Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (88 page)

But I still had a tongue.

I still had breath.

I had a plan.

“My mortal blood I sacrifice. But only my mortal blood. You have no right or claim
to my spirit blood, the blood I inherited from my sire. So if you have taken even
a drop of my spirit blood, then the contract is broken.”

The festive cacophony twirled on unceasing as I took in a breath and let it out, as
I moistened my bone-dry lips. My legs and arms trembled, but I did not fall.

The throned presences leaned forward as if suckling on a suddenly dry teat. Stretched
toward me a little more, as if puzzled. Then probed with talons and knife-bladed teeth.
The sharp planes of their human-like visages wrinkled as they sniffed the air, as
they tugged on the chains and, in increasing frustration, shook those chains to try
to force the blood to flow.

But the chains no longer bound me because there was no possible way to separate my
mortal blood from my spirit blood.

“I invoke
rei vindicatio
.” My voice rang clear above the hissing whirl of the courts as the chains slithered
off my body and wilted like withering vines on the ground. “Without my blood to seal
the contract, we reclaim ownership of our own selves.”

Insubstantial chains make no sound as they shatter.

What you hear are the defiant shouts as we rise.

My sire laughed with the howl of a man who has had to keep his contempt hidden for
far too long. He sprouted eru’s wings, unfurling them to their full majesty and making
ready to fly. The Wild Hunt scattered with a boisterous roar, fleeing the courts.

“Sire!” I cried, although it was surely hard to hear me in the clamorous storm of
its departure. “Sire! How do I get out of here? How do I get home?”

Like the ungrateful, manipulating creature he was, he flew away without a backward
glance.

The plaza erupted in a blizzard of chaos. Daggers of ice burned my skin. The dais
and its thrones dissolved in a shrieking wail whose punch was like a spear of thwarted
greed and rage that drove me to my knees. Agony raked through my chest. But I could
not faint. I could not falter.

The courts swelled like vast wings unfurling. Wave upon wave of furious beings pounded
against me as storm waves thrash the shore. I drew my sword and frantically parried,
deflecting their freezing bite and icy grip. But my strength was ebbing fast.

This was the one part of my plan I had been able to devise no answer for, the reason
I feared I might not survive. I had thought to fight my way to the gate and through
to the salt mine, where I might hope and pray to find enough water in the desert in
order to live and travel a long road back to the ones I loved. But as the wrath of
the courts rose like a flood tide around me, I realized I was going to drown before
I could ever cut my way to the mortal world.

“Hsss! Hurry!”

A door swung open in the air above me. I shook off the bag of coins and heaved it
into the coach, tossed my sword in after, and hooked an arm through the steps. Claws
raked through my skirt and petticoats. Teeth fastened on my boot. I kicked until they
fell back.

They were only gathering themselves for another, more ferocious assault. But the brief
respite was all I needed to pull myself up, roll inside, and slam shut the door.

Gale winds tossed the coach up and down and sideways as it bucketed away from the
palace. Where we went I did not know. I clung to my sword. The bag of coins slammed
into my belly, winding me. Where the chains had bitten into me to take the first taste
of my blood, my chest throbbed like fire. The pain of that wound deafened and blinded
me and I just lay there panting in the hope that oblivion would claim me soon. All
I could do was tighten my hand around my locket and pray that if I had just been infested
with the salt plague, then the disease would consume me quickly and with less agony
than this.

“Blessed Tanit,” I murmured, “please bring me home.”

My blood seeped onto the floor of the coach, moistening and melting into the coach’s
substance. Blood makes the gate.

I fell through.

The goddess caught me in her arms. She cradled me like a newborn, her brown face smiling
down at me. Tears wet her cheeks. A crescent moon shone above her head to light the
path for those who must walk into darkness.

“Choose, little cat. For you may have peace now if you wish it.”

“I just want to go home.”

Home is the people you care for, the ones who care for you in return.

Her kiss woke me back into the world. When I opened my eyes I found myself kneeling
in a garden lush with pomegranates and ripe grapes and cascades of purple flowers.
Before me rose a stone statue of the goddess wearing her lioness head, she who protects
women but also gives them the strength to protect themselves.

