Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (17 page)

I tucked up my skirts, shifted the basket to my back, and climbed the tree to the
window of Uncle Jonatan’s study. A chain of magic still protected the window latch.
The whisper of its cold magic woke my sword. I unsheathed my blade and severed the
threads. Then I turned the latch and swung into a deserted room.

Uncle Jonatan’s desk had been replaced by a table, chairs, and two settees shrouded
by heavy covers and the dusty flavor of neglect.

I stepped into the first-floor corridor and listened through the threads that bound
the house. Aunt Tilly had spun Kena’ani magic to guard home and property, and its
embrace lingered in the walls like a memory of her warm smile. I wiped away a tear,
for although I knew she and Uncle had betrayed me to save their own daughter, I still
missed the way Aunt Tilly would kiss my forehead at night before we slept. I longed
for the plates of sweet biscuits she and Cook had baked when they had extra coin for
a treat of honey.

The house lay utterly silent except for the patter of rain. I went down to the ground
floor and into the half basement. In the kitchen I opened the shutters and looked
around. A new stove with all manner of modern conveniences had been installed in place
of the old one where Cook had eked out each last morsel of tough stew meat and mealy
turnips to make enough to feed us all. Dust smeared the tabletop,
broken by the footprints of mice. Yet the coal bin was full, and the pantry was stocked
with sealed pots of oats, barley, and beans.

I found a key hanging beside the back door. By the time the rain really began to pour,
we were all safe inside.

I shivered. “No one knows we’re in Adurnam, and no one has lived here for weeks. I
say we stay here the night, take a bath, and wash our clothes.”

Bee nodded. “We can haul water while we’re still wet. Now it’s coming on dark, no
one will notice our chimney smoking. Do you want to haul water or start the fire?”

“I’m cold and wet,” said Rory in a tone of offended surprise. “I can’t work at hard
labor in this condition!”

“You’d be surprised what you could do rather than have me bite you,” said Bee.

A grumbling Rory and I filled two copper tubs and the big scullery pot with water
while Bee lit lamps, stoked and lit a fire in both the scullery and the fancy kitchen
stove, and set oats and beans to soak. She found towels and an entire cake of lavender-scented
soap of a kind we had only been able to afford as shavings at the holidays. In the
scullery I gave Rory a towel to wrap around his waist and told him to take off his
wet clothes.

“If you sit and watch the big pot, the water will boil,” I added.

“Really?” He settled on a stool with such a pleased expression that I could not tell
whether he simply did not know the old saying, or had a profoundly complex sense of
humor.

In the kitchen Bee and I stripped, wrapped ourselves in towels, and hung the wet clothes
on a rack by the stove to dry.

“Really, Cat, wasn’t that a little mean-spirited? A watched pot never boils!”

“Of course it boils eventually unless there’s a cold mage nearby to douse the fire.
It will keep him out of trouble.” I pulled out Queen Anacaona’s skull, with its empty
eye sockets and remarkably good teeth. Some peculiar magic was keeping the jaw wired
on. “Where shall we set her?”

“You can’t mean to set out the skull as if it can see or hear anything!”

“It seems rude to leave her shut up in the basket. I’ll set her here on
one of the plates so she feels as if she knows what’s going on.” I placed her on a
cupboard shelf, facing out. “There you are, Your Highness. We will be going into and
out of this kitchen, but be assured we will not leave the house without you. In fact,
if you have any spectral powers, you might warn us if an enemy approaches the house
so we can escape. Otherwise you’ll fall into their custody and then you’ll never reach
your son.”

I glanced at Bee, sure she was about to make a mocking comment.

Instead, her lips pursed as she considered the skull of the cacica who had briefly
been her mother-in-law. She made a courtesy. “My apologies, Your Highness. I regret
my rude comment.”

We left the cacica to oversee the kitchen while we explored the house. Our bare feet
marked trails on the floors. Warmth from the two fires drifted upstairs like the kiss
of an opia. The cold mages had repapered the walls, replaced the curtains, and removed
all the old furniture. Only two things remained from the house we had grown up in.

