Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (83 page)

The icy sculpture of Four Moons House glittered as the moon rose. Moonlight coruscated
through the many facets of the ice, splintering light across the terraces and driveway.
In this eerie weave of shadow and bright, Bee and the stewards counted heads and sorted
people by injury and need. The cold mages who had been Drake’s prisoners were, like
the mansa, injured and unconscious. Three were dead. The cold mages who had been at
Four Moons House, like Serena, had absorbed some measure of backlash, but on the whole
they had not been badly harmed, although all the pregnant women had gone into labor.

All the fire mages were dead. I pitied them, but I could not mourn.

Mostly I sat with Vai’s head in my lap. No sign of injury marked him but he lay oblivious,
the only movement the shallow rise and fall of his chest and the sluggish pulse at
his throat. Wasa huddled next to me, petting the cowering puppy. Bintou fetched water
for us from the well, and the cool liquid slowly eased her mother’s coughing. I even
got a little down Vai’s throat. As the evening wore on I slipped in and out of a doze,
glancing up now and again to search for Bee. She was always there, busy managing people.
I just hadn’t the strength.

In the middle of the night, wagons trundled up under the light of an almost-full moon
and a clear sky. Andevai’s half brother Duvai led the contingent from Haranwy. All
were men, all armed with their hunter’s bows, spears, scythes, and a few illegal rifles.
I went to greet them.

“Peace to you, Andevai’s brother, and to all who live in your compound,” I said in
the traditional way. “Do you have peace?”

“I am well, thanks to the mother who raised me,” he replied, “and my family has peace
also. And you, Cat Barahal?”

“I am well, thanks to my power as a woman.”

He raised an eyebrow, as if something in my face made him take pause. Then he looked
past me to the massif of ice that entombed Four Moons House.

“Will the village give these refugees shelter?” I asked. “On their behalf, and on
my own, I ask for guest rights.”

“That is our duty and obligation,” he said. “We will do what we must.”

“The mansa named Vai as heir.”

“We heard the rumor.” He glanced toward Vai’s mother, who had not left Vai’s side.
The stubborn line of old resentment creased his brow. “An honor to his mother, indeed.
He has made his choice between his two hats. This turn of events cannot have improved
his conceit.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about the hats. You must work honestly with him, Duvai. I think
you will find him something changed. He is the village’s ally, not its enemy, not
its ruler.”

“Is that what you think? You surely were determined to escape him the last time we
met.”

A flush warmed my cheeks. “I am something changed as well.”

The resemblance between the two men was keen, although Duvai was lighter, having a
mother who had been born in a Celtic village, and being therefore more mixed of feature
and complexion. Ten years older, he had the surety of a man in his prime strength,
fully aware of who he is and of his place in the world. Besides that, he was a hunter
who had braved the spirit world more than once and returned successfully.

“Are you something changed in the matter of my brother?” he said with a chuckle that
made me blush yet more. “I would not have taken you for a woman to be bought by the
offer of riches and rank, so I must suppose he found another way to capture you.”

“You are mistaken. No man can capture me. But he might have… courted me.”

His smirk resembled Vai’s. “So my brother finally smiled at you, did he?”

I had no answer to this, except to refrain from punching him.

“Grandmother made us promise never to fight each other. Out of respect for her, and
knowing she watches over us still, I will speak in his favor. The elders of Haranwy
have agreed to house as many of these refugees as we can until a decision is reached.
The rest can shelter at Trecon and other House villages.”

The ice-bound House breathed like winter on our backs as we walked away.

No one would ever live there again.

The mansa was brought to Grandmother’s single-roomed house with its tiny private courtyard.
The room smelled of pine wreaths even though no one had lived in it for some time.
Vai was conveyed to the room where his mother had lived for so many years with her
children. She directed him to be placed on a cot and asked for hot water to be brought
so he might be stripped of his grimy clothes and washed. This task I asked to do,
behind a screen for privacy. The furnishings in the modest room were nothing compared
to the luxurious riches in Two Gourds House, but the modern circulating stove, the
four-poster bed, an oak table, and the rosewood wardrobe revealed the concern Vai
had taken both for his mother’s comfort and for her status in the village.

