Cold Magic

Not until I stuck my head around the corner. A mob of torches bobbed along the street, heading toward us from both directions. Men brandished shovels and clubs and swords; behind the front line, crossbows were being leveled. Voices chanted, but fortunately the bells were so loud I couldn’t make out what the crowd was screaming beyond “kill!” and “burn!” and “revenge!”—the usual furious shouts that come right before a mob’s victims are swarmed and brutally hacked to death.

Fear came in a rush so strong that for an instant I could hear nothing except an indeterminate roaring. It seemed I would choke on terror.

A howl cracked over the mob, muffling the peal of the bells. Every burning torch shuddered and snapped out. Just like that. An icy wind blew through, shattering tree limbs and dropping men as though they’d been punched. Through the crowd rolled the coach, ghastly where the twisting light of the conflagration, still burning strong, caught in its lineaments. The horses no longer looked like flesh-and-bone beasts; they galloped about an arm’s span above the ground, the white-haired coachman flicking his whip over manes as translucent as icicles. The other creature hung off the riding board in the back, looking no longer anything like a human being but rather a storm of cold magic so powerful it began to pelt ice along the street.

They pulled up alongside us as men wailed in fear, faces pressed into the ground. The eru leaped down from the back, flipped out the stairs, and opened the coach’s door, as precisely as would any humble footman serving an exacting household. My husband climbed in without looking back, but I stared at the eru, who paused in the midst of chaos and looked right at me.

“Greetings, Cousin,” it said in a voice that sounded so perfectly normal I should not have been able to hear it above the clangor of the bells and the wail of the storm winds and the cries of the mob. “I’ll offer you a gift, if you’re inclined to accept. For I think you may need this.”

It flicked an object off the rack on the roof where boxes were tied and tossed it to me, hilt first. I caught it instinctively, felt its weight and balance mold to my grip. If there’s one thing a Barahal knows, it is the sword. For it is true we are born to a lineage long scorned, if necessary, to the rule of the powerful: that of the hired swords and spies who across the centuries have done the dirty work of princes, bankers, guilds, and mage Houses. Djeliw and bards never sang praise to us, although we Barahals had always served honorably, paid the bitter price, and finished the job.

My husband called from inside the coach. “What is taking so long? We must move.”

The horses stamped restlessly. The cold cut to my bones, and my teeth chattered. The eru turned away, and only then was I able to drag my cold-heavy legs up into the coach. I collapsed onto the seat facing him. He slammed the door shut. The stairs thunked into place beneath the undercarriage. The coach jerked forward once, twice, and a third time, slamming me back each time against the box.

The coachman shouted, “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!”

Blue sparks spun, and then we were rolling with a grinding roar along the cobbled street. I had a blinding headache.

“I didn’t see you had a cane,” he said, so surprised he sounded neither irritated nor supercilious.

I gaped, for I still felt a sword’s hilt molded as if to my hand, but when I looked, it was as if with doubled vision: a ghost sword slim and straight and gleaming, layered within and around a fashionable ebony cane like the one my husband carried, an affectation of perfectly healthy and wealthy young men that Bee and I often mocked. Where was Bee now? Was she thinking of me, sleepless, in the room we had shared for over thirteen years? Had she noticed the distant fire in a far district of the city and wondered what it signified? If it would spread? If the entire city would go down in flames?

Hastily and awkwardly, I changed the subject. “Blessed Tanit! Surely that was a mage storm. I didn’t realize you were so powerful.” Yet I was shaking in the face of the immense power raging around us, for either he had raised that storm untrammeled and barely out of breath, or he had bound an eru, a creature of the dread ice, which had raised the storm on his behalf.

Vanity blinds even powerful men to blatant attempts at distraction.

He tugged at the neck of his jacket, straightening it where it was rumpled. “My abilities were unexpected, that’s true. So unexpected that the masters of Four Moons House did not even recognize what they had until the diviners of five rival houses were caught asking questions in the villages. I was the strongest spirit in a generation, so they said, although diviners have a way of exaggerating to emphasize their own importance.”