One was the big mirror on the first-floor landing, covered by a sheet. I pulled back
the sheet and rubbed a finger over the mirror’s slick surface, remembering how an
elderly djeli had chained the marriage between Vai and me in its dark surface. The
light from the lamp Bee held gleamed in the mirror, illuminating us as indistinct
figures. Threads of gossamer magic chased around me before receding into the shadows.
A faintly gleaming chain spun out of my chest and pierced the surface of the mirror,
as an arrow loosed into a pool stabs a path. Although barely visible in the darkness,
the thread shot sure and strong into the unseen depths.

Was there movement in the heart of the mirror? I extended a hand to touch it. Its
surface was smooth and hard.

“Cat, are you staring at yourself? For you look a sight, with your hair all tangled
and that towel draped so fashionably…” She touched her own bedraggled curls with her
free hand. “Blessed Tanit! Is that really how I look?”

I pretended to recognize her as if for the first time. “Bee? Is that truly you? I
would never have known… I thought perhaps a medusa, with the snakes of her hair all
dead and limp—”

She kicked me in the shin.

I let the sheet drop back over the mirror’s face. We went upstairs to
the bedchamber we had shared for most of our lives. In a secret hiding place in the
wall of the chamber we found Bee’s first sketchbook with its scrawls, and a scrap
of faded calico fabric wrapped around my childhood toys: a red-and-cream polished
agate, a little wood play sword, and a tiny carving of a stallion caught in the flow
of a gallop.

“You gave me an awful bruise on the head with that thing,” said Bee as I brandished
the little sword. “You were such a beast, Cat. Always getting into fights.”

“I was not! I was always saving you when
you
got in fights! Like the time in the ribbon shop when that Roman girl yanked on your
hair until you screamed while her mother pretended nothing was happening.”

She grinned as she galloped the toy stallion across the floor. “You had hacked off
half her hair before her mother bothered to come look. It’s a good thing we can run
so fast.”

“It’s not speed. It’s knowing how to distract the enemy.”

“Do you remember seeing her again years later when we arrived at the academy?” Bee
laughed so hard she had to wipe tears away. “All grown up, and with her hair done
in those knots and bows that were fashionable four years ago.”

“Thank Tanit that went out of fashion as quickly as it did. Your hair was too curly
and mine too heavy and straight.”

“How she looked daggers at us! She started a whispering campaign, do you remember?
To try to make us feel ashamed of being impoverished Phoenician girls.”

We shared a smile, for of course the girl hadn’t known we were shameless. We simply
didn’t care what she and her circle thought of us. Our indifference had demolished
her campaign. Not to mention the syrup we had secretly smeared on her knots and bows,
which soon attracted ants.

“Let’s go down before Rory does something he oughtn’t,” said Bee, taking my hand.

We gathered our treasures. As we started down the steps I heard splashing.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “We’d better hurry.”

When we reached the scullery we found Rory happily washing himself as he sang a spectacularly
obscene song. Fortunately he was
sitting in the tub, and had filled it with hot water. The water was already grimy
with his dirt.

“Am I supposed to eat this?” he asked brightly, holding up a sliver he had cut off
the cake of soap. Then he laughed as he set back to scrubbing himself. “You should
see your expressions!”

“Be careful I don’t make you eat it!” muttered Bee. “Where on earth did you learn
those crude verses?”

He brushed his lips as if he were grooming up the corners of his grin. “That’s a story!
Do you remember when you sailed with the general and I was left behind with Brennan
Du and Professora Kehinde Nayo Kuti? I discovered they have houses here in Europa
where all they do is pet all day and all night!”

“You can tell us another time, Rory,” I said quickly.

Bee and I retreated to the kitchen. I prepared a nourishing porridge from oats and
pulse while she cleaned the fish and baked it plain, with only salt. Shockingly, we
discovered a cache of actual sugar in a glass jar that had been shoved behind a small
butter churn in the pantry. When Rory had finished bathing and clothed himself in
a towel wrapped around his waist, I set him to watch the porridge while Bee and I
bathed. We washed each other’s hair in a bucket, as we always used to do, then traded
washing in the tub and rinsing with buckets of warm water from the stove. Afterward,
we washed our underthings.

“I miss the shower and plumbing at Aunty’s boardinghouse,” I said. “This seems so
awkward now. Think of the faucets in the town house where the general lived!”

“I do think of them,” said Bee with a melancholy sigh. “Even that was as nothing compared
to the magnificent plumbing in the palace in Sharagua.”

With towels wrapped around us, we returned to find the porridge ready to eat and Rory
picking slivers off the cooked fish. We dug in.

