Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1), Page 2

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  Once upon a time, a young woman hurried along a rocky coastal path through a fading afternoon. She had been sent by her mother to bring a pail of goat’s milk to her ailing aunt. But winter’s tide approached. The end of day would usher in Hallows Night, and everyone knew the worst thing in the world was to walk abroad after sunset on Hallows Night, when the souls of those doomed to die in the coming year would be gathered in for the harvest.

  But when she scaled the headland of Passage Point, the sun’s long glimmer across the ice sea stopped her in her tracks. The precise angle of that beacon’s cold fire turned the surface of the northern waters into glass, and she saw an uncanny sight. A drowned land stretched beneath the waves: a forest of trees; a road paved of fitted stone; and a round enclosure, its walls built of white stone shimmering within the deep and pierced by four massive gates hewn of ivory, pearl, jade, and bone. The curling ribbons rippling along its contours were not currents of tidal water but banners sewn of silver and gold.

  So does the spirit world enchant the unwary and lead them onto its perilous paths.

  Too late for her, the land of the ancestors came alive as the sun died beyond the western plain, a scythe of light that flashed and vanished. Night fell.

  As a full moon swelled above the horizon, a horn’s cry filled the air with a roll like thunder. She looked back: Shadows fled across the land, shapes scrambling and falling and rising and plunging forward in desperate haste. In their wake, driving them, rode three horsemen, cloaks billowing like smoke.

  The masters of the hunt were three, their heads concealed beneath voluminous hoods. The first held a bow made of human bone, the second held a spear whose blade was blue ice, and the third held a sword whose steel was so bright and sharp that to look upon it hurt her eyes. Although the shadows fleeing before them tried to dodge back, to return the way they had come, none could escape the hunt, just as no one can escape death.

  The first of the shadows reached the headland and spilled over the cliff, running across the air as on solid earth down into the drowned land. Yet one shadow, in the form of a lass, broke away from the others and sank down beside her.

  “Lady, show mercy to me. Let me drink of your milk.”

  The lass was thin and trembling, more shade than substance, and it was impossible to refuse her pathetic cry. She held out the pail of milk. The girl dipped in a hand and greedily slurped white milk out of a cupped palm.

  And she changed.

  She became firm and whole and hale, and she wept and whispered thanks, and then she turned and ran back into the dark land, and either the horsemen did not see her or they let her pass. More came, struggling against the tide of shadows: a laughing child, an old man, a stout young fellow, a swollen-bellied toddler on scrawny legs. Those who reached her drank, and they did not pass into the bright land of the ancestors. They returned to the night that shrouded the land of the living.

  Yet, even though she stood fast against the howl of the wind of foreordained death, few of the hunted reached her. Fear lashed the shadows, and as the horsemen neared, the stream of hunted thickened into a boiling rush that deafened her before it abruptly gave way to a terrible silence. A woman wearing the face her aunt might have possessed many years ago crawled up last of all and clung to the rim of the pail, too weak to rise.

  “Lady,” she whispered, and could not speak more.

  “Drink.” She tipped the pail to spill its last drops between the shade’s parted lips.

  The woman with the face of her aunt turned up her head and lifted her hands, and then it seemed she simply sank into the rock and vanished. A sharp, hot presence clattered up. The spearman and the bowman rode on past the young woman, down into the drowned land, but the rider with the glittering sword reined in his horse and dismounted before she could think to run.

  The blade shone so cold and deadly that she understood it could sever the spirit from the body with the merest cut. He stopped in front of her and threw back the hood of his cloak. His face was black and his eyes were black, and his black hair hung past his shoulders and was twisted into many small braids like the many cords of fate that bind the thread of human lives.

  She braced herself. She had defied the hunt, and so, certainly, she would now die beneath his blade.

  “Do you not recognize me?” he asked in surprise.

  His words astonished her into speech. “I have never before met you.”

  “But you did,” he said, “at the world’s beginning, when our spirit was cleaved from one whole into two halves. Maybe this will remind you.”

