Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

“You’re no help,” I muttered with a grimace at Bee.

Fati gave me a look that made me feel small and petty. “He placed three strands of his hair behind the portrait in the locket, to help you find him. A thread ties you together, because of the binding the djeli wove over you, which is a chain that reaches between worlds. Seek him in your heart, and you will know where he is. But if you have no heart to seek him, then he is the one who will search in vain.”

“Cat didn’t ask to be married to him,” said Bee. “I am sure you cherish your grandson. I’m sure he is loyal to his family. But it isn’t fair to scold her as if she had asked for a pretty bauble and then tossed it carelessly away because it didn’t match her gown. She was betrayed by my mother and father, by our entire clan. She shouldn’t be taken to task for something she never asked for.”

“It’s all right, Bee,” I said, for I couldn’t bear to see his grandmother’s expression harden into disapproval. “My apologies for my sharp tongue, Grandmother. I can’t truly understand what it means for your village to have endured clientage for so many generations. We studied law at the academy, but…well…it was words in a book. I admit I feel a more personal concern now.”

“You can be sure,” said Fati, “that Four Moons House has bound you tightly to him. And he belongs to them, just as my village does. When they wish to make use of you, they will do so.”

“Unless I free myself.”

“Do you think it is so easy to free yourself??”

I glanced at Bee, and held my tongue.

Fati raised her eyebrows as if she knew we had secrets we weren’t sharing. “Anyway, girls, enough talking. We must seek a path or a warded place.” She rose, brushed off her skirts, and walked away from the river.

Bee and I exchanged a glance.

“I like her!” whispered Bee.

“The hunters will cross at Imbolc,” Fati called over her shoulder. “My grandson plans to be with them.”

“How romantical!” said Bee as we hurried after her. “I wish some man would rescue me!”

“Isn’t that what Legate Amadou Barry was trying to do? During the riot? Rescue you?”

“He was trying to capture and cage me,” she snapped.

And wasn’t that what Andevai would end up doing, if he brought me back to Four Moons House? Uneasiness rose in my heart, like a chain being reeled in. The world seemed made of cages. Walking gave me something to do instead of think about chained marriages and forbidding mage Houses and a voice commanding me to come now. We strode through a grassy landscape, skirting thickets of flowering bushes. Tiny translucent unicorns flitted between the blooms, wings flashing like thinnest glass.

Bee ventured closer. “How pretty!”

They coalesced into a swarm and stung at her. Stumbling away, she batted at the cloud as a haze of scintillant wings engulfed her. I swept my sword back and forth through them until they scattered to settle on the bushes, snorting, with teeth bared.

“Ah!” she said, pressing a hand to her face. “They attacked me!”

Fati said, “Let me see your chin.”

After a pause, Bee lowered her hand. Several bumps swelled redly, but otherwise she appeared unharmed. “Nasty creatures!”

A few took to the air, and I brandished my sword, and they retreated.

“Stay beside me,” said Fati.

We walked on. In places, the ground bottomed into swales, thick with white-barked aspens, their round leaves flashing like mirrors. Butterflies and dragonflies winked where pools of water had given birth to thickets of reeds and flowering lilies. Overhead, a pair of crows paced us.

“Do all the dead bide in the spirit world?” I asked. “Could I really find my parents?”

Fati had a long stride. “See this grass around us? You might say it comes from a seed, but a seed alone is nothing. It needs water and soil, and it needs the desire to grow. Without these, no grass can become grass. No thing is only one thing unchanging. Right now I walk in the body in which I walked on the other side. This form remains mine only until the tide of the spirit world reaches me. Then I will change, as all things change. So I cannot know what form your parents have taken, or how they have changed.”

“Vai said that those who are caught in the tide of a dragon’s dream never come back.”

“How can you come back if you have not departed?” A smile softened her mouth. “Vai is a very clever and a very obedient and a very hard-working boy, but I am sorry to tell you, Cat, that he does not know everything he thinks he does.”

Bee laughed.

I said, “But if all the dead people come here after they die, then where are they all?”

“A fish sees the eagle only as a shadow within the water, but the eagle sees the fish for what it is.”

I scratched my bruised chin. “You’re saying we can’t look at things here in the spirit world and assume that what we think we see means what we think we see is what we think it is.”

“Cat, that made no sense at all,” said Bee.

“It made perfect sense! Think of the headmaster! We think we see a man, but maybe he’s the eagle and we’re the fish who only see the eagle’s shadow. Grandmother, do you know anything about dragons?”

“I know a story, a long story. I am no djelimuso to tell it with the proper introductory remarks and blessings. It is the story about how my ancestors the Koumbi Mande came north across the desert out of the Mali Empire to escape the salt plague. So it happens, after many trials, the remnant reached the city of Qart Hadast and did not know where to go next.”

Bee looked at me, and we didn’t mention that Qart Hadast was the city the Barahal family had originally come from, the city the Romans called Carthage.

“The mansa’s sister Kolonkan was a powerful sorceress. She stood on the shore of the sea with one foot on the sand and one in the water. She saw beneath the waves smoking mountains which the Romans call Vulcan’s Peaks. In the very fire of one of those peaks, a female dragon had coiled in its nest and laid its eggs, and now she slept. Into the creature’s dreams, Kolonkan walked. ‘Maa, please advise me,’ called Kolonkan. ‘Where shall my people go?’ The serpent answered, ‘One of the daughters you will bear will serve me, and your people will go north, to the ice.’”

“How can a dragon nest in a volcano?” Bee said. “Wouldn’t the molten fire destroy eggs?”

“My apologies, Grandmother,” I said hastily, poking Bee. “We are listening.”

“Mmm.” Fati was clearly a woman not accustomed to being interrupted. “The tale goes on. That is the only mention I know of a creature the Romans would call a dragon or serpent.”

We walked a while in silence. Grass swished along our legs. Insects buzzed sleepily without massing in a swarm to afflict us. The cursed crows floated above. A jumble of shapes like boulders came into view on the horizon.

“Grandmother,” I asked at length. “Do you know who my sire is?”

She looked me up and down. “Why would I know that?”

“You can’t tell somehow, because you’re an ancestor now?”

She chuckled. “I have no such power. I am newly born into this place. I know nothing more than what I knew before. I would tell you if I knew. A child ought to know its sire. For if you do not know what ropes hold you, then you might as well be a tethered goat. So it seems you and your cousin have undertaken a journey to discover the heart of your own selves.”

“I would like to know what it means to walk the dreams of dragons,” said Bee with a look a mule might give its handler. “Did this sorceress Kolonkan’s daughter walk the dreams of dragons? Is that what the story meant?”