Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (51 page)

“Not if you do not ignore it!” said Bee.

“Words scratched on paper do not a binding make. Only blood makes a binding.”

“We are bound if we believe there is only one way things can be,” said Bee.

“Do you think we can stand against their soldiers?” asked the potter as others nodded.
“You are young and innocent to not know the way of things.”

Regardless of how little agreement Bee fostered among the women who stayed up late
to listen, she kept them listening, even if only for the novelty. She and I slept
together in an alcove bed tucked into the wall, with a pair of dogs curled at our
feet. In the morning I gave the potter a steel needle, and the women provisioned us
with enough barley-cake, turnips, and beans to last three days.

“What did you discuss?” I asked Vai once we were back out on the river.

“I can’t speak of it.” To a man raised as he had been, such secrets were sacred. He
was careful not to touch me. Even Rory was unusually solemn, in a mood I might have
called brooding.

Bee said, “I did not see you, Rory. Were you with the men?”

“I don’t like temples. They make my skin itch.” He perused our faces as if he expected
to uncover a rebuke. “I saw a terrible thing while you three were about your feasts
and friendly talk! These people wish they were not bound to the mage House, but they
bind people in their turn, don’t they? While they feast and sing and sleep, aren’t
there people who serve?”

“Everyone must work,” said Vai, with a shake of his head.

The river’s voice almost drowned out Rory’s words, for he could barely choke them
out. “I heard a noise in one of the byres as I was sniffing about as I like to do
at dusk. There was a man handling a woman who did not want him. He pushed her down
into the dirty straw and pulled up her skirt and shoved his part into her. She did
not cry out for help or fight but I could smell her humiliation and shame. So I pulled
him off. I told him I was the spirit of vengeance visited
upon men who abuse helpless women. He laughed at me. He said the woman is a slave
and thus a whore because slaves have no honor. So I showed him my true face. And he
pissed himself and ran off. Then the woman reviled me. She said she was taken from
her village by soldiers when she was young and sold months later to the blacksmith’s
father. Any man in the village can use her as he wishes, just as he said. She will
be punished now for what I have done. So I was ashamed for having done a thing to
bring trouble on her. I told her she could escape with us.”

“Lord of All,” muttered Vai.

“But she refused! She said she has a healthy boy child who has been adopted as a son
by a village man who has only daughters. He means the boy to marry one of the girls
and inherit his cottage. If she runs, the boy will be turned out. She cannot let the
chance go that he will have a good life. How can this be true? How can people live,
with their spirits crushed day after day?”

“Blessed Tanit protect her!” murmured Bee.

Rory trembled with hissing fury. “I thought the radicals mean to free people who are
bound to serve others. But what of people like her? I should have stolen the boy and
made them both come with us, but I was a coward.”

For a long while we floated downstream in silence.

At last I said, “You’re not a coward, Rory.”

“Such a woman would fare worse as a stranger in a town with a child in tow and no
family to protect her,” added Vai. “That the child may flourish gives her hope each
day.”

Bee said, “You can’t save every mistreated person, not alone and with the law against
you.”

Rory shifted onto the bench beside Vai. “I want to row now. I’m too angry to talk.”

Though our hearts felt wintry, signs of spring had crept into the landscape: buds
greening on trees, violets in patches of color beneath the stark woodland, birds flocking
north as they honked or trilled. In this flat country the river split into channels
separated by long, flat islands. We passed several villages. At midday we saw riders
on the eastern shore. Later in the afternoon a man with a spear watched us pass. Sheep
worked their way over a greening pasture still damp with
yesterday’s rain. As we swept around a wide bend, the sun peeped out from behind a
patchwork of clouds.

Open land breached by a canal spread away from the eastern bank. Through this grassy
expanse a troop of mage House soldiers picked their way toward the water’s edge.

“Curse it,” said Vai. “Bee, you’ve the steadiest hand. Keep the prow in line with
the current. Rory. Catherine. You two sit close in the middle.”

He shifted up to kneel at the prow as Bee settled to the oars. Rory and I weighted
the bench at the stern. My cane flowered into a sword as two boats exactly like ours
appeared alongside us. It was an impossible illusion to hold through every shift and
nuance, and Vai meanwhile kept glancing up at the sky. Thunder rolled although the
sky hadn’t the weight of storm clouds.

