Cold Fire Read online

  Take Beatrice with you, the headmaster had said. Bee had walked unchanged through the tide of dreaming when everything around her was altered. She had known where to find the nest because her dreams had told her, and she had drawn the landmarks and the actual spot. The hatchlings that survived had crossed back to the mortal world, and through water Bee had shepherded them home.

  I could not rest, and I had no one else to talk to. I looked down at the latch.

  “Is that what it means to walk the dreams of dragons? That you aren’t changed by the tide?”

  The gremlin face snickered.

  “You remind me of my young cousin Astraea.” I folded my arms on my chest.

  After a long pause, it said, sulkily, “Why?”

  “I’d like to tell you, but we haven’t been formally introduced. What can I call you?”

  “What can you call me? A good question. Names, like blood, can be eaten in this country. Do not spill names lightly. I have no name. What can I call you?”

  “You already know my name.”

  It added a smirk to its repertory of unpleasant smiles. “True. The cold mage called you Catherine.”

  A sudden inquisitive urge overtook me to learn more about the man I’d been forced to marry. “Did the cold mage talk to you?”

  Light glinted where its eyes should have been, like lantern light picking up the sheen of polished brass. “Why should he? If he didn’t know I could talk? He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does.”

  “No, so I’ve discovered. What else do you know about him?”

  “He weaves threads of magic into images. That was nice. It is a bit boring, you know.”

  “Is it? Can’t you see outside?”

  It sighed, with a squinched grimace. “No. That’s the other latch. We never talk.”

  “Did the cold mage do anything else?”

  “Not until you got into the coach. And I must say, except for looking at you a lot when you were asleep, he sat very still, not like you, shifting about and rubbing the cushions and snoring when you sleep.”

  “I do not snore!”

  “You do! So did the dreamer.”

  I realized that every word Bee and I had said, in the privacy of this coach, the gremlin had overheard and could repeat.

  It spoke as gleefully as that little beast Astraea when she had been thwarted of something she wanted and felt her only leverage to sway you was just being mean. “The Wild Hunt knows she exists. Her scent is on me, on you, on these cushions, on the wind. When next the gate opens to the Deathlands, they’ll ride through, hunt her down, and kill her.”

  I riposted with an attack. “Are you glad of it?”

  “Oh, I don’t care,” said the gremlin, mouth flat as if hiding another emotion. “Why should I care? She would have hacked me to pieces.”

  “No, because I would have hacked you to pieces first. No offense intended. We just wanted to run away. Can you blame me?”

  The gremlin shut its burning eyes and remained silent for so long that I bent closer, my breath visible as a shimmering glamour on its brass face.

  “Remember one thing, little cat.” Its voice altered, as if someone else were speaking through its mouth. “You must have his permission to ask questions. Do not ask questions.”

  A gust of wind sprinkled salt spray over my face, and I blinked. When I looked again, the latch was just a smooth brass latch. Cautiously, I touched it, but it did not bite.

  “Hey, there,” I whispered.

  It did not answer.

  On we rolled through the restless sea-swept night. Every time a big swell struck the causeway and splashed, I flinched as droplets spattered my face. Yet I could not bring myself to close the shutters, for then I would truly feel I was in a cage.

  Bee had crossed. She would find Rory. They were safe. That belief I clung to.

  On we rolled, and I did not sleep.

  After forever, night lightened to day. The wind-washed sea spread to a horizon so gray it was impossible to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. At first I took the pale shapes rising and falling along the swells for boats, and then I realized they were rafts of ice. I shivered and drew my coat tighter around me as the coach slowed to a halt.

  The horses stamped.

  A footfall clapped on stone.

  I clambered out because I could not bear to sit inside for one more breath. Better to plunge into the storm than cower to await its blow.

  We had come to the end of the road.

  The causeway ended in a pile of rocks. Breakers boiled at their base. The gray sea was whipped by a stark wind under an iron sky. Islands of ice peaked and troughed as swells passed beneath them. The wind chapped my face, and when I licked my lips to moisten them, I tasted my own blood, for the wind’s icy claws had cut them.

