Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (9 page)

Bee had made her choice. She had chosen to be loyal to me.

I released Kofi’s hand and smiled crookedly at him. “Thank you, Kofi.”

Rory had fallen back asleep, so Luce took the first watch in a chair and I settled
on a bed of blankets on the floor. I shut my eyes, but my mind kept pressing me back
into the bitterly sweet memory of lying in Vai’s arms the one night we had shared.
How he had kissed me! How was a gal meant to sleep if she could not stop thinking
of his passionate caresses?

The scratching at the window just would not stop. I sat up. Luce slept, one arm curled
against her chest and the other flung out to one side. Kofi was leaning against the
interior door, eyes closed, napping on his feet. I crawled over to the drapes that
concealed the glass doors. I twitched aside the lower corner to peer out into the
night-swamped courtyard.

Shadows marked the glass in blotches and lines. Winged shapes flittered across the
sky.

A slender green finger was tapping on the glass. I recoiled. A branch had elongated
until it reached the doors, as if trying to find a path inside. A bat perched on the
swaying end, staring at me with obsidian eyes. I blinked, and it vanished.

A man pressed against the door. He had Vai’s face and he wore a magnificent dash jacket
printed with fishes spilling out of gourds.

“We shall find a way in,” he said in a low, sweet voice. The scent of guava penetrated
the glass separating us. I wanted to kiss him to taste the fruit, but I knew better.
“Yee cannot escape us. We know yee killed her.”

The latch turned but caught because it was locked. The key shuddered in a gust of
wind.

“You can’t come in,” I whispered.

It was impossible to stare into those brown eyes and not be drawn closer; his lips
tempted me; his hands reminded me of the kind of work they could do. But he was not
Vai. He was an opia, the spirit of a dead man.

“Open the door,” he whispered, “and yee shall have what yee so badly desire.”

The hot look in his eyes drowned me. Next thing I knew, my hand was touching the key.
I jerked away my hand and fixed it around the hilt of my sword.

“Cat?” The drape rustled away from me.

I jolted back as Kofi joined me. He looked into the courtyard with its dense shadows
and a night wind trawling through the branches of the ceiba tree. The nearest branches
of the tree waved twenty strides or more from the glass-paned doors. Of branch, bat,
or male figure I saw no sign, although a small frog hopped along the paving stones
along the side of the building.

“I reckon yee shall step back from there,” Kofi said. “That tree have a powerful spirit.”

Shapes were climbing in the tree, some grappling up and some slipping down. The movement
made me dizzy.

“Do you see them?” I whispered.

Instead of answering, Kofi pulled me back, let the drapes cover the view, and settled
me on the blankets beside Luce. I dozed off.

A mosquito buzzed by my ear, and I kept swatting it away and it
kept coming back, until I opened my eyes. Both Luce and Kofi slept soundly. But Rory
was gone.

One of the glass doors was open, its key fallen to the floor.

With my ghost-sword in hand, I ran out into the courtyard. It was so late I heard
not a breath of sound from anyone living.

The soporific aroma of overripe guava drenched the air. As on a gust of wind, a cloud
of bats poured down over the roofs that surrounded the courtyard. Their tiny bodies
battered me. I drew my sword out of the spirit world where the blade resided and slashed
at them, but they darted past into the shadow of the ceiba tree. A hundred ratlike
rodents were hauling Rory up the trunk of the ceiba tree, calling to each other with
whistling chirps and chortling barks.

I sheathed my sword and ran back into the chamber.

“Kofi! Luce!” No matter how I shook them, they did not wake. They slept the heavy
sleep of the enchanted.

I dressed in skirt and sandals and grabbed the two flasks Uncle Joe had given me,
as well as trousers, sandals, and a singlet from Vai’s chest. Then I raced back out.
I could still hear them climbing. The scent of the spirit world breathed down over
me. I tasted its dry chaff and a kick of dust, as if I had walked into a mown hayfield
baking under a late summer sun. The massive trunk was covered with big blunt thorns.
Even had I been able to reach the lowest branch, I would have torn my skin to ribbons
and bled all over the tree.

