Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (46 page)

“I did not try to eat her. I hoped she might see a memory in the tides of the Great
Smoke.”

I had always respected the headmaster because his easy demeanor and impressive erudition
stood in such contrast to my Uncle Jonatan’s short temper and small-mindedness. I
didn’t truly know what sort of older man my father Daniel would have become, had he
lived, but I had liked to believe he would have been something like the man who had
patiently satisfied all factions whose children attended Adurnam’s academy college,
without giving way to any one.

Only evidently he was no man.

“How can we trust you?” I asked.

“A reasonable question, Maestressa. I apologize for our unfortunate way of meeting
just now. You surprised me at a vulnerable moment.”

“Are you a dragon?” I asked.

“I find I am rather weary. Will you take tea on this cold day?”

Bee said, “You choose, Cat. I’ll do as you say.”

I had seen what I had been too young to understand at the time, that I had survived
because I had accidentally fallen into and out of the spirit world.

“I think it is safe to go,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Strangely, I am sure.” I could forgive a lot for having been given the chance to
see the loving way my parents had smiled at me and at each other, the way I had looked
at them with such wholehearted trust. The way my mother had tried to hold on to me.

The house was a stately lord’s home with two wings and three stories plus tiny attic
windows. It was set near the river’s edge flanked by a second band of trees. The gravel
drive led to the imposing front entry but we walked around to the side, where a man
took charge of the dogs and chivvied them away to a kennel.

We made our way through the house to a pleasant library. Bay windows overlooked a
field of sheep-mown grass that sloped to the bank of the Rhenus River. A door opened
onto a garden alcove. In the little garden, rosemary surrounded a flat granite rock
where a sun-loving creature might bask in summer.

The walls were lined with bookshelves and enough mirrors that every part of the room
could be seen within a reflection. There were two hearths instead of one, both fitted
with the most modern circulating stoves; the room was too warm for my liking. Worktables
were heaped with scrolls, books, and ridges of stacked letters, the usual detritus
of a scholar. The chamber looked nothing like the study in Adurnam.

The headmaster sat in a chair situated by the windows and gestured toward a couch
placed opposite. He shifted restlessly, as if he wanted to leap up again. Cautiously
we sat. I saw no point in pleasantries, given everything that had happened. I asked
what I needed to know.

“How did you drive off the Wild Hunt and save Kemal?” I asked.

He lifted a hand to indicate the nearest mirror. “In mirrors we can see the threads
of magic woven through the worlds. Because of this, mirrors can be used to confuse
and conceal.”

My hope crashed. He could not save me any more than a troll maze could.

“Ever since the day you and your cousin arrived at the academy, I saw that the threads
of both worlds run through you,” he added. “I have always known what your cousin is,
but I long wondered why your blood and bone are mixed of both mortal and spirit kind.
The day the head of the poet Bran Cof spoke, I realized your sire must be a powerful
spirit lord.”

“You had no idea before?” I asked.

His mouth parted as if he were about to hiss, but he coughed instead. “I know less
than you might think about the spirit world. I cannot walk there.”

“But you hatched there,” said Bee.

“I hatched there, although I have no memory of the event. We have no thinking mind
until we swim through the Great Smoke and come to land in this world. The creatures
of the spirit world live in their place, and we live in ours. The two are not meant
to mix.” He examined me as he might a curiosity. “Before I met you, Maestressa, I
would have said someone like you could not exist. Everything you are and can do rises
out of the mingling of two worlds in your flesh.”

“Not everything, Your Excellency,” I said. “I was given love and strength by the actions
and example of the mother and father who meant to raise me and were killed because
of me. I know affection and constancy because of the loyalty of my dear cousin Bee.
My aunt and uncle fed and clothed me in the same manner they fed and clothed their
own girls, so I learned fairness from them. We girls were taught deportment, fencing,
dancing, and sewing, as well as how to read and write and do accounts and to use herbs
to make the last of winter’s store of turnips and parsnips taste palatable. So I learned
both a trade, and how to make do. I refuse to agree that everything I am is due to
my sire breeding me on my mother. I am not a horse or a dog, to be described in such
a way. Even horses and dogs can be raised poorly, or well.”

Perhaps, becoming heated, I had raised my voice.