Bee paused to watch me. “The way you’re eating, are you sure you’re not pregnant?”

“I am quite sure!”

“She’s not pregnant.” Rory brushed his face alongside my head. “I have a very sensitive
nose. She’s not pregnant. Nor is she at the moment fertile.”

“How can you know that?” demanded Bee.

His affronted expression made her laugh. “Didn’t I just say I have a sensitive nose?
I know when females are fertile, or not fertile. You human women aren’t like the females
of my own kind. You are fertile more often, and yet never seem to know it, so it’s
fortunate
I
can tell.”

Bee and I stared at him for so long, mouths dropped open, that his brow wrinkled.

“How can you
not
tell? I would think it would be something you would want to know.”

“Goodness,” I murmured as heat crawled up my cheeks.

“You look so sweet when you blush, Cat.” Bee’s smirk made me laugh, although I was
still flushed. She crossed to the high basement window with its four expensive panes
of glass, cracked the latch, and pushed open the window to let out some of the heat.
“What else haven’t you told us, Rory? We’ve asked you more than once to tell us about
the spirit world and the Wild Hunt and the spirit courts, but you always say you don’t
know anything.”

A flicker of wildness stirred in his amber eyes. He leaned closer, growing more threatening,
like a great cat guarding the succulent deer it has just dragged in. Bee glanced toward
the knives hanging by the stove, but I held my spoon and did not retreat.

“You two persist in talking to me as if I am a man. I am not a man. It amuses me to
walk in these clothes. I am a cat. I live in the wild, and I hunt. The dragons are
my people’s enemy. As for the other, I cannot walk in the spirit courts. I know nothing
of their kind, except that they rule us.”

“How do they rule you?” Bee asked.

He considered the bones of the fish. “How do princes rule here? All creatures in the
spirit lands where I grew up bide under the rule of the courts because the courts
are stronger.”

“But why are the dragons your enemies?” Bee asked.

“If we are caught in the tides of their dreaming, we are changed, and lose both our
bodily form and the mind that makes us a self. How can they not be our enemies?”

Bee’s smile had the brilliant assurance of the sun flashing out as wind drove off
its shield of clouds. “You see! The headmaster must know about dragons, dreaming,
and the Great Smoke. Why else
would he have tricked us into crossing into the spirit world? Cat, get my sketchbook.”

After wiping my hands, I unfastened the lid of Vai’s chest. Bee had placed her sketchbook
at the top, wrapped in an oilskin pouch. As she flipped through its pages, I went
through the contents of the chest.

The top was spanned by the length of canvas, sewn with pockets, in which I kept my
sewing things and my other necessaries. Beneath the unrolled canvas lay a pretty pagne
I had never before seen, a festive gold-and-orange print with smiling suns and laughing
moons. I blinked watering eyes, for it was obviously a special gift from Aunty, one
the family had chosen for me with affection. Below this I found trousers and underthings
and, beneath them, some of Vai’s beautiful dash jackets tucked within clean pagnes
for extra protection.

“He can probably describe exactly where and when he got each one,” I said, running
my hands along the folds.

Bee snapped shut the sketchbook. “What is it like to love someone that much?”

I glanced up at her. “Did you love Caonabo?”

“In that ridiculously infatuated way you love Andevai? No, thank Tanit, I did not
love him!”

“How can you say so? At the academy, you were always droning on and on about Amadou
Barry’s beautiful eyes or whichever young man took your fancy that week. You filled
your sketchbook with pictures of handsome young men. And you were always talking—”

“Yes, I was always talking. I enjoyed the attention. Who wouldn’t?”

“I wouldn’t!”

“Yes, dearest. That’s my point. You wouldn’t and never did, because you’re a different
person than I am.” She lifted a hand to scrub at her face as if she were tired. “Because
I’m beautiful, people expect me to have a romantical disposition. Even you expected
it, Cat! But I must say, there is nothing romantical about using cheap ribbons to
make an old dress appear newer whenever the family is obliged to appear at a social
gathering. Melqart forbid there be any chance we look as poor as we really were, lest
people inclined to hire us reject our services due to our wrecked finances! There
is nothing romantical about eating tough winter radish or mushy turnips for every
meal in chilly Martius and damp April because the root cellar is almost empty, the
early-ripening
crops aren’t yet at market, and there’s not enough money for meat.”