He mumbled incoherent syllables. Settled in the bed, he tossed and turned for the
next three days, feverish one hour and shivering with cold the next as I forced broth
down his throat. Every now and then he had lucid moments, during which I told him
some of what had happened and fed him gruel. At length the worst of it eased, and
he slept like the dead.

At intervals I attended Bee, who sat for hours in the village’s festival
house acting as mediator. I admired her fair-minded intercessions between the demands
of the Houseborn, many of whom had never set foot in so rustic a situation, and the
complaints of the burdened villagers. Disputes were also sparked between the younger
generation in the village, who agitated for resistance, saying this was their chance
to throw off the yoke of clientage, and the elders, who refused to offend the ancestors
and the gods by violating guest rights.

I just wanted to stab everyone when they started to argue. My foot got bruised from
Bee stepping on it.

The mansa was dying. Everyone knew it but no one spoke of it. Rory had taken a violent
liking to the old djeli, Bakary, and prowled around him seeking any pat of attention,
which meant he spent most of his day in Grandmother’s cottage listening to the old
bard sing the story of the mansa’s life and deeds, the tale of the Diarisso lineage,
and the history of the world.

The history of the world begins with a seed. The seed is the kernel of what you are,
but it is also the promise of what you can become.

On the fourth day a delegation arrived from Trecon, where the rest of the House refugees
languished. The mansa’s nephew had arrived with the mage House troop from Lutetia.
Because the mansa had not regained consciousness, his nephew wanted to immediately
convene the House council of elders to vote on the matter of the heirship.

I returned to Vai’s mother’s room to find Vai sitting on the edge of the bed clad
in trousers and nothing else. With a hand braced on the wall he stood, trembling across
his entire body as he steadied himself to take a step, another step, and a third.
It was obvious he was headed for the screen behind which we washed and dressed and
kept the chamber pot. He had not yet seen me.

He said in a strikingly peevish tone, “I will manage the business myself, Mama.”

Twice I thought he would topple right over, but he got behind the screen without mishap.

I crossed to where his mother sat on a chair, knelt beside her, took her hand, and
smiled up at her.

“He was never a patient invalid as a child,” she remarked. “Fortunately he did not
get sick often.”

The girls were sitting at the table beside a window, perusing a book.
Wasa elbowed her sister. “Kayleigh used to say no one whined like Vai when he was
sick.”

“I heard that!” said Vai from behind the screen, not in a jocular tone.

Because I understood how much he hated feeling weak, I ventured behind the screen
to find him sitting, head in hands, on the bench. A mirror and razor rested on the
bench next to him. My footsteps brought his head up. His beard was unkempt, and his
hair squashed on one side. His skin had an ashy sallowness and his eyes a gray weariness.

“I don’t need help!” he snapped. “I can shave myself!”

“Nor have I the least desire to help you,” I retorted. “I merely came to inform you
that the mansa’s nephew has arrived and is making an entirely predictable grab for
the heir’s seat.”

“That would be a disaster for Four Moons House! Not to mention Haranwy and the other
villages. It’s not his right anyway, to make such a demand when the mansa has already
spoken.” He tried to stand but could not keep his feet under him. I had to catch him
and ease him back down, for which he repaid me with a string of rude phrases directed
not at me personally but at the uncaring world at large, which had not had the courtesy
to allow him to heal faster.

“Stop it! Just pee and go back to sleep. Nothing will happen until you have recovered
enough to face the elders.”

He ran a hand along his beard, and I was sure he was thinking that he could not face
the elders looking so scruffy. “What of the mansa? What news of him today?”

I shook my head. “No change. Magister Serena is recovering well, although she grieves
over losing the pregnancy. You didn’t tell me she’s a diviner.”

“You didn’t ask.”

I left him to it and went back to his mother. “I believe you are better suited than
I to handle him when he is afflicted with this distemper.”

She regarded me with an equanimity matched only by Vai’s muttered cursing behind the
screen. “Even as a child he had the habit of believing every sunny day would last
forever to please him, and that clouds came as a personal affront.”

“Catherine. Love.”

