow parks where hotheaded young men fought duels.

Adurnam, city of eternal quarreling!

The great port city was built along the banks of the Solent River, downstream from the vast marshy estuary we in Adurnam called the Sieve. As many rivers and tributaries and streams flowed into the Sieve as peoples, lineages, languages, gods, rhythms, and cuisines flowed into the city. So it was no wonder that the academy had chosen for its headmaster a man who could claim relation to the Kushite dynasty, whose scions had been peacefully ruling venerable but decaying Kemet—Egypt—for the last two thousand five hundred years. Even the Roman Empire had lasted only a thousand.

“Now is not a convenient time, maestra,” murmured the headmaster in a low voice I could hear, although I certainly was not meant to. “Does this matter really warrant my attention?”

“If you’ll just speak to them, maester.”

He looked toward me, as if to say with his gaze that he knew how well I could hear although we were still a thrown book away and they were speaking softly.

Bee leaned her whole body into tugging me, and we crossed the gap out of breath and staggered to a halt before him. Bee pulled off her indoor slippers, and this impulsive gesture of respect—removing shoes before an elder—made him smile. We kept our gazes humbly lowered.

“The Barahal cousins may attend me,” he said as he tucked Bee’s schoolbook under an arm. He offered a courtesy to the maestra and, leaning heavily on his cane, made his way across the hall.