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“Everything has been capably cleaned and repaired.”
The coach arrived so quickly that I suspected they had been waiting for us to wake up, meaning to get us out of town before there was more trouble. People gathered under the cold lens of the sky to watch as we left the cottage. Women covered the eyes of their children, as if my gaze might wither the innocent. At the back of the crowd, thin young men stared at the coach with sullen contempt. The djeli handed in heated bricks, a basket of provender, and a bottle of wine while offering a fulsome apology for the disrespect we had endured. Vai thanked him, shut the door, then leaned across me to close the shutters as a whip snapped and the coach began rolling.
“I see no point in allowing them to stare. We can’t change the minds of the ones who hate and fear us, not like this. Are you feeling better, love? I mean, after everything we saw.”
“If you mean the ugly words that hateful old man said to me, I see he meant to poison me against my mother. All he did was make me love and admire her more. Do mages simply kill anyone who tries to assault one of the Houseborn?”
“At Four Moons House, criminals were sent to the mines.”
“I wonder under what conditions they labor there.”
“I don’t know,” admitted Vai, “but everyone in my village knew that people sent to the mines never returned.”
On the first day the carriage rolled uneventfully through the winter countryside. An outrider went ahead to alert each next stage that we were coming. By the second day I was surprised at how good the roads were, until the coachman informed me that they had been built in the last ten years with indentured local labor under the supervision of soldiers. Before that, he said, the journey would have taken a month on a cart track.
At dusk on the third day we rolled into the courtyard of an isolated inn out in the middle of nowhere. No one bustled to assist us. The watering trough had been smashed to pieces.
An outrider came running from the stables. “My lord, the place has been ransacked and defaced.”
Vai and I drew our swords. Under Vai’s mage light we investigated the two-room inn and the stove house and kitchen behind. Every piece of furniture had been stripped out except a wooden slops bucket with a leaking bottom, filled with frozen excrement. Shattered floorboards exposed the pillars of the hypocaust system, on which were painted curses. Amulets plaited with animal bones, withered leaves, and chicken feathers caked with dried blood hung from the lintels.
Outside, Vai called over the most senior outrider, a quiet man who performed his duties and kept the younger men in line. “Speak honestly and I give my word I will hear your speech without reprisal. Why do the people here hate cold mages so much they would do this?”
The man considered his gloved hands. “My people have been living in these lands since the dawn of time, my lord. Then in my father’s youth, the outsiders came. You mages brought down the anger of the god over all the countryside.” He glanced at me. “The mage houses and their princely allies rule us now. They take our young men to build roads and to fight, and our young women to be servants and to be shamed. For this privilege, my lord, we must be paying a tithe of our furs and meat to the mages likewise.”
Snow dusted down over us. The men watched with the caution of servants. They were five and we were two, and yet they showed no sign of being eager to attack us.
Vai spoke. “Did you know there is a man, General Camjiata, who has written a legal code that outlaws clientage? A law that says no person may own another person as property or claim another community as its possession?”
“Do you mean the Iberian Monster, my lord?” asked the senior man. Unaware of how he was twisting his hands, he had almost pulled off one of his gloves.
“You have the look of a soldier about you,” I said. “Perhaps you fought in the war twenty years ago.”
His gaze flashed to me before settling back to Vai. “We should go on, my lord. We’ll nurse the horses along and get to the next hostel. There is moonlight, and your magic, to light our way.”
“I’ll scout ahead.” In full sight of the riders I wrapped the shadows around me. They exclaimed as I vanished, and I was glad of it, because if they refused to like or trust me, then I wanted them to be scared of me.
Vai walked in front of the horses with a lamp fashioned of cold fire. The clop of horses’ hooves and the stamp of the men’s footfalls faded into winter’s silence as I ran ahead. It was so quiet that the ambush revealed itself by the heavy breathing and restless shifting of men hiding alongside the road in a ditch. There were only ten, armed with iron weapons. I trotted back to the coach.
“Wait here,” Vai said to the attendants. “By no means come forward until you hear sounds of fighting. Catherine, no killing unless we have no choice.”
“They mean to kill us!”
“Maybe so, but they are not without fair grievances and no means to gain a hearing. If we have no choice, we won’t spare them.”
I acquiesced rather than argue; I would do what I must when the time came. Sparks of cold fire bobbing along the ground gave us just enough light to creep off the road and thus up behind them. At the ditch I stalked in among them where they shivered, waiting patiently.
“Did ye hear a footstep?” one whispered.
“Hsss! Look!”
A carriage and horses glided down the road, fitted with a coachman and footman. It was an astonishing illusion, except for a lag in the turning of the wheels. Still, the ambushers should have been instantly suspicious of it for the lack of sound. Instead, wound up and eager, they leaped.
The carriage and horses dissolved into a hiss of falling ice.
Cold magic hits like a hammer, so sing the bards and the djeliw. Air becomes ice. Iron groans. I dropped to my knees just as all the iron in their weapons shattered in a burst of shards and screams. Only cold steel was safe.
Wreathed in my threads of magic, I ran among them. The smell of their hot blood and the scent of their panic lanced through my veins like lust. My sire was a killer and my mother a soldier, but I remembered what Vai had said, so I only pricked them in shoulder and thigh. Many were already bloodied. Two had to be carried by their fellows. Routed, they fled into the night.