Yet wasn’t blood the gate? I surveyed the courtyard: stone sculpture, cistern, tree.
In the spirit world, stone, well, and tree set the three points of a triangle to create
warded ground. Warded ground had the property of reaching into the mortal world, as
if the touch of the mortal world anchored the wards in the ever-changing spirit world.
I had crossed into and out of the spirit world through stone. I had crossed into and
out of the spirit world through water. Why not through the tree?

The chortles of the thieves faded. I pressed my right arm onto the stinging tip of
a thorn. It pierced my flesh with an almost audible groan. My blood trickled down
the bark. Beneath my hand the tree smeared to shadow as the trunk became a ladderlike
stair leading up into darkness. I tucked up my skirts to keep them out of the way,
and I climbed.

I climbed up the central pillar of the tree toward a smoky abyss studded with lights.
Desperation gave me strength and speed. Perhaps the little creatures were at a disadvantage,
them being so many and so small and having to coordinate a large limp weight, for
I sensed I was gaining on them.

The canopy of leaves faded into smoke, just as it had in my dream. A sleeting wind
cut my face, numbing my lips and then my fingers. With my next step, I kicked out
over a gulf of air. Nothingness yawned around me as the tree dissolved. Falling, I
flailed desperately.

My sandals caught the rim of a ledge. A bucketing motion beneath and around me made
me sway as though I had landed on a moving object. Just before I tumbled off, my hand
fastened over a metal door latch. I tried to open it, but it was locked.

“Hsst!” a thin voice whispered. “Quiet! Look through my eyes into those of my sibling
inside.”

The latch bit me, two pinprick points of pain. Blood slicked the metal. Like a scraping
file, its tongue rasped away the moisture.

I shut my eyes. Only then did I realize where I was. A coachman and his coach served
the Master of the Wild Hunt. Gremlin spirits inhabited the latches of the coach’s
doors, one facing in and one facing out. Four days ago, as time passed in the mortal
world, my sire had thrown me out of this very coach. Again I pushed on the latch,
but it did not budge.

Yet through the latch, linked by my blood, I saw into the interior of the coach.

With a hand open on Vai’s chest, the Master of the Wild Hunt
pressed him against the opposite seat. Andevai’s eyes were open but he seemed paralyzed,
both blind and deaf. The gold threads of his red-and-gold dash jacket shimmered under
a weirdly glowing light that emanated from my sire. His blue-white mask of ice made
my sire seem even more dreadful, for the mask hid his expression and the true color
of his eyes.

For all I could tell, my sire had just flung me out a moment ago, as time flowed in
the spirit world.

For the longest time—it seemed an eternity and yet maybe I took in only a single shocked
breath—he kept himself propped at arm’s length, hand splayed open on Vai’s chest,
while he examined Vai in the considering way an experienced cook examines produce
to pick what is best out of the basket. He considered Vai’s dark eyes, kissable mouth,
very short, trim beard, and shorn-short black hair. His scrutiny had such a disturbingly
predatory focus that I opened my mouth to protest, thinking I could be heard through
the door. A rough lick from the gremlin’s tongue silenced me. My lips went numb.

As if he had seen enough, my sire sat back. The mask of ice melted into the youthful
face he had worn on the ballcourt the night he had taken Vai prisoner after the death
of the cacica. His was the kind of face that drew the eye even if you could not warm
to it. He had long straight black hair like the Taino, eyes with a slight fold like
the Cathayans, a thin Celtic nose, and brown skin rather lighter than Vai’s deep brown
Afric complexion. His golden eyes looked so like mine that anyone would know he and
I were related.

Vai sucked in a breath. His gaze swept the confines of the coach, flickering as he
noted my sire sitting opposite him. He paused to examine the grubby bundle of clothing
and food I’d stolen on Salt Island. The shuttered doors and the rest of the interior
had no ornamentation except loops to hold on to, a bracket for a lamp, and a filigree
of gold-wire decoration around doors and joinings.

As Vai realized I was gone, his hand tightened on the hilt of his sword, which had
been forged of cold steel by the secret mage craft known to Four Moons House. I could
almost see his thoughts running. I was pretty sure that much of his exceptional power
as a cold mage arose from his patience. He analyzed his situation from all angles
before he made a decision, just as he spun illusions out of cold magic and worked
them over and over until they were seamless.

