Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (70 page)

He smiled. “I’ve got some sack. It’s an Iberian wine from the Sherez region near Gadir.”

I felt the presence of a trap, a danger I wasn’t aware of. Yet with the fall of night
my sword had bloomed, even if to his eyes it still looked like a cane. The locket
warmed my skin. My parents walked with me, so I nodded.

He fetched a bottle and two glasses. He poured, sipped from the
glass as if to mock me for thinking he might mean to poison me, and handed it to me
before pouring for himself. I shifted the glass to swirl the wine, then tasted. The
liquor had a dark brown color and a strong, sweet taste that I did not like as much
as rum’s.

“I wish you hadn’t given my father’s journals to the family. I’ll never get them back
now.”

He pushed aside the pile of dispatches. “If you go to Gadir, you can sue in court
for
rei vindicatio
, the right to regain possession of something you already own. If you can stand up
in court and swear that Daniel Hassi Barahal sired you and thus you are his next of
kin.”

My mouth had gone so dry that my voice emerged hoarse. “Daniel and Tara were married.
That makes him my father.”

“Yes. According to the law, the husband of a woman is the father of her children and
thus has legal rights of guardianship over them. Whom was Tara protecting?”

I glared at him. “Tara was protecting
me
.”

“I find it odd she would have believed that by dying she would protect you.”

“She knew Daniel would protect me. I hope you don’t find that odd.”

“Indeed, I do not, for Daniel was exactly the sort of man who could raise another
man’s child as if it were his own and never love it less for all of that.”

How he had me then! For I was seized by both overwhelming grief and passionate curiosity.

“What do you mean? What sort of man was he?”

He leaned closer, voice dropping to a murmur. “Ah, Cat, he was a better man than I
am.”

I sat back. “Are you mocking me?”

“No, I am not.” I knew he meant it, although I could not have said why. “I am mocking
myself. I have asked myself a thousand times since that day why she did not confide
in me.”

“The Amazon’s oath she swore condemned her to death for becoming pregnant.”

“She could have told me the truth. I would have found a way. But she felt only Daniel
could rescue her, as if Tara had ever needed rescuing from anything except that hells-ridden,
pestilent village she was born in.
That must be why she hid the pregnancy for so long, waiting for Daniel to come. Or
perhaps she hoped that drill, or a battle, would cause her to miscarry and rid her
of a thing she did not want.”

“Do you know, General, I start to begin to like you again, and then you say something
like that. My mother and father loved me.”

“I do not dispute that they loved you. I’ve read his journals. There’s a passage I
recall in particular. ‘Is some other man’s bastard worth this to you?’ So your Uncle
Jonatan demanded of his brother Daniel. And Daniel writes, ‘What happened on the ice
does not matter. The child will be my child. I have promised Tara that, and even if
I had not, it would make no difference, for my little cat is my sweet daughter, the
delight of my life.’ ”

He examined me where I sat just outside the spill of light. “Why, Cat—are you crying?”

I wiped a tear from my cheek with the back of a hand. “There’s no shame in grief.
I lost my parents when I was six. I lost the love I would have had from them all the
years from then to now. Think of what they lost! They lost the years they would have
had to watch me grow up, to welcome more children, to treasure each other.”

They were with me still, but it wasn’t the same as if they were sitting across from
me at a table in an attic room in a market town in the midst of a war.

“What happened on the ice?” he asked. “There is no journal for the crucial months,
the ones during which you must have been conceived. It’s missing, leaving only the
mystery of you.”

“The secret belongs to those who remain silent.”

“A phrase I have heard before, from the lips of your husband. Think of this, Cat.
If your aunt and uncle had not handed you over to the cold mages, you would never
have married him. Destiny is a sharp goad. Never think otherwise.”

“You think it destiny, and not just accident?”

“ ‘Where the hand of fortune branches, Tara Bell’s child must choose.’ We stand on
the road washed by the tides of war, you and I. Is it accident that has brought us
here? I believe it is not. I believe our fortunes are sealed before we are born.”

