Kate Elliott - Cold Steel

“Not until the next Hallows’ Night,” said Vai in the clipped tone he used when he was particularly wound up. “So I ask again, if you intend to kill me, what chance is there I would ever agree to sire a child on you if it would gain me nothing? If you do kill me, how can I sire a child on your daughter, if a child born to your daughter is what you require? Neither of these things can be accomplished unless you free me, allow me to return to her, and promise me you’ll never hunt me down.”

“A well-argued point. Why would I need you at all? I could sire a child on her myself.”

The words hit like a punch in the chest. Fingers slipping, I almost lost my grip on the latch.

So fast I didn’t see it coming, Vai swung up his sword and stabbed my sire.

He aimed for up under the ribs to the heart, a move he’d no doubt been taught by rote by the mage House’s swordmaster. But the close confines of the coach and my sire’s astonishingly fast reflexes—an arm flung up—deflected the blow. The tip slid into the meat of my sire’s right shoulder.

Pain pierced like steel sliding into my own flesh.

I screamed. A howl rose, shuddering around me and through me: Every creature bound to the Master of the Wild Hunt by blood felt the cut of that blade.

My sire grabbed the blade with his left hand. A clear ichor oozed from his shoulder. The translucent liquid dribbled down the length of the blade. The fingers of my left hand flamed with agony. I was barely holding on with my right, hanging over the abyss.

My sire did not let go of the sword. He raised his right hand to squeeze Vai’s sword arm. Eyes flared with fury, he spoke in a terrifying whisper. “What is done to me, I do to her. That was her cry of agony.”

Vai froze, struck between horror and disbelief. With a single tug, my sire pulled the sword out of his shoulder and shoved the blade against Vai’s throat.

I choked out a wordless cry. The screams and whimpers of the pack echoed me, their pain and my pain churning like so many merging currents until I was almost obliterated. Vai’s hand spasmed on the hilt of the sword as he fought uselessly against the paralysis washing through him.

“It would have gone better for you if you’d stayed amusing. I’d have sheltered you then, at least until next Hallows’ Night. Now you’ve made me angry. I’m throwing you into the pit. No mortal can survive there.”

I struggled to open the latch, but my limbs had no strength. I was as frozen as I had been in my dream. Frost crackled out from the ichor that seeped from my sire’s wounded shoulder, like winter devouring the dying memory of summer. Its lacework beauty ate through the human form my sire had taken. Ice engulfed the interior of the coach, consuming every morsel of space that was not the coach itself. Ice entombed Vai, so cloudy and dense I could see only the line of steel that marked his sword.

Last of all, ice crystals bristled down the length of the latch. With a whimper of fear the outside latch gremlin shut its eyes, leaving me alone in the dark.

Yet instead of falling, I held on. Nothing, not even my sire’s vile threat, could make me give up. The rocking ceased, and I found myself back on the tree as abruptly as if I had never left it. Clutching the nub of a broken branch, I heaved myself up, gritting past the blaze of pain in my right shoulder and left hand. The pain told me that what I had witnessed was real, not a dream.

As I climbed, the air changed texture, stirred by a guava-scented wind. I emerged into the hollow trunk of a ceiba tree so huge that the buttressing of its aboveground roots rose like the pillars of a house over my head. The chittering of Rory’s captors echoed around me, but I could not see them. I sought threads of shadow to conceal myself, but here in the spirit world the shadows were like eels, too slippery to hold. Skulking in the tangle of roots, furious and almost weeping at losing Vai when I had come so close to him, I probed at my shoulder. Just below the collarbone rose a puckered scar, tender to the touch. The fingers of my left hand were scored with whitened scars, cleanly healed. The ache subsided to that of an injury sustained days ago instead of moments. The speed of healing was a brutal reminder of how time passed differently in the spirit world, where an hour might equate to days in the mortal world and a day to months. How much time had passed in the mortal world just while I climbed the tree? How far away was Vai now?

Hidden within the roots, I peered onto open ground, my first glimpse of the spirit world here in Taino country. In the heavens, no sun or moon shone. The sky had a silvery-white sheen like the inside of a conch shell. Straight ahead lay a monumental ballcourt where figures played batey, the game so beloved in Expedition and throughout the Antilles. The players ran up and down the ballcourt bouncing a rubber ball off thighs or forearms or elbows, never letting it touch the ground. They even bounced the ball off stone belts they wore around their hips, although in Expedition no one used the traditional gear.

At the end of the ballcourt closest to me rose a stone platform. A man sat there, cross-legged, watching the game. He wore a headdress ridged with feathers as in imitation of a troll’s bright crest, a white cotton loin wrap, and armlets of beaten gold. His septum was pierced by a needle of pale green jade, and he wore dangling earrings carved out of bone. One step below him, a rabbit dressed in a loin wrap was seated at a sloped writing desk with a brush in hand, busily writing in sweeping strokes as its ears twitched.

I crossed the plaza, climbed four steps, and halted below the lord.

“You’re the Thunder, the Herald of the storm the people call hurricane.”

“Here you are, Cousin,” said the Thunder, unsurprised by my arrival. “By what name should I call you?”

“People call me Cat,” I replied, for I knew better than to reveal my full name. “Why did you take my brother?”

“You took a life. We took a life.”

Dread chilled my heart. “Have you killed my brother?”

“Death is merely the other side of the island.”

“I haven’t the knowledge to debate questions of natural philosophy with you. I just want my brother back.”

“It is time for the match. Batey is the game.” He gestured toward the ballcourt. At the motion of his hand, thunder grumbled beneath my feet. “If you score, then we shall give you a chance to stand before the elders and defend yourself against the accusation laid against you. On behalf of the spirit lord you call the Master of the Wild Hunt, you cut a path into our country and allowed him to kill here as if he possessed the right to do so when he possesses no such right. Think how we must look at you, Cousin! We let you walk in our land as a guest, and you betrayed us.”

My head was still spinning with the vision of Vai encased in ice. “So if I score a point, I’ll be allowed to stand trial before a hostile assembly? That’s my chance?”

“If you don’t choose to speak in your own defense, it’s no skin off my nose.”

“It scarcely seems a sporting game if I’m obliged to play a game I only learned a few months ago against spirits and opia who have played for time uncounted.”

“I freely offer you a gift, Cousin.” A skull inset with beads and gems sat by his right knee, and I was sure it was watching me, for its hollow eyes gleamed. “The gift of the skill you would have achieved had you played the game for as long as these others have.”

I had to take the chances I was offered. “That seems fair. I agree only if all responsibility falls to me. If the ancestors find I am not at fault, then my brother and I are both free to go.”