  His kiss was lightning, a storm that engulfed her.

  Then he released her.

  What she had thought was a cloak woven of wool now appeared in her sight as a mantle of translucent power whose aura was chased with the glint of ice. He was beautiful, and she was young and not immune to the power of beauty.

  “Who are you?” she asked boldly.

  And he slowly smiled, and he said—

  “Cat!”

  My cousin Beatrice exploded into the parlor in a storm of coats, caps, and umbrellas, one of which escaped her grip and plummeted to the floor, from whence she kicked it impatiently toward me.

  “Get your nose out of that book! We’ve got to run right now or you’ll be late!”

  I ripped my besotted gaze from the neat cursive and looked up with my most potent glower.

  “Cat! You’re blushing! What on earth are you reading?” She dumped the gear on the table, right on top of the slate tablets.

  “Ah! That’s my essay!”

  With a fencer’s grace and speed, Bee snatched the journal out of my hands. Her gaze scanned the writing, a fair hand whose consistent and careful shape made it easy to read from any angle.

  She intoned, in impassioned accents, “ ‘His kiss was lightning, a storm that engulfed her’! If I’d known there was romance in Uncle Daniel’s journals, I would have read them.”

  “If you could read!”

  “A weak rejoinder! Not up to your usual standard. I fear reading such scorching melodrama has melted your cerebellum.”

  “It’s not melodrama. It’s an old traditional tale—”

  “Listen to this!” She slapped a palm against her ample bosom and drawled out the words lugubriously. “ ‘And he slowly smiled, and… he… said—’ ”

  “Give me that!” I lunged up, grabbing for the journal.

  She skipped back, holding it out of my reach. “No time for kisses! Get your coat on. Anyway, I thought your essay was…” She excavated the tablets, flipped them closed, and squinted her eyes to consider the handsomely written title. “Blessed Tanit, protect us!” she muttered as her brows drew down. She made a face and spoke the words as if she could not believe she was reading them. “ ‘Concerning the Mande Peoples of Western Africa Who Were Forced by Cold Necessity to Abandon Their Homeland and Settle in Europa Just South of the Ice Shelf.’ Could you have made that title longer, perhaps? Anyway, what do kisses have to do with the West African diaspora?”

  “Nothing. Obviously!” I sat on a chair and began to lace up my boots. “I was thinking of something else. The beginning and ending of the world, if you must know.”

  She wrinkled her nose, as at a bad smell. “The end of the world sounds so dreary. And so final.”

  “And I remembered that my father mentioned the beginning of the world in one of his journals. But this was the wrong story, even though it does mention ‘the world’s beginning.’ ”

  “Even I could tell that.” She glanced at the page. “ ‘When our spirit was cleaved from one whole into two halves.’ That sounds painful!”

  “Bee! The entire house can hear you. We’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “I’m not that loud! Anyway, of course I spied out the land first. Mother and Shiffa are up in the nursery where Astraea is having a tantrum. Hanan is on the landing, keeping watch. Father and Evved went all the way out into the back. So we’re safe, as long as you hurry!” />
  I plucked the journal from her hand and set it on the table. “You go on ahead to the academy. I just need to write a conclusion. It’s the seminar the headmaster teaches, and I hate to disappoint him. He never says anything. He just looks at me.” I excavated my slate tablet and pencil from beneath the coats and caps.

  Bee shoved my coat onto one of the chairs, searching for her cap. After tying it tight under her chin and pulling on her coat, she swung her much-patched cloak over all. “Don’t be late or Father will forbid us the trip to the Rail Yard.”

  “Which handsome pupil do you intend to flirt with there?”

  She launched a glare like musket shot in my direction and strode imperiously from the parlor, not bothering to answer. I wrote my conclusion. Her little sister Hanan clattered down the stairs with her to bid her farewell by the front door. Up in the nursery, Astraea had launched into one of her mulish fits of “no no no no no,” and our governess, Shiffa, had reverted to her most coaxing voice to appease her. Aunt Tilly’s light footsteps passed down the steps to the ground floor and thence back to the kitchen, no doubt to consult with Cook about finding something sweet to break the little brat’s concentration. I wrote hurriedly, not in my best script and not with my most nuanced understanding.

