Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (35 page)

“An interesting consideration. I will ask.”

But Devyn put off Vai’s questions by insisting only the priest could answer. We rode
with little conversation for the rest of the day and well into the evening.

Night wrapped the world in silence. A full moon bathed the trees and the snow-clad
earth in a glamour, painting the world in contrasts: the white shine of birch bark
and the heavy branches of dark spruce. I felt like a forgotten ghost drawn back to
an unremembered grave. It was so cold. Vai wrapped the fur blanket around me.

The road brought us to a clearing.

The moon overhead poured light on a princely hall that sat amid untended shrubbery
gone wild. Its arched doorway was staved in as if kicked by a giant. Every window
had shattered, and the roof had collapsed. On the lintel above the entrance was carved
a crescent moon. Though the manor house rose two stories and had wings flying back
on each side, a coat of ice as clear as glass encased the entire building.

Vai sucked in a breath. The mare, taking his mood, sidestepped skittishly before he
brought her back under control.

Not a single plant had woven its way inside, despite the age of the ruin. The smashed
floor revealed the rubble of a hypocaust beneath. Intact corpses were caught and preserved
within the ice as if they had been frozen as they tried to escape.

“Blessed Tanit!” I murmured. “Gracious Melqart, protect us. Noble Ba’al, watch over
your faithful daughter.”

“The spirit knows this place because she visited here before in her other form.” Devyn
signed a ward against evil tidings.

“I am not a ghost or a wolf,” I said in a choked voice, but he would not look at me.
To look at his face slammed me with the axe blow of memory. As a child, I had looked
into a similar face, my mother’s face, as she bent to kiss me. A scar had ripped a
lightning-like seam across the right side of her face, and she was missing one eye.
The hole gaped like a skull’s socket, a gate onto the pain she had suffered. Yet her
expression was serene and loving.

“Tell no one. Keep silence,” she had murmured. “Just until we tell you we’ve reached
the safe place we’re traveling to. Sleep, little cat. Your father and I are right
here beside you.”

The memory opened a pit inside my heart. There was no safe place.

“Bad fortune to be here at midnight, haunted by spirits,” said Devyn. “Best we ride
on.”

Vai did not budge. “This is the mage House that was destroyed by the Wild Hunt. Crescent
House, it was called.”

“To this place the Hunt came, it is true, my lord. On Hallows’ Night, they were riding
with claws and teeth. Bad fortune it is, my lord, to be lingering. Please let us be
moving on.” He glanced toward me as if expecting me to turn into claws and teeth,
and rend him.

I hated him for fearing me. The frozen shell of the House was a grave for those trapped
within, woman, man, and child. The ice had spared no one.

“I am Tara Bell’s child!” In the muffled night my voice rang like a shout. “That’s
why I look like her! I’m your niece!”

He looked at Vai. “I have no niece.”

“Don’t you understand?” I cried. “Don’t you see who—?”

“Silence!” Vai’s voice snapped.

I dragged in a bitter breath, fighting a flood of anger and an ebb of despair. Of
course he was right: The last thing I needed to do now was make them more suspicious
by informing them that their worst fears about me were true.

Devyn clipped his horse forward.

In a softer voice Vai said, “Catherine, I’m tired of the cold, love.
I’m exhausted, and I hurt. I need to know you won’t freeze to death. Please, let’s
get out of here.”

The sight of the ice-caged ruins and trapped corpses had truly shaken me, but it was
his effort to disguise the tremor in his voice that made me realize that will alone
was carrying him. I rode out of the ghost-ridden clearing, for I knew he would not
leave if I did not go.

As if our movement unleashed it, the moon began its slide westward.

Soon the road passed pasture walls built of peat. If there were fields awaiting spring
planting, I did not recognize them. Everything was strange to me. My moorings had
slipped the dock and I had drifted free. I was riding the road my mother and father
had traveled. We had just ridden past the estate where Camjiata’s wife, the dragon
dreamer Helene Condé Vahalis, had been born and raised and had died. The general had
been here, too, back in the days when he was merely Captain Leonnorios Aemilius Keita.

