Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

A powerfully cold wind rocked the coach. As the mansa started walking to the gatehouse, icy sleet began to fall. I drew my sword.

“How did they get past the gate?” I asked. “Is it not protected by a cold magic binding?”

“She who holds the keys to the gates must be alive to close or open them.” His right hand clenched as he looked toward the body on the steps. He let out the hard exhalation of a man determined to get on with the painful task that has to be done.

“Was she your kinswoman?” I asked, for she had hair the same color as his.

“My sister,” he said curtly. “Let Rory scout in his cat form. Go around to the back. I think they will not think to use a cat as a catch-fire. Go on.”

Rory shed his clothes and turned from man to cat. He nudged my hands, licked Bee, yawned assertively at the mansa, and loped off. We got in the carriage.

The shadow of the arch passed over us as we entered the estate.

“Here is a riddle,” the mansa said as we rolled down the wide avenue past black pine and a reed-choked pond. “Fire will burn as long as it has fuel and is not doused by water. If this man Drake uses Andevai as a catch-fire yet cannot fathom the well of Andevai’s power, what then?”

“I told Vai once that the potency of his cold magic is the inverse of his modesty,” I said.

“Cat, are you saying that by using Andevai as his catch-fire, Drake becomes as powerful as Andevai is vain?” Bee smiled at me with brows lifted in the way she had that provoked me to mischief. Her smile broke through the wall of relentless concentration I had raised around my fears. We broke into hysterical giggles.

The mansa stared as if to scold us but instead sat back with a stiff but honest smile. “I suppose a little levity cannot harm our cause. Anyway, it may well be an apt analogy that should give us pause, given what we know of Andevai’s monstrously bloated conceit.”

Bee snickered. I wiped tears from my eyes.

He set a fist on the window’s rim and studied the orchard as we passed. The first time I had been driven this way, I had seen Kayleigh walking in the orchard among the field hands. Vai had halted our carriage to greet her. I had begun then to comprehend that the man I thought I saw was merely the clothes he showed to the world. What made him who he truly was ran far deeper. Just as it did in all of us.

The main house lay almost two miles from the road. Smoke boiled up above the trees, shimmering with heat.

“What better way to humiliate Vai than by destroying the House he has pledged to uphold and maintain?” I cried. “And likewise practice for the greater destruction he means to visit on his own home?”

“I fear you are right,” said the mansa. He did not take his gaze from the smoke. “My surviving troops and magisters will be days behind us on the road. Beatrice, you must remain in the coach so you do not yourself need rescuing. Catherine, are you ready?”

Shared laughter had polished away the weight of my dread. I knew what I had to do.

“Mansa, the only way to kill James Drake is with cold steel.”

“Andevai taught us how to pull the backlash off another and into ourselves, so I will keep the fire mages from using you as a catch-fire for long enough that you can reach him,” he said without the least sign that he appreciated the irony of protecting me after he was the one who had once demanded I be killed. “I will not let you burn. Best you scout first, however.”

“Be safe, dearest.” Bee grasped my hand, kissed my cheek, and let me go.

I pushed down the latch as we rumbled along the drive. As the door swung open I leaned out, feet in the coach and body braced on the door. The coach came to a halt just out of sight around the last curve of the drive from the House.

I hopped out. The coachman touched the brim of his cap in salute. The eru leaped onto the roof of the coach in a tremor of unseen wings. I wrapped the shadows around me and ran alone up to the House.

45

Four Moons House resembled a princely palace, with a broad forecourt, a grand portico reached by a series of stepped terraces, and an imposing building anchored by round rooms at either end and wings stretching behind to enclose interior gardens. A curtain-like shimmer of heat pushed smoke skyward from the back of the building. With cracks and bangs, windows, walls, and furniture shattered, broke, fell as the flames ate forward through the structure like a fiery leviathan devouring its helpless prey.

A troop of soldiers stood on the portico facing toward the House, their rifles trained on the doors to prevent anyone inside from venturing out. Six young fire mages were ranged along the steps, each with a cold mage huddled in front being used as a catch-fire, although it seemed to my eye that they weren’t trying to raise fire as much as simply control the six magisters. Most likely there were other fire mages elsewhere around the estate. I had no idea how many had followed Drake and how many had been left behind with Camjiata’s army.

About thirty people, mostly women, knelt on the highest terrace. White-haired elders and slender youths were treated with equal disrespect. I recognized Serena among them, but I did not see Vai’s mother or sisters.

Drake stood like a hero on the topmost step. Wrapped as I was within the threads of the worlds, I could easily see the geometry of his fire magic, the way he cast threads of backlash into all thirty of these mages. He had not the cacica’s skilled and delicate touch. In her hands catch-fires were lit with a nimbus glow as the threads of their magic spun north to the far ice and through the spirit world and back again into the mortal world. These catch-fires blazed too brightly, flooded with more power than they could channel even though it was shared between them.

Only one mage still stood, braced upright by sheer force of will.

The well of Vai’s power shone as radiant a blue as the sacred wells of the Antilles. Given so much fuel to burn, Drake’s fire raged. He was pouring his fire into the palace and his backlash into the thirty cold mages. Even split among them it was obviously too much for them to handle, for many were too young or too ill or too elderly to sustain the heat. Vai was pulling streams of backlash out of them and into himself, to stop any one of them from flooding and thus dying.

That was how Drake was controlling Vai: Not by using him as a catch-fire but by forcing him to protect the people he felt responsible for. Of course the mansa had named him heir! The mansa had finally understood that once saddled with the burden, Vai would never lay it down.