Kate Elliott - Cold Steel

He flashed a smile, silently laughing at me. “She’s angling for a prestigious marriage with a very promising magister from Five Mirrors House. There are two powerful candidates to be heir, and the mansa there wants to move one out of the way so there is no trouble.”

Bee batted her eyelashes as her most dangerously honeyed smile lit her face. “If that is the case, don’t you worry about bringing such a powerful magister into Four Moons House?”

He looked at her blankly. “No. Why would I?”

Kofi stuck his head in. “I shall ride up front to see the countryside. Fair wild, I call this!”

“I want to hold on in back with the eru,” I said.

“No!” Bee and Vai spoke at the same time, as Kofi shut the door.

“You are so recently recovered, dearest,” said Bee. “It really is outside of enough that you are making such a long journey so soon.”

“It was your idea!”

“It was your idea!” retorted Bee primly. “I only agreed because it is time I got to have an adventure!”

“Because giving radical speeches and slamming down rude hecklers as soldiers march to arrest you is not an adventure? Wrestling an overloaded rowboat for hundreds of miles down the Rhenus River with only a lazy cat for company is not an adventure? Sleeping with the most famously handsome radical in Europa—”

“What?” said Vai. “Bee and Brennan Du… what?”

“—is not an adventure? Not to mention the part where you marry a prince of the Taino, or are asked to run for a seat on the first elected council in Europa.”

Bee sighed happily, paging through her sketchbook with the dreamy blush of an addled schoolgirl. “Yes! Who knows what will happen next?”

The latch’s sliver eyes and wire mouth glittered as its sour little voice woke. “I won’t know. No one tells me anything.”

In the sudden hush that throttled the ones I loved best in all the world, the coachman snapped his whip and cried, “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!” The eru leaped onto the back of the coach, and we rolled out onto the street, wheels rumbling on stone.

Bee put her nose down by the latch, which matched her glare for glare.

In a low voice Vai said, “I thought you were just making that up to entertain us, like you do.”

“What do I ever make up, I should like to ask? Andevai! You do believe I punched a shark, don’t you?”

“Yes, love, I believe you punched a shark just like I believe you drank coffee with the Master of the Wild Hunt on the streets of Havery on Hallows’ Night.”

Bee sat up. Her eye turned on me as her expression bloomed into the full flower of indignant suspicion. “But she did punch a shark. James Drake was on the beach and saw it happen. He told the general and me all about it.”

They looked at each other, sharing an unspoken thought, and then they looked at me.

In the depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt, and when it wakes, all tremble in fear. In the depths of the black abyss there drifts in a watery stupor the leviathan whose lashing tail can smash ships into splinters and drive the sundered hulks under the waves. In the depths of the smoke lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All Dragons. If she stirs, waking, the world changes. So we are told.

But none of that seemed at all frightening compared with the prospect of Bee and Andevai united in exasperation and anger, against me.

Me!

I thought about how many days it was going to take us to reach Noviomagus and how many hours of that time they were going to spend scolding and haranguing me as only they could.

“Everyone knows all the good parts except me,” groused the latch. “For instance, where are we now and where are we going? Why? How did we get here?”

There is more than one way to skin a cat. Or at least, if you’re the cat, to stay unskinned by rebuking tongues and accusing eyes for just a little longer.

“Fortunately, it’s a very expansive story and one I can tell you if you don’t mind hearing every piece of it all. At length.”

“Catherine, I believe you owe us some manner of explanation!”

“Cat, what have you been hiding from us? What did you do? ”

“I don’t mind, no matter how long it takes!” said the latch, with the nearest thing to a real smile I had ever seen on its dour face. “Do you have any of that coffee stuff? That was very tasty.”

“We can get coffee along the way like we did before. Let me see. There’s a great deal you don’t know, so it’s best if I start at the beginning.”

First I peeked into the basket to see that there was indeed a jar of Serena’s most excellent yam pudding tucked to one side. Then I settled myself more comfortably on the seat and smiled at my beloved if fulminating cousin and my handsome if reproachful husband. Finally I winked at the latch that had just saved me.

The latch winked shyly back, like a child caught out on its first budding infatuation.

Never let it be said I could not talk my way out of any trouble that I could not punch.

“The history of the world begins in ice, and it will end in ice.”

April Quintanilla

KATE ELLIOTT has been writing stories since she was nine years old, which has led her to believe either that she is a little crazy or that writing, like breathing, keeps her alive. Her previous series are the Crossroads Trilogy (starting with Spirit Gate ), The Crown of Stars septology (starting with King’s Dragon ), the Novels of the Jaran, and a collaboration with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson called The Golden Key . She likes to play sports more than she likes to watch them; right now, her sport of choice is outrigger canoe paddling. She has been married for a really long time. She and her spouse have three children, as well as a miniature schnauzer (aka the Schnazghul). Her spouse has a much more interesting job than she does, with the added benefit that they had to move to Hawaii for his work. Thus the outrigger canoes.

Find out more about the author at www.kateelliott.com. You can also find extras there, including short fiction set in the Spiritwalker universe.

Emma Bannon, forensic sorceress in the service of the Empire, has a mission: to protect Archibald Clare, a failed, unregistered mentath. His skills of deduction are legendary, and her own sorcery is not inconsiderable. It doesn’t help much that they barely tolerate each other, or that Bannon’s Shield, Mikal, might just be a traitor himself. Or that the conspiracy killing registered mentaths and sorcerers alike will just as likely kill them as seduce them into treachery toward their Queen .

In an alternate London where illogical magic has turned the industrial revolution on its head, Bannon and Clare now face hostility, treason, cannon fire, black sorcery, and the problem of reliably finding hansom cabs .

The game is afoot .

Emma Bannon, Sorceress Prime and servant to Britannia’s current incarnation, mentally ran through every foul word that would never cross the lips of a lady. She timed them to the clockhorse’s steady jogtrot, and her awareness dilated. The simmering cauldron of the streets was just as it always was; there was no breath of ill intent.

Of course, there had not been earlier, either, when she had been a quarter-hour too late to save the other unregistered mentath. It was only one of the many things about this situation seemingly designed to try her often considerable patience.