Kate Elliott - Cold Magic

The walls, lined with shelves, were insulated with books.

There was no fire in the hearth, but despite this, the chamber

was perfectly warm, its heat the splendid calm of sun-warmed rock. Three dogs lay on a rug, alert but eerily silent as they watched us enter. A pair of lamps set on side tables burned sweet oil, their glow illuminating an upholstered chair in which sat an ancient and very frail man. He wore a light red and gold silk jacket over loose trousers and a pair of black house slippers. His white hair was bound in a braid that trailed over his shoulder. His face was thin, and his hands were as bony as claws. Indeed, he looked far too weak to rise, but when he looked up at the pair of us trembling on the threshold, his gaze stunned us into immobility.

With a sharp inhalation, Bee stiffened, her fingers tensing on mine. "I recognize you," she said in a low, almost pained tone. "I saw you-I saw this library-in a dream."

"Of course you did," he said in a labored hiss, as if gruel had filled his lungs and made it hard to breathe. "I have waited, all these years, as all creatures wait for death to approach them."

As he spoke these words, he looked away from Bee to me. His blue eyes had the blaze of fire, like echoes of the lamps but far more penetrating, able to pierce the stygian depths. Then he blinked, and I staggered and caught myself as from a fall.

He said to Bee, "I knew you would come." His words were like a spell. She walked as in a trance across the carpet to his chair.

"Bee!" I said, although I could not move, not even to lift my cane, which suddenly weighed like lead in my hand. My eyes watered as though I were standing too near a bonfire.

To my utter and heart-stopping astonishment, she knelt before his chair. He kissed her forehead as gently as a father kisses the brow of his child when he sends her out into the cruel world, knowing she will meet bitter disappointment and sharp pain before she has any hope of finding happiness and peace.

She looked up, her face aglow in the lamplight, so beautiful

that it was as if he said the words out loud-"so beautiful"- only I heard no utterance. He bent farther yet, and for an instant I saw a different face, a younger face so wild and strong and striking, as if years and decades had unwoven from his skin.

He touched his lips to her lips, scarcely more than a butterfly's kiss. A touch. A breath, given from him to her. He drew back. Bee's eyes flew wide and she collapsed in a faint.

"Bee!" I cried, but I could not move.

On the floor, Bee took in a hard breath; she rose to her feet, staring at him, but she said nothing, as if he had stolen her voice.

"Now I am released," he said. "I have given you my heart's fire to help you walk your dreams in the war to come. Go quickly. Take Montagu Street to Serpens Close. There, at the back past the well, you will find a stair that will lead you under the old guildhall to a path alongside the Duvno Stream. After that, you are on your own, for beyond that I cannot see. When the soldiers and mages come calling, as they will shortly, my servants will have departed, and I will be dead."

The servant's candelabra dipped before us, as with a bow, and we stumbled away down the hall to the front door. The woman opened it, and when we passed over onto the threshold, she shut it behind us without a word. Bee and I stood shivering on the steps, his words like knives in our hearts. A clatter of feet and hooves drummed a swift rhythm as, away behind us, the pursuit began in earnest. Blessed Tanit. What had happened to Rory?

I groped for and grasped Bee's hand. "Who was that?" I whispered.

She drew in a shuddering breath and found her voice.

"I don't know."

In the confines of Serpens Close, we discovered a stair that led, just as the old man had said, to a path along Duvno Stream, a bricked-in sewer whose stench was leavened only by the steadily dropping night temperature. We hurried for some way along this path and left it to make our way through deserted streets to humbler districts and eventually the festive sprawl of the winter market on the shore of the Solent River. Here we bargained for winter coats, the kind worn by women who must work out of doors through the fierce winter chill, and cloaks to go over them to double as blankets. Bee traded her elegant frock for sturdier garb, and we stood in the cold street and shivered, heads bent together and my hand on the hilt of my ghost sword in case anyone accosted us.

"We need legal help," I said. "What about those trolls I met?" She looked askance at me. "You met trolls? Spoke to them?" "I liked them, Bee. So would you have. But I don't know where their offices are. We can scarcely go searching this time of night. We have to find somewhere to hide until the sun goes down on solstice eve. Tonight, tomorrow day, the next night, and the next day. That's all."

"Then what? Beat off our pursuers with your cane?" "I don't know, but our first goal is to get you free of the contract."

"What do you think happened to Roderic?" she whispered.

I wiped my eyes, unable to speak.

So at length we settled into the smoky supper room of a tavern, where we shared a bowl of millet and goat's meat stew at a corner table so out of the way that a stout oak pillar cut off our view of the door into the common room. In this forsaken corner, there was plenty of smoke but little enough heat. Out there, people were eating and drinking and conversing merrily, as folk did who weren't running for their lives. We had, of necessity, come into the somewhat more expensive supper room, but despite the late hour, it was packed with noisy folk keeping late hours. I demolished our first helping and began working through a second while Bee picked past stringy goat's meat and yellow turnip seeking what was not there.

"The old man said he was waiting for me," said Bee.

"Maybe. Or maybe he was an old lecher and thought it a likely story to draw you in for a kiss."

I had expected her to recoil at the thought of being kissed by a dying man who must have been ninety if he was a day. I had even hoped perhaps to squeeze a chuckle from her. Instead, she pinned my wrist to the table.

"No. He said I was death coming to meet him." I had forgotten how deep her gaze was. Men stuttered and collapsed at a glance from her eyes. Right now, I thought she looked as if the weight of the world's misery had fallen on her shoulders. "He said he was giving me his heart's fire to help me walk my dreams in the war to come. I'm frightened, Cat. What did he mean?"

"I don't know," I said. "Eat something."

She released my wrist and scooped up a spoonful of brown gravy. With a frown, she stared at a shred of wilted green mint floating in the liquid, then drizzled the spoon's contents back into the bowl. "I'm not hungry."

"We have to keep up our strength. If not for yourself, then think of Rory, who may have sacrificed his life for us."

She sighed and, after wiping her eyes, began to eat. "You never told me what happened to you, Cat. The tale would make the stew go down better, I'm sure."

So I told her. As the story unfolded, she ate with more gusto, and her bowed shoulders began to straighten as if my words nourished her.

"Can that be true? That the male who sired you is a creature of the spirit world?" she demanded, a little too eagerly. "Like an eru or a saber-toothed cat?"

"What else can I think?"

"It does seem likely, but awfully strange. And how would they have managed the… the deed?"

"In the usual way, I would suppose. Not that you know anything about that."

"No more than you do!" She grinned, then bit a finger, thinking. "Still, if it's true, do you think we could cross into the spirit world and hide there?"

"If I knew where to find a crossroads. If you could even cross with me."