Cold Magic

Glory loosens the tongue! He rattled on in that clipped, arrogant way he had.

“That’s why I was given the honor and the privilege of this assignment.”

There I sat, an honor and a privilege. The contract sealed by magic. Why on earth did Four Moons House want a daughter of the Barahal clan?

He twisted in his seat, flipped the latch, and slid open the window set into the back of the coach. Behind us, the glare of light made bright the sky, roofs limned as with a painter’s knife, licks of flame curling skyward at erratic intervals as skeins of fuel caught. There was an ammonia sting in the air that made my eyes water and a flavor odder still that I wasn’t familiar with.

The flames illuminated his satisfied smile. “Done well, if I must say so. Completely destroyed! They were sure I was too inexperienced to manage it!”

He was talking about the conflagration! I wasn’t the honor and the privilege at all. To him, I was an afterthought, a mere task.

We sloped around a corner and rumbled down a deserted street, its doors and gates shut against the night. He snapped shut the board and sank back into the cushioned seat. The winds had died. The roil and clamor of the conflagration and the hunting, furious mob faded. One by one, the bells ceased their toll as fire horns woke in the distance, calling men to man the water brigades.

“What did you do?” I demanded.

“The airship, of course. Weren’t you paying attention?”

“The airship?”

“I destroyed the airship of course.”

“You destroyed the airship?”

“Must you repeat everything I say?”

Of course, the mage Houses hated airships. They hated the busy technology of combustion, the scalding power of steam, the schemes and contraptions imported across the ocean by those cursedly clever trolls and their treacherous human allies in faraway Expedition. While foreign engineers were lecturing on design principles in the halls of the academy, a House had sent its agent into the Rail Yard where the huge airship from Expedition was being stabled.

Gracious Melquart! The man had walked arrogantly into the academy library and used their scholarly materials to figure out how and where and when to do it!

“You did it alone?” For I wondered where the eru had been, and what manner of creature the coachman might actually be. Perhaps he was human, as he appeared to my eye, but perhaps he was not. Unlike the man I had been forced to marry, I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe I comprehended everything.

“You doubt I could?” he retorted dangerously.

“Since I know nothing about you or Four Moons House, I’m scarcely likely to have any opinion on that subject, am I?”

“Spoken resentfully! You should be cognizant of the honor shown to you by Four Moons House, established by the Diarisso lineage, who with their sorcery brought so many families and households safely across the desert.” For a breath, a sniff, a blink, a humbled tone of awed respect for these ancestors shone in his voice like the glimmer of sunlight on water. Then the tone was gone. “Certainly I did not expect to find myself bound in such a way, to a person—” He broke off.

“I was never told of any sort of contract.”

“It falls to the mansa to speak to you of the contract. For now, it would be better if we were silent.”

“I don’t even know your name!”

“My name?”

“Must you repeat everything I say?” But my embarrassed and pathetic counterthrust sailed right past him, missing its mark.

“It was spoken in the contract to seal the binding. Weren’t you listening?”

Anger is better than tears. “Did it ever occur to you that I might have been too stunned to listen? That I had no expectation, no warning. Did you even think—” I gulped down tears. I could not go on. I had humiliated myself in front of him, and that was the very last thing I ever wanted.

He exhaled sharply, as at a powerful emotion. The illumination dimmed until the interior was mostly shadow. He settled back on the cushions and closed his eyes. We rolled along. Now and again the coachman’s whip snapped, a sound like the crack of kindling fire, although combustion of all things is anathema to the cold magic so assiduously nurtured and cultured and studied for so many generations by the mage Houses that wove their power out of the vast breathing spirit of ice that is the soul of the hidden Ancestors.

At length he stirred, then spoke barely above a whisper, as though he feared the servants outside might hear and thus gain power over him by the rule of naming. “Andevai Diarisso Haranwy.”

Still embarrassed, I could not resist prodding him. “You name yourself in the Roman style, I collect. Yet you are obviously not of Roman descent.”