Cold Magic

“The truth is, I don’t know who sired me. Do you know?”



She narrowed her eyes and examined me, and I returned her gaze boldly. “The spirit world is knit into your bones, and you wear a spirit mantle close against your mortal flesh,” she said. “That much I can see. Your blood is what allowed you to cross from the mortal world into this one.”



With a grunt, Andevai sat down heavily on the third stone bench. Lips pinched tight, he peeled off his heavy coat to reveal a wool tunic slashed at the shoulder and, folded within the lips of cut fabric, the bloodstained linen of a shirt. “Blood opens the path between worlds,” he said, wincing as he tested the movement of his arm. “As every hunter knows.”



I flushed. “I was only defending myself ! Is the wound… bad?”



“Not so bad as to stop me riding.”



“How comes it you can so easily cross into this world and back?”



He rolled his eyes, the expression making him look much younger and considerably less sophisticated. “You spent the night in my village—sheltered and fed by my family—and you cannot answer that question?”



Of course. My cheeks burned. I did not like to look stupid. “You’re like that stripling I met with your brother’s hunting band. You were being trained as a hunter. And then your magic bloomed and you were taken away to Four Moons House to become a magister.”



“If I know how to find the gates that open around the cross-quarter days, if I know how to walk and guard myself in the spirit world and return to the mortal world, that is because of my people, not because of the magisters.”



“Why not stay in the village, then? Remain a hunter?”



He took a long draught of mead and, lowering the bottle, tucked his legs up on the wide stone bench to sit cross-legged. “The question is not worthy of you, Catherine. I am a magister of rare and unexpected potency.”



His cool vanity annoyed me. “In our world, but evidently not here.” I gestured toward the djeli, whose fingers ran up and down the length of the strings of her fiddle as if seeking the weakened point where the string was most likely to snap. “Is it true? That you magisters draw power through the spirit world but have none in it?”



“The secret is not mine to share. Likewise, what of you, Catherine? When my blade cut you, you ought to have…” He faltered and looked past the djeli toward the oak tree whose vast canopy blotted out a portion of the sky. His expression was as shuttered as the deserted dun. “But you did not.”



“I ought to have died.” I touched my tender chin.



He uncrossed his legs, set them soles to earth, and looked at me with a gaze that seared me with its icy anger. But he had no power to freeze my words on my tongue. I knew I shouldn’t taunt him, because I had weeks left to survive before winter solstice freed Bee from the contract, but all that pent-up fury had to explode.



“How frustrating it didn’t work out so well for you! I suppose you’re accustomed to everything falling just as you like it, you with your magister’s rare and unexpected potency and the might of Four Moons House behind you. You with”—your handsome face—“your sister willing to throw herself into the mansa’s bed on your behalf and—”



He rose sharply. I had gone too far, even considering that I was the one who had been sacrificed. He walked away to stand under the oak’s branches. Even with my cat’s eyes, I could barely see him in its heavy shadow. I looked at the djeli to see what she made of this, but her expression retained that smilingly amused interest, not as if she were laughing at us but as if she were well pleased. I had thought her a bent old woman at first, but maybe that had only been the way she played her fiddle. She sat with the erect posture of a woman sure of her place, and the firelight—was it brighter than it had been before, or exactly the same?—had smoothed away the deep wrinkles I had thought I noticed before.



“I ask your pardon,” I murmured, abruptly embarrassed at my outburst. “I’m tired and hungry and I’ve been running for my life.”



“Tell me,” she said.



Andevai shouted a wordless cry of warning. The mare whinnied in panic. A dark shape flowed past them, and I leaped to my feet as the black-pelted saber-toothed cat that had followed me ran in under the tree with a second smaller cat at its side. The two beasts raced to the pride lounging by the well, ignoring the horse, but the mare jerked hard at her slipping tether, which I hadn’t tightened firmly enough. I didn’t mean to aid Andevai, but the horse was blameless, and if she pulled free and bolted, I was sure the cats would pursue her and pull her down, unable to resist the chase. I ran to the tree and held the line while he tied a better slipknot.