He poured himself a second glass and topped up mine.

“Destiny and fortune are just words. I think you are ambitious,
General. Ambition is not the same as destiny. You only want to say it is.”

He chuckled. “I like how you speak your mind, Cat. So few manage to be both honest
and likable. That is one of your charms. Daniel had the same gift of speaking truth
while making his listeners laugh. Do you want to know how I met them? Tara and Daniel,
and Helene?”

A jolt like a blow from an axe split through my body. I managed to nod.

“I was a young captain in the army of the Numantian League. One of the princes who
ruled the League had made a marriage alliance with a princely clan out of the city
of Sala, one of the cities of the Wagadou Federation. The Wagadou Federation grew
out of mostly Mande communities who had recently moved into the uninhabited lands
northeast of the Rhenus River.”

“Those lands weren’t uninhabited. People lived there already.”

He waved a hand with a casual dismissal. “Herders and trappers, living in the most
appalling conditions. Best of all, the new territory was fertile ground for cold mages.”

“Because of its proximity to the ice.”

“Yes, so I understand, although naturally I know little of cold magic. The prince
sent me to Sala to escort the noblewoman he was to marry back to Numantia. Instead
we found ourselves embroiled in a war against the Atrebates and their allies. The
war exploded all across the far north, into the boreal forest and the Barrens. The
Celts who live right up against the Barrens are called the Belgae, a barbaric people.
A few mage Houses had moved into that area fifty years earlier and civilized them.
So we marched north and crossed the Boreal River.”

He paused to drink.

I could not move, nor could I speak. I was frozen, as in ice.

“I met Daniel first, before either Tara or Helene. He was in the city of Sala, at
the court of the ghana. He asked if he could travel north with our battalion because
he wanted to explore the Barrens. Daniel was terribly entertaining. No man I’ve met
before or since could keep a miserably cold and wet huddle of men around a guttering
campfire laughing the way he could. He’d heard the Belgae were cannibals. Thought
it might be best to investigate from a position of strength, if you will. With an
army at his back.”

“Were they cannibals?” I thought of my grandfather, crouching by his cauldron.

He smiled. “He asked in every village we came to if it was true the Belgae were cannibals.
And they all said the same thing.”

“What was that?”

“That they themselves weren’t, but the neighboring village, the one they’d been having
a feud with for years, was certainly known to eat human flesh.”

I laughed.

He smiled, then sobered. “We fought a skirmish against those cursed Atrebates. Bad,
marshy conditions, and low morale. Our cursed colonel turned tail and ran with his
entire staff, those who were still alive. So I took over and managed an orderly retreat.
We had to escape north because the Atrebates had blocked the road. We couldn’t go
overland because the ground was a mire. We ended up in a village next to a mage House,
Crescent House.”

I nodded. “Where your wife came from.”

“Yes.” His smile had a bittersweet quality. “And there she was.”

“Helene?”

“Tara. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. I thought she was a boy at first,
for she was dressed in men’s clothing. She and her cousin and brother had been out
hunting. They had come across remnants of the fighting and run back to warn the village
with this mangy dog she kept for years and years—”

“She kept a
dog
?”

His gaze flashed up. I couldn’t be sure if my outburst had surprised him or if he
was gauging the import of my expression before he went on. “As it happened, the village
was a client village to Crescent House. The elders insisted I pay my respects to the
mansa at Crescent House and explain how I and my troops had come into their territory.
Tara accompanied us to give a report on what she had seen. Daniel came, because you
could never stop him from doing what he wanted. There we met Helene.”

He poured himself another glass of sack, but I refused a third. The lamp cast gold
and shadow over the table. And I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, General
Camjiata was a little lonely, a man who had lost the people he loved best.

He did not drink. He looked at me instead, his elbows braced on the table, his chin
resting on his interlaced fingers. “You look so much like Tara.”

I toyed with the glass, turning it around just for something to do. He leaned a little
closer.

