Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

hastened along the aisle, shaking from relief and shivering from the cold, I heard her key turn in the lock. Once again, I had landed—just barely—on my feet.

A few of the other pupils glanced my way, but I wasn’t important enough to be worth more than a titter, an elbow nudge, or a yawn. At the back of the balcony’s curve, I slipped onto the bench beside Beatrice. Her schoolbook was open to a page half filled in with an intricate drawing, and she was shaking a broken lead out of her pencil as I sat down.

“There you are!” she whispered without looking at me, intent on her pencil lead. “I knew you would make it here in time.”

“Your confidence heartens me.”

“I dreamed it last night.” She slanted a sidelong look at me. “You know I always believe my dreams.”

Below, on the dais at the front of the lecture hall, two servants rolled out a chalkboard and hung a net filled with sticks of chalk from its lower rim.

I bent closer. “I thought you dreamed only about certain male students—”

She kicked me in the ankle.

“Ouch!”

The headmaster limped out onto the dais and we fell silent, as did every other pupil, males below on the main floor and females above on the balcony. The old scholar was not one to drag out an introduction: a name, a list of spectacular experiments accomplished and revolutionary papers published, and the title of the lecture we were privileged to hear today: Aerostatics, the principles of gases in equilibrium and of the equilibrium of balloons and dirigible balloons in changing atmospheric conditions. Then he was finished, although a surprised murmur swept the hall as the students realized the lecturer was a woman.

“So, did you complete the essay?” Bee demanded, the words barely voiced but her expression emphatic. “I know how you love the headmaster’s seminar. It would be awful if you couldn’t go.”

Under cover of the measured entrance of the dignitary in a headwrap and crisply starched and voluminous orange boubou, I made a business of extricating my schoolbook from my bag and arranging it neatly open before me on the pitted old table with my new silver pencil set diagonally across the blank page. Meanwhile, I spoke fast in a low voice as Bee fiddled with her broken lead.

“I finished but not quite how I wanted it. It was the strangest thing. Some man had come in through the window and was waiting in the study.”

“How did he manage that?”

“I don’t know. Uncle wondered the same thing. That’s why they’d gone out to the garden when you came down. Then another man came after that. Uncle had to get a book from the parlor for him—I had to run so Evved wouldn’t see me. Blessed Tanit! I left the journal I was reading on the table. He’ll wonder why it was there!”

“He’s been very absentminded and more snappish than usual these days. I think he’s anxious about something. Something he and Mama aren’t telling us. So perhaps he won’t notice or will forget to ask.”

“I hope so. What else could I do? I grabbed my schoolbag and my essay, and I ran all the way to the academy, only I forgot my coat, so I was very, very cold.” I was still cold, because a third of the long underceiling windows were propped open with sticks to move air through the otherwise stuffy confines of the cramped balcony tiers. “One exciting thing did happen, however,” I added coyly. “As I ran into the courtyard, a very fine carriage rolled up and who should step out but Maester Amadou and his twin sisters.”

Bee’s hands stilled. Her rosy lips pressed tight. She did not rise to the bait. Not yet, but she would. Instead, she said in the most casual voice imaginable, “I saw the twins come in.” She gestured to a pair of girls seated in the front row by the balcony railing, resplendent in gold-and-blue robes cut to emphasize their tall figures, their hair wrapped in waxed cotton scarves whose sheen might have given off more light than the poor gas illumination. They recorded dutiful notes, writing in unison, as the esteemed professor sketched the lines of an airship on the chalkboard. “How did they get up here faster than you did?”

I smiled, luring her closer. “Maester Amadou stopped me. To ask a question.”

“Oh. A question.” She sighed wearily, as if his questions were the most uninteresting thing in the world to her.

“He asked about you.”

Sprung! I gloated expectantly, but she turned her back on me, her attention flying away to fix on a spill of movement in the hall below us. Certain male pupils were coming in fashionably late and now settled into their assigned places. It seemed likely she would stare at Maester Amadou’s attractive form and excellent clothes for the next century just to thwart me of the chance to annoy her, or perhaps she would stare at him because she had been doing so from the first day he and his sisters had arrived as pupils at the academy college, right after the Beltane festival day almost six months ago at the beginning of the month of Maius.

Two could move pieces in that chess game.

I rearranged my skirts, careful to fold back the front cut of the outer skirt so as to reveal the inner layers of petticoats, and tugged on my jacket to make sure it fit properly down around my hips. Then I buttoned the academic robe to conceal it all and folded my hands in my lap.

I tried to listen as the distinguished guest lecturer abandoned the introductory remarks to begin devouring the meat of the talk—the principles of aerostatic aircraft popularly known as airships and balloons. An interesting topic, especially in a time when the new technological innovations were very controversial. It was particularly interesting because the scholar was female and from the south, from the famous Academy of Natural Science and History in Massilia, on the Mediterranean, where female students were, so it was rumored, allowed to sit on the same benches as male students.

Because I had run from our house to the academy, a significant distance and much of it uphill, and because of my late essay, I hadn’t had time to eat my morning porridge. So now, despite the unpadded bench pressing uncomfortably into my backside and the chilly draft wrapping my shoulders, I began to doze off.

A body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid. Likewise, by this same principle, a craft that is lighter than air will be buoyant… gases expand in volume with a rise in temperature… by creating a cavity filled with flammable air… if pigs could fly, where would they go?… Will there be yam pudding for luncheon?…

I am sailing across a blinding expanse of ice in a schooner that skates the surface of a massive ice sheet, and a personage stands beside me who I know is my father even though, as happens in dreams, he looks nothing like the man whose portrait I wear in a locket at my neck—

A jab to my ribs brought me to my senses. I jerked awake, grabbing for my pencil, but it wasn’t lying on my open schoolbook where I had left it. Bee’s right hand gripped my right wrist and pinned my hand to the table we shared. Idly, I noted the smeared gray of pencil lead on the tips of her thin white wool gloves.

“What did he ask about me?” she whispered. Under the gloomy hiss of the gaslights—we female pupils stuck up here in the balcony got only half the light afforded the male pupils in the main hall below—I could see her flutter her eyelashes in that obnoxious way she had, the one that never failed to demolish the objections and reproaches of any adult caught in the beat of those dark wings. “Cat,” she added, her voice warming, “you have to tell me.”