Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

We paused to take a bite to eat when the sun reached its highest point.

“We should make Mutuatonis by nightfall.” I sat on a stone field wall, feet dangling.

He leaned beside me. He wore his long dark hair in a single braid, like a woman, for these days men cropped their hair short. Perhaps it had been otherwise in other times and other places, but I had never seen a man wear his hair as long as my own was. Yet none of his admirers seemed to count it against him.

“Can you see that prominence there?” I pointed to the southwest, to a hill bulging higher than the rolling land around it. “That should be Cold Fort, if my memory of maps is correct. When we get a bit closer, we’ll know for sure. There’s a temple atop it, within the old earth ramparts. In ancient days it was a fort, maybe a barbarian prince’s royal seat.”

He wasn’t looking toward the distant hill.

“What place is that?” He indicated a manor house far to the south of us, half screened by a row of poplars. “I smell meat cooking.”

“A lord’s estate. Not a mage House, as you can see by the arrangement of chimneys.”

“Every building must have fires against the winter cold, mustn’t they?”

“Cold mages kill fire. They heat their homes in the Roman way. Furnaces on the outside heat air that flows inside below a raised floor.”

“What lord lives in that fine manor?” He wrinkled his nose. “Can we go there to beg for our supper?”

We were too far away for me to smell anything. “One of the cousins of the Prince of Tarrant, I suppose. He’d have no reason to show hospitality to the likes of us. I’m getting cold.”

I hopped down and we set out again.

“From Mutuatonis we have a choice whether to follow the old Roman road west to where it meets the toll road. Then we would turn south and pass through Newfield before reaching Adurnam. But if Four Moons House still has seekers and soldiers out looking, it will be easier to find us on the toll road. Otherwise, we can cut across the chalk hills and stay in the countryside.”

“They will expect you to return to Adurnam?”

“They must assume I will try to reach the Barahals. Although why I would want to see them ever again after they betrayed me…” It seemed my life had turned into an unending parade of betrayals, and while I could comprehend what had led someone like Kayleigh to play the part she had, it was awfully hard to find forgiveness in my heart for all those so willing to sacrifice me.

“Why go to Adurnam? We could leave the Deathlands. Go home.”

“It is your home, maybe. It isn’t mine. I don’t understand the first thing about it. What would have happened to me if Andevai had not pulled me back within the wards when that… tide… swept through? Would I have died?”

“You would have changed. Maybe that is like what you call death here. You would have become something other than what you are now.”

“What am I?” I murmured. The words made me dizzy. “Rory, do you know our father?”

“I never met him. He is not a personage you meet.”

“He must have met your mother, and my mother. In order to sire children. If it’s true we were both sired by him, he would have had to have been a cat in one form… a man in another…. You must know something more about him.”

“No. Except that one thing my mother said.”

“That he was a tomcat.”

“That he was a tomcat. And not the sort of personage you go hunting for. If he wants you, he’ll call you to him.”

“That’s really all you know? Aren’t you curious to know more?”

“No. Should I be?”

“Do I wear a spirit mantle?”

He narrowed his eyes to look at me, then closed one eye to peer at me, opened it and closed the other, and looked, then opened it and, with both eyes on my face, made a gesture of defeat. “I can smell it, but I see only your human flesh.”

Before I could reply, he lifted his chin, tilted his head, blinked, and brought me to a halt with a hand on my arm. “Listen.” One moment he had been a relaxed and genial companion; now he was a predator alert to danger. “Horses and men behind us. I smell iron and cold steel.”

I did not for one instant doubt him, although I could not sense anything amiss. The sky was flawless, its blue made brilliant by the clarity of the winter air. A breeze had been blowing out of the south all morning, just enough to set the tops of bushes swaying and to send fluttering kisses of movement across fields of uncut grass. Beyond the open ground rose yew woods, screened at their edge with bare-branched sapling beech and straggling bushes. Not more than a mile away rose the ridge where the ancient Celts had built Cold Fort and the Romans later raised a temple to claim the stronghold for their own gods.