Cold Magic

Yet I saw as with fractured vision: The creature was not a single entity but three. It was a mask, a big puppet built over a simple framework of wood. I could see right through the feathers and fabric and frame to the inside. A man, an ordinary man, carried this armature across his shoulders. His skin was painted with clay, thick strokes forming symbols I did not recognize. The clay glimmered as if smoldering with heat. As he spun, his gaze slid right over me once, a second time, and yet again, but he did not see me.



But the third entity saw me. Horned and feathered, it loomed above me like a twirling giant limned with silken threads of white fire, its trailing cloak like luminescent mist. It had eyes darker than the night and infinitely deep, and with these eyes it stared into my heart, and I knew it could devour me and that it would devour me if it decided I was a danger to the village on a night when perilous spirits might try to invade.



Some throat-catching instinct made me release the hilt of my sword.



Do spirits blink?



It spun away into the night, vanishing down one of the narrow streets and leaving me untouched.



My breath came in painful gulps. Shuddering, I chafed my gloved hands, but that did not warm them. I clawed at my frantic, muddled, matted thoughts as I fought to find a calm thread of reason: It had turned away. It had chosen not to harm me. It had recognized I held no animus toward Haranwy Village.



“There you are, Catherine!”



Perhaps I shrieked.



Kayleigh laughed as if I had made a joke, and rested a hand on my arm in a companionable, sisterly way. “Grandmother sent me. Did you get lost?”



Maybe the village’s guardian spirit had let me go, but forgetting that Andevai had been commanded to kill me would be fatal.



“I need to… relieve myself. There is perhaps a… uh… dunghouse?”



Kayleigh snickered. “Your pardon. That’s not the word we use. We have a place, but it will be cold this time of year. If you don’t mind, my mother has a pot in her house you can use.”



She led me again into the compound of Andevai’s family and to a door no larger than the others. Inside, past a small, square entryway, stood a different room entirely. Hung with lace curtains and furnished with a circulating stove built into the hearth, a fine four-poster bed, a small elegant table supporting a wicker sewing basket, and a beautifully carved wardrobe that shone with the luster of rosewood, it might have passed for a city merchant’s bedroom. The main room boasted a plank floor instead of the packed dirt of the entryway. These accoutrements looked so out of place that I forgot my manners and stared until Kayleigh reminded me to take off my boots and step inside.



Two girls slept curled up on a cot. In the bed lay a woman whose face was so wasted and sunken, her complexion such an ashy, unhealthy gray, that it was impossible to discern any relationship. Heat soaked me. I took off my cloak and draped it over my arm, then wiped my brow.



“Here,” whispered Kayleigh, drawing me aside and behind a screen.



She offered me a covered chamber pot and left me alone behind the screen with the pot, a bench, and a smaller wardrobe with one of its sliding doors open. A man’s expensive and fashionable dash jacket had been folded on a shelf; it was the jacket Andevai had been wearing earlier. A glimmer teased my eye, and I pushed aside a pair of polished boots to see a sheathed sword, tall and slim like my own, propped in the wardrobe’s corner. I tasted the metal’s sharp flavor in the stifling air. Andevai carried cold steel, the better to kill me with.



But not tonight. Tonight he would laugh and dance with his companions. Fury scalded me. But I did actually badly have to use the chamber pot. I did my business, and afterward Kayleigh offered me warm water to wash and a comb to tidy my hair.



“I’ve never seen hair like yours,” she said, untwisting a black strand from the comb and pulling a finger down its length. She touched her head, her hair confined beneath a tightly wrapped scarf. “It’s so thick and straight, and as black as night. Your eyes, too, they’re such a beautiful color, like amber.”



I did not know what to say, so I busied myself braiding my hair. “You have so many fine things. Were these wardrobes made in the village?”



She regarded the larger one with pride. “The rosewood came all the way from Havery. Andevai had it brought in for Mama. He stints on nothing for her.” She bit her lip as her gaze flashed to the sword I held close.



“Is there something else you want to say?” I asked, more brusquely than I intended.



“There’s nothing else.”



I wasn’t sure I could enter a conversation with a girl whose brother had been ordered to kill me and whose grandmother and uncle had convinced the village elders to spare my life, at least until I left their village.