Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

I tucked up my skirts, shifted the basket to my back, and climbed the tree to the window of Uncle Jonatan’s study. A chain of magic still protected the window latch. The whisper of its cold magic woke my sword. I unsheathed my blade and severed the threads. Then I turned the latch and swung into a deserted room.

Uncle Jonatan’s desk had been replaced by a table, chairs, and two settees shrouded by heavy covers and the dusty flavor of neglect.

I stepped into the first-floor corridor and listened through the threads that bound the house. Aunt Tilly had spun Kena’ani magic to guard home and property, and its embrace lingered in the walls like a memory of her warm smile. I wiped away a tear, for although I knew she and Uncle had betrayed me to save their own daughter, I still missed the way Aunt Tilly would kiss my forehead at night before we slept. I longed for the plates of sweet biscuits she and Cook had baked when they had extra coin for a treat of honey.

The house lay utterly silent except for the patter of rain. I went down to the ground floor and into the half basement. In the kitchen I opened the shutters and looked around. A new stove with all manner of modern conveniences had been installed in place of the old one where Cook had eked out each last morsel of tough stew meat and mealy turnips to make enough to feed us all. Dust smeared the tabletop, broken by the footprints of mice. Yet the coal bin was full, and the pantry was stocked with sealed pots of oats, barley, and beans.

I found a key hanging beside the back door. By the time the rain really began to pour, we were all safe inside.

I shivered. “No one knows we’re in Adurnam, and no one has lived here for weeks. I say we stay here the night, take a bath, and wash our clothes.”

Bee nodded. “We can haul water while we’re still wet. Now it’s coming on dark, no one will notice our chimney smoking. Do you want to haul water or start the fire?”

“I’m cold and wet,” said Rory in a tone of offended surprise. “I can’t work at hard labor in this condition!”

“You’d be surprised what you could do rather than have me bite you,” said Bee.

A grumbling Rory and I filled two copper tubs and the big scullery pot with water while Bee lit lamps, stoked and lit a fire in both the scullery and the fancy kitchen stove, and set oats and beans to soak. She found towels and an entire cake of lavender-scented soap of a kind we had only been able to afford as shavings at the holidays. In the scullery I gave Rory a towel to wrap around his waist and told him to take off his wet clothes.

“If you sit and watch the big pot, the water will boil,” I added.

“Really?” He settled on a stool with such a pleased expression that I could not tell whether he simply did not know the old saying, or had a profoundly complex sense of humor.

In the kitchen Bee and I stripped, wrapped ourselves in towels, and hung the wet clothes on a rack by the stove to dry.

“Really, Cat, wasn’t that a little mean-spirited? A watched pot never boils!”

“Of course it boils eventually unless there’s a cold mage nearby to douse the fire. It will keep him out of trouble.” I pulled out Queen Anacaona’s skull, with its empty eye sockets and remarkably good teeth. Some peculiar magic was keeping the jaw wired on. “Where shall we set her?”

“You can’t mean to set out the skull as if it can see or hear anything!”

“It seems rude to leave her shut up in the basket. I’ll set her here on one of the plates so she feels as if she knows what’s going on.” I placed her on a cupboard shelf, facing out. “There you are, Your Highness. We will be going into and out of this kitchen, but be assured we will not leave the house without you. In fact, if you have any spectral powers, you might warn us if an enemy approaches the house so we can escape. Otherwise you’ll fall into their custody and then you’ll never reach your son.”

I glanced at Bee, sure she was about to make a mocking comment.

Instead, her lips pursed as she considered the skull of the cacica who had briefly been her mother-in-law. She made a courtesy. “My apologies, Your Highness. I regret my rude comment.”

We left the cacica to oversee the kitchen while we explored the house. Our bare feet marked trails on the floors. Warmth from the two fires drifted upstairs like the kiss of an opia. The cold mages had repapered the walls, replaced the curtains, and removed all the old furniture. Only two things remained from the house we had grown up in.

One was the big mirror on the first-floor landing, covered by a sheet. I pulled back the sheet and rubbed a finger over the mirror’s slick surface, remembering how an elderly djeli had chained the marriage between Vai and me in its dark surface. The light from the lamp Bee held gleamed in the mirror, illuminating us as indistinct figures. Threads of gossamer magic chased around me before receding into the shadows. A faintly gleaming chain spun out of my chest and pierced the surface of the mirror, as an arrow loosed into a pool stabs a path. Although barely visible in the darkness, the thread shot sure and strong into the unseen depths.

Was there movement in the heart of the mirror? I extended a hand to touch it. Its surface was smooth and hard.

“Cat, are you staring at yourself? For you look a sight, with your hair all tangled and that towel draped so fashionably…” She touched her own bedraggled curls with her free hand. “Blessed Tanit! Is that really how I look?”

I pretended to recognize her as if for the first time. “Bee? Is that truly you? I would never have known… I thought perhaps a medusa, with the snakes of her hair all dead and limp—”

She kicked me in the shin.

I let the sheet drop back over the mirror’s face. We went upstairs to the bedchamber we had shared for most of our lives. In a secret hiding place in the wall of the chamber we found Bee’s first sketchbook with its scrawls, and a scrap of faded calico fabric wrapped around my childhood toys: a red-and-cream polished agate, a little wood play sword, and a tiny carving of a stallion caught in the flow of a gallop.

“You gave me an awful bruise on the head with that thing,” said Bee as I brandished the little sword. “You were such a beast, Cat. Always getting into fights.”

“I was not! I was always saving you when you got in fights! Like the time in the ribbon shop when that Roman girl yanked on your hair until you screamed while her mother pretended nothing was happening.”

She grinned as she galloped the toy stallion across the floor. “You had hacked off half her hair before her mother bothered to come look. It’s a good thing we can run so fast.”

“It’s not speed. It’s knowing how to distract the enemy.”