Vai’s lips pressed into a flat line, and his gaze fell away as if he were looking
elsewhere.

The locket I wore at my neck grew warm. Over a year ago a
djeli
had been paid to weave magic to chain our marriage so I could not escape the mansa’s
command to bind the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter to Four Moons House. The djeli,
a bard who was also a shaman, had anchored the magical chain in our bodies, so Vai
had told me on the night we consummated the marriage. That night we had pledged in
whispers things I dared not think of now because to be able to see but not touch or
speak to him, to know he was in danger and cut off from me, made my spirit rage.

His faraway pulse caught in my heart. His mouth twitched.

He knew I lived. Maybe he even knew how close I was.

He glanced cautiously at my sire. The contrast between the two men’s clothing could
not have been greater. My sire wore a jacket and trousers of unrelieved black, whereas
Vai’s clothing was a beacon, meant to be noticed and admired. It was one of his best
garments, sewn by a master tailor from a tightly woven silk so smooth it was sensual,
cut longer than the current fashion but so well built that the length and trim emphasized
its flattering fit.

With gaze lowered respectfully, as a younger man addresses an elder, he spoke polite
words in an exceedingly polite voice that I was pretty sure disguised a rich vein
of sarcasm.

“Where I come from, a man would call his wife’s father
Father
. As a courtesy, you understand. To acknowledge the relationship between them. Shall
I address you as
Father
then?”

“She’s dead.”

Contempt flashed in Vai’s expression, his chin coming up to allow him to look down
his nose at an inferior being. I had seen that look all too often in the first days
of our marriage. It was odd to be glad he had it in him when I had disliked him for
it before. “We both know she is not dead. I must suppose you will tell me what you
did with her when you think it worth your while to reveal the information to me.”

“I threw her out the door. She’s of no more use to me.”

Vai’s gaze flickered but he had enough self-control not to glance at either of the
doors. “Your own daughter? Able to cross between the mortal world and the spirit world
at any time, of her own will and
with a drop of her own blood? Of no more use to you? I don’t believe that, and neither
do you.”

“She accomplished what I commanded her to do. She cut a gate through the spirit fence
the creatures of this part of your world have erected to stop my Hunt from entering
these lands. Now I have even more fields in which to hunt.”

“Let us say that is true. If you truly had no more use for her, you would have no
reason to take me. I heard you tell her I was the leash you would use to keep her
tied to you. So you do wish to keep her bound to you. If you’d stop pretending otherwise,
we might manage a productive conversation.”

“I find your arrogance intriguing. I can do what I want to you, and you know it. Yet
you speak this way to me.”

“I think you cannot kill me. Not until next Hallows’ Night. You might be better asking
yourself, how can we be allies?”

My sire laughed. “You are entirely delightful. More arrogant than the male who was
with Tara Bell, but just as talkative and defiant. The difference is that he had never
touched Tara Bell while you have had sex with my daughter. You realize, of course,
I will have a claim on any children you sire on her.”

Blessed Tanit! I hadn’t thought of that!

Judging by Vai’s suddenly pinched expression, he hadn’t either.

We knew the mansa of Four Moons had a claim on any children we might have until we
could find a way to release ourselves from clientage. To condemn our children to the
chains my sire had already shackled me with was unthinkable. Yet to gauge by the narrowing
of his eyes and the tension in his jaw, the idea of never having children was to Vai
unendurable.

“Ah, now I have trapped you,” said my sire with a pleased smile. “That wasn’t nearly
as difficult as I feared it might be.”

Horribly, as they had in my dream, his body and face melted, flowing into another
face and another body. He became a creature who looked exactly like me, with my thick
black hair pulled into a braid. I saw Vai’s gaze drawn as by a spell down the length
of the braid to the span of her hips. The creature’s lips were slightly parted as
if she was thinking of eating or speaking, and I couldn’t be sure which, but either
way she looked as if she was inviting a kiss. She was dressed
exactly as I had been when in the coach with him, in a faded length of cloth wrapped
to make a skirt and in a damp lawn blouse so thin and threadbare where it clung to
the curve of her breasts that the shadow of her nipples showed through the cotton.
Was that how I had looked when I had stepped down out of the coach on the ballcourt
on Hallows’ Night?