Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

“I thought your father and uncle were hunters.”

“They were also hunters. But a person must have a trade. Before she became ill, my mother was renowned for her basketry. Did I ever tell you that?” He did not wait for my answer. “When things got bad for me in the youth hall at Four Moons House, I started sneaking out to the carpentry barn. The mansa’s uncle let me work there.” He began stroking my belly with a motion similar, I supposed, to that he might delicately use to plane a surface.

“The mansa’s uncle was a carpenter?”

“An architect. He was educated in Camlun and had studied with learned masters across Europa. He said knowing the carpenter’s craft helped him understand how to build. In a mage House, many sons and daughters have no magic, so they serve the House in some other way. Because he was the uncle of the mansa he was willing to defy the mansa by teaching me, since it was seen as lowborn of me to wish to work with my hands. But the work helped me concentrate on my studies. I couldn’t be angry or fighting if I was working with my hands.” His stroking hand clenched.

“How did things get bad for you in the youth hall?”

He pushed to sit. “Can you heat enough water to scald and pluck the grouse? The sooner we can leave here and get away from the ice, the better. Next Hallows’ Night your sire will come after us. I can hide from the Hunt in a troll maze, but you can’t. We must find a way to protect you from him.”

His sudden change of subject forced me to ask a question whose answer I feared. “Did my sire harm you?”

He gave a curt laugh leavened by a self-mocking smile that reassured me that he had not been hurt. “He did an injury to my pride, that is certain. My magic counts for nothing in comparison to the magic he wields as easily as breathing.”

“Yet you had the courage to stab him. Even knowing how strong he is.”

He pulled down the blankets to expose my right shoulder. I had once thought him the pampered, privileged son of a mage House, as highborn as he was arrogant. The callused touch of his fingers, however coaxing and sensual, reminded me that he had been born to a very different life. With kisses, he traced the two seamed scars on my shoulder. “I hurt you instead. How could you know that horrible thing your sire threatened you with?”

“The latch of the coach conceals two gremlin spirits, one inside and one outside. They can see and talk. When I was climbing up the tree in the spirit world, I saw through its eyes.”

“Ah, yes, I remember you talking about the latch.”

“Are you saying you don’t believe me about the latch?”

He kissed my forehead. “Love, why did you try to kill your sire? You would only have killed yourself.”

I brushed my fingers across his lips. “I was so angry and afraid that I forgot.” I swung out of bed and padded over to the table to dress. “Although now that I think of it, if you hadn’t stabbed him the first time and he hadn’t boasted that the injury would fall on his children, then you wouldn’t have known to stop me from trying to kill him.”

“That is convoluted logic even for you.” Sitting up, he shaped four globes of cold fire as easily as I might inhale. “Love, how did your mother get pregnant by the Master of the Wild Hunt?”

I got into my undergarments. “He threatened to kill Daniel, and the other survivors, unless she allowed him to impregnate her.”

He nodded gravely. “The women in my village suffered much the same. My grandmother was sent up to the mage House to work in the hall. One of the men fancied her. Village girls like her weren’t allowed to say no. He kept her as his mistress until he got her pregnant and discarded her.”

“Is that why you bloomed with cold magic? Because your grandsire was a magister?”

He smiled as at an old joke. “The man who sired my father on my grandmother was a clerk, not a mage. He was sent to Four Moons House as part of the retinue of a woman from another mage House when she married the mansa’s father. Who’s to say the magic came from his breeding? It might have bloomed from an unknown seed. It might have come from my grandmother.”

“The same place you got your looks? From your grandmother?”

“My mother did once say my father was the handsomest man she had ever seen. Of all his children, I resembled him the most.” He looked very appealing, sitting naked on the bedding. The light cast a sheen on his skin that made me want to rub my hands all over him all over again. The curve of his knee drew my eye to the line of his thigh. He had a way of looking at me that meant he knew I knew he knew I was admiring him, and that he was perfectly happy to be admired. He was like Bee in that way: That people enjoyed looking at him gave him satisfaction.

“You’re sitting there hoping to tempt me back into bed, aren’t you? But if we want to dry out your clothes, I have to light a fire.” I glanced at the skin nailed over the window. “It will be dark soon, so I won’t make you stay out for long.”

“How can you dry out my clothes? To go outside, I must have something to wear.”

“You can wear the clothes I brought for Rory. They’ve dried out—”

“Rory?” The courting Vai who had sat patiently through many evenings at the boardinghouse while I flirted with customers had never spoken quite this sharply to me.

“One of my sire’s other children. The saber-toothed cat. You met him in the spirit world, at the hearth of the djelimuso Lucia Kante.”

He lifted his chin, gone a little prickly as if embarrassed he had revealed a spark of jealousy. “I remember the cats. The male is your half brother?”

“Yes. My sire can change form as he wishes.”

“I can guess the details.”