“Rory, sit down, your pacing is making me dizzy.” But it was his words that made my head reel. “How can he be a dragon?”
“He’ll eat me first. He’s much bigger and stronger. But I have to try.” If he’d had a tail, he would have lashed it. “Because he must want to eat you, too.”
“I have attended the academy for over three years. He could have eaten me at any time. Why wait until now, when he couldn’t have expected to see me again?”
“Dragons are cunning and patient and never strike until you least expect it.”
“I least expected it all these years. He’s no threat to us.”
“You just can’t see it! I can’t let you go to his lair.”
“This is not your decision!” Watching his bare feet tread the freezing ground made me wince. My lips were so stiff I could scarcely form words. I had to move, or I would die, too. I leaped up and grabbed his arm. “You’ll die of cold if you don’t get shoes and clothes! I couldn’t bear to lose you. But I have to go to the academy to hear the message.”
“Maybe he won’t eat Bee,” he admitted sullenly. “She does stink of dragons, like they licked her when she was sleeping and she just doesn’t know. I didn’t say anything about it, because she’s right, it is rude to say so, and I could tell neither of you knew or suspected.”
I embraced him, petting his arms and back until he relaxed a tiny bit. “Rory, how about this? You will go right now to the Old Temple District, to the inn called the Buffalo and Lion.”
“‘Helene sent me.’”
“Yes, that’s what you say when you get there. Right now I’m thinking Camjiata’s the only person we can trust to be interested in us purely for his own selfish reasons. That makes it easier to negotiate. You’ll keep the bags with you. Don’t lose them! You know how precious my father’s journals are to me.”
“Cat, you and I don’t know who our sire is.”
“I meant, my father who raised me, not the male who sired us. Bee and I will join you after we hear the poet’s message. We can’t stay at the academy anyway, so we won’t be far behind you. Then you can tell me everything you know about dragons.”
“I just told you everything I know,” he said indignantly. “Do you think I’m keeping secrets from you?”
I searched his face. Was he really my half brother? His eyes and hair were so very like mine, and yet he was not human but a wild creature, nothing tame. Yet I trusted him with my life. “No, I don’t think you’re keeping secrets. But it has to be this way. Promise!”
As if the words were forced out of him, he muttered, “I promise.”
I released him. “Ask on the street for Old Temple, and then the inn. Tell people the militia roughed you up during the riot. They’ll help you. Use your charm.”
“Oh!” he said, distracted by the thought of using his charm. “I am cold and hungry and thirsty. I could use some petting, too.”
“I don’t need to hear about that kind of petting.” I wiggled fingers into the hem of my jacket’s sleeve, fished out the last of my coins, and pressed them into his hand. “Buy yourself clothes and shoes, but try them on first, then haggle over the price, and make sure you get correct change.”
We ran down the path together. Kemal waited at the tophet gate.
“Tell me, Maester,” I said as he chained and locked the gate, “did the headmaster save you from the Wild Hunt?”
His hand paused as he was turning the key. He did not look at me. “Yes.”
“How?”
He slung the key, on its chain, over his neck. “It is not my place to speak of it.”
“Is he a dragon?”
As if goaded beyond measure, he met my gaze. “The headmaster of the academy is a man.”
“One just like you?” I demanded, for I sensed a riddle in his words.
His smile twisted scornfully, which startled me, for I had thought him a passive young person. “In the empire of the Avar, every albino child like me”-he touched fingers to his pale cheek-“belongs to the emperor. It is a crime punishable by death to hide such a child from the imperial governors. So I would answer you, ‘No.’ He is not a man just like me.”
“I take it that is all I am to hear on the matter.”
So returned the diffident exterior, like a shell covering vulnerable flesh. “My apologies, Maestressa.” He inclined his head with a polite bob of his shoulders and followed his master.
Bee and the headmaster were making their way slowly up the hill, the old man leaning on his cane and she with a hand beneath his elbow quite oblivious to his desire to eat either of us. Rory watched the headmaster’s back with a hooded gaze that did nothing to hide his wish to pounce.
“You promised,” I said.
“Yes, I promised.”
I gave him simple directions based on the bell towers and the high plinth that marked the site of the ancient village founded by Adurni Celts. I kissed him on either cheek, to seal our agreement, and waited at the tophet gate as he walked away down the main thoroughfare, lugging the bags. The wide avenue with its shops remained deserted, everyone in hiding.
I watched until he walked out of sight. Then I hurried up the hill, catching the others as they passed the old Kena’ani temple complex that was the original structure built on Academy Hill centuries ago. All that remained of the old complex was the walled sanctuary dedicated to Blessed Tanit and a grove of votive columns in commemoration of the holy trees felled during the Long Winter of 1572 to 1585. The gate into the sanctuary stood open. Within, a man wearing a heavy coat swept the porch of the priests’ house.
“The gate is always open,” the headmaster was saying to Bee, “due to an agreement made during the Long Winter, when the priests kept the gates open to provide warmth and sustenance to the destitute. It was that, or have the entire complex be burned down.”
“But it was destroyed anyway,” said Bee.
“Much of Adurnam burned at that time. Do you know what saved the city?”
“I do,” I said. “The arrival of the refugees from the empire of Mali. Certain of the refugees had secret magical knowledge, and they found common cause with the Celtic drua. From that union sprang the cold mages. With the rise of the cold mages, the Long Winter was vanquished. Or at least, that is the story we learned at the academy, Maester.”
“So it is. It makes you wonder, does it not? Is there some link between cold magic and the more clement weather of our time? For according to history and the evidence of old Roman ruins found north of Ebora in the uninhabitable Barrens, the climate was less clement, and the ice more advanced, two thousand years ago. What causes these changes?”
“There were no cold mages in the times of the Romans,” said Bee. “Were there?”
“Not as we know them, no. Ah, here we are.”
His chief steward waited on the front steps of the academy entrance.
“Owain,” said the headmaster as he paused at the top of the steps to catch his breath, “the academy remains closed to all callers for the day. Admit no one.”
“As you command, Your Excellency.”
A cascading boom cracked outside. Whoever was shooting off muskets and field cannon was nowhere near the hailstorm. The hum rising off the city reminded me of maddened bees being smoked out of their hive. I hurried after Bee and the headmaster, who had already crossed the wide entry hall.
Surrounded by buildings, the central court lay quiet under its glass roof. No one was around. Midwinter festival wreaths of mistletoe and pine withered atop a trellis arch. The trellis covered the grated shaft of an ancient sacrificial well. A hundred years ago, a now-famous labyrinth had been laid out as a paved walkway spiraling around the well, ringed by stone benches.
I followed the others upstairs to the headmaster’s office. The circulating stove set into the hearth gave off glorious warmth.