The soldiers parted to let through a man on a horse. In his flowing robes and with
his height and hair, I knew him at once as the mansa of Four Moons House. Soldiers
with crossbows knelt to take aim.

“How could the mansa have come after us so quickly?” muttered Vai.

“The dragon betrayed us,” muttered Rory.

“Kemal never would!” Bee glared, but her steady rowing and skillful piloting did not
slacken.

A force both terrible and strong was grinding within the clouds drifting innocently
above. On the shore the mansa raised his gaze heavenward as snow began to fall. Vai
was going to hide us in a blizzard. All we needed to do was get beyond the range of
their bows.

More soldiers rode into view. They were wearing three different uniforms: the black-on-white
squares of Five Mirrors House, the four phases of the moon of Four Moons House, and
the strung bow of White Bow House. Mansa Viridor trotted up to greet the mansa and
look across the water toward us. I was too shocked to utter a word.

“I should have known better than to trust friendship offered by cold mages,” Vai muttered.

Snow began to fall in earnest.

Soldiers bundled two slight figures to the shoreline, making sure we could see the
swords held to their throats. Vai’s hands gripped the gunnel. The illusions of the
other rowboats dissolved.

“Who are those terrified girls?” said Rory. “Do the soldiers mean to kill them?”

“Those are my little sisters,” said Vai in a voice I scarcely recognized because it
was flat with fear and rage. “Lord of All, he will kill them. They are nothing to
him. Love, go on to Havery. I will find a way back to you, but I cannot abandon them.”

He cast me a desperate look, shed his coat, and plunged into the river with his sword.

A crossbow bolt plopped into the river near him. A captain shouted at the troops to
stop shooting because the man they wanted was in the water. The girls could not have
been more than thirteen or fourteen. They clung to each other as swords caged them.
I looked at Bee, and she looked at me. I knew what she would say before she said it.

“Cat, you have to go after him while he’s still in the water so they can’t shoot you.”

“I have to stay with you to protect you, Bee.”

Her gaze held me. “Rory and I can protect ourselves. Look how frightened the girls
are. Together, you and he can manage an escape with them. You know where to meet us.
Go!”

I shed my cloak. This river had drowned my parents, but I plunged in anyway. Fear
drove all thought from my mind as I came up floundering and gasping to the surface.

Rory called, “Swim! Don’t paddle like a dog!”

I churned my arms through the current and did not gulp down more than four or five
mouthfuls of water before my feet scraped on river bottom. I crawled onto the bank,
trying to hack out the water I’d swallowed. A crow flapped down from the sky and landed
so close to me, watching me with its black eyes, that I shrank back. Then it fluttered
off, cawing. Soldiers surrounded me as though I were a cornered boar, their spears
ready to pierce me through.

I leaped up, fumbling for my sword. A whistling hiss spat past my ear. Something pushed
hard on my shoulder, spinning me backward.

A crossbow bolt stuck out of my flesh, right below the collarbone. Where had that
come from?

I toppled to my knees. The world filled with a whirl of snow. An imposing man loomed
before me out of the blizzard. His voluminous robes rippled across my sight like the
wings of death.

“Don’t kill her,” the mansa said.

I fainted.

I woke to a warm cloth wiping my face. Opening my eyes, I looked up at a woman with
gaunt cheeks and short wiry hair more gray than black.

“Do not speak,” she said in a raspy voice, careful not to jostle the crossbow bolt
sticking out of my body. Stabs of pain pulsed through my right shoulder. “Here comes
the surgeon.”

Over her shoulder I caught a glimpse of a man in a traditional boubou, carrying a
leather bag and a small drum. I lay on a cot in a hospital tent spacious enough to
house a dozen soldiers, although I was the only patient. Before the doctor could reach
me, a soldier cut him off.

“Catherine Barahal. I have been looking for you.” Lord Marius stared down at me with
such loathing that I whimpered. “Where is Legate Amadou Barry?”

