Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (69 page)

“Bring the maestra a fresh plate,” said Camjiata. “Please be aware, Drake, that Lutetia
is the crucial battle of this entire campaign. This is no time to quibble over prizes
as if we are boys playing a game of sticks in the river. I have promised you that
when the time is right, we will turn our attention to the Ordovici Confederation,
but I cannot do so if my army is defeated. Cat?” He examined me. “Are you well? You
look pallid.”

“When will the time be right?” muttered Drake under his breath. “How long must I wait
to get back the throne and honor that are rightfully mine?”

“Ah, here is a fresh plate. I hope everything on it is to your liking, Cat.”

It was an imperial portion of beef and a full half of roasted chicken. I knew better
than to let anger and disgust harm my appetite. I dug in while the command staff discussed
the speed with which the army could move, and how far from Lutetia’s walls the hospital
camp ought to be set up.

The meal’s ending gladdened me, for escape from Drake’s presence beckoned the way
a street filled with the best fabric and tailoring shops calls to a fashionable woman
with a limitless purse. Camjiata ushered me out of the room with a speed that took
my breath away. Doctor Asante cut off Drake with a question that allowed us to get
out the door, and the door shut behind us even before Rory could follow me. The general’s
fingers pinched so hard I almost yelped.

“Wait before you speak,” he murmured.

He escorted me swiftly out of the hall and up a set of back stairs to a modestly furnished
loft. Four young officers, one an Amazon, studied a table covered with maps. They
acknowledged our entrance with salutes. He pressed me past them through an inner door
into a long attic storeroom whose boxes and crates had been shoved back to
leave room for bedrolls and gear. A window at the far end looked over the front of
the market hall and the main square to an old stone castle tower rising above green
trees.

Camjiata paused at a closed door that led into another room set in under the eaves.
Hand on the latch, he paused. Long golden spears of late-afternoon sunlight lanced
in through the window to illuminate his figure as in a portrait. As in a dream. His
hair was pulled back and tied with an incongruously bright-green ribbon that matched
the old-fashioned bottle-green dash jacket he wore, cuffs trimmed with lace.

He turned to address me with a serious look that quite disarmed me, for who would
offer such a direct and confiding gaze to an enemy? His tone had an intimate color,
as if despite everything he trusted me enough to speak his true mind.

“I need you to kill him. You’re the only one who can.”

This was what it meant to walk the dreams of dragons, for I had swum through this
very moment when I had slept in the belly of the beast as we crossed the Great Smoke.
That journey in the ocean of dreams had given me a brief taste of Bee’s gift. I was
too astounded to speak.

Footfalls hammered up the back steps.

“But not until we defeat the Coalition and their Roman allies,” he went on, as if
I had already agreed. “If we lose now, the mages, princes, and Romans will use their
victory to crush the radicals and all dissent for another generation.”

“You created a monster,” I said.

“No, the monster created himself. Why do you think people hate and fear mages? Surely
you can see their fears are not irrational. Still, young men are weapons that experienced
men will wield. My weapon has proved more dangerous than I imagined. I doubt even
Andevai Diarisso can stop him now.”

“Are his fire mages loyal to you, or to him?”

His hesitation was so brief that I noticed it only because I was strung to a high
pitch. He smiled crookedly. “You perceive my situation.”

Drake strode into the attic from the other end. “Why did you rush away before I was
done speaking to Cat? I want—”

“James!” His curt tone betrayed not a glimmer of disquiet. He might have been slapping
down any underling. “Cat has business that will not be possible to manage once we’re
on the move.”

He opened the door and ushered me into an attic room with a
sloped ceiling, four windows, a dozen lit lamps, and six people sitting at a table
writing or reading dispatches.

A man I did not know glanced up. “Ah, General! We’re just about done here. The Barahals
have almost finished that cipher for your orders for Captain Barca.”

The Barahals
. There were two people in the room I had once thought I had known, before the day
they had thrown me to the wolves.

