Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (50 page)

A horn’s call rose and faded. Rain spattered over us. I clutched Bee’s hand more tightly.

“Catherine, are you cold?” Vai pulled the left oar to steady us in the current. A
bauble of cold fire chased out in front of us to light our way.

“I’m scared of being out on the water, to be honest.”

Bee put an arm around me, but her attention was fixed on the globe of cold fire. “Andevai,
how far can you push the cold fire away from you before you lose control of it? For
that matter, how close must you be to a fire to kill it?”

“In Expedition we did a number of experiments to study exactly these issues.”

“Did you?” said Bee, shifting excitedly beside me on the facing bench. “What did you
do?”

“Everything will be different here because of the proximity and mass of the ice, but…”
He described how the troll scientists he had worked with had set different combinations
of things on fire and adjusted him for distance, angle, and substances placed between
him
and the fire. They had tested his ability to manipulate cold fire at distance, and
how long the brightness would last after he had let go of it. “And both the feathered
people and the dragons have an effect on my cold magic.”

As they talked, I shut my eyes and pretended we were in a carriage.

After another hour we put in at an isolated sandbank. The boat became our roof as
we huddled beneath like kittens under the beaver-pelt blanket and our winter coats,
with Vai and Rory on the outside and Bee and me snug between them. Rory fell asleep
at once.

“No kissing,” said Bee.

Vai kissed me anyway. The touch of his lips was as soft as the caress of flowers.

“The cacica warned we must beware cold mages pretending to be our friends,” I said.
“But we already know the mansa of Five Mirrors House sent word to Four Moons House.”

He sighed. “Yes. I should have known better than to believe I could return to the
Houses.”

“To think dragons walk among us and we never knew!” whispered Bee. By the lilt in
her voice I could tell she was wide awake. “It seems to me the spirit world and the
Great Smoke are locked in a struggle that neither can win. One grows powerful while
the other grows weak, and then they reverse, back and forth endlessly.”

“Perhaps the interlocked worlds are like steam engines, ever heating and cooling,”
said Vai.

“Gas expands as its temperature goes up, and a balloon deflates as its temperature
goes down,” she murmured. “What if cold mages are moving the vital energy from one
place to another?”

“I’m trying to sleep,” said Rory, and they lapsed into silence.

Tucked against Vai, I listened to him think by listening to the way he breathed steadily,
sucked in a breath as a thought struck him, then slowed again as his mind waded through
the possibilities. The river flowed with a soothing voice that pulled me into its
drowning waters. Held in his arms and with Bee’s back pressed against mine and Rory’s
soft snuffling just beyond her, I did not fear. My mother’s hand and my father’s voice
had guided me home. I slept.

I woke alone in the frosty chill. A pallor of gray brushed the edges
of the night, promising dawn to come. Wisp-lights trailed along the far bank.

Vai knelt beside me, a gloved hand shaking my shoulder. “Catherine, wake up.”

“I’m awake. What are those lights?”

“Troops searching the shore. We’ve got to get back out on the water.”

The Rhenus River flowed north before its final curving southwest plunge toward the
vast marshy delta we in Adurnam called the Sieve, which poured through a hundred channels
into the Atlantic Ocean. On this stretch of the river the current was steady but not
treacherous. Vai gave us each turns at the oars. The banks were overgrown with bushes
and woodland. All morning we saw no villages or fields, and only once a rider on horseback.

Just past midday and by now exceedingly thirsty and hungry, we spotted a village on
the western bank marked by the round houses typical of northwestern Celts. It appeared
to be a peaceful place, folk about the spring business of sharpening plowshares and
milking ewes. We pulled into a backwater and tied up.

The village was larger than it seemed from the river, with a pair of temples and a
blacksmith’s forge at the intersection of two cart tracks. The crossroads was marked
by a stone carved with the image of a seated man with antlers on his head, who held
a snake in one hand and an armband in the other. Called Carnonos in my mother’s village,
he had other names elsewhere and was often called a god, but I knew the figure was
a depiction of the Master of the Wild Hunt, who in the old tales guided the souls
of the dead across the veil that separates this world from the spirit world. My father
had recorded one such tale in a journal:
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
.