Why had it all happened? How had the four of them met: the ambitious captain, the
loyal soldier, the half-blind oracle, and the restless traveler? Was there ever a
reason, a destiny, as Camjiata claimed? Or were the Romans right that the goddess
Fortuna was veiled and blind and therefore capricious?

We passed stone walls and winter-seared pasture. Barking dogs gave notice of habitation.
Under the brilliant light of the moon rose long houses with peaked thatching, flanked
by sheds with sloped roofs. Torchlight flared ahead. As we reached the village, Vai’s
magic guttered the torches one by one. The doors leading into the houses opened, and
dimly seen faces peered out. Although we didn’t need light on the night of the full
moon, Vai extended his right hand in a gesture meant to be dramatic, and pinched four
globes of light out of the air. Devyn mumbled a prayer.

We rode down a dirt street through the center of the village. In spring the main street
would be nothing but a strip of sloppy mud. There were no modern chimneys, only smoke
holes, and no glass windows set in the wattled walls. To judge by the bleating of
sheep, the flocks were being wintered over in the same houses the people lived in.
Two thousand years ago a Roman legion pressing forward to find tin, fur, and slaves
for trade had probably seen the same sights we did now.

Had my mother truly come from this barbaric place? How different Daniel must have
seemed to her, with his sophisticated education and his years of travel!

Watchmen paced us through the streets, holding their blackened torches. People slipped
out of their homes to follow Vai’s mage light. We halted in front of a substantial
house with a high roof. An elderly man dressed in an embroidered wool gown and a calf-length
sleeveless leather tunic appeared on the porch. He greeted Vai with incomprehensible
words.

Devyn translated into his weirdly archaic and broken Latin. “To you, Magister, we
are honored to be giving guest rights. Your magic is strong. You have captured the
god’s beast and trapped her in the form of a woman. But in this village the beast
cannot be staying. She bears malice toward us by wearing the face of one of our dead.”

“She is my wife,” Vai repeated. “Not a beast. We need shelter for the night. We will
go on in the morning.”

“No shelter can we be giving you unless the priest pours the offerings and the god
grants his blessing.”

Vai’s lips thinned. I had a feeling that he was trying to decide whether to terrify
them with a frightening display of cold magic.

“It can’t hurt to go to the temple.” My teeth were beginning to chatter even with
the fur blanket wrapped around me.

“Very well, love. But only because you say so.” He turned to the headman. The arrogant
tilt of his chin lent curtness to his words, reminding me of when I had first met
his withering disdain. “Because the hour is late and I do not engage in debate on
the street, I will allow you to escort us to the temple. You personally will attend
me, as befits my consequence and your hospitality. I expect a decent meal, hot drink,
and fur cloaks and gloves to make up for this unwarranted insult.”

The old man was obviously unaccustomed to being spoken to in this manner, but he touched
hands to his bowed head and, to my surprise, himself took the reins of Vai’s horse
as would a servant. Villagers followed us in procession: women draped in long shawls,
men wrapped in wool capes, children swaddled in pelts. At the outskirts of the village
we passed between a row of granaries set up on stilts. Beyond the granaries a lane
entered a rocky pasture. The moon’s light
was so bright I could see the shape of every rock tumbled in the field, every face
breathing into the frigid night.

The temple grounds were surrounded by a ditch and stockade. The procession halted
in front of a plank bridge that spanned the ditch. Vai dismounted, so I did as well.

He turned to the headman. “You will accompany us.”

The man answered, and Devyn translated. “We are forbidden.”

“Then we will go alone.” Vai took the reins of the horse that carried our gear and
led it over the bridge. Moonlight gleamed on the skulls of cattle set in rows at the
bottom of the ditch. I touched the hilt of my sword.

“Do not draw your blade in this holy place unless you are threatened,” he said softly.

“I feel threatened.”

The stockade had no gate, rather an opening framed by two stone pillars. The pillars
each had three niches, and in each niche rested a human skull. Their staring silence
made my skin crawl.

“Let me sneak in ahead to make sure there’s no ambush,” I whispered.

His cold fire vanished, leaving him and the horse like ashen ghosts under the moon.
I wrapped myself in shadows. Beyond the gate a path sprinkled with white stones led
down by stair-steps into a hollow. I crept not into a stone building as Romans would
have built nor the kind of open-air sanctuary lined with pillars in which Kena’ani
worshiped.

