Cold Magic

Pasturage spread green where hills sloped upward in the distance. A hare sprang alongside the road, heading back in the direction we had come. Cattle grazed meekly under the watchful eye of half-grown lads who turned their heads to watch us rumble past. No doubt we were an unusual sight. Toll roads were traveled only by those who could afford carriages, and in any case at this time of year with winter breathing down off the ice, folk did not like to travel. I was suddenly wishing for Bee, to draw strength from her presence, but I was alone. A black cane bumped against my booted feet. I stared at it, but in daylight it was just an ordinary cane. It is strange what the mind can dream up when it is frightened. Wishful thinking, as Bee would say, will sting you when you stick your nose too deep into a sweet-smelling flower.

For a while we ran alongside a rail track. I leaned forward to get a better look as we passed a tiny depot where a long rail car sat on the siding, a new team of horses being harnessed to the vehicle as passengers paced the station walk. One man, rigged out in an ankle-length worsted coat like a radical, shook a fist in our direction.

CURLING GAP, the depot sign said. I recognized the name of a village on the edge of the outer district of the city of Newfield. If we were passing Newfield, that meant we were traveling northeast on the Adurnam-to-Camlun Pike. I reached to unlatch the shutter, but my husband’s sharp gesture checked me.

“You can’t open that shutter.”

“I just wanted to see if I could see the Newfield round tower,” I protested. “It’s very famous.”

“You can’t open that shutter,” he repeated, as if I were a simpleton.

I did not want to argue a trifle—I did not want to argue at all, although smacking my fist into his face seemed an attractive option—so I twisted my fingers together to make sure they didn’t attempt something I would later regret. Instead, I stared out the open window on his side: rectangular farmhouses flanked by granaries and byres, rubbish heaps at pasture’s edge, here and there a village of the distinctive round houses that my father had noted were known especially among the northwestern Celtic tribes and certain of the Mande tribes who had fled West Africa over three hundred years ago.

The man I had to call my husband sat opposite me, arms crossed as he stared out the window. He seemed to be looking inward, mulling deep thoughts like spiced wine. He was still smudged and stained from his night’s adventures: a torn sleeve, a streak like mud on his left cheek, a chaff of straw caught in his carefully trimmed beard. He had a proud face more Afric than Celtic and very handsome eyes, of the kind Bee loved to swoon over, so brown they were almost black, thickly lashed and finely formed. He had boasted of destroying an airship. He had been glad to do it, no matter its cost to others in material and labor. Perhaps in lives.

He shifted forward, and I averted my gaze hastily, but he wasn’t interested in me. The road was beginning to rise into the chalk hills. Somewhere up here stood the famous windmill, but because it lay on the western side of the road and my shutter remained closed, I had no chance to see it. We drove into a wood of black pine, and soon I saw nothing but pine beyond the ditches that flanked the raised roadbed.

He grabbed his own cane—polished ebony inlaid with gold—and, thrusting it out