Uncle Jonatan didn’t even look up, so intent was he on a message he was turning into
code. He had always been single-minded, more involved in his work than with his family,
yet not a bad father for all that. His curly hair had entirely gone to silver since
I had last seen him. The wrinkles in his forehead cut deep.

Aunt Tilly had paused to dip her quill in ink. Her face bore the beloved frown that
meant she was considering how to stretch the turnips in the bin so no one in the house
would go hungry. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun and tucked under a scarf.
Her merry, round face looked the same but for the dark circles under her eyes that
spoke of hours of fretting. Yet she had always been able to dredge up a smile to hearten
her children and ameliorate their disappointments, for just as Uncle Jonatan had remained
engrossed in work, she had cared most about the well-being of those she loved.

Drake came up beside me in Vai’s stolen clothes. How I hated him! He put a hand on
my back in a proprietorial manner that made me tense, and him smile.

“Why would you bring a spy to spy on spies?” he demanded of the general. “I know she
plans to betray us, but what you mean to gain by abetting her I cannot fathom.”

Every head came up at the sound of his voice, just as deer startle when they catch
the scent of a slavering wolf. His hand crept along the curve of my waist like a crawling
poison. There I stood, caught between the man who had used my ignorance and fear to
take advantage of me in a most intimate way, and the aunt and uncle who had raised
me from childhood so they could sacrifice me to save their daughter.

Uncle Jonatan leaped to his feet. “Cat! Fiery Shemesh! Is Bee with you? Where is she?”

“Cat!” Aunt Tilly rose, grabbing onto the back of her chair for support as she swayed.

I was the one whose legs gave out. Camjiata neatly peeled me away from Drake’s unwanted
embrace and hauled me to a narrow bed placed along one wall. He set me down like a
sack. I sat there numb, handless and footless, floating as if I no longer had body
or will.

The other clerks hurriedly vacated the room. The click of the door closing behind
them made me jump, as if all my skin were flayed and my heart laid out on the table
to be carved into pieces by the knives of betrayal.

“I thought you loved me,” I whispered. “All those years, I really thought you loved
me.”

Aunt Tilly’s shame twisted her face, and I did not want to see it there.

Uncle Jonatan pressed a hand to my shoulder. “Cat, of course we loved you, it’s just…”

“Don’t touch me!” I shrieked, leaping up. Blindly tearing away from him, I slammed
into the wall. Pain burst down my shoulder, and erupted in my heart. I sobbed until
I thought my lungs would be ripped from my chest.

For there was no comfort. They had knowingly raised me and nurtured me and prepared
me, so I could all willingly and innocently take their daughter’s place as the sacrifice
the family had to make to appease the angry mages.

“The mansa tried to kill me,” I said hoarsely, not looking at them but rather at the
burning lamps, the flame that consumes the oil that feeds it. “Would it have been
a worthwhile sacrifice, if you had saved Bee knowing I was dead?”

“I explained this all to you already, Cat,” said Uncle Jonatan. “But in the end, we
lost Bee anyway, so we lost you both. We’re just glad you’re not dead.”

“Only because of my own actions, and the decency of the man you forced me to marry!
Did you never think you could have asked me to do it and I would have gone willingly?
That I would have done anything to save Bee, at whatever cost to myself? How can any
person embrace a child and then throw her away into the cold to die alone and abandoned?
How can you live with yourself?”

I was shouting, hands clenched, tears streaming. How could all this rage and grief
find an outlet? They could live with themselves: They had and they did! I pounded
a fist into the wall over and over until the general caught my arm and held it, held
me.

“Is Beatrice with you? Is she well?” Uncle asked.

A part of me wanted to claw his face by refusing to answer. But my mouth opened and
I said, “She is well. Let her sisters be told so, for I know she misses them.”

“Cat,” said Aunt Tilly.

I shuddered to hear the voice that had soothed my childish hurts and warmed my orphaned
heart with its affection.

Camjiata murmured, “Be brave like your mother.”

So I looked up to meet Aunt Tilly’s gaze.

Sorrow and shame had washed her skin to an ashy pallor, but she did not flinch from
my accusing eyes. “Cat, I’m sorry for what happened that day. It took us by surprise.
We did not know what else to do.”