That he used the endearment in his mother’s hearing worried me. I went back to find
him stretched out on the bench, an arm flung across his face. He had mottled bruising
on his ribs from either the battle or his captivity, his wrists were reddened and
scarred with rope burns, and he was thin from the privation of the last days. Benevolent
Tanit! The man needed to eat!

“Lord of All,” he murmured with disgust, “to think of how easily I was captured! I
could not even break out of my captivity, nor prevent them from using me as a catch-fire
for the entire cursed journey. When it came to the point, I could not even save the
mansa. Now his useless nephew cocks about like a rooster crowing for attention, while
I cannot stand.”

Annoyance and pathos warred in my breast, and after a short struggle, annoyance punched
pathos in the snout like the voracious shark it was.

“I will say this once, and not again. You were easily captured because you had collapsed
in an exhausted faint after saving the lives of other mages and no doubt many other
people on the day of the battle. As for being exploited as a catch-fire, that was
an obvious decision on Drake’s part for otherwise he could not have held you as prisoner.
The problem is not that you are weak but that you are so unusually strong that Drake
saw you as the means to effect his revenge. I may not fully agree with how the Taino
treat catch-fires, but from what I saw they do regard them with respect. Drake stole
the knowledge from them but not their care for the law and their respect for the balance
that is needed to wield power responsibly. He was a thief, and a greedy, resentful,
envious, selfish thief at that. Maybe his family stole his inheritance, or maybe they
threw him out because they saw what a monster he was. I don’t know. But in the end,
Drake’s frightening power came from the strength he took from you.”

I paused to catch my breath. I had not realized how much anger I held against my heart
for all the people who use others as nothing more than tools to build a house for
themselves, who wrap chains around others and then claim they have the right and even
the obligation to do so. Vexation overflowed like water over the brim of a full cup.

“To be perfectly honest, Andevai, it is nothing more than petulant vanity on your
part to lie there after everything you have done
and querulously complain that it wasn’t enough. Many thousands of people have died
because of Camjiata’s war and many more will die, and uncounted more have suffered
because of the rule of unjust princes. You are just one person doing what you can.
Even you cannot be catch-fire for all the injustice in the world!”

From the table, far enough away that they thought I couldn’t hear, Bintou whispered
to Wasa, “I can’t believe she talks to him like that!”

“I’m going to learn to talk like that!” murmured Wasa. “I can’t run about and hit
people like Cat does, but I can become an orator like Cousin Bee. I’m going to become
a hero and cause trouble all over everywhere!”

“Girls!” scolded their mother.

“So if you are done with your humble business about the pisspot, Husband, then go
back to bed. You will get strong if you rest and meanwhile cease whipping yourself
raw over the obvious fact that even your astoundingly monumental cold magic has its
limits although clearly your vanity does not. Also, I will smack you if you keep whining
like this, because I. Have. No. More. Patience. For. It.”

He withdrew the arm that shielded his eyes. His tight jaw and frustrated sneer smoothed
into loving concern as he examined me. “Catherine, are you well? Is something wrong,
love? I am accustomed to you speaking your mind, but you sound sour and on edge. That’s
not like you.”

In two months the Wild Hunt would ride up to my door and take me away, but I was not
about to tell him that.

When I did not answer he sighed and, with a grimace, heaved himself up. “Yesterday
I could not even sit up, so I am somewhat improved. I’ll go back to bed and be patient
a little longer.”

“I doubt that,” I muttered.

But he did go back to bed, stubbornly refusing my helping arm, and he ate every bit
of the porridge his mother brought. Afterward he slept restfully.

I had a long talk about law and history with Bakary at the bedside of the mansa, where
I found him whistling the spirit melody as he wove a song describing Andevai’s magic
and exploits. That night, as always, Bee slept on the far side of the bed while I
took the middle between
her and Vai. Rory was curled up in his cat form on the floor, with the puppy sleeping
trustfully between his big paws. House children who had been sleeping in the village
festival house lay crammed together on mats on the floor, exhausted from Rory letting
them climb all over him. They had come to us because the mansa’s nephew had taken
over the festival house for his entourage without even asking the village elders for
their permission.