Cold Magic

“You’re pacing,” he said with another yawn.

“What are we to do?”

“I say we eat, for I’m powerfully hungry.” He snagged cloth, hoisted it, and swung out his bare legs to pull on—

“You can’t wear those! Those are women’s drawers.”

“They’re soft. They feel good.” Without the least idea of modesty, he wiggled out buck naked from under the cloaks and pulled on the drawers over slim hips. “I like them.”

“You don’t wear women’s clothing.”

“Why not?”

“You’re impossible!” I separated men’s garments: drawers, stockings, trousers, shirt, waistcoat, and the jacket in a dreary brown fabric that was nothing a fine blade like Andevai would ever be caught dead in. “It seems impossible that five entire weeks have passed while I told a few stories!”

He fingered the man’s drawers. “I don’t like these. They’re not as soft.”

“The ones you have on are meant for me to wear, you disgusting beast. I’m going to turn my back, and you’re going to take off my drawers and dress properly. Five weeks! How can it happen?” I walked back to the window. Through the open gates of the inn yard, I could see a slice of the main street and the gate, empty of traffic as dusk strangled the winter day.

How should he know why time flowed differently there from here? He was a saber-toothed cat, by all that was holy! A spirit man, the villagers would have said, walking out of his beast’s body and into this one as a man. His mother was a cat, and his father was, evidently, a cat.

I tried to imagine having a saber-toothed cat as a sire, a spirit animal who had walked into this world as a man and had congress with my mother. Did I really believe it, with no evidence except Rory’s word and the cats coming to protect me?

Trembling, I leaned my head against the dense whorls of glass, feeling the cold seep through. The eru had called me “cousin.” She had seen the spirit world knit into my bones when even the mansa, despite his immense power, had not guessed. But the djeliw had known.

What had Daniel Hassi Barahal known? Was my bastard parentage why he had handed me over to the Barahals to sacrifice in Bee’s place? I considered the story Bee and I had been told. He had fallen in love with an Amazon from Camjiata’s army. They’d fled together to make a new life but had tragically drowned in the Rhenus River, leaving behind an orphaned daughter.

Was any of it true?

“Why are you crying?” Roderic’s gentle tone, with a slight scratch like the lick of a cat’s tongue, opened the vein of my grief. I began to sob. He came up behind me, suitably dressed at last, rested hands on my shoulders, and stood quietly until the river ran dry.

“You still stink,” he said as I wiped my eyes.

“Let’s go down,” I said as I turned to face him. “And… thank you.”

He touched his nose to my cheek, not quite a kiss, but the gesture heartened me. I had kin. I wasn’t alone. And furthermore, the mansa’s soldiers and seekers would be looking for a solitary woman, not one traveling with a man.

Good hot soup and thick ale followed by a hot bath, however humble the tub, and the pleasure of clean drawers and shift did much to strengthen my resolve. When I returned to the common room, I discovered Roderic seated on a bench with his long legs outstretched and a mug of ale in one hand as he embellished the tale of our altercation with brigands with the delight of a born liar. No longer was it a half dozen brigands but thirteen or twenty, hard to count in the muddy light of a cloudy dawn. Certainly his audience had swelled from the innkeeper’s infatuated daughters to an appreciative crowd, including the very Emilia we had met by the well, a ruddy-faced girl with red-gold hair.

As the tale unfolded, I realized he was retelling in altered form one of the episodes from Daniel Hassi Barahal’s journal I’d related to Lucia Kante.

“There’s been trouble with roaming bands of young men these last two years,” interposed the cousin of the innkeeper. She wore a scarf in muted tones wrapped over her gray hair. I wondered if she had come over to see how Roderic filled out her dead son’s clothes. Was she, too, grieving for what she had lost? “Lemanis’s council and Lord Owen have sent pleas in plenty to the Cantiacorum prince, but in his proclamation he blames radicals for stirring them up. He says he can do nothing until we police our own. Last year, Falling Stars House sent soldiers to sweep through the Levels, rounding up outlaws and villains. Some of our lads joined up just for the summer. We thought our boy would be home after Hallows, but he never did come back.”