I walked into a grove of oak trees. Oaks certainly could not flourish this far north,
yet here they were, fully leafed as if with summer, their canopies meeting over my
head. Between the trees rose poles from which hung lamps, each one burning a sweet-smelling
oil. The smoky heat breathed like summer. Had I passed back into the spirit world?

No. For they were not living trees. They were dead trunks decorated with tin and copper
foliage. Wind brushed a tinkling whisper through the metal leaves.

Beside a bricked-in hearth, a man sat on a stool. A huge bronze cauldron hung over
the fire. Its polished surface glimmered in the twisting light of the flames. The
face of a horned man shone in the curve of the cauldron, and it watched me as with
living eyes.

The man at the fire turned. He heard me, although I could sneak as quietly as any
mouse. He saw me, although I concealed myself within the shadows. I knew at once who
he was. I resembled him in some ways more than I did my mother, for he was darker
than his children. There was mage House blood in him.

I did not know what language he spoke, yet I understood him perfectly.

“Beast, we have not invited you to enter. Trouble us no longer, you who come to haunt
us wearing my dead daughter’s face. Begone. I banish you.”

“I’m not a spirit! I’m Tara Bell’s child. You are my grandfather.”

“Tara is no longer my daughter. Her home and her family she gave up to follow the
Roman goddess Bellona, the lady of war. All men she foreswore except the captain who
took her oath to serve him, Captain Leon. She marched south into his service. Her
child you cannot be, because the Amazon soldiers bear no children.”

“She did bear a child, because I am hers and in your heart you know I am hers!”

He raised his hands as if warding off an attack. “If you speak, the god will be hearing
you!”

“Who will hear who does not already know?” I cried. Would my own grandfather reject
me?

“The anger of Bold Carnonos fell upon this village. The magisters of Crescent House
made offering of their magic to build an empire. So the god destroyed them.”

“He’s not a god! You just call him that because you fear his power.”

He raised the knife of sacrifice. “We do not want your poison here to call his anger
back on us. Begone. Begone. Begone.”

Down the avenue of oak trees, lamps flickered and began to go out one by one. Vai
appeared in a nimbus of cold fire, leading the pack horse.

“I heard you shout, love.” He tossed the reins to the ground and, drawing his sword,
stepped between me and the man who refused to be my grandfather. “Holy one, you cannot
possibly wish to anger a magister, and you especially do not wish to anger me. Because
I promise you, no magister you have ever seen or heard tell of has done what I have
done. For I have defied the hunter, and stolen his own daughter
out of his very nest. Of course she has fallen in love with me and chosen to become
my wife. She is no threat to you or to this village. You ought to rejoice and lay
a feast to celebrate her arrival, for I assure you that everything about this woman
ought to make you proud to call her your kin.”

The priest lowered the knife, his gaze fixed on Vai’s cold steel, which needed only
to draw blood to cut his spirit out of his flesh and send him screaming into the spirit
world. “The girl has bewitched you, Magister. The god toys with you. It will end in
grief and blood. I see it in the cauldron.”

“You see your own fears,” I said hoarsely. “You know what happened to your daughter
on the ice, don’t you?”

His pitiless gaze seared me. “I told her to smother the child the moment she gave
birth. Do you know what she said to me?”

My heart dropped as if into the pit of my belly. I feared to know. Yet I had to know.

The old man’s malice gleamed in a face so much like mine. “She said, ‘Do you not think
I did not try to rid myself of his hateful seed? Yet nothing I did would dislodge
it.’ ”

“You don’t need to listen to any more of this, Catherine. We can walk out of here
now.”

My feet would not shift. My grandfather’s hate pinned me to the earth. The memory
of Tara’s defiance still enraged him.

“Yet after that, the shameless whore spoke of
pride
! She said, ‘But then I realized that it was loyalty that made the child, because
I went willingly to the hunter to save the lives of the others. Loyalty will be her
birthright. Do not think I will be ashamed! I will be proud! Because loyalty will
be the bright light this child will bring to the world.’ ”