The Hallows’ Hunt was, my father had opined, a way for people to comprehend the unexpected
nature of death. The old tale had not spoken of blood and chains. Had the Wild Hunt
always hunted blood to feed the courts? Not according to the old tales. Likewise,
had young women always walked the dreams of dragons? For it certainly seemed
that dragons had somehow planted a seed whose fruit had become dragon dreamers.

Had the worlds always been one way, or did the worlds also change, shifting and transforming?

A hammer’s pounding started up at the forge.

“Maybe we’d better go back,” I said.

“Blacksmiths have no love for cold mages, it’s true,” said Vai, “but we can use this
to our advantage.”

“How is it to our advantage to have a blacksmith have no love for you, Andevai?” Bee
asked.

“Why would you give speeches to gatherings of people, Beatrice,” he responded in exactly
the same tone, “when so many are hostile to what you have to say?”

“Because I may change their minds if only they hear and understand the important things
I have to tell them!”

“Just so,” he agreed.

Folk gathered to watch us approach the forge. Inside, the bellows kept pace, and the
fire kept burning despite Vai’s halting twenty paces away. That was part of the blacksmith’s
magic. A white-skinned man with a burn-scarred face and work-marred hands emerged,
wiping his palms on a cloth. He spoke with a rough dialect, but I was beginning to
get an ear for it.

“Ye is a magister,” the man said. “We like not having truck with yer kind, mage. Some
of them mage House soldiers was a-coming through here yesterday. They carried the
banner of Five Mirrors, but they had riding with them some men wearing tabards marked
with the four phases of the moon.”

Vai showed no emotion, but it was all I could do not to react to the mention of soldiers
from Four Moons House. The courier simply could not have gotten there and back so
quickly.

“We thanked them kindly and showed them the road out of here. Yet they still went
a-taking a lass and a lad and four stout sacks of turnips with them, as they are having
the right to do. So if ye must take anything from our peaceful village, take it, and
then with our favor, ye may walk out that road likewise, and be quick about it.”

“Perhaps I am the one the soldiers are looking for,” said Vai.

The blacksmith looked him up and down, for he was wearing his laborer’s clothes, having
packed away the precious dash jackets. “Ye is a workman’s son, not a fancy magister.”

“I am a village-born lad, but I am a cold mage likewise. You know how it is with the
mage Houses. They take what they want and bind it to them.”

“That, indeed!” said the blacksmith. The village folk murmured in agreement, as they
would make interjections when a djeli told a tale. I could not help but notice that
men stood in the front ranks with the women and children in a separate group at the
back.

Vai went on. “Besides that, I have something to tell you. For many generations have
blacksmiths and cold mages stood at odds. You know this to be true.”

“I know it,” said the blacksmith, and from within the crowd people echoed, “I know
it!”

“Blacksmiths keep the secret of fire, and a dangerous secret it is,” said Vai.

“That’s true,” said the blacksmith, “but ye must be knowing it is no fit subject for
standing out in the public square, to be speaking of such mysteries. Especially not
in front of women.”

“There is a way for fire mages and cold mages to work together,” said Vai, “as I have
had reason to learn in the western lands across the ocean, which are ruled by a people
called the Taino.”

The blacksmith’s blond hair was shaved to stubble, although he had a long beard. He
scratched his bristly hair now. “Ye speak like a madman. Why have ye come here?”

“I speak truth. We seek to escape the mage House. I admit we need food and drink,
but that is not all we are about.” He glanced at Bee with a lift of his chin.

As in the game of batey, she took the pass. “Are you a free village? Do you rule your
own selves? Or are you bound to a prince or a mage House, all that you have and your
own labor and children besides chained by law and custom as their property? I know
the answer from the words you have already spoken.” Some nodded, while others stared
with frowns, wondering what path her speech would take. Perhaps they weren’t sure
they wanted to hear such words from a woman. “You
are not the only ones who dislike the tithes and chains by which people are bound.
We are bound likewise, yet we fight.”

