Cold Magic (49 page)

The walls, lined with shelves, were insulated with books.

There was no fire in the hearth, but despite this, the chamber was perfectly warm, its heat the splendid calm of sun-warmed rock. Three dogs lay on a rug, alert but eerily silent as they watched us enter. A pair of lamps set on side tables burned sweet oil, their glow illuminating an upholstered chair in which sat an ancient and very frail man. He wore a light red and gold silk jacket over loose trousers and a pair of black house slippers. His white hair was bound in a braid that trailed over his shoulder. His face was thin, and his hands were as bony as claws. Indeed, he looked far too weak to rise, but when he looked up at the pair of us trembling on the threshold, his gaze stunned us into immobility.

With a sharp inhalation, Bee stiffened, her fingers tensing on mine. “I recognize you,” she said in a low, almost pained tone. “I saw you—I saw this library—in a dream.”

“Of course you did,” he said in a labored hiss, as if gruel had filled his lungs and made it hard to breathe. “I have waited, all these years, as all creatures wait for death to approach them.”

As he spoke these words, he looked away from Bee to me. His blue eyes had the blaze of fire, like echoes of the lamps but far more penetrating, able to pierce the stygian depths. Then he blinked, and I staggered and caught myself as from a fall.

He said to Bee, “I knew you would come.” His words were like a spell. She walked as in a trance across the carpet to his chair.

“Bee!” I said, although I could not move, not even to lift my cane, which suddenly weighed like lead in my hand. My eyes watered as though I were standing too near a bonfire.

To my utter and heart-stopping astonishment, she knelt before his chair. He kissed her forehead as gently as a father kisses the brow of his child when he sends her out into the cruel world, knowing she will meet bitter disappointment and sharp pain before she has any hope of finding happiness and peace.

She looked up, her face aglow in the lamplight, so beautiful that it was as if he said the words out loud—”so beautiful”—only I heard no utterance. He bent farther yet, and for an instant I saw a different face, a younger face so wild and strong and striking, as if years and decades had unwoven from his skin.

He touched his lips to her lips, scarcely more than a butterfly’s kiss. A touch. A breath, given from him to her. He drew back. Bee’s eyes flew wide and she collapsed in a faint.

“Bee!” I cried, but I could not move.

On the floor, Bee took in a hard breath; she rose to her feet, staring at him, but she said nothing, as if he had stolen her voice.

“Now I am released,” he said. “I have given you my heart’s fire to help you walk your dreams in the war to come. Go quickly. Take Montagu Street to Serpens Close. There, at the back past the well, you will find a stair that will lead you under the old guildhall to a path alongside the Duvno Stream. After that, you are on your own, for beyond that I cannot see. When the soldiers and mages come calling, as they will shortly, my servants will have departed, and I will be dead.”

The servant’s candelabra dipped before us, as with a bow, and we stumbled away down the hall to the front door. The woman opened it, and when we passed over onto the threshold, she shut it behind us without a word. Bee and I stood shivering on the steps, his words like knives in our hearts. A clatter of feet and hooves drummed a swift rhythm as, away behind us, the pursuit began in earnest. Blessed Tanit. What had happened to Rory?

I groped for and grasped Bee’s hand. “Who was that?” I whispered.

She drew in a shuddering breath and found her voice.

“I don’t know.”

In the confines of Serpens Close, we discovered a stair that led, just as the old man had said, to a path along Duvno Stream, a bricked-in sewer whose stench was leavened only by the steadily dropping night temperature. We hurried for some way along this path and left it to make our way through deserted streets to humbler districts and eventually the festive sprawl of the winter market on the shore of the Solent River. Here we bargained for winter coats, the kind worn by women who must work out of doors through the fierce winter chill, and cloaks to go over them to double as blankets. Bee traded her elegant frock for sturdier garb, and we stood in the cold street and shivered, heads bent together and my hand on the hilt of my ghost sword in case anyone accosted us.

“We need legal help,” I said. “What about those trolls I met?”

She looked askance at me. “You met trolls? Spoke to them?”

