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My cheek burned against the glass.
A breath of summer’s warmth eased in beside me.
“Trouble?” asked Chartji in a low voice.
I jolted back, banging my head against the shutter, then pushed its lower edge farther away so the troll could dip her narrow head in, glimpse the distant torchlight, and duck out again. There flowed from her muzzle a series of clicks and whistles, and Godwik’s patter ceased on the instant. Kehinde, too, fell quiet; she shoved her sliding spectacles up her nose. I latched the shutters, feeling chilled to my core.
Chartji cocked her head at me, examining me with one eye, then the other. The movement was itself a question.
“Trouble,” I said intelligently.
“Legal trouble?” she asked, tilting her head in that trollish way. “We’re experts.”
“No. Not precisely.”
But I thought, What if I do nothing? What if I let them reach the inn, and what if they are indeed an illegal crew of radicals sent after Andevai Diarisso Haranwy? He has, after all, done a great deal of damage in Adurnam simply because the mage Houses detest the new technology, and he may be responsible for the deaths of people caught in the airship’s destruction.
What if I do nothing and let them kill him?
Let them try. They had ridden all this way in pursuit knowing he was a magister. They’d sent a messenger ahead; they already had allies in town, maybe some already in the common room waiting to strike.
But Andevai would not stand idly by. He would defend himself, and it was not in the capacity of cold mages to distinguish the innocent from the guilty within the circle of their power any more than an ice storm can blister some trees in its path and leave others untouched.
If I did nothing, then it was the innocent people gathered in the common room listening to the djeli’s tale who would suffer. Probably me, too. But them most of all.
“Peace upon you and all your undertakings,” I said to Chartji in the old Kena’ani way.
In perfect mimicry, she said, “Peace upon you.”
I put out my hand and took her claw in farewell. “I thank you for your hospitality. I will not forget it. Now I have to go.”
I ran to the door and tugged it open, and thanks be to Tanit that Andevai looked up, and while I could not see my own expression, he could. We did not know each other at all, not really. We were strangers. But I looked at him, and he rose and spoke briefly to the old man as he stepped over the bench.
“Maestressa Barahal?” said Brennan, looking startled as I strode past him, as if he hadn’t noticed me go back into the supper room.
“Fare you well,” I said to him over my shoulder. I met Andevai with every gaze in the place sidelong on us, no one wanting to be quite so bold as to stare directly on a cold mage.
He said in an undertone, “What?” and I murmured, “Torches, a big party,” and he said, “This way.”
We walked to the back of the inn as the djeli rolled on with his tale. The innkeeper at his bar set down a pair of mugs as if he’d meant to offer them to us but thought better of it. Andevai pushed open the door into the kitchen, where a lass about my age looked up, red-faced, from the steam of a big kettle of some sickly sweet brew. Her eyebrows flew up as she gaped at us, but we were already through and out the back door into a kitchen yard coated in frost. I grasped my ghost sword, but I had forgotten my coat and gloves, and it was too late to go back because we were already committed. Out here under the cold sky, I could distinctly hear the clatter of hooves, although Andevai did not yet seem aware of the sound. He cast his gaze first toward the wall of the stables and then toward the woven hazel hurdle that fenced off the rest of the kitchen yard.
He spoke under his breath, as to himself. “Where are those plague-ridden wraiths?”
He whistled four low notes.
I twisted the ghost hilt, and to my utter astonishment, the sword drew smoothly free. The naked blade gleamed, its length and weight perfectly balanced in my hand.
Its light cast an odd luster on Andevai’s profile, making him look, for an instant, unsure rather than arrogant. As he stared at the blade, his gaze flared and his chin lifted belligerently. “Where did you get that? That’s cold steel. Only mage Houses forge and possess cold steel.”
There were many things I could and ought to have said, but instead I smirked. I might be dead by midnight’s bell. This might be my only chance to gloat. “It’s my black cane. You never saw what it really was.”
He grabbed my right wrist, and I braced, because I thought he meant to wrest the sword out of my left hand, but instead he tugged me after him to the gate of the kitchen yard.
“Do you know how to use it?” he asked.
“I’m a Barahal.”
He unbound the rope and shoved open the plaited gate. We staggered onto a muddy lane crackling with frost where wheels had left their imprints. The lane led away behind a block of row houses. He looked skyward, hearing clearly now the approaching hooves, the ring of harness, a man’s call: “There’s the Griffin Inn!”