The horns of a crescent moon sank into dawn. Pain pooled at my chest. Sticky blood
oozed down my body to be swallowed by the damp soil. I blinked. A winter wind rattled
through bare branches, for I now found myself huddled not in a summer garden but all
alone and abandoned in an empty sanctuary. The air had a bitter, angry bite. Someone
had stabbed me in the heart and then eaten out my head. I pitched forward onto my
face.

A familiar and beloved voice spoke my name. “Catherine. My sweet Catherine, wake up.”

A familiar and beloved hand took hold of mine. “Cat, wake up! What on earth got into
her to wander off to Tanit’s sanctuary when she ought to have been hiding inside like
every other sensible person? I thought I was going to die of anguish when we got back
and she was gone!”

“I should like to know what miscreant stabbed her in the chest. She’s fortunate it
is such a shallow wound.”

“Look how her skirts are torn. I can’t leave her for a single day without her getting
into trouble!”

Warm lips brushed my forehead. “She’s feverish. Let’s get her home.”

I dreamed I was turning into a pillar of salt, grain by grain. I was thirsty all the
time, and hot, and uncomfortable, but there was always someone to wipe me down with
a damp cool cloth or lift me up to spoon broth down my parched throat. I could not
get enough salty gruel to eat.

Sometimes Rory licked my face with his rough cat’s tongue, rumbling softly as he guarded
me in his cat shape. Sometimes Bee held my hand and sang to me, off-key, or combed
out and rebraided my tangled hair. Sometimes Vai slept beside me in the bed he had
built for us—although I had only slept in it once, I recalled its contours with intimate
precision.

Obviously I was hallucinating, because I also saw Kayleigh sitting with her mother
in attendance on my sickbed, and it was intriguing to watch how animated Vai’s mother
was with her eldest daughter compared to the stiff formality she offered her only
son. For what seemed like hours Vai would sit on the bed gently stroking my hands
or hair while talking softly to Kofi about the latest radical pamphlet by Professora
Nayo Kuti or the setbacks the radical efforts had met with in the Veneti dukedoms
under the hand of their overlord, the Armorican prince, and his pregnant daughter
who would act as regent if she bore an infant son.

Kofi’s laugh heartened me. “I reckon it is as well we happened to come when we did,
for I thought sure I should have to tie yee to a chair lest yee burn down the entire
building for the way yee lost yee head. Not that yee can burn things, fire bane! Peradventure
yee shall have an easier life of it, Vai, if yee stop and think before yee panic.”

“I did not panic!”

“You did,” said Bee, for I just then realized she was sitting on the bed at my feet,
her pencil scratching across a page.

“No more than you did, Beatrice!”

“Is this how it shall be, yee two always bickering?” demanded Kofi. “Because if it
shall be this way, I can go back to a more restful domicile in Expedition and likewise
not have to suffer this frightful cold.”

“You only think this is cold because you’ve not yet experienced winter,” muttered
Vai so peevishly that Kofi laughed again, obviously teasing him, and I realized it
was Kofi’s willingness to joke with him that had likely won Vai’s trust when the two
men first met.

Bee broke in. “I think the worst was when we were searching and those men at the coffee
shop said they had seen a young woman answering to Cat’s description drinking coffee
with the horned hunter god Carnonos on the street!”

“People will see anything in shadows when they’re frightened,”
said Vai, “but I admit it gave me a turn. For you know it’s exactly the sort of thing
she’d have thought she had to do, sacrifice herself to save us.”

“It surely is, and it makes me so angry to imagine her even thinking of doing such
a thing to us! Never telling us, sneaking off… well, she didn’t, so all’s well.”

All’s well, until you become a salter with sightless eyes, trapped inside a deathless
crystal body with your own dying thoughts and a craving that will not go away.

I tossed and I turned, for the ground was rumbling and thumping beneath me. As in
a restless dream a woman with feathers and shells in her hair entered the room. Her
gentle hand traced my navel; her lips touched my forehead with a kiss that snaked
through my body to kindle my blood. She spoke: “
She is clean
.”

Clean was all very well, but I needed to be able to talk!