My nurse looked up with no sign of servility. “My lord, she will do better once the
arrow is out and the wound cleaned.”

“Ah.” He cut away my clothes and probed the wound in a way that made me almost stop
breathing as I struggled not to cry out. “It’s hit the bone, but the bolt must have
been at the end of its range. Nothing I haven’t dealt with on the battlefield.”

He fixed a hand around the shaft and pulled it out. The pain made me go blind and
deaf for the longest time, oblivious to everything except the pulse of my heart, or
the earth, or a drum: I was not sure what I felt. Nor did the pain ease as my body
was washed and handled, wet clothes stripped from me, and a stinging poultice laid
atop the red-hot center of the wound.

After an agony of time I sought with my mind along the length
of my body and found my right foot. Focusing on the foot, which did not hurt, I opened
my eyes. The roof of the tent billowed with odd patterns of light that made my eyes
water. I was naked, a blanket tucked modestly around my body and folded under my armpits.
My right shoulder had been bandaged. When I shifted, a wave of pain spilled outward
from the shoulder, and I whimpered.

“Here you are,” said the gaunt woman, still seated beside me.

Two girls stood behind her with huge dark eyes a-goggle. Their striking resemblance
to Vai snapped me into full wakefulness. One girl was a head shorter than her sister
and as thin as a reed; she leaned on a crutch. The taller girl was robust.

The woman leaned forward. “Drink this. It will ease the pain.”

Again Lord Marius appeared, a god out of a Greek tale, ready to smite. He snatched
away the cup before it could touch my lips. “I want an answer to my question.”

She nodded calmly. “Of course, my lord. But it is hard for the young woman to speak
with dry lips.”

I could speak!

“The Legate Amadou Barry is responsible for his own death.” My voice emerged as more
of a hoarse croak. “It was his choice to follow us into a dangerous place. He thought
he had the right to possess Bee simply because he wanted her. Yet he didn’t respect
her enough to trust her when she tried to save him. He was swept out of the spirit
world by the tide of a dragon’s dream. I don’t know what happened to him after that.”

“My lord, if you will allow her to take willowbark tea to ease the pain, she will
come to her senses.”

“She is not delirious.” White-lipped, Lord Marius glared at me. “The punishment for
murdering a Roman legate is death. The punishment for murdering my beloved brother
is that I will hound you until you show me his grave and then I will water it with
your blood.”

From outside I heard men shouting angrily. Lord Marius turned to look at the tent’s
entrance, where two soldiers in the colors of the Tarrant militia stood guard.

“No! They’re saying one of them was shot! I will see my sisters!” The voice was Vai’s.

A second male voice replied in the loud and mocking tone of a
highborn man who means to be heard by as many people as possible. “Your sisters, or
your daughters? I know how your kind are. Everyone sleeps in the same bed.”

“I’ll kill you,” said Vai in a raw, ugly tone I had heard only in his nightmares.
The smack of a fist hitting flesh was followed by the thud of a body hitting dirt.

The other man shrieked, “Get the stinking goat off me!”

A commanding voice I recognized as the mansa’s spoke. “Enough! Tie his arms back if
he can’t control his fists.” The grunts and curses of a scuffle faded to silence.

Vai burst into the tent. His arms were trussed up behind his back with rope bound
around a stout stick that could be twisted to control him. The brawny soldier who
had hold of the stick brought him up short as he saw the girls.

“Bintou! Wasa!”

The bigger girl bolted to him and pressed her face against his shoulder. He kissed
her hair, then looked with a frown toward the other girl who, with her too-short crutch,
hadn’t tried to move. His glance skipped from the invalid girl to the woman. His lips
parted. A jolt of stunned shock rolled through his body. But he recovered quickly.
In a cunning move worthy of a sly Barahal, he slammed back into the soldier, jostling
the stick. With a wrench, he freed himself and staggered forward to drop to his knees
before the woman.

“Mother.” He rested his forehead on her knees. “Forgive me for bringing this trouble
on you and the girls.”

“Son.” She laid a hand on his head in a blessing. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but
her tone was implacable, even a little aloof. “You will be strong, as I taught you.
I am told this woman is your wife and thus my daughter.”