  That is how those druas with secret power among the local Celtic tribes, and the Mande refugees with their gold and their hidden knowledge, came together and formed the mage Houses. The power of the Houses allowed them to challenge princely rule while—

  I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and a key turned in the office door. I paused, hand poised above the slate. Men entered the office; the door was shut.

  Uncle spoke in a low voice no one but me could have heard through the wall. “You were supposed to come at midnight.”

  A male voice answered. “I was delayed. Is everything here I paid for?”

  “Here are the papers.”

  “Where is the book?”

  “Melqart’s Curse! Evved, didn’t you get the book?”

  “It must still be in the parlor. Just a moment.”

  I wiped the “while” from the slate and pressed a hasty, smeared period to the sentence. It would have to do. I scooped up the slate tablet and my schoolbag, bolted for the door, and got out just as the door between the study and the parlor was unlocked.

  I halted on the landing to listen. Aunt Tilly was back upstairs, speaking with Shiffa about the girls’ lessons for the day while Astraea whined, “But I wanted yam pudding, not this!” Meanwhile, Hanan had gone back to the kitchen and was chattering with Cook and Callie in her high, sweet voice as the three began to peel turnips. Pompey, with his distinctive uneven tread, was in the basement. I fled down the main stairs and out the front door, and it was not until I was out of sight of the house that I realized I had forgotten my coat, cap, and umbrella. I dared not return to fetch them.

  Yet what is cold, after all, but the temperature to which we are most accustomed? It is cold for half the year here in the north. However pleasant the summer may seem, the ice never truly rests; it only dozes through the long days of Maius, Junius, Julius, and Augustus with its eyes half closed. I stuffed the tablet in my schoolbag between a new schoolbook and my scholar’s robe, and kept going. To keep warm, I ran instead of walking, all the way through our modest neighborhood and then up the long hill into the old temple district where the new academy had been built twenty years ago. Fortunately, the latest fashionable styles allowed plenty of freedom for my legs and lungs.

  As I crossed under the gates into the main courtyard, a fine carriage pulled up to disgorge a brother and two sisters swathed in fur-lined cloaks. Though late like me, they were so rich and well connected that they could walk right in the front through the grand entry hall without fearing censure, while I fumbled with frozen hands at the servants’ entrance next to the latrines. The cursed latch was stuck.

  “Salve, Maestressa Barahal. May I help you with that?”

  I swallowed a yelp of surprise and looked up into the handsome face of Maester Amadou Barry, who had evidently followed me to the side door. His sisters were nowhere in sight.

  “Salve, maester,” I said prettily. “I saw you and your sisters arrive.”

  “You’re not dressed for the weather,” he remarked, pushing on the latch until it made a clunk and opened.

  “My things are inside,” I lied. “I can’t be late, for the proctor locks the balcony door when the lecture starts.”

  “My apologies. I was just wondering if your cousin Beatrice…” His pause was so awkward that I smiled. I was certain he was blushing. “And you, of course, and your family, intend to visit the Rail Yard when it is open for viewing next week.”

  “My uncle and aunt intend to take Beatrice and me, yes,” I replied, biting down another smile. “If you’ll excuse me, maester.”

  “My apologies, for I did not mean to keep you,” he said, backing away, for a young man of his rank would certainly enter through the front doors no matter how late he was.

  Inside, as I raced along a back corridor, all lay quiet except for a buzz of conversation from the lecture hall. I had a chance to get to my seat before it was too late. In icy darkness, I hurried up the narrow steps that led to the balcony of the lecture hall. The proctor had already turned off the single gaslight that lit the stairwell and had gone in, but I knew these steps well. With the strap of my schoolbag gripped between my teeth, I tugged my scholar’s robe on over my jacket and petticoats. I shrugged the satin robe up over both shoulders and smoothed it down just as I felt the change of temperature, from bone cold to merely flesh-achingly chilly, that meant the door loomed ahead.