Her tender look scoured me, like an acidic bath thrown over my skin.

She did love me. She had loved me then.

And she had done it anyway.

I said, “At least the mansa never lied to me.”

I turned my face into Camjiata’s shoulder. I wanted to forget the terrible moment
when she had given me a precious kiss on the forehead and, with that offering, released
me to a fate whose end she could not guess except that the mages would be furious
when they discovered the truth.

I wanted to forgive them so I did not have to live with this weight on my heart.

But all I could do was weep.

When I closed my eyes, a vision of my grandfather’s malicious glare was chased by
the light of flames as he spoke:
Begone. Begone. Begone
.

The door opened. I glanced up as Camjiata shook his head. Aunt and Uncle left the
room. Aunt Tilly’s face was streaked with tears. Rory stood in the attic looking ruffled
and annoyed; behind him hovered a pair of young fire mages bouncing on their toes,
as if they expected a fight.

“Why don’t you kill them?” Drake asked, and in the wrinkling of his brow and the softening
of his tone I read pity. “It would be fair recompense for what they did to you.”

“Do you believe killing them will ease the pain or change anything,” I cried, “except
to orphan the children who depend on them?”

“You’re so naïve, Cat. That they know the one they cast out has returned to destroy
them will make the triumph all the more sweet.” He glanced at the general.

“In due time, James,” said Camjiata, “in due time, we will march to your old home.
But not today.”

“I have been patient.”

“So you have,” agreed the general so sincerely that I believed the general believed
it.

Drake dusted his fingers together, tugging on the gloves that always concealed his
hands, then turned and walked out. The general closed the door.

“This is where I sleep. You can rest here.”

He set me on a bed, and I lay down because I hadn’t the strength to stand.

Rory sat beside me and began rubbing my hands. A sort of blindness and deafness smothered
me. I was a wounded animal panting in the shadows, too weak to lick my injuries.

Camjiata’s voice rumbled softly. Rory replied. They conversed in a friendly manner
as Rory’s thumbs stroked back and forth along my palms until the tension eased from
my hands. I surrendered to the waters of sleep, for it was better to drown than to
suffer with the bloody scar that had been reopened.

Hungry wolves fed at my entrails. I ran from the Wild Hunt, but it was gaining, gaining,
and my sire caught me in his icy claws. My severed head rolled down stone steps, bumping
like a rubber ball used in batey. It tumbled off a cliff and plummeted into the Great
Smoke. Leviathan purred.

Purred?

I woke in a dark chamber. Rory was stretched out beside me, snoring in that snuffling
way he had. We were both still fully clothed. My sword, basket, and satchel rested
at the foot of the bed. At the table Camjiata sat reading through a stack of dispatches
by the light of an
oil lamp. The light shed gold on his face, but his eyes were pools of darkness.

I sat up.

Without looking up from his reading, he spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb
Rory. “There is ale and bread on the side table. A basin, if you want to wash.”

I slid off the bed. Rory did not stir, but something in his changed breathing made
me think he had woken, as wild animals do at the least movement, but was pretending
to be asleep to give us privacy. At the side table I washed my face in the basin,
then sat opposite the general.

“Don’t you sleep?” I asked.

“Cursed little. I concentrate best on dispatches at night, when no one disturbs me.
A nap or two during the day suffices. How fare you, Cat?”

“Did you expect me to embrace them?”

“I thought it best to get the meeting out of the way. I can’t say I expected your
anger. Beatrice did not confide the full particulars to me.”

“So you found a way to discover the full particulars by surprising me with the meeting.”

He looked up with a wry smile. “Is that what you think of me, Cat?”

I could not fathom how I could like him, yet I did. “You want me to kill Drake. But
how can I trust you? You betrayed me.”

He glanced toward the door and nudged my foot under the table to signal me that people
waited outside. “I did not betray you. You walked into Taino country of your own free
will.”

“That you can say that with a straight face and such sincerity is almost admirable!
Everything I did was encouraged and machinated by you.”