Kate Elliott - Cold Magic

"The magister crossed."

"He was raised among hunters. Didn't I mention that? It's a dangerous place, Bee."

She frowned. "And this world is not? Tell me, Cat, did all that coin you now possess come from him?"

"Yes."

Through narrowed eyes, she regarded me shrewdly. "Did he like you?"

"Yes, certainly he must have, because that is how young men show young women they like them. By trying to kill them."

"But you said he said afterward that he was sorry."

"He never said that!"

"Maybe not in those exact words. But he said-"

"Leave it! I do not ever again want to talk or think of Andevai Diarisso Haranwy."

"How quickly you snap, for someone who claims to be undisturbed by the flies buzzing all about her."

"Somehow, that makes me feel like a steaming pile of fresh manure out in a field."

She smirked.

"Our pardon." Two men reeled up like gasping fish. They wore the respectable clothing of apprentices and clerks, and the younger had dressed his up with a bright orange and brown dash jacket. Because of their pallor, it was easy to mark the flush of drunkenness in their cheeks. I shifted my sword to my right side so I could if necessary draw it quickly.

The younger one straightened his jacket and then addressed us. "You fine gels look like you have an empty cup, which we would gladly fill."

Bee skewered them with a glare. "Was that meant to be poetic or merely crude? You may move on."

"No reason to knife a man just for asking!" They departed, unsteadily, and made their way to a table crowded with young men who greeted them with the hoots men shower upon the unfortunate. A few blew kisses in our direction. I thought about how much we were like the table and the wall, nothing to bother looking at, nothing at all, and they turned back to their conversation and, I hoped, forgot about us.

Bee was carving lines in the smears of gravy left on the bottom of the bowl. "How could he do it? Use the vision of a woman who was walking the dreams of dragons to plot a military campaign?"

"Who? Camjiata? Do you ever see Camjiata in your dreams?"

"How would I know? I've never seen him except in caricatures. Some make him squinch-faced, hunchbacked, and spittle-ridden, while others claim him as mighty and black-haired. Rather like you, now that I think on it, so perhaps you are secretly his love child."

"I am not-" Words caught in my throat. I stuck a spoonful of stew into my mouth and chewed to make them go back down. It was no stranger a notion than the other possibilities. "Anyway, how would an imprisoned man know about you?"

"Couldn't someone who walked the dreams of dragons dream about someone who walked the dreams of dragons? If he had a wife who dreamed, she might have told him."

"If she was a diviner. But diviners are notoriously imprecise. And I'm not sure what that has to do with walking the dreams of dragons."

She looked up, resting the spoon on the bowl's rim. "You said that when a dragon turns over in its sleep, the world changes."

I shuddered. "Yes, in the spirit world. I saw it happen."

"What about in our world? You called it a tide. Wouldn't that tide run through this world, too, somehow? If things are connected, as you say."

"I just don't know, Bee."

"What do you think dragons dream of, Cat?"

"Plump deer who run exceedingly slowly."

She pulled out her sketchbook from the knit bag we had purchased to carry a change of drawers and shifts and a few other necessaries. She paged through the sheets: Some were drawn to capture historical events, like the Romans kneeling before the armies of Qart Hadast after they lost the Battle of Zama. Others were pure fancy, like the poor folk falling from balloons. But others, I now realized, represented scenes from her dreams, when it seemed she had truly dreamed things that had not yet come to pass: the ramparts of Cold Fort; the bookshelves and

dead fireplace of the library in which we had met the old man; my hand pressing down the latch of the balcony door in the academy lecture hall. A tall man standing framed by the lintel of a door; I did not know him but I was sure I had seen that face recently.

"If they know what Camjiata looks like, and I have sketched him in a recognizable place in my dreams and maybe with some means to identify the day or season, then the cold mages and the princes-who hate each other but hate Camjiata more- might have a chance to find him. Wouldn't they?"

I whistled softly. "I never thought of that."

"But why, then, could the agents of the Prince of Tarrant and the mansa of Four Moons House not have come to my parents and asked with a pretty and a please to pay for my services? Maester Amadou was certainly willing to pay for my kisses!" She flushed, glancing toward the table of clerks and apprentices who had begun singing a song likening the city council members to high-priced and coldhearted whores who lifted their skirts only for the wealthy and never for passion or justice. " 'Greetings and peace to you, Maestressa Barahal,' they might have said, 'for you have the very means by which we may capture the wicked Camjiata, the Iberian Monster whose armies wrought such devastation across the lands. And for your services we will meanwhile lavish gold upon your family so they can pay their debts and buy new curtains to replace these much-mended and very shabby old ones.'"

"They might," I agreed. "But they had evidence the Hassi Barahals were spies for Camjiata. So that answers that question. Anyhow, having met the mansa, I am certain that once he determined he wanted as well as needed you, he'd not be willing to share you."

She tucked the book into the bag. "So no matter what happens, we will still be at the mercy of people who can force us to

do their bidding just because they have powerful kinfolk, and money, and soldiers."

"In't that the truth!" cried the innkeeper as she swept in on the wings of Bee's final words. She poured mulled wine into the tin cup we were sharing. "Always it is lords and mages who grind us under their well-shod feet. Shoes that were made by the likes of us, weren't they? Yet we are tossed a pittance and told to be grateful for the work, while they parade in the avenues and rest on finest linen and crow in the city council. Who hears us?"

"Indeed!" replied Bee emphatically, with raised eyebrows. "They have curbed our'mouths with bridles and bits! Thus are we silenced."

"The very words of the Northgate Poet!" said the innkeeper. "I took you for radicals. For you clearly aren't nightwalkers. If you don't mind my saying so, you ought not be out so very late. Not with your looks, and on such a night with a picketing planned."

Bee and I glanced at each other.

"I thought it would have started already," said Bee, batting her eyes in that invitingly innocent way she had.

The innkeeper was a stout, healthy woman old enough to be our aunt. She smiled warmly on us in the way older women do when you remind them of their daughter. "Och, no, lass. Word just came round early today, that tomorrow morning, the Northgate Poet means to go sit on the council steps and refuse to eat until the city council agrees to seat council members elected from the populace."

"That's a radical notion," Bee said, eyes widening with real surprise.

"No different than what happened in ancient days, in old Rome, so the poet has declaimed. Them who can read, can read if on broadsheets being posted. Maybe you saw the one we nailed up by the door. In old Rome, plebeians had their own

tribunes and their voices were heard. So you can sure we in the city mean to go picket by the steps in support of the poet's hunger strike. It's just that the prince does not like crowds and is threatening to call a curfew. He'll not touch the poet, of course. But he may strike at us! So folk are building up their courage for tomorrow's picket by drinking, and drinking men are like to have wandering hands, if you take my meaning."