“How can ye fight?” said the blacksmith with a curt laugh. “Best to give them what
they want and see their backs as they are leaving.”

“Words can fight when enough people know there can be another way,” I said.

Vai said, “Let fire mages and cold mages work together, and we can break down the
power of mage Houses and princes.”

The blacksmith’s sneer stung like the ashy smoke of the forge. “And raise up ourselves
in their place? A friendly offer, lad, but this thing cannot be done. We of the brotherhood
hold our secrets close to keep ourselves alive. We who live with the fire burning
within us live one breath away from our death. This ye are knowing, and likewise I
have said more than enough. We are wanting no trouble here. Begone, and we will pretend
we never saw ye if any are come to ask.”

“I do not know by what secrets and rituals blacksmiths protect themselves from the
backlash of fire, but I do know there is a way for cold mages to protect fire mages.
If they trust each other.”

Several of the old men laughed, as if this were the greatest joke they had heard in
an age.

The blacksmith’s frown made me think he might melt into white-hot slag just from anger.
“Ye’s a tale-teller, lad, is that it? A wanderer trying to taste a piece of bread
with what words ye have to spend. The two lasses’ pretty looks are a better lure than
yer blasphemous promises.”

The old men gestured for the villagers to move away as from a fight.

Vai did not budge. “You know better than to speak insultingly of another man’s wife
to his face, much less to hers, so I will let that pass for this once. This is what
I know: Cold magic feeds me, but the backlash of fire magic devours itself. Yet I
can teach you how to pour the backlash of fire through the threads of my magic and
thus harmlessly into the bush—the spirit world—where it cannot harm you. This is the
truth. I swear it on my mother’s honor.”

By no other vow could he have so forcibly impressed them. The blacksmith looked startled,
but the outright hostility drained from his face.

“I will talk to ye in the forecourt of the temple of Three-Headed Lugus,” he said
at length, “if ye are willing to enter the god’s sanctuary.”

“I am a carpenter’s son. My father and uncle made offerings to thrice-skilled Lugus,
whom they called Shining Komo with three hands and three birds.”

The man indicated me. “This one? She is truly yer wife?”

“She is. And the other is her cousin.”

“My apologies,” he said as politely as anyone could please. He beckoned Vai over and
spoke in a whisper, but of course I could hear them perfectly well. “To enter the
forecourt of the god, ye must abjure the touch of woman.”

“For how long?” Vai asked with perfect seriousness, as if the request were not at
all unreasonable.

I knew that hunters held various proscriptions, as well as hanging amulets about their
bodies before they entered the bush to hunt, so I felt it prudent not to listen to
their secret business. Instead, Bee and I introduced ourselves to the women.

In a village like this, still fixed in the traditional ways, women and men kept most
aspects of their lives separate. The women took Bee and me to a little temple dedicated
to Mother Faro, the name they gave the deity of the river, where we poured libations
over the stone altar. Afterward we settled into a common room lined with pots made
by the most prestigious woman in the village, a potter who had married the blacksmith.
The potter was black in complexion, a woman of renown married in from another prosperous
village. Food and drink she offered in plenty, although no beef, as that was reserved
for the men at this time of year. Women and children wandered in and out to observe
us. I brought out my sewing kit, and they exclaimed over my steel needles, commonplace
in Expedition but precious here. I sewed while Bee talked.

It was just so interesting to watch how Bee coaxed people into thinking about things
in a new way. The women had never heard of Expedition or the Antilles, nor even of
General Camjiata, although they had all heard of the Iberian Monster, known as a marauding
general whose troops ate babies and who magicked women into men to make more soldiers
for his army.

“All this talk of an assembly in a far country makes little difference
to us,” said the potter. “What I want to know is how a man can write a law code and
suppose any mage or prince will care what it says? They can ignore it easily enough.”