“I liked them, Bee. So would you have. But I don’t know where their offices are. We can scarcely go searching this time of night. We have to find somewhere to hide until the sun goes down on solstice eve. Tonight, tomorrow day, the next night, and the next day. That’s all.”

“Then what? Beat off our pursuers with your cane?”

“I don’t know, but our first goal is to get you free of the contract.”

“What do you think happened to Roderic?” she whispered.

I wiped my eyes, unable to speak.

So at length we settled into the smoky supper room of a tavern, where we shared a bowl of millet and goat’s meat stew at a corner table so out of the way that a stout oak pillar cut off our view of the door into the common room. In this forsaken corner, there was plenty of smoke but little enough heat. Out there, people were eating and drinking and conversing merrily, as folk did who weren’t running for their lives. We had, of necessity, come into the somewhat more expensive supper room, but despite the late hour, it was packed with noisy folk keeping late hours. I demolished our first helping and began working through a second while Bee picked past stringy goat’s meat and yellow turnip seeking what was not there.

“The old man said he was waiting for me,” said Bee.

“Maybe. Or maybe he was an old lecher and thought it a likely story to draw you in for a kiss.”

I had expected her to recoil at the thought of being kissed by a dying man who must have been ninety if he was a day. I had even hoped perhaps to squeeze a chuckle from her. Instead, she pinned my wrist to the table.

“No. He said I was death coming to meet him.” I had forgotten how deep her gaze was. Men stuttered and collapsed at a glance from her eyes. Right now, I thought she looked as if the weight of the world’s misery had fallen on her shoulders. “He said he was giving me his heart’s fire to help me walk my dreams in the war to come. I’m frightened, Cat. What did he mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Eat something.”

She released my wrist and scooped up a spoonful of brown gravy. With a frown, she stared at a shred of wilted green mint floating in the liquid, then drizzled the spoon’s contents back into the bowl. “I’m not hungry.”

“We have to keep up our strength. If not for yourself, then think of Rory, who may have sacrificed his life for us.”

She sighed and, after wiping her eyes, began to eat. “You never told me what happened to you, Cat. The tale would make the stew go down better, I’m sure.”

So I told her. As the story unfolded, she ate with more gusto, and her bowed shoulders began to straighten as if my words nourished her.

“Can that be true? That the male who sired you is a creature of the spirit world?” she demanded, a little too eagerly. “Like an eru or a saber-toothed cat?”

“What else can I think?”

“It does seem likely, but awfully strange. And how would they have managed the… the deed?”

“In the usual way, I would suppose. Not that you know anything about that.”

“No more than you do!” She grinned, then bit a finger, thinking. “Still, if it’s true, do you think we could cross into the spirit world and hide there?”

“If I knew where to find a crossroads. If you could even cross with me.”

“The magister crossed.”

“He was raised among hunters. Didn’t I mention that? It’s a dangerous place, Bee.”

She frowned. “And this world is not? Tell me, Cat, did all that coin you now possess come from him?”

“Yes.”

Through narrowed eyes, she regarded me shrewdly. “Did he
like
you?”

“Yes, certainly he must have, because that is how young men show young women they like them. By trying to kill them.”

“But you said he said afterward that he was sorry.”

“He never said that!”

“Maybe not in those exact words. But he said—”

“Leave it! I do not ever again want to talk or think of Andevai Diarisso Haranwy.”

“How quickly you snap, for someone who claims to be undisturbed by the flies buzzing all about her.”

“Somehow, that makes me feel like a steaming pile of fresh manure out in a field.”

She smirked.

“Our pardon.” Two men reeled up like gasping fish. They wore the respectable clothing of apprentices and clerks, and the younger had dressed his up with a bright orange and brown dash jacket. Because of their pallor, it was easy to mark the flush of drunkenness in their cheeks. I shifted my sword to my right side so I could if necessary draw it quickly.

The younger one straightened his jacket and then addressed us. “You fine gels look like you have an empty cup, which we would gladly fill.”

Bee skewered them with a glare. “Was that meant to be poetic or merely crude? You may move on.”

“No reason to knife a man just for asking!” They departed, unsteadily, and made their way to a table crowded with young men who greeted them with the hoots men shower upon the unfortunate. A few blew kisses in our direction. I thought about how much we were like the table and the wall, nothing to bother looking at, nothing at all, and they turned back to their conversation and, I hoped, forgot about us.