Rory touched a finger to each of my eyes. “Cat, I swear, you talk constantly even
in your sleep. It’s safe to wake up. I never gave them the letters, so they don’t
know anything.”

I opened my eyes. Rory sat in a chair next to me. I lay on the bed Vai had built for
us, and strange it was to do so, for we had not had it with us before. A fabric-covered
standing screen blocked my view of the rest of the room, its golden suns and silver
moons smiling at me. By the quality of the light I guessed it to be mid-afternoon
on a cloudy day. I heard the clatter and ring of utensils and cups as people ate at
a nearby table.

“Why am I dreaming that Kofi and Kayleigh are here?” I demanded, although my voice
came out as a hoarse whisper. “Have I been delirious?”

He rolled his eyes in an expression copied from Bee at her most aggravating. “That
is one word for it. Kofi and Kayleigh and their baby and people arrived on Hallows’
Day on a ship from Expedition. The Assembly in Expedition has sent Kofi to be ambassador
to Europa, only no one really knew where he ought to go, so they sent him to Godwik
and Clutch to get his bearings. Then Bee and Vai returned with the others at sunset
on Hallows’ Day. You can imagine what happened when they found you missing! It’s fortunate
we tracked you
down as quickly as we did. I admit it was rather dramatic to find you just at sunrise
in the goddess’s temple. Are you better now?”

Venturesomely I swung my feet out from under the beaver-pelt blanket and set them
on the plank floor, which radiated heat, for evidently the hypocaust had been repaired.
I wore the nightgown I’d been given at White Bow House, and my chest had a poultice
on it, wrapped into place by linen strips. “How long have I been sick?”

“Eight days.”

According to report, if a human is bitten by a ghoul, the onset of the disease is
so swift and implacable that the victim will become morbid in less than seven days
. So the headmaster had read aloud to us the day Bee had argued with Bran Cof in his
study.

Eight days! Well! This was encouraging! I stood, and my feet stayed under me. Holding
on to Rory’s arm, I shuffled to where I could see past the screen and into the room.

The scene of a family dinner just come to its end could not have been more charming
even had Bee sketched it. Vai’s mother was seated in the chair of honor, looking frail
but aglow with happiness as she held the hand of her pregnant daughter, Kayleigh.
Bintou and Wasa were fomenting mischief with a lad I was pretty sure was one of Kofi’s
young cousins, brought with him from Expedition. Old Bakary was seated next to Bee,
and to my surprise Beatrice was paging through her sketchbook while the djeli made
comments. Over at a lovely new desk Chartji, Caith, Godwik, and the Taino woman I
had seen in my delirium bent over a schematic Kofi had unrolled. The
behica
was explaining about good plumbing, drinking water, and cholera.

Vai stood looking at it, too. He held a fat baby with chubby brown cheeks and a chortling
laugh. I had just decided that I had to be dreaming when he turned his head and smiled
at me, as if he’d known I was standing there. He gave a half-wink as if to say that
I ought to notice how handsome he looked with a baby in his arms and didn’t I want
him to have one of his very own?

With a smile, I mouthed,
Soon but not yet
.

Then everyone else saw me, and their exclamations of delight and concern bent me like
a reed under the onslaught of a winter gale. I
retreated to the bed and sank down. Vai and Bee hurried in to sit on either side of
me.

“Love, how are you?”

“I’m hungry! I could eat a whole side of beef and have room for turnips besides!”

“We were so worried,” said Bee, wringing my hands until I grimaced and said, “Ouch!”

Vai brushed strands of hair off my brow. “Why on earth did you go to Tanit’s sanctuary
on Hallows’ Night without telling anyone? We thought you had been taken by the Wild
Hunt!”

“I don’t remember that part very well,” I said truthfully. “But I do remember that
you asked me if I had anything I wanted to do. I want to build batey courts in Europa
so we can have our own batey leagues and tournaments. Isn’t that a good idea? And
in a few years we can go to the desert and destroy any of the ghouls that were caught
on the other side of the gate. Without blood, no more will ever fall into the mortal
world. If the last of them are hunted down, there is a chance the salt plague can
be eradicated. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Bee pressed the back of a hand to my forehead. “Is she still feverish?”