Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

Bee twined her fingers through mine. “I miss Mama and Hanan and even Papa and wretched little Astraea. I miss the quiet life we had in Falle Square. Can you even believe I’m saying that? When I was there, all I could dream about was having a wealthy and handsome prince rescue me from the dreary poverty of our lives. Now a quiet life doesn’t seem so ill-favored.”

“It wasn’t as quiet as you remember. Aunt and Uncle were always scrambling to make ends meet. Not to mention the constant trouble they were in for buying and selling information. I expect they found the life more wearying and anxious than quiet, whatever it may have seemed to us. They kept us very sheltered, Bee. As I am discovering!”

“I wish I could have spoken to the hatchlings. I feel I am their midwife. All this time dragons have lived among us and yet we have never known.”

“I could have told you,” muttered Rory. “I expect the only reason the dragon didn’t eat you is that you taste sour, not at all to his liking. But who ever listens to me? Besides Vai, I mean.”

“Andevai listens to you?” Bee said with a snorting chuckle.

A board creaked in the passage. Fingers tapped lightly on the door. Rory rolled off the bed with unseemly haste, and slipped out. I heard the husband’s murmur, and they padded away.

“Does he do this everywhere he goes and every place he stays?” I asked.

“Yes, he’s incorrigible. But you know, Cat, he’s right. Andevai does listen to him in a way you and I don’t. Simpering Astarte, they’re actually rather sweet together, just as a man and his wife’s brother should be. Rory makes Andevai likable.”

“Vai’s not likable with me?”

She laughed. “Watching you soothe his ruffled feathers amuses me, considering if it were anyone else you would cut him to pieces with your tongue.”

“I tell him what I think!”

She squeezed my hand. “Yes, dearest, and he adores you for it. Still, I expect Andevai particularly likes Rory because he has discovered Rory can tell when you are fertile and when you are not. A useful sort of person to have around, don’t you think? Given that you don’t want to get pregnant yet but wish to enjoy sexual congress.”

“Blessed Tanit! Now that you mention it, Vai has conversed upon that subject more than once since he and Rory met. I ought to have suspected. Anyway, Rory has the knack of flattering people in exactly the right way, so that it’s true but not condescending.”

“Yes. It’s like he’s hunting for the kill, only the kill in this case is winning people over to like him. He always seems to leave them in better spirits than when he arrived. Don’t you think that is a rare gift, the ability to make people happy?” She sighed.

“Haven’t you been happy as a radical? Sleeping with the infamously handsome Brennan Du?”

She released my hands. “Yes, as for adventure and the admiration of men swept off their feet by my brilliant rhetorical abilities, I would say that the last nine months have been eminently satisfactory.”

“Goodness, Bee! Were there other men?”

A smack of sound against the windowpane startled me; someone was throwing pebbles at our room. I got off the bed and peered down to the street. With clouds overhead, no moon or starlight limned the street, and although the houses on this lane had night lamps burning on their porches, not a single flame now illuminated the dark. I recognized the shadowy form from the drape of his winter coat over his shoulders. Alarm leaped like a deer bolting from the scent of wolves.

“It’s Vai!”

I crept downstairs, unbarred the door, and let him in. In the back of the house the fire in the kitchen stove, sealed for the night, groaned with a resigned huff as the presence of a powerful cold mage sucked all combustion from the flames. We tiptoed upstairs.

“Andevai!” Bee whispered as he shaped a spark of cold fire into the shape of a candle. “Why are you here? What went wrong?”

He shook off the coat. He was wearing a rough workingman’s jacket and trousers we had smuggled into Five Mirrors House as cushioning for the cacica’s head, which he had pulled on over his other garments.

“I told them it wasn’t the first time you had run away from me, which statement has the added benefit of being the truth. I spent all day nagging at them to find you, thinking that would relieve their concerns about me. Then they paraded four women in front of me and asked which one I wanted in my bed.” He sank down on the bed and rubbed his head as if it hurt. “They were so insistent, reminding me of how every magister owed it to the vigor of the Houses to do his part. The only way I could get rid of them was to reduce them all to tears by enumerating their flaws and shortcomings at length.”

“That can’t have been difficult for you, Magister,” said Bee with a sting in her smile.

He looked up so quickly I thought he meant to cut her with an edged retort. She braced herself, ready to give back what she got.

“For over seven years I worked to become the magister they would accept in Four Moons House, so I could prove I was more powerful than them, smarter than them, better than them. It was so easy to become him again. But I don’t want to be that man.”

Bee’s mouth parted in astonishment. Mercifully she said nothing, for above all things I could not imagine Vai accepting sympathetic platitudes.

“Then you won’t go back, love,” I said.

He looked away. “None of that matters,” he went on in a curt tone that another might have heard as a rejection but that I knew came from pride. “As I was leaving the parlor after getting rid of the women, I saw a messenger wearing the colors and badge of Four Moons House.”

“The courier I saw leave last night can’t have gotten there and back so quickly.”