  “Go to your sire,” said the coachman. He pointed to a rowboat leashed to a post among the rocks, waves breaking beneath its fragile ribs. “We have brought you as far as we can.”

  Once or twice in your life the iron stone of evil tidings passes from its exile in Sheol into that place just under your ribs that makes it hard to breathe. That makes you think you’re going to die, or you’re dead already, or that the bad thing you thought might happen is actually far worse than you had ever dreamed and that even if you wake up, it won’t go away.

  “My sire?” I whispered, my mind recoiling.

  All that was out there was cold, deadly water.

  The coachman said, “Remember, he seeks what you fear most so that you come to him most vulnerable. Courage, Cousin.”

  “Look for the tower,” the eru called.

  My feet moved under the master’s compulsion. My heart squeezed as in a vise, I picked my way over the rocks while fixing my sword into the loop at my hip, tied three times so I wouldn’t lose it. I closed a hand around my locket as I splashed into the pebbled shore break.

  “Blessed Tanit. Father and Mother. Watch over your daughter.” What hold did he have over me, the creature who had sired me and yet left me to be raised by others? Why had my mother never spoken of this? Or had she and Daniel been waiting until I was older?

  The water hissed, mocking me. I stuffed the locket beneath coat, jacket, and shift, against my skin. Caught on an incoming swell, the boat slammed into my knees and I sprawled forward into it, facedown in the choke water of the bilge. I inhaled a miasma of foul brine. One of the oars whacked me on the head. I grabbed at it as the boat pitched sideways. Water sloshed in, so cold I could not breathe.

  The boat came loose. It began to tip and spin as the waves brought the prow around. In a moment, I’d be swamped.

  I sucked in air, battled up to the seat, and grabbed the oars. Already, impossibly, the boat had drifted a hundred paces from the pier of stone where the coach-and-four waited. If the tide of a dragon’s dream washed the spirit world now, I would be lost. Changed. Obliterated.

  “Tanit protect me! Melqart grant me wisdom. Ba’al give me strength!”

  I set to the oars, working the prow back around. With my back to the swells, I rowed into the sea. The prow lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped, my backside slapping on and off the seat each time. Water slurped in with each plunge.

  I rowed, glancing over my shoulder as I set my sights on a nearby floe of ice that appeared as a sculpted tower. I rowed until my shoulders ached and my back throbbed. I rowed until the causeway was nothing more than a smear on the sea like a smudge of charcoal on one of Bee’s sketches that she had forgotten to erase.

  The rowing kept my body warm and my boots kept my feet mostly dry, but I had begun to lose the feeling in my fingers. I could not think of the watery deeps. Instead, I thought of Bee, dragged away by a call neither of us understood. I thought of Rory, compelled to kill the enemy. I thought of Uncle Jonatan and Aunt Tilly. Of Bee’s sisters, amiable Hanan and annoying little Astraea. Of the charismatic general, Camjiata. I thought of handsome Brennan and thoughtful Kehinde, and of the trolls and their odd charm. Most strangely, I t
hought of my husband.

  I thought: He would row beside me. He would not have left me here alone.

  I was getting awfully tired of being someone else’s puppet. The salt that stung worst in my eyes was the pressure of angry tears. I was not going to give up now, even in the middle of that which I feared most. A wave crashed over the prow, and the boat sank up to its gunnels. The water embraced me with an icily heart-stopping grip.

  Breathe.

  In and out. That was the first thing. In and out, measured and steady. I fumbled at the buttons of my winter coat and tugged it off just as a wave plowed into my back, flinging me sideways into the merciless sea.

  The ice of the water robbed me of breath. I had no air.

  I dragged an arm free of the water and heaved myself over the gunnel, using the swamped boat to keep me afloat. The waves wrapped my sodden skirts around my legs. The shocking cold made my throat close and my chest tighten, and I was sure I would pass out. But I bit at the inside of my mouth until the pain brought me reeling back.

  Breathe.

  Kicking my way around to the stern, I pushed the boat toward the ice floe. As my legs grew inert and my heart grew numb, the shadow of the ice covered me. The boat nudged onto a shelf.