“Passionately argued.” A faint smile calmed his face. “Very well. Your actions and
your loyalty to your cousin have convinced me you are not a servant of the spirit
courts, they who are our implacable enemies. I believe you have earned the right to
have a few of your questions answered.”

Bee touched clasped hands to her lips, then lowered them. “From everything I have
learned, it seems your people somehow bred or created the women who walk the paths
of dreams. Your people infested us, if you will, with the curse of walking the Great
Smoke in our dreams. You did so because you want us to walk into the spirit world
and unearth a nest and guide its hatchlings into the mortal world.”

“That is correct.”

“But we can also glimpse meeting places in the future.”

“Your visions allow you to find a nest. All the rest is coincidental, not of importance
to us.”

Bee’s expression sharpened to her axe-blow glare, and I was sure she was about to
say something cutting, but instead she sat back. “Surely nests hatch without our help.”

“They do. And they have across the passing of many generations. Understand that we
are far older than your kind. It is the way of my people that our mothers live in
the Great Smoke. They lay their eggs on the shore of the spirit world. The eggs hatch
in the spirit world, and hatchlings seek water, through which they fall into the Great
Smoke. After a time swimming there, those who survive surface into this world, for
it is here we must grow to maturity. Thus the cycle starts over. But in recent ages,
our ancestors began to notice that fewer and fewer were reaching this world. We came
to believe that the creatures of the spirit world were deliberately devouring the
hatchlings in the hope of eating them all and thus causing us to die out completely.”

“Why would they want your kind to die out?” Bee asked.

I said, “Probably so there will be no more tides. That’s why the eru and other spirit
creatures build warded ground, so they won’t be changed when a tide sweeps over the
land.”

He smiled as he once would have at the academy, approving a pupil’s correct answer.
“That is what we believe. We can only know what we have learned from humans who have
walked there.”

“How did you make the dream walkers?” Bee asked.

“Only the mothers know. I do not.”

Kemal held open the door to allow a woman to carry in a tea tray. As she set down
the tray on a worktable and poured, I recognized her. She had been the housekeeper
for the dying man we had stumbled on while escaping from the Barry household, an old
man who had exuded heat, sheltered loyal hounds, and asked Bee for a kiss. Now she
was working for the headmaster.

“You may go, Maestra Lian. Kemal, you may also leave us. I will ring if I need you.”
When the door had closed, the headmaster took a sip of tea. “For a very long time
now our numbers have suffered, and we have become few. We have come to expect at best
three hatchlings to survive from a mating swim. Two days ago, on the equinox, eleven
hatchlings swam ashore from the nest you unearthed, Beatrice. They were all brought
safely to the house. Quite astonishing, and a reason for us to hope our numbers may
increase.”

I thought of how many had been eaten and crushed in their race through the spirit
world. Truly, few if any would have survived if Bee had not been there to shepherd
them into the river.

“Why would they only be coming ashore now when it was so long ago that Cat and I dug
them up?” Bee asked.

“While they are swimming in the Great Smoke, hatchlings cannot sense the mortal world.
However, here in the mortal world, a male announces his readiness to crown by marking
a river’s shore with a scent. That mark attracts any rivals who wish to challenge
him. The scent is so strong that it penetrates the Great Smoke as well. Hatchlings
follow it into the mortal world.”

“What does it mean to crown?” I asked, for I could not help but wonder if the word
was a euphemism for mating.

With a frown, he glanced out the window as if to suggest I had been rude for asking.

We sat in an uncomfortable silence. I did not know what to say, and Bee did not speak.

“Can it be?” He sat forward abruptly. An unexpected grin brightened his expression,
and he rose. “What rich bounty showers on us! Yet more arrive!”

He limped into the garden and down the lawn. Bee and I ran to the window.

A spout of water swirled up from the river like an unraveling thread pulled off the
fraying hem of a piece of cloth. The water poured into the headmaster. His human shape
changed. I suddenly understood that his human form was nothing more than an elaborate
illusion. The body absorbed the water and grew into a glistening dragon, one with
a mouth large enough that it could eat me in one gulp. The slippery texture of its
black scales swallowed light. Its head had a whiskered muzzle, and a shimmering crest
ran down the length of its spine, waving like grass in the wind. Its body tapered
into a flat tail more like a fish’s than a bird’s. Yet despite the creature’s perilous
aspect and daunting size, it waddled in a remarkably ungainly way down the sloping
ground.

