Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

“I am Maestra Fatou,” said the woman, “and this is my cousin, Maester Conor. We are come at the mansa’s order to take over the running of the household. Also, he did not think it appropriate for two young women to live alone without older female companionship.”

“Of course,” said Bee. “Our thanks. We’re a little nervous of the soldiers, I admit.”

“Have they shown you any disrespect?” she asked sharply.

“No, no,” said Bee in a tone that suggested otherwise. “We have been locking ourselves in here at night. We sleep here, for no fires will light on the second floor, with the magister sleeping up there. If you don’t mind, could we wait until morning to show you the house? You may take the cook’s room downstairs, by the kitchen, where there’s a fire, or bunk with the soldiers in the dining room below us.”

They left, and we made ready. We sat in darkness and silence and warmth, waiting for the midnight bell. When the lonely tenor cried the night watch across the city, I took Uncle’s keys and unlocked the door into his private office. We padded in, and I unsheathed my sword and sliced through the cold magic that bound shut the latch. We paused, listening, but no alarm stirred the house; the magister was asleep and would, we hoped, note nothing until he woke. Bee positioned herself by the window where, weeks ago, an unwanted visitor had climbed in unannounced and unasked for, slipping through the protective cawl. I went downstairs in my slippered feet, carrying a lantern lit with the last beeswax candle. I pretended to trip and stumble as I came to the back door.

The mage House soldiers were well trained. They were perfectly awake: two inside and two outside. I held the lantern up right into their faces, to confound their night vision.

“We forgot to take a chamber pot upstairs,” I said. “I’ve got to use the latrine.”

They opened the door, and I quickly shone the lantern light in the faces of the outside pair. I made a business of exclaiming over the bitter cold, and my slippered feet, and how I had forgotten my cloak, and should I go back and get it, and on in this vein as I listened for the faint creak of Uncle’s office window opening above and the fainter creak of the stout branch on which Bee was climbing out to the wall. We’d climbed that path before. We Barahals were trained to be spies, after all.

When I was sure she had gone, I used the latrine and made my way back to the first-floor parlor. I locked myself in, pulled on boots and coat, secured the knit bag with its books around my torso, stoked the fire, and made up lumpy figures beneath the feather bed we’d thrown over the window-seat cushion. Then I went into Uncle’s office and locked the door between office and parlor. The office door leading onto the landing was already locked from inside. If we were fortunate, they would not think to break down the doors until morning.

o;Cat! Are you paying attention? You look a little flushed. I said, perhaps we’d be better off to go to the academy and throw ourselves on the mercy of the headmaster.”

Startled, I retreated behind a glower. “The one who handed you over to Legate Amadou Barry? I think not.”

She sighed. “No, I suppose not. I’m just exhausted by thinking of having to haul Uncle Daniel’s journals across Adurnam.” Abruptly, she sucked in breath so hard I looked up and followed her gaze out the window and over Falle Square. “Fiery Shemesh! What’s this?”

A black coach rumbled down the west side of the square, pulled by four horses as pale as milk. My heart leaped in my chest, or it would have, if I’d had a heart, which Bee so often accused me of lacking. But after all, it was not the coach I thought it was: This vehicle bore a crest of four moons—crescent, half, full, and new—and its coachman was a heavyset man with black skin and its paired footmen a matching set of blond Celts. The horses were ordinary horses with brown specks flecking their gray coats. Their hooves fell solidly on stone. I wondered if I would ever see the eru and the coachman again.

Four Moons House had come to claim its new property the moment the festival was over. The coach drew up before the house, and the footmen hopped gracefully down to open the door and pull down two steps. The man and woman who climbed out were not cold mages but wore the serious garb and tidy demeanor of accountants and housekeepers, stewards come to take possession and take inventory. Seeing them emerge, I felt a dull ache in my heart. Was it sadness at losing the only home I remembered? Selfish disappointment that Andevai had not come himself? Relief that I did not yet have to figure out what to say to him?

We rose as the stewards were shown in. They were reserved and polite.

“I am Maestra Fatou,” said the woman, “and this is my cousin, Maester Conor. We are come at the mansa’s order to take over the running of the household. Also, he did not think it appropriate for two young women to live alone without older female companionship.”

“Of course,” said Bee. “Our thanks. We’re a little nervous of the soldiers, I admit.”

“Have they shown you any disrespect?” she asked sharply.