Bee was carving lines in the smears of gravy left on the bottom of the bowl. “How could he do it? Use the vision of a woman who was walking the dreams of dragons to plot a military campaign?”

“Who? Camjiata? Do you ever see Camjiata in your dreams?”

“How would I know? I’ve never seen him except in caricatures. Some make him squinch-faced, hunchbacked, and spittle-ridden, while others claim him as mighty and black-haired. Rather like you, now that I think on it, so perhaps you are secretly his love child.”

“I am not—” Words caught in my throat. I stuck a spoonful of stew into my mouth and chewed to make them go back down. It was no stranger a notion than the other possibilities. “Anyway, how would an imprisoned man know about you?”

“Couldn’t someone who walked the dreams of dragons dream about someone who walked the dreams of dragons? If he had a wife who dreamed, she might have told him.”

“If she was a diviner. But diviners are notoriously imprecise. And I’m not sure what that has to do with walking the dreams of dragons.”

She looked up, resting the spoon on the bowl’s rim. “You said that when a dragon turns over in its sleep, the world changes.”

I shuddered. “Yes, in the spirit world. I saw it happen.”

“What about in our world? You called it a tide. Wouldn’t that tide run through this world, too, somehow? If things are connected, as you say.”

“I just don’t know, Bee.”

“What do you think dragons dream of, Cat?”

“Plump deer who run exceedingly slowly.”

She pulled out her sketchbook from the knit bag we had purchased to carry a change of drawers and shifts and a few other necessaries. She paged through the sheets: Some were drawn to capture historical events, like the Romans kneeling before the armies of Qart Hadast after they lost the Battle of Zama. Others were pure fancy, like the poor folk falling from balloons. But others, I now realized, represented scenes from her dreams, when it seemed she had truly dreamed things that had not yet come to pass: the ramparts of Cold Fort; the bookshelves and dead fireplace of the library in which we had met the old man; my hand pressing down the latch of the balcony door in the academy lecture hall. A tall man standing framed by the lintel of a door; I did not know him but I was sure I had seen that face recently.

“If they know what Camjiata looks like, and I have sketched him in a recognizable place in my dreams and maybe with some means to identify the day or season, then the cold mages and the princes—who hate each other but hate Camjiata more—might have a chance to find him. Wouldn’t they?”

I whistled softly. “I never thought of that.”

“But why, then, could the agents of the Prince of Tarrant and the mansa of Four Moons House not have come to my parents and asked with a pretty and a please to pay for my services? Maester Amadou was certainly willing to pay for my kisses!” She flushed, glancing toward the table of clerks and apprentices who had begun singing a song likening the city council members to high-priced and coldhearted whores who lifted their skirts only for the wealthy and never for passion or justice. ” ‘Greetings and peace to you, Maestressa Barahal,’ they might have said, ‘for you have the very means by which we may capture the wicked Camjiata, the Iberian Monster whose armies wrought such devastation across the lands. And for your services we will meanwhile lavish gold upon your family so they can pay their debts and buy new curtains to replace these much-mended and very shabby old ones.’ ”

“They might,” I agreed. “But they had evidence the Hassi Barahals were spies for Camjiata. So that answers that question. Anyhow, having met the mansa, I am certain that once he determined he wanted as well as needed you, he’d not be willing to share you.”

She tucked the book into the bag. “So no matter what happens, we will still be at the mercy of people who can force us to do their bidding just because they have powerful kinfolk, and money, and soldiers.”

“In’t that the truth!” cried the innkeeper as she swept in on the wings of Bee’s final words. She poured mulled wine into the tin cup we were sharing. “Always it is lords and mages who grind us under their well-shod feet. Shoes that were made by the likes of us, weren’t they? Yet we are tossed a pittance and told to be grateful for the work, while they parade in the avenues and rest on finest linen and crow in the city council. Who hears us?”

“Indeed!” replied Bee emphatically, with raised eyebrows. “They have curbed our mouths with bridles and bits! Thus are we silenced.”