Cold Magic

“You must obey them if they command you to hand me over to them,” I said hoarsely, “for you are servants of Four Moons House.”



The coachman snorted.



“Are you so sure our situation is what it has seemed to you to be?” asked the eru.



The soldiers stirred, parting to make way for the djeli. No glamor I possessed would shield me from the djeli’s sight, his handle of power whose chains reached into the spirit world.



I leaped up into the carriage. The eru shut the door behind me as shouts rang from the stairs and the carriage began to move. My cane was laid across one of the padded seats. I grasped the hilt, feeling the sword’s power through my palm.



“Halt!” cracked a command, and the carriage jolted to a stop as if it had run into an iron wall.



Was that the mansa’s power?



The carriage rocked beneath me as a moving body jostled it, and a whispery sound tickled my ears with unseen feathers. There were two doors in the carriage: the one Andevai and I had always entered and exited by, and the other one, the one whose shutters he had told me I could not open. Could not, or must not?



The unopened door latch shifted now, clicking down, just as a hand jostled the latch of the door behind me that I had entered through.



“I saw a shadow enter the coach,” cried a male voice, not one I recognized, “right after the footman opened the door.”



“Open!” commanded the djeli.



Fear hurts behind your eyes, like bright sun shining. I licked my lips as the other door, the door Andevai had forbidden me, cracked to let in a skirl of wind that cut with knives. I felt my skin opening, blades slicing shallow cuts as blood oozed like tears, but when I touched my cheeks, they were dry.



“Hurry,” said a voice on that wind, the eru’s voice, deep and strong. “Until the mansa’s hand is forced by stronger chains to release this carriage, we cannot move.”



As one door opened behind me, I plunged out onto the other side. A blast of wind slammed shut the carriage door behind me.



The carriage and I rested on a rise within an ancient forest of spruce, the wheels of the carriage fitted perfectly within a rutted track that cut away through the trees. Far away, down the direction Andevai and I had come earlier in the day, I saw a single stone pillar, surely the same one where we had poured an offering. The managed orchards and deciduous trees of the estate were missing. In my hand, in daylight, I held a sword whose blade had the hard sheen of steel. In this place, it looked perfectly ordinary, although in the world I knew it appeared as a sword only at night.



Impossible as it seemed, I had crossed over.



In tales and song, the spirit world exists in perpetual summer. Not here.



Here I stood in a landscape etched so hard by winter that the trees seem scratched on a copper plate against a sky whose grayish white pallor made me wonder if the blue had been drained from it as one might drain water from a tub. No sun’s disk was visible in what I took for a cloudless sky. As my eyes adjusted to the glare, I realized the track had a shimmer as fine as if silver thread were woven into the earth, a trembling current of magic coursing along its length.



“Cousin, run down to the pillar. There, speak these words: ‘As I am bound, let those bound to me as kin come to my aid.’ Quickly. We’ll pick you up there. Whatever you do, do not leave the path.”



The eru blazed, a nimbus of bright orange and flaring blue roaring off her skin. Her face still wore a human shape, but her aspect was so bright she was difficult to look upon. Her third eye was the most ordinary thing about her.



“Run,” said the coachman. He looked no different than he had before, solid and imperturbable. The horses steamed exactly as a china kettle steams when water is boiling inside.



Grasping my sword more tightly, I cautiously emerged from behind the reassuring bulk of the carriage. Of the massive building itself, I saw no sign at all. According to the tales my father had recorded, it is life—spirit—that interpenetrates both worlds. Transparent wisps as fragile as the wings of ghostly moths flickered in the air, the souls of human beings alive in the physical world, soldiers and servants running to the escalade that existed only in the world I had just left. Farther back, within the space that would in the physical world mark his audience chamber, the mansa’s spirit blazed as brightly as that of the eru. He had not pursued me. Why should he, when he had others to hunt for him?



The spirit flames of other cold mages moved toward the front of the house at the call of horn and hounds. I could not recognize my husband’s spirit among the gathering cold mages. All I could tell was that threads of power laced them, knotting and tangling through the unseen barrier that separated the two worlds.