“No, no,” said Bee in a tone that suggested otherwise. “We have been locking ourselves in here at night. We sleep here, for no fires will light on the second floor, with the magister sleeping up there. If you don’t mind, could we wait until morning to show you the house? You may take the cook’s room downstairs, by the kitchen, where there’s a fire, or bunk with the soldiers in the dining room below us.”

They left, and we made ready. We sat in darkness and silence and warmth, waiting for the midnight bell. When the lonely tenor cried the night watch across the city, I took Uncle’s keys and unlocked the door into his private office. We padded in, and I unsheathed my sword and sliced through the cold magic that bound shut the latch. We paused, listening, but no alarm stirred the house; the magister was asleep and would, we hoped, note nothing until he woke. Bee positioned herself by the window where, weeks ago, an unwanted visitor had climbed in unannounced and unasked for, slipping through the protective cawl. I went downstairs in my slippered feet, carrying a lantern lit with the last beeswax candle. I pretended to trip and stumble as I came to the back door.

The mage House soldiers were well trained. They were perfectly awake: two inside and two outside. I held the lantern up right into their faces, to confound their night vision.

“We forgot to take a chamber pot upstairs,” I said. “I’ve got to use the latrine.”

They opened the door, and I quickly shone the lantern light in the faces of the outside pair. I made a business of exclaiming over the bitter cold, and my slippered feet, and how I had forgotten my cloak, and should I go back and get it, and on in this vein as I listened for the faint creak of Uncle’s office window opening above and the fainter creak of the stout branch on which Bee was climbing out to the wall. We’d climbed that path before. We Barahals were trained to be spies, after all.

When I was sure she had gone, I used the latrine and made my way back to the first-floor parlor. I locked myself in, pulled on boots and coat, secured the knit bag with its books around my torso, stoked the fire, and made up lumpy figures beneath the feather bed we’d thrown over the window-seat cushion. Then I went into Uncle’s office and locked the door between office and parlor. The office door leading onto the landing was already locked from inside. If we were fortunate, they would not think to break down the doors until morning.

With my ghost sword slung tightly over my back, I climbed out and crouched on the wide branch to close the window behind me. Some instinct or training or sound alerted the guards standing out back, and they glanced around and up, but I was part of the tree, nothing more than a skeletal winter branch, a little stouter than most, but nothing to notice. Nothing to see.

Bee and I met in the mews. We avoided the gaslit thoroughfares and made our way through the cold winter night, me at the front with my good eyes and my ghost sword to mark the path, Bee following tightly in my footsteps with an ordinary cane of her own to sweep the street for obstacles. We found our way to the Blessed Tanit’s temple near the academy, whose gates remained unlocked in every season and at all times of the day and night. Three bags, Callie had been instructed to give them. One was full with the last of the grain from our larder, given as an offering for the priests. The other two held my father’s journals and a few other items crammed in with them: four silver candlesticks, four beeswax candles, and some stockings, shifts, and underthings that had been left by Aunt Tilly when the family had fled. What coin we had, we’d sewn into our bodices. The priests slept soundly in their winter cottage; I had no trouble retrieving the two bags, except for their weight.

It was a cursed long and struggling walk hauling them across the dark city. Winter’s cold deadened the night. Fortunately, no festival debris littered the streets to trip us. The balloon rides, the ice fair with its food booths and games, the processions to the temples, the public banquets at which beggars snatched from the filth of the streets would preside over the only good meal they would eat all year, all had been canceled due to the riots. The prince’s curfew kept criminals and rogues at home this night. Militia patrols, however, were out in force. We would hear the clop of hooves and see yellow torchlight gleaming around a corner, giving us time to shrink back into a shadowy alcove or rubbish-strewn alley to hide.

“I feel like someone is following us,” Bee said in a low voice as we crouched on the steps of a locked and barred chandler’s shop, waiting for a clot of six Tarrant soldiers to decide that they did not want to loiter in the intersection ahead. “Do you really know how to get there? We’ve never been to that part of town before. Are you sure they’ll help us?”

A cold wind chased down the street and kissed my nose and lips like a flirt. Or a cold mage. “I’m not sure of anything,” I said, shivering. I was tired and much too chilled, and my arms hurt even though we were swapping off carrying the bags. “But I know the radicals have no love for cold mages or princes. If anyone can help us now, surely it’s lawyers.”

“You set your sights too low,” said a male voice.