  Gasping, spitting, retching, I crawled out. I had no feeling in my hands and little strength in my limbs, yet by fixing fingers onto knobs of pitted ice, I pulled myself out of the deadly water.

  For a while, an eternity, I lay on the ice like a suffocating fish.

  A whisper of warmth pulsed against my skin where the locket pressed between my breasts. It aroused me from my stupor. I took in a breath, salt water fouling my mouth. Shaking, I rose. I checked my sword, the loop twisted so tight my frozen fingers could not untangle it. The locket’s throbbing heat fed strength to me as I stared across the shelf toward a vertical fissure in the ice. The fissure led into blackness.

  Really, what choice had I?

  “Brave enough for my purpose,” said a male voice, smooth and cold. I saw no one, not a single sign of life. “Come, Daughter. I will look on you now.”

  “I hate you,” I whispered to the empty ice.

  He laughed, as if my squeak of outrage amused him. As if he could hear everything. And maybe he could, for would it not explain me?

  Maybe that would teach me to keep my mouth shut and not speak when I ought to be silent.

  My legs were as heavy as logs as I stumped into the fissure. If he hadn’t killed me by now, he might actually wish to see what manner of creature he had sired on Tara Bell. A warm breeze stirred the passage. A bell tolled three times, the vibration passing right through my flesh. I felt as if my soul were being rung to check its temper, as a person might flick a finger against a finely wrought glass vessel to see how pure the sound is.

  Light bloomed to reveal an arch made out of two massive ivory tusks. The tusks were carved with crows and hounds and saber-toothed cats and an eru, and with the image of a girl no more than six years of age. She had long, straight hair and held a sheathed sword far too big for her.

  The girl was me.

  My body began to prickle and stab as sensation returned. I stumbled under the arch, which vanished, leaving me in a blast of humid air so fetid I hid my face behind my hands. The smell faded, and the light sharpened.

  I lowered my hands.

  To find myself and see myself in a maze of mirrors, reflected over and over again. Blessed Tanit! I was a mess! My complexion looked as lifeless as the underbelly of a dead fish; my hair clumped in knots and tangles to my hips; my clothes wrung around my body.

  “Find me,” his voice said. “One is a gate, not a true mirror. Walk through it, and I will answer three questions.”

  I turned, seeing myself turn over and over, I and I and I, each one of me alike. My thoughts lurched sluggishly as I blinked, trying to signal myself as I had blinked at Andevai in the troll’s nest. Why did I think of the troll’s nest? Of course: The upper floor had formed a maze of mirrors.

  What was it Andevai had said that time in the carriage when he had thought I was asleep? He had been weaving illusions. He had woven my face in light.

  “The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion.”

  I had it: In every mirror except one I saw my reflection. My jacket’s buttons were sewn on the left so when I drew my sword it would not hang up in the cloth. I looked for the one image of me with the buttons on the image left not the mirror left.

  When I found her, I walked into myself. Heat cut through me to banish the chill that numbed my bones. My steps sank into a thick pile of lush rug, and I halted.

  I was the candle that lit the chamber, for its depths were shadow as layered as draped cloth dyed black. At four points equidistant around me, as if at the four points of the compass, loomed four monstrous toads with belligerent stances. Their skin had the yellow-green color of fouled mucus. They did not move, nor did they blink, if toads even blinked. The only way I could tell they were alive was by the pulsing beat in their throats.

  A personage sat cross-legged on the back of a turtle. He was clothed in amulets, or perhaps his body was covered in an illusion woven to appear as a shimmering fabric. He had long straight beautiful jet-black hair just like mine and Rory’s. The skin of his bare arms had the same coppery burnished-bronze shade as Rory’s. His face was hidden behind a mask like a sheet of ice. His eyes had neither colored iris nor black pupil, only fathomless light.

  He regarded me in silence, masked and unkindly. On a perch next to him sat that evil crow, watching me with its evil black eyes, and I understood that what it saw, he saw, because he had bound it to his will.

