Cold Magic

The sound of breaking glass sprayed like shards over us, followed by a smashing crash as an impact hit the front door hard enough to make the entire inn tremble.

A howl rose like wolves scenting blood. “Death to mages!”

“Burn them who suck the life from our children!”

Bee yanked her hand out of mine and bolted, pushing past the innkeeper and her husband.

“Bee!” I shouted after her.

“I won’t allow kindness to be repaid with destruction!” she cried, and ran into the kitchen, out of my sight.

Ba’al protect us! I ran after her. The innkeepers followed at my heels through the kitchen and the ale room and the empty supper room into the black-beamed common room. Bee stood behind a table, facing the front of the inn. One of the doors was cleaved in two, planks snapped and gaping, and a long casement window lay half in pieces on the floor and half in jagged patterns still affixed within what remained of the frame. Outside, a surly crowd of men crowded forward to surge in, but it seemed Bee’s presence, staring them down, had arrested the forefront in the act of clambering across the damaged sill.

“By what right,” she cried, “do you invade this peaceful house?”

“A boy says he saw a cold mage come in here.”

“There is no cold mage in this building!”

The power of Bee’s voice caused them to look over their shoulders and address remarks to the men pressing behind them. This shoving, restless crowd was inflamed by drink as much as by anger. I stepped up beside Bee, wishing my cane were a sword and not, in daylight, just a cane.

A man with a ripped coat and blood on his face called, “Aulus also says he saw the cursed cold mage shatter the lock and go in! And then when he ran after to check, the door had been frozen shut!”

“We mean to go in ourselves and see, maestressa,” said a burly man wearing a blacksmith’s apron. “Just step aside, and no harm done to your pretty face.”

I grabbed Bee’s wrist before she could run forward and do something rash like slug a blacksmith. Glancing around, I did not see the innkeepers, but I heard footsteps ascending the stairs. Bee and I were alone against the mob.

“I will not allow you—” began Bee.

The boom of repeated musket fire cracked over her words, and we both ducked. Down rolled the thunder of hooves, screams and shouts and voices aflame with panic and rage. The crowd before us dissolved like salt stirred in water as two ranks of mounted militia wearing the green Tarrant jackets galloped up the street with swords flashing and muskets smoking. We watched helplessly through the fractured casement as men went down beneath the bright blades. The blacksmith hit the mullions and collapsed across the sill. A lad, blood bubbling up through his hair, staggered, screaming, toward the window and fell before he reached the safety of indoors. The crowd scattered; the soldiers rode on, leaving the reek of fear and destruction behind them.

Then Andevai was in the room, striding past me to the window. He grabbed the body and heaved it out. He grabbed up big shards of glass from the floor and held them up to jagged edges. The temperature in the room dropped so precipitously that my eyes stung and my mouth went dry, teeth chattering. He knit the glass together, bent to pick up larger pieces, spinning out an icy frame in which to hold it.

I dashed forward to grab up shards and hand them to him, to make the work go more quickly. On the street beyond lay the two bodies before the window, and three more within view, two sprawled lifeless while a third, a man wearing a cap trimmed with a red ribbon, dragged himself along the cobblestones like a rat with broken hindquarters. Two women ran out from a building and hauled the red-capped man inside their door, him whimpering in a way to set me so on edge that I had to gulp down a sob.

“Why are you doing this?” I said, finding a measure of calm in our pointless and rather idiotic task.

“Broken things must be fixed,” he said. “Also, if the front is closed up, looters and thieves are less likely to come inside.”

“I mean, why follow us back here?”

“Because you didn’t come after me when I left,” he said. “And I heard the shouting and the crash.”

“You could have walked into a killing mob.”

“Yes.”

It was so cold standing next to him that I might as well have been immersed in a snow bank, but I kept bending and handing, bending and handing, and the effort kept a core of warmth in my body. He remained intent on the glass, spreading in its patchwork frame back across the gap more quickly than I would have believed possible. I could not discern what he was doing without a mirror to watch him in, but somehow he was able to knit the glass together by tracing the breaks with a hand.