Cold Magic

No cat, he, but curious just the same. He had midwifed babies into the world, escaped brigands, climbed mountains, and sat through the interminable sessions during which Camjiata’s law code was argued into fruition. He had traveled south to Rome and Qart Hadast, east to Galatia and the very border of the Pale. He had ventured north into the ice with a party of determined explorers, and west to Land’s End beyond which the ocean crashed against a desolate shoreline.

The man I had believed to be my father.

As I talked, the djeli assayed a bowed melody here and a plucked tune there. Her feet rapped a rhythm on the earth. Now and then she spoke in response, or sang a phrase to punctuate my story: It’s true. I hear you.

How or why or when sleep overtook me I did not know. I only knew I slept because I woke between one breath and the next, as if a melody had called me out of an entrancing dream that had something of Andevai in it, curse him. A fiddle played a graceful tune as sinuous and proud as the stroll of a cat. I touched tongue to lips and wiggled my fingers and toes; yes, I was awake. Warmth drenched my back.

I looked over my shoulder. The young male cat sprawled along the other half of the length of my stone bench, ears twitching with cat dreams. All the cats were drowsing except for the big female, who watched with interest as I stirred. The sky had grown dark, as with night; the fire burned as it ever had; the djeli played her music.

I sat up cautiously, not wanting to startle a saber-toothed cat. The music ceased as the djeli pulled a flourish out of her bow and lowered the fiddle. Fire and shadow flatter women, so it is said, but her rosy youth was not the fire’s flattery. I recognized her as the same djeli who had been here from the very first, only now she looked a mere decade older than I was.

The cat stirred, rolled, and with its weight pushed me right off the stone. I shrieked and, without thinking, shoved it back, and it batted at me, claws sheathed. It did not know its own strength. The paw, connecting with my shoulder, sent me spinning, but I laughed and steadied myself against the brick wall surrounding the fire. This hearth was a center point set equidistant from the three exterior points of oak tree, dun, and well. A triangle, in fact. Bee, with her mathematical mind, would have seen it from the first. Andevai had clearly understood it when he’d dragged me back into the shelter of the oak to escape the tide. This place was warded. Beyond the wards of oak, tower, and well lay the spirit world in all its danger and beauty; here, one might rest without fear.

“Why did the cats not kill him?” I asked. “When we first crossed over, they leaped on him. I see now they were protecting me. But why did they not kill and eat him?”

She frowned. “Marriage does not stop at two. A woman and a man may marry, but they are not alone, her and him only. His family and her family also are bound by obligations and rights. To have devoured him just like that would have shown very little respect for the relationship, don’t you think?”

“You’re saying these cats are my kin.”

The young male yawned, showing his teeth, but the gesture offered no threat. He was just slow to wake up. He leaped—more like a flow of muscle and flesh—down off the stone.

“And how,” I continued, as questions like rain fell into my head, making a great deal of noisy splash, “did you even know Andevai and I are—were—married?”

“How could I not know? It breathes in the air between you.”

I bit my lip. Maybe she had not meant desire. Andevai and I had been chained into a contract by magic, a chain anchored in the spirit world. It was likely the denizens of this place could recognize such bindings even if they seemed invisible to me.

“What does it mean to walk the dreams of dragons?” I asked.

“Like you I am curious.”

I laughed. “Spoken truly. How are you come here?”

“I bide where my chains bind me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone has troubles.”

I nodded, respecting her limits. It was time to go. “How do I cross back into the mortal world, maestra?”

“There is a door, is there not?”

A door! I looked at the dun, with its closed door and shuttered window. A forbidding place because of its air of emptiness. But it might not be empty. It might be full. An entire world might lie inside the dun.

I laughed bitterly as I made ready to depart, layering on my cloaks, the humble covering the fine. Hidden in plain sight, like a sword that appears to be a cane in daylight. I tied bottle and coin pouch to my belt, fixed my sword so I could draw it easily, and drew on my gloves.

“May your day pass well, maestra,” I said to the djeli.