  Had the proctor locked it already?

  Blessed Tanit! Watch over your faithful daughter. Let me not be late and get into trouble. Again.

  3

  My hand tightened on the iron latch, the metal so cold it burned through the palm of my writing gloves. I applied pressure, and the latch clicked blessedly free. Catching my breath, I listened as female voices gossiped and giggled, schoolbook pages turned, and pencil leads scratched on paper. A heavy tread approached, accompanied by the jangle of a ring of keys. Straightening, I opened the door and crossed the threshold into the proctor’s basilisk glare.

  She lowered the key she had been about to insert into the lock and attempted to wither me with a sarcastic smile. “Maestressa Catherine Hassi Barahal. How gracious of you to attend today’s required lecture.”

  I opened my mouth to offer a clever reply, but I had forgotten the schoolbag gripped between my teeth and had to grab for it as it fell. The neat catch allowed me to sweep into a courtesy. “Maestra Madrahat. Forgive me. I was discommoded.”

  Some things you could not fault a respectable young woman for in public, even if you wondered if she was telling the truth. She favored me with a raised eyebrow eloquent of doubt but stepped aside so I could squeeze past her along the back aisle toward my assigned bench. “Button your robe, maestressa,” she added, her parting shot.

  As I hastened along the aisle, shaking from relief and shivering from the cold, I heard her key turn in the lock. Once again, I had landed—just barely—on my feet.

  A few of the other pupils glanced my way, but I wasn’t important enough to be worth more than a titter, an elbow nudge, or a yawn. At the back of the balcony’s curve, I slipped onto the bench beside Beatrice. Her schoolbook was open to a page half filled in with an intricate drawing, and she was shaking a broken lead out of her pencil as I sat down.

  “There you are!” she whispered without looking at me, intent on her pencil lead. “I knew you would make it here in time.”

  “Your confidence heartens me.”

  “I dreamed it last night.” She slanted a sidelong look at me. “You know I always believe my dreams.”

  Below, on the dais at the front of the lecture hall, two servants rolled out a chalkboard and hung a net filled with sticks of chalk from its lower rim.

  I bent closer. “I thought you dream
ed only about certain male students—”

  She kicked me in the ankle.

  “Ouch!”

  The headmaster limped out onto the dais and we fell silent, as did every other pupil, males below on the main floor and females above on the balcony. The old scholar was not one to drag out an introduction: a name, a list of spectacular experiments accomplished and revolutionary papers published, and the title of the lecture we were privileged to hear today: Aerostatics, the principles of gases in equilibrium and of the equilibrium of balloons and dirigible balloons in changing atmospheric conditions. Then he was finished, although a surprised murmur swept the hall as the students realized the lecturer was a woman.

  “So, did you complete the essay?” Bee demanded, the words barely voiced but her expression emphatic. “I know how you love the headmaster’s seminar. It would be awful if you couldn’t go.”

  Under cover of the measured entrance of the dignitary in a headwrap and crisply starched and voluminous orange boubou, I made a business of extricating my schoolbook from my bag and arranging it neatly open before me on the pitted old table with my new silver pencil set diagonally across the blank page. Meanwhile, I spoke fast in a low voice as Bee fiddled with her broken lead.

  “I finished but not quite how I wanted it. It was the strangest thing. Some man had come in through the window and was waiting in the study.”

  “How did he manage that?”

  “I don’t know. Uncle wondered the same thing. That’s why they’d gone out to the garden when you came down. Then another man came after that. Uncle had to get a book from the parlor for him—I had to run so Evved wouldn’t see me. Blessed Tanit! I left the journal I was reading on the table. He’ll wonder why it was there!”

  “He’s been very absentminded and more snappish than usual these days. I think he’s anxious about something. Something he and Mama aren’t telling us. So perhaps he won’t notice or will forget to ask.”