  I tried to marshal my thoughts, but I could not keep the accusation from popping out.

  “Would you have let me drown?”

  “You must be both clever and strong. Otherwise you are of no use to me. That is one.”

  “What manner of creature are you, that you can breed with a saber-toothed cat and a human woman, and no doubt other females besides?”

  “I am the Master of the Wild Hunt. That is two.”

  His words hit as a blow. I sank to my knees as the truth poured over me.

  My sire was the Master of the Wild Hunt, before whose spears even cold mages were powerless.

  Had Tara Bell known? Blessed Tanit! Of course she had known!

  “Did you kill my parents?” I whispered.

  “Yes. That is your third. Now, Tara Bell’s child, I will ask you three questions.”

  “Even though it wasn’t Hallows’ Night, you found a way to kill them,” I cried. “It was your voice that said ‘Daughter,’ not my father’s. It was your arms that pulled me out of the Rhenus River while leaving them to drown. You killed them, and saved me.”

  “Your destiny was chosen before you were born because I made you. Tara Bell promised to bring the child to me, but she disobeyed me. So I punished her.”

  “I hate you.”

  As if hate blazed, the chamber grew brighter. The shadows retreated to reveal a seething mass of creatures ringing the edge of what I now realized was a vast cavern whose walls were ice. Everywhere frozen within the transparent ice I saw hunters caught in motion: sleek hounds striped in gray and gold; hulking dire wolves; scowling hyenas; carrion crows; big spotted cats; men with dog faces and four paws instead of hands and feet; creatures half moth and half woman with soft gray wings and wicked sharp teeth; a cloud of wasps; slumbering snakes in coils and layers; furred spiders with faceted eyes; owls; and rank upon rank of bats with folded-up wings. Did they sleep, or were they suspended by the power of the ice?

  “You can’t hate me because you do not know me nor do you know anything of me.” His voice’s timbre was limned with an indifference so supreme it was like asking the sun what it thought of you and receiving no answer. “You are a mortal creature bound and ruled by the tides and currents of the Deathlands. The tide that surges through you, you name as hate because you
have no other way to describe it. But you need not remain bound and ruled by the tides that govern other creatures. How do you cross between the worlds?”

  His question compelled my answer. “With my blood.”

  “In the Deathlands, in what ways can you weave the threads that bind the worlds?”

  “I can see in the dark. I can hear exceptionally well. I can conceal myself.”

  “What is your name?”

  I gritted my teeth in stubborn resistance, sinking to sit on my heels as I pressed my right hand to the locket. Its heartening pulse rose and fell like my father’s breathing when as a young child I had sat on his lap as he told me stories. I grasped my sword’s hilt and thought of my mother. With my elbow I brushed the hem of my jacket, feeling the stone I had picked up from the road. I remembered what Vai’s grandmother had told me: Names are power.

  I pressed my lips together. Keep silence. Tell no one.

  “Do not defy me. You do not have the strength. What is your name? ”

  Despite my struggle to keep them closed, my lips parted. For all my life I had been told to call myself Catherine Hassi Barahal. Yet the name his command called forth was the name Camjiata had given me, the name that linked me to the mother who bore me and the father who had chosen to raise me. “Catherine Bell Barahal.”

  A black fleck like ash flickered in those blank bright eyes. “Now your name is mine, and you are mine. You are both my offspring and my servant, obedient to me because you are part of me, bone of my bone and blood of my blood. I will tell you this one thing, Catherine Bell Barahal. I admired your mother. Tara Bell was a female strong of will, with the strength of iron, and with the heart to accept fear but not succumb to it. You are like her. What I did not understand until later was that she harbored a reckless disobedience deep in her heart. But I now understand better how chains bind the vulnerable. In the end, she agreed to all I demanded because she was a slave to the threads that bound her to other creatures.”

  I thought of my mother, tall and strong, a loyal Amazon in Camjiata’s army, sworn to celibacy. On an expedition to explore the Baltic Ice Sheet, under the light of the aurora borealis, she had debated with Daniel Hassi Barahal, using words as a form of flirtation, maybe even courtship.