Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

“By what right,” she cried, “do you invade this peaceful house?”

“A boy says he saw a cold mage come in here.”

“There is no cold mage in this building!”

The power of Bee’s voice caused them to look over their shoulders and address remarks to the men pressing behind them. This shoving, restless crowd was inflamed by drink as much as by anger. I stepped up beside Bee, wishing my cane were a sword and not, in daylight, just a cane.

A man with a ripped coat and blood on his face called, “Aulus also says he saw the cursed cold mage shatter the lock and go in! And then when he ran after to check, the door had been frozen shut!”

“We mean to go in ourselves and see, maestressa,” said a burly man wearing a blacksmith’s apron. “Just step aside, and no harm done to your pretty face.”

I grabbed Bee’s wrist before she could run forward and do something rash like slug a blacksmith. Glancing around, I did not see the innkeepers, but I heard footsteps ascending the stairs. Bee and I were alone against the mob.

“I will not allow you—” began Bee.

The boom of repeated musket fire cracked over her words, and we both ducked. Down rolled the thunder of hooves, screams and shouts and voices aflame with panic and rage. The crowd before us dissolved like salt stirred in water as two ranks of mounted militia wearing the green Tarrant jackets galloped up the street with swords flashing and muskets smoking. We watched helplessly through the fractured casement as men went down beneath the bright blades. The blacksmith hit the mullions and collapsed across the sill. A lad, blood bubbling up through his hair, staggered, screaming, toward the window and fell before he reached the safety of indoors. The crowd scattered; the soldiers rode on, leaving the reek of fear and destruction behind them.

Then Andevai was in the room, striding past me to the window. He grabbed the body and heaved it out. He grabbed up big shards of glass from the floor and held them up to jagged edges. The temperature in the room dropped so precipitously that my eyes stung and my mouth went dry, teeth chattering. He knit the glass together, bent to pick up larger pieces, spinning out an icy frame in which to hold it.

I dashed forward to grab up shards and hand them to him, to make the work go more quickly. On the street beyond lay the two bodies before the window, and three more within view, two sprawled lifeless while a third, a man wearing a cap trimmed with a red ribbon, dragged himself along the cobblestones like a rat with broken hindquarters. Two women ran out from a building and hauled the red-capped man inside their door, him whimpering in a way to set me so on edge that I had to gulp down a sob.

“Why are you doing this?” I said, finding a measure of calm in our pointless and rather idiotic task.

“Broken things must be fixed,” he said. “Also, if the front is closed up, looters and thieves are less likely to come inside.”

“I mean, why follow us back here?”

“Because you didn’t come after me when I left,” he said. “And I heard the shouting and the crash.”

“You could have walked into a killing mob.”

“Yes.”

It was so cold standing next to him that I might as well have been immersed in a snow bank, but I kept bending and handing, bending and handing, and the effort kept a core of warmth in my body. He remained intent on the glass, spreading in its patchwork frame back across the gap more quickly than I would have believed possible. I could not discern what he was doing without a mirror to watch him in, but somehow he was able to knit the glass together by tracing the breaks with a hand.

“Why?” I asked.

He spoke without looking at me. “I made a promise to myself that if I was not going to kill you, then no one would.”

“Very noble I am sure.” Musket fire popped in another street, startling me so badly I dropped a thick pane of glass, which broke in half at my feet. The street before us lay empty under a gray sky. “Then why delay by fixing this window? If folk see you here, or recognize your work for cold magic, the innkeeper and her people will suffer.”

“Catherine, the militia just rode past. We can’t go out quite yet. Anyway, people blame cold mages for everything. Cold magic is so commonly used to improve life that folk take it for granted.”

“It is?”

He rushed on without having heard me. “How few understand that cold magic saved most of them from a life of constant petty war and raiding. That it is the mage Houses that have secured them from the tyranny of princes.”

“Only to substitute their own tyranny. You’re the son of slaves, Andevai! Bound for generation after generation to serve a mage House. Whether bound by princes or mages, what difference does it make to those who want freedom?”

“What is freedom?” he asked bitterly, “and who is truly free? We are all bound by what we are, and where we come from.”

“Maybe,” I said slowly as I considered the turn my life had taken, the lies I had been told, “because we do not look farther than where we have been told to look. Perhaps it would all appear very different if we weren’t afraid of what we are. Or what we might become.”

He had cut his hand, blood smeared across one palm as he stared at me. He looked as if I had just struck him. I was rather struck myself. The words had come out, although I’d had no idea they were waiting on my tongue.

What was I most afraid of? Beyond the prospect of being hunted down and killed.

I was most afraid of being alone and unwanted.