Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

“If the mage Houses discover you are acting as our agent, they will kill you.”

He shrugged. “If I am willing to risk nothing for freedom, then I am not a man.”

“Spoken like a radical, Magister.” Brennan set down his cup. “We had best get out of Sala sooner rather than later. I won’t travel with you all the way to Noviomagus. I need to deliver news of the general’s victory to printers and allies in Koumbi. We’ll meet in Havery after we have both completed our other business.”

“Caith and I are not going to Noviomagus,” added Chartji. “Not if one of our older brethren is nesting there.”

“Keer also used the phrase older brethren,” I said. “By which I collect you mean the creatures we call dragons. Why can you not go to Noviomagus if the headmaster is one of them?”

She showed her teeth again, all white and sharp, and chuffed in a way meant to show amusement or, perhaps, a shiver of what a human would have called nervous laughter.

“Because he would eat us.”

29

On a cold late Martius day, slushy and stinging, we reached the mighty Rhenus River. The town of Noviomagus had been founded as a far-flung outpost of the expanding Roman empire and was now a thriving center of trade and textiles. The central district was crowded with opulent four-story edifices, the homes of rich lords and merchant families. In contrast, the mage House was ostentatiously single-storied, its sprawling wings and courtyards eating up several city blocks.

The palatial forecourt of Five Mirrors House looked every bit as grand as the estate of Four Moons House. Even decently dressed in well-tailored clothing I felt utterly out of place. Vai slapped his gloves repeatedly onto his palms as he examined the sweep of the steps, the pillared portico, and the double doors.

“Keep silence and follow my lead.” The press of his mouth gave him a sneer.

A steward starched to perfection in a magnificent orange boubou appeared at the door. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and as dark as Vai, the patrician height of all that is cultured and impeccable.

“We interview for servants in the kitchen wing. You may go around to the left.”

Vai crushed his gloves in his hands. “I am Andevai Diarisso, a magister of the Diarisso lineage, out of Four Moons House. I suggest you escort me to see your mansa as soon as we are properly purified and have made the rightful courtesies.”

The steward’s eyebrows flew up in an expression of astonishment. “Is this all an honored magister of Four Moons House travels with? A satchel and a woman?”

A chilly blast of air huffed over us as a few stray hailstones clattered down.

“I am on a Grand Tour. My coach overturned this morning. It will take days before it can be repaired. Likewise, my servants were injured. I left them behind with the coach and driver and came ahead myself with my wife to have a hope of acceptable accommodation and some manner of edible food. Really, the fare at the mage House hostels in this part of the world is unpalatable. I had heard that the magnificence of the architecture and the lavishness of the table fare at the mage Houses in old Roman territory were beyond description, but I admit myself sorely disappointed in what I have so far experienced.”

Here stood the Andevai I had first known and loathed!

The steward’s stare made my neck prickle. “Ah, of course. This way, Magister.”

He ushered us into an antechamber furnished with plain wooden benches and a set of tapestries depicting the diaspora from the Mali Empire. A heavyset woman in an indigo robe offered us water in the traditional way.

“Magister, you must be purified through water.” She indicated that Vai should go with the steward. “I will myself attend you, Maestra.”

The House had splendid baths in the Roman style, split into a men’s and a women’s half just as they had been at the gatehouse of Four Moons House.

“Tell me what happened,” she said after I immersed myself.

We had deposited Bee and Rory and our luggage at a modest hostel at the edge of town and sent the carriage back to Sala, but naturally I was not going to tell her any of that.

“It was so frightfully rough to be tumbled in such a vile manner. And I had to leave all my gowns behind.” I simpered into a digression on why I preferred wool challis to damask that soon caused her expression to glaze over in a satisfactory manner.

Servants brought clean underthings and a shapely gown with a shawl. In this pleasing garb I was escorted to a parlor fitted with low couches. Attendants brought a tea tray with tiny almond cakes and jellied berries. Vai was shown in, and we were left alone. He wore the same dash jacket he had arrived in, although it needed to be cleaned and pressed.

“Did they not offer you a change of clothes?” I asked.

“Nothing I could lower myself to wear,” he said in a combative tone.

Refusing the bait, I reclined on the cushions and drank three cups of tea and ate four almond cakes and all of the jellied berries while Vai glared over the bare branches of a winter courtyard as if his gaze had ripped the leaves from the shrubs. The way he tapped a drumbeat on his thigh was a sure sign he was churning with restlessly unpleasant thoughts.

“Vai, you need not use that expression when there is only me here to see for I can assure you it no longer intimidates me although it does make me want to bite you. And not in an amorous way.”