“Catherine Bell Barahal.” A smile like regret wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “You
should have been my daughter.”

I inhaled sharply. There was no reply to that!

He added, “Had she married me instead of Daniel, you could have been my heir. We might
still manage it.”

“Your
heir
?”

“Like the didos of old, the queens of old Qart Hadast. Like Queen Anacaona. Is it
so strange a thought? While it is true in these days most people in Europa would scoff
at the thought of a woman ruling, that is purely due to local prejudice and current
custom. You look surprised, Cat. You can’t believe a woman cannot rule just as well
as a man. You met the cacica. You were raised in a Kena’ani household.”

“To rule as emperor is the wrong thing to wish for. We must work for Assemblies like
the one in Expedition.”

He chuckled. “Do you believe you can demand Assemblies in every city in Europa and
have them established overnight?”

“No, of course one battle will not win the war.” He had trapped me.

“It will take years, decades, more likely generations. Yet all might be accomplished
swiftly if a single man could set it in place.”

“And then what? Retire gracefully, leaving the happy subjects to rule themselves?”

He sipped at his glass.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“You want to believe me.”

“I want to believe a lot of things! I want to believe my parents are alive and soon
to be reunited with me. Is this what my mother feared? That you would claim me and
pass me off as your own child? I won’t be your heir, and I’m not your daughter.”

In silence he studied me over the brim of his glass as if waiting for me to rethink
my position and change my mind. But I was not to be trapped as Vai had been. I knew
how to riposte.

“Did you love her?” I asked.

He drained the glass and set it down with a hard clunk. “You are not the only one
to have lost those you held dear.”

“I’m sorry they aren’t with us now,” I replied quickly, for his spike of anger startled
me.

“This is why you and I will never be done, little cat, for we are all that remains
of them.”

“Maybe so. Anyway, as this war goes on, it seems we need each other.”

I went to the side table to slice bread and smear dollops of cheese on top.

Many scribes and storytellers have recorded the history of the world, each colored
by its author’s own interpretation and illuminating only the part of the tale she
feels is important or wishes to reveal. Stories tell us what we think we know about
the world. Sometimes they share truth and knowledge, and sometimes they propagate
lies and ignorance.

But words are only one road to change. The sword, which is not fighting but any form
of action, is the other. Some cut a path that others may follow into the wilderness
of possibility. The general saw not limits but unchained opportunity. I did not trust
him, but I believed that, as Rory had once said, he said what he meant, and he meant
what he said. At least in the moment he said it.

“What exactly is it you need me for, Cat?”

“Your legal code will release villages and clans from clientage. That’s what I need.”
I offered him the plate. “Do you ever worry about your safety? Since I’m to be the
instrument of your death.”

“Will I die because of a deliberate action on your part against me? Might you be the
tool someone else will use to destroy me? Or is your refusal to be my heir the death
of my hopes to set in place a successor whose ideals will match my own and thus improve
the destiny of humanity?”

I laughed. “Oh, that was well played, General. But the answer is still no.”

He took several slices of bread off the plate. “You can’t possibly believe that I
believe you came to me because you have been seized by an overwhelming desire to join
my army.”

“We have a common enemy,” I said in a low voice.

He glanced again toward the door, then smiled with a confiding look that drew an answering
smile from me. Was I so starved for affection that I would rub up against any hand
that offered a friendly pat?

“So we do. It is the only reason you are not weighted in chains and thrown into the
river to drown. I mean that in the poetic sense, you understand.”

“When you offered to make me your heir, did you mean that in the poetic sense as well?”

“Oh, no, Cat. I mean that with all seriousness.”

“Even though you distrust my motives for coming here?”

“Were I to truly gain your loyalty, I would know it to be sincere and unshakable.
Do not dismiss my offer out of hand.”

Unlike with Vai and the mansa, nothing in the offer tempted me. “Should you gain your
empire, it should then die with you. I will not be the means to prolong it. I stand
with the radicals, General. Each day we add to our numbers. You are strong, but in
the end, we will be stronger.”