Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy) Read online

  Rain spattered as the wind picked up. Bee and Rory waited in the back alley while I wrapped shadows around myself, climbed over the back gate, and scanned the yard with its laundry room, cistern, and outdoor hearth. The old carriage house had been empty for years, for we could not afford horses or carriage, but the new owners had stocked it with hay and bags of feed. Bee and I had long ago hidden a key beneath a pair of loose boards in the carriage house. It was still there, but when I brought it to the door, the locks had been changed.

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  Uncle Jonatan’s desk had been replaced by a table, chairs, and two settees shrouded by heavy covers and the dusty flavor of neglect.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

  After a glance at her stormy expression, I pulled a comb out of my sewing canvas and handed it to her. She set down the sketchbook and began to comb out Rory’s snarled hair.

  I talked to fill in her silence. “Maybe it’s not so wise to choose a palace of gold and silk over a humble cottage if the first comes with a knife in the back and a foot on the heart and the second comes with a smile and a kiss.”

  “Yes, that’s very sweet. I am not so sure the smiling and kissing will survive the dreary struggling day in and day out. Or did you not live in the same house I did, watching Mama and Papa with their polite indifference?”

  “Bee…” My voice trailed off as she sniffed down angry tears. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault that we were poor. Especially not Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan.”

  “You are so loyal, dearest, that even after they sacrificed you to try to save me, you can’t bear to speak a word against them. I’m not talking about fault, even if they did take uncounted imprudent financial gambles. I’m talking about bargaining my beauty for wealth and position.”

  “Was that why you were so angry at Amadou Barry when he merely offered you a position as his mistress? Because it wasn’t a more secure contract?”

 
; “No,” she said softly. “I was angry at myself. I almost said yes to him just because his kisses dazzled me. What a fool I was! Desire is a foolhardy way for a young woman to secure a livelihood.” She glanced at me. “Not that I mean to accuse you of falling into love with Andevai just because of his looks, or his kisses.”

  “I suppose I was dazzled by his looks from the beginning.” I tried to stop myself from smiling and could not. “But he courted me with radical principles. And food.”

  “This is a new expression for you, Cat. You were always so heartless and sensible before. Now you look absolutely stupefied.”

  I laughed, but quickly sobered. “Did you really trade yourself and your beauty and your dream walking to the Taino for the security and wealth of the palace and a noble station?”

  “Of course I did. Our marriage was arranged for political gain. I didn’t go in expecting to love him. But I liked him. He’s restful. I didn’t realize how pleasant it is to be with a restful person.”

  “Are you saying I’m not a restful person?” I teased, essaying a joke, for I hated her tears and wanted desperately to make her laugh.

  “I think you’re a restful person, Cat.” Rory brushed the corners of his lips with the back of his hand as if smoothing down quivering whiskers.

  “Not that I mean this in a critical way, Cat, but neither you nor your cold mage is restful. Honestly, I can’t imagine how you two will get on once you have to manage daily life together.”

  I pressed a jacket to my cheek. “I will keep his dash jackets in good repair.”

  “That’s a skill he will certainly appreciate!” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “Did you know that in Taino country women can divorce men with the same legal rights as men can divorce women? Now that we’re back in Adurnam I can’t help but reflect that I would have been left penniless and ostracized if it had happened to me here. Strange to think I should be glad it was a foreign man who divorced me instead of a local one!”