Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

“It means we are cousins. Go now.”

She reached inside and firmly slid closed the shutters. An instant later, too quickly for her to have walked around the carriage, the latch of the other door clicked down and the door opened. I climbed out not into the autumnal beauty of the spirit world but into the shivering cold of winter’s twilight in my own. The clouds lay heavy and dark above; the last light drained like hope from the empty landscape of frost and field. There was no wind.

Sitting above, the coachman lifted his riding whip in salute.

The horn rang a third time around us, the sound rolling like thunder away over the hills.

The whip came down across the backs of the horses, whose hooves no longer touched the earth. The eru leaped up onto the running board, and from her back roiled a disturbance in the air. She was spreading wings.

A wind out of the north howled over us, almost bowling me over. The carriage and the eru and the coachman and the horses dissolved into a thousand shards of ice, and I was battered as by a vortex of bladed leaves so hard I shut my eyes.

And when the wind died and I opened my eyes, the eru and the coachman and the coach and four were gone. I stood alone, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but my sword and my bracelet and the clothes I wore, as snow began to fall and the gloaming of Hallows Night swallowed a now-silent world.

19

Broken woodland surrounded me. In the clearing in which I stood, snow dusted the grass. I had thought we were on the toll road, so smoothly had we traveled, but no road revealed itself to my searching and desperate gaze. Perhaps in the spirit world this was a line of power unseen to the mortal eye in the physical world, for I could see nothing but the last shadows of the trees beneath the darkening sky.

The hunt rides.

There! A taper wavered in the gloom to the north of me, then vanished. Voices lifted and faded, then lifted again in song underlaid by hands clapping and a drum’s accompanying patter.

East lay the House. Out of the north came the singers. Between south and west lay little enough choice except for a barest glimmer as faint as a thread of spider’s silk caught between two trees. It might be a path. Even if it wasn’t I could hide in the trees. Keeping my sword sheathed, I paced as swiftly as I could without breaking into a run whose haste might trip me up. A rustle like the pelting race of animals through brittle grass chased around me and quieted, but I dared not pause, knowing that spirit wolves—or a family of hunting saber-toothed cats—might have followed my scent out of the spirit world. Could the animals of the spirit world cross into ours, as I had crossed into theirs?

The enveloping canopy and loamy scent of spruce loomed before me. Beneath the trees, the path continued on as straight as if surveyed by Roman engineers, laid with a glamor so slight it was as if the track exhaled. It was easy enough to follow for a person with my vision.

Branches swayed above me. A weight dropped so fast down out of the trees that I flailed as netting tangled over my head and in my hands. I gave myself a single breath to strangle my panic, then crouched and pulled the sheathed sword free right on the earth between rope and soil. Pushing the sword’s hilt before me to lift the net, I wormed forward. When I found the edge of the netting, I peeled it back from my head just as two men stepped onto the path before me. I grasped the netting, dragged it up and sideways, and flung it with all my strength at them as I sprang in the other direction.

I slammed against another body. A hand’s powerful grasp chained my sword arm. The man who had captured me was tall and bundled in winter’s clothing. That was all I could tell, except that he smelled of sweat and wool. I dropped to my knees to get a new angle, my sword’s blade glittering as I torqued it toward his face.

He made a noise between gritted teeth, something between a grunt and a laugh. He got a knee up between us and kicked me back so hard I stumbled into the netting and slashed at empty air. But I had a cat’s grace. I did not fall, as they expected me to. My chest hurt, but I could still breathe.

The taper had reached me. In its flaring light, I found myself surrounded by seven men wearing quilted wool coats hung with charms and armed with the bows and spears of hunters. The eldest had a seamed face; the ends of many gray-streaked braids, each bound with an amulet at its tip, stuck out from beneath a wool cap drawn down over his ears. The youngest was a stripling, younger than me and wide-eyed with amazement at finding a creature such as myself alone in the forest with a sword on such a night.

“Ah!” said the man I’d slammed into, licking blood off his thumb. “I am cut by your blade. Does the cat scratch on purpose, or is it only startled?”

“I know how to use my sword,” I said, addressing him. “You dropped the net on me.”

“You are a knowledgeable person,” he agreed. “Still, we are seven, and you are one.”

The elder spoke up, his common speech thick enough that I had trouble understanding him. “No wise hunter makes a killing after sunset on Hallows Night,” he observed. “Especially not with cold steel.”

How did he recognize cold steel?

Two men folded the netting into a neat bundle that the stripling settled over his shoulders. They set out with the stripling, who coddled a hand drum hanging by a leather loop from his neck. Behind came another pair of men single file with a stout stick braced on their shoulders and a dead animal dangling down, tied by its legs. At first I took it for a tundra antelope, for the edge of the Barren Lands lay perhaps ten days’ walk north of here, and animals might stray. Then I saw that it possessed three horns; two sprang up from just above its pale ears, and the third, in the center of its quiescent brow, was knit with a silver glamor.

The tall man and the elder waited.

“Are you a woman of this world, or a spirit creature that followed us out of the bush in the form of a woman?” the tall man asked, not kindly but not angrily, either. He was just asking.

When had my breathing become so unsteady? I hadn’t been running, but so many shocks tossed into my path one after the next made me dizzy. Ahead, the stripling began tapping out a pattern on the drum as if it were a protective shield.

“Peace to you,” I said, in the greeting of the countryside, which I’d read about in Daniel Hassi Barahal’s journals. “Do you have peace, friend?”

The old man chuckled. “I have peace, thanks to my mother who raised me. And you?”

“And me, I am fine, thanks to—ah—my power as a woman.” Although at the moment it was difficult to know what power that could be. “And the people of your household, they also?”

“There is no trouble. And your people?”