Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

He fingered the man’s drawers. “I don’t like these. They’re not as soft.”

“The ones you have on are meant for me to wear, you disgusting beast. I’m going to turn my back, and you’re going to take off my drawers and dress properly. Five weeks! How can it happen?” I walked back to the window. Through the open gates of the inn yard, I could see a slice of the main street and the gate, empty of traffic as dusk strangled the winter day.

How should he know why time flowed differently there from here? He was a saber-toothed cat, by all that was holy! A spirit man, the villagers would have said, walking out of his beast’s body and into this one as a man. His mother was a cat, and his father was, evidently, a cat.

I tried to imagine having a saber-toothed cat as a sire, a spirit animal who had walked into this world as a man and had congress with my mother. Did I really believe it, with no evidence except Rory’s word and the cats coming to protect me?

Trembling, I leaned my head against the dense whorls of glass, feeling the cold seep through. The eru had called me “cousin.” She had seen the spirit world knit into my bones when even the mansa, despite his immense power, had not guessed. But the djeliw had known.

What had Daniel Hassi Barahal known? Was my bastard parentage why he had handed me over to the Barahals to sacrifice in Bee’s place? I considered the story Bee and I had been told. He had fallen in love with an Amazon from Camjiata’s army. They’d fled together to make a new life but had tragically drowned in the Rhenus River, leaving behind an orphaned daughter.

Was any of it true?

“Why are you crying?” Roderic’s gentle tone, with a slight scratch like the lick of a cat’s tongue, opened the vein of my grief. I began to sob. He came up behind me, suitably dressed at last, rested hands on my shoulders, and stood quietly until the river ran dry.

“You still stink,” he said as I wiped my eyes.

“Let’s go down,” I said as I turned to face him. “And… thank you.”

He touched his nose to my cheek, not quite a kiss, but the gesture heartened me. I had kin. I wasn’t alone. And furthermore, the mansa’s soldiers and seekers would be looking for a solitary woman, not one traveling with a man.

Good hot soup and thick ale followed by a hot bath, however humble the tub, and the pleasure of clean drawers and shift did much to strengthen my resolve. When I returned to the common room, I discovered Roderic seated on a bench with his long legs outstretched and a mug of ale in one hand as he embellished the tale of our altercation with brigands with the delight of a born liar. No longer was it a half dozen brigands but thirteen or twenty, hard to count in the muddy light of a cloudy dawn. Certainly his audience had swelled from the innkeeper’s infatuated daughters to an appreciative crowd, including the very Emilia we had met by the well, a ruddy-faced girl with red-gold hair.

As the tale unfolded, I realized he was retelling in altered form one of the episodes from Daniel Hassi Barahal’s journal I’d related to Lucia Kante.

“There’s been trouble with roaming bands of young men these last two years,” interposed the cousin of the innkeeper. She wore a scarf in muted tones wrapped over her gray hair. I wondered if she had come over to see how Roderic filled out her dead son’s clothes. Was she, too, grieving for what she had lost? “Lemanis’s council and Lord Owen have sent pleas in plenty to the Cantiacorum prince, but in his proclamation he blames radicals for stirring them up. He says he can do nothing until we police our own. Last year, Falling Stars House sent soldiers to sweep through the Levels, rounding up outlaws and villains. Some of our lads joined up just for the summer. We thought our boy would be home after Hallows, but he never did come back.”

“My condolences on your loss, maestra,” I said politely.

Someone in the back muttered an imprecation, and people shook their heads with a frown.

“Ach, nay, lass,” she replied, touching an amulet that hung from a cord around her neck. “He’s not passed. The House captain liked his measure and how he sat a horse, so they took him into the company. We hope for some good to come of the connection. He’s not been allowed to visit home yet, but he sent money and a steer for his sister’s wedding.”

“He said he’d send for me,” said Emilia tartly, “but I’ve not heard one word since he rode off all high and proud. I suppose he’s too good for the likes of us now.”

“The lad will do what’s right,” said the innkeeper sternly.

“Until the House soldiers run afoul of radicals and he finds himself staring down a musket held by one of his own kinsmen!”

“That’s enough, Emilia!” said an older man standing in the back. With an expression that betrayed how ill used she felt, she stepped back as he went on. “Lads will make promises to lasses. You know how it is. Drink, duel, and dally. And a bit of livestock raiding when they’re bored. I don’t suppose you lost any cattle, did you, Maester Barr?”

This lame joke forced a few chuckles.

“Only the horse,” replied Roderic. As his grin widened, I was sure he was about to say something that would annoy and embarrass me. “And a very fine and handsome horse it was, to be sure. A glossy creature, more brown than bay, and exceedingly well groomed and ornamented.”

He was laughing at me with his cursed eyes as my cheeks went up in flames, although I was sure I did not know why.

“That reminds me of a song,” said Emilia.

The women laughed; the men groaned. But the fire was blazing and the night was long, and folk will want entertainment after the tedium of a day’s work. Emilia’s song detailed the amorous adventures of a water horse who fell in love—if love was the right word—with a series of young women who passed beside the lake in which the creature dwelled and from which he emerged in the form of a good-looking young man of exactly the right sort to catch a young woman’s fancy. She had a clear voice and a pleasing timbre, and every local knew the chorus, whose euphemisms about mounting and galloping embarrassed me. We did not sing these sorts of songs in the Barahal house. Rory caught right on and sang the chorus as if born to it.

In the laughter and pounding of tables that followed, I said, to no one in particular, “I thought kelpies drowned and then devoured their victims!” The words, innocently spoken, only caused the gathered folk to laugh even harder until I am sure my face was as red as if burned.

I retreated to the bartender’s domain as Emilia—like Bee, she enjoyed being the center of attention—began another song, this one mournful and dreary and containing numerous references to summer rain, sodden flowers, and dead lovers. The bartender was a young man who smiled sympathetically as I rested against the bar. He slid a mug of ale down to me, and I sipped, savoring the brew. Two men with distinctly foreign features approached the bar and asked for a drink. They spoke, haltingly, the formal Latin of the schoolbook, hard for locals to understand here in the north where three languages had been thrown into the same pot and stirred. They were obviously not southerners like the woman Kehinde whom I had met with Chartji; she’d been from Massilia, and whatever other languages she might speak, she’d spoken Latin with the flawless casualness of the native speaker. So had the trolls, now that I thought about it. Only Brennan had used the local cant.

“Salvete,” I said to the men as I set down my mug. Greetings.

“Salve,” replied the elder. The younger made a gesture of greeting, cupped hand touched to chest, but said nothing and kept his gaze lowered.