Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

The coachman nodded toward the door. “The master is waiting.”

Bee had escaped. Surely that was all that mattered, the best outcome I could have hoped for. Weary to my bones, my face moist with sea spume and my body battered by a tearing wind rising off the wide, dark sea, I climbed into the coach and sank onto the cushions.

“What were those grubs she dug up?” I asked, looking out at him.

Without answering, he shut the door, although he left the shutter open. Outside, four gray birds with long beaks swept into view, battling the wind. One dove and snatched a fish out of the water. They flapped to rest on the rocky revetment that shored up the causeway and began pecking life and entrails out of the fish. I looked away, down at the brass latch. Glimmering eyes watched me.

The coach rocked as the coachman climbed up into the box. As we began to move, the latch spoke in a hissing gremlin voice, its elongated mouth drawn tight in a mocking grin.

“Dragons. Silly girl. Those that survive will become dragons. Some will breed, and some will nest, and sleep, and dream, and then the tide of their dreams will wash through this country. It can never end until they are all dead. The master is waiting. He is very angry.”

We rolled on as night poured over the sea and blinded me.

13

I did not sleep. I could not sleep. I closed my eyes, but my thoughts tumbled in time to the rhythm of hooves and the rattle of the turning wheels. As the wheel turns, we rise and we fall. So say the Romans, who rose and fell and rose again, even if their second empire was smaller than the first.

Take Beatrice with you, the headmaster had said. Bee had walked unchanged through the tide of dreaming when everything around her was altered. She had known where to find the nest because her dreams had told her, and she had drawn the landmarks and the actual spot. The hatchlings that survived had crossed back to the mortal world, and through water Bee had shepherded them home.

I could not rest, and I had no one else to talk to. I looked down at the latch.

“Is that what it means to walk the dreams of dragons? That you aren’t changed by the tide?”

The gremlin face snickered.

“You remind me of my young cousin Astraea.” I folded my arms on my chest.

After a long pause, it said, sulkily, “Why?”

“I’d like to tell you, but we haven’t been formally introduced. What can I call you?”

“What can you call me? A good question. Names, like blood, can be eaten in this country. Do not spill names lightly. I have no name. What can I call you?”

“You already know my name.”

It added a smirk to its repertory of unpleasant smiles. “True. The cold mage called you Catherine.”

A sudden inquisitive urge overtook me to learn more about the man I’d been forced to marry. “Did the cold mage talk to you?”

Light glinted where its eyes should have been, like lantern light picking up the sheen of polished brass. “Why should he? If he didn’t know I could talk? He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does.”

“No, so I’ve discovered. What else do you know about him?”

“He weaves threads of magic into images. That was nice. It is a bit boring, you know.”

“Is it? Can’t you see outside?”

It sighed, with a squinched grimace. “No. That’s the other latch. We never talk.”

“Did the cold mage do anything else?”

“Not until you got into the coach. And I must say, except for looking at you a lot when you were asleep, he sat very still, not like you, shifting about and rubbing the cushions and snoring when you sleep.”

“I do not snore!”

“You do! So did the dreamer.”

I realized that every word Bee and I had said, in the privacy of this coach, the gremlin had overheard and could repeat.