Far away, across the river, I heard a bell ringing.
The rain had stopped, but I shivered as the chill seeped into my bones. The sound of footfalls brought me spinning around, my hand so cold it was hard to grasp the hilt. I groaned. There came my assailants, one limping behind and the other jogging ahead. I could not suck in enough air. I didn't think I could kill. And if I couldn't, what would they do to us?
Andevai appeared beside me. "Give me the sword," he said.
The two men closed inexorably on us, big, burly, unstoppable men who held their weapons like they knew how to kill with them. In another six steps they would cut us down.
I recalled words scrawled in one of my father's journals:
My thanks to the gods that fortune has spared me from that most terrible act, that I have never taken another persons life.
"It is yours for this one act." I pressed the sword into Andevai's right hand.
Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage is a wicked thing.
Two strokes, and they fell, dead.
He wiped his brow with his left hand, his expression pure in its anger and not remotely directed at me. Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage severs the soul from the body, so common wisdom has it: They need only draw blood, the merest cut, to kill you.
In the distance, I heard the sounds of a company in disorder, shouting, confusion, a pair of whistles calling for scattered men to form ranks. I stared at the corpses sprawled in the gateway, a step away from me. A wind stirred ash. Andevai looked east down the road.
"Late!" he exclaimed with withering scorn. His brow furrowed as he looked at the sword in his hand. Then he looked at me, and his eyebrows raised, and he offered the sword, hilt first. "If you think I'm going to try to keep it, then you don't understand the properties of cold steel."
"My thanks," I said hbarsely as I snatched it out of his hand.
There came the carriage out of the night, the horses gleaming rather like the sword, as if they, too, were forged of cold steel. Blessed Tanit! Could they be? Or maybe that breathlike mist rising from their nostrils was akin to the exhalations of steam, dangerous and powerful if the pressure grows too high. The coachman hauled the vehicle to a stop in front of us, and the footman leaped down from the back to slam open the steps and wrench back the door.
"Where were you?" demanded Andevai.
"There's more trouble here than what you see," said the coachman. "We discovered a cache of rifles, several hundred in crates-"
"Rifles! Within a two days' journey of Four Moons House? Catherine, get in!"
I clambered in and sagged onto the bench. I sheathed my sword as Andevai climbed up and dropped onto the seat opposite me.
"Rifles!" he said, to the air, to the ancestors, to no one.
The footman closed door and stair; the carriage creaked and shifted as he-she?-leaped onto the back. Andevai slammed back the shutter and stuck out his head.
"What did you do with the rifles?" he called.
"Trouble coming!" called the coachman with a laugh. "Your illusion has melted, Magister."
"It will have vanished when I touched the sword," retorted Andevai. "Not because I lost control of the illusion! Or was too weak to sustain it. Cold steel cuts soul and magic alike. You know that."
"I don't think he was doubting you," I muttered under my breath. "Just reporting a fact."
"The rifles are so much scrap metal now, Magister," said the footman from up behind.
Andevai glanced at me, then closed the shutter so hard the carriage resounded. I twisted the hilt of my ghost sword, and the blade slipped back inside its intangible sheath, although it still appeared doubled in my vision. As the carriage slewed around, he pulled a wisp of illumination like a disembodied flame out of the air and stared at the sword with narrowed eyes.
"It looks like a black cane," he said irritably. "I can think of no possible way the Barahal family could possess cold steel. Where did your people get it?"
I kept my mouth closed tight as a burst of voices shouting in frustrated outrage rose from the town behind us. The carriage gained speed along the road, our ride so smooth I began to wonder if we were actually running along on the surface of the turnpike or if we had risen above it on a tide of magic. My head swam dizzily. My teeth began to chatter.
He swept the thick fur blanket off the seat beside him and thrust it onto my lap. "You look like you need this. You may as well rest, as it's obvious from that mulish expression you're not going to tell me anything." He stared at his hands as if staring at death, his brows drawn down and his expression resolving again into his habitual scornful anger.
I scooted into the corner farthest from him and bundled myself into the blanket, wrapping it tightly around me because I was shuddering. Maybe most of my convulsive shivering was from the bitter cold and maybe it was just exhaustion that had drained all warmth from me. I rested my head against the padded side and closed my eyes.
Perhaps I dozed.
At some indeterminate point, I opened my eyes to see him, wedged in the opposite corner in his smudged and disheveled traveling clothes, with no coat or blanket, staring at his hands as he wove light into helrriets and horses, let them dissolve, and pulled new illusions into miniature form.
"The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion," he muttered to himself as he manipulated the patterns of light lifting and shadow falling.
Tiny soldiers faded, and a face appeared: lips, nose, eyes, and a shadow's skein of long black hair. My face. He was weaving my face in light.
Before he could glance up to study me and see me looking, I shut my eyes.
The carriage rocked, jostling me, then steadied.
With my eyes closed, I could not fight off exhaustion. Thought faded.
When I woke again, he was asleep, propped as uncomfortably upright in his corner as I was in mine. It was the first time I had seen him asleep, his face in repose. Bee would have proclaimed his lineaments handsome: his lean face set off by the beard trimmed very, very short around a well-shaped jawline, his long black eyelashes, his skin the brown of raw umber seen in painters' studios.
Bur Bee had not been forced to marry him. It is easy to admire
what you must not endure, as my father had written years ago during the Iberian war.
My husband had killed two men in front of my eyes, and how many more in Adurnam's Rail Yard I would likely never know. I fixed the ghost sword in its sheath between my body and the carriage and shut my eyes, but could not find rest.
14
Yet in the end I did sleep as we traveled east through the night, into dawn, and across the morning and came to a town on whose outskirts rose a House inn. I now understood these inns must be wrapped around with protections able to fend off assaults from whatever enemies the Houses had accumulated over the centuries since their founding. Should be able, although they had failed in Adurnam and in Southbridge Londun behind us.
We pulled into the inn court as hostlers hurried out. I staggered in Andevai's wake into a parlor furnished with a sideboard, two couches, and a polished table with four chairs. While Andevai exchanged formal greetings with the steward in charge of the inn, I collapsed on the blessedly comfortable and unmov-ing daybed with my cane tucked against me. I fell asleep at once, waking when the door opened and servants carried in food on trays and set the covered dishes on the sideboard with platters and utensils and cups gracefully laid on one of the tables.
"We'll serve ourselves," said Andevai. He was standing at the window, as far away from me as was possible in the chamber. The servants shot nervous glances at him and hurried out, shut-ting the door behind them.
I staggered up onto unsteady legs and stumbled over to the sideboard, thinking I might expire just from the glorious smell. After washing, I uncovered every dish and heaped up a platter