A roil of movement stirred the river. Creatures surfaced.

“They’re mine!” Bee’s face had the shine of a mother’s smile. “Don’t you recognize
them?”

She ran outside.

I halted in revulsion by the garden door. Eleven silvery-white eels the size of children
humped up onto the shore, blowing and wiggling as they snuffled along the grassy bank.
They were the ugliest things I had ever seen, except for their startling gem-like
eyes. The dragon huffed a smoky breath that stopped them in their tracks and compelled
their attention. Every pair of glowing eyes fixed on him.

A twelfth grub squirmed unremarked onto the shore farther down the bank, beyond a
small wooden pier to which a rowboat was lashed. A hawk dove down to investigate its
movement. The stray hatchling’s sapphire eyes tracked the hawk’s flight as the bird
settled on the bare branch of a tree. The raptor and the grub studied each other.
Then the hatchling lunged forward. In the time it took me to suck in a shocked breath,
not sure who was going to devour whom, it changed.

As if the tide of a dragon’s dream swept its unformed body, it molted its ungainly
larval form and rose as a large hawk, beating for the sky. The true hawk followed.

I dragged my gaze away from the birds to see the eleven hatchlings molting their ugly
grub forms. They transformed into smaller versions of the scaled beast. The air around
the headmaster shivered as if rippled by a blast of heat. The shining black body of
the beast turned in on itself and became that of the man we knew, thankfully in his
clothes. A brief circle of dense rain splashed around him, as if he were raining away
the water he had earlier absorbed.

In a frenzy of imitation, the grubs also changed, although they did not change size.

Eleven youthful persons stood dripping wet and naked on the shoreline, with no thought
for modesty. They had the size and features of innocent boys who are no longer children
but not yet grown. They surged forward to crowd around Bee, touching her, patting
her, sniffing her.

Maestra Lian came striding down the lawn. With brisk gestures and snapped words she
herded them away from Bee and toward the house.

Bee ran to me, her face so opened by joy that she seemed ready to fly. “Did you see,
Cat? They know I’m the one who hatched them!”

She glanced past me, and the brilliance of her gaze softened. I
turned. Kemal stood in the garden door, watching the youths flock into the house.
An expression of unimaginable grief seared his pale features.

“Maester Napata, I hope we have done nothing to disturb you,” said Bee in the same
tone she might use to coax a wounded dog out of its hiding place.

He muttered, “What have you not done to disturb me?”

“Are you a dragon, too?” she asked, more lightly.

He flushed, glancing away, then took in a sharp breath and faced her. “This is the
only body I have ever been able to wear. Since it is a man’s body, can I then call
myself a dragon?”

Her frown usually presaged a scold, but she spoke in a mild voice. “If you hatched
as these others did, out of a nest in the spirit world, then aren’t you a dragon regardless
of what body you wear?”

“The others say I am too much of a weakling to change,” he muttered in a low, shamed
voice.

“I hope they shall say no such thing where I can hear it!” she retorted. “I am sure
there is some other explanation.”

The headmaster walked into the garden alcove. “There is an explanation.”

He ushered us back into the study. There he sat at the desk and sipped at his cooling
tea as if our conversation had not been interrupted by the arrival of eleven—twelve—inhuman
creatures out of the unseen smoke of the spirit world’s fathomless ocean.

“As with all that is born into the spirit world, our essential nature is one of change.
When a hatchling first emerges into the mortal world from the Great Smoke, it does
not comprehend that it has a true nature, the kernel of its being. That is why we
must meet our young ones at the shore, so we can shepherd them into their true shape.
Kemal came to shore among humans. It is remarkable he was not killed the moment he
breached the water, for that is usually what happens if a young one wades onto land
where no kinsman is there to aid it. But he was not killed. For all his childhood
he thought he was human. I am not sure if the family that took in the small orphan
child did so because they felt pity for him or because they knew in time they would
be able to receive a substantial pension from the emperor. In the Empire of the Avar,
any child with the white skin and hair we call
albino must be handed over to the emperor. Those who bring such a child forward are
rewarded, while those who try to hide such a one are punished. I found Kemal in a
sacrificial lot being made ready for the Wild Hunt. It is known among the Avar that
in rare cases these albino children are dragons, although most such albino children
are perfectly human. However, that is why the empire exposes them on Hallows’ Night,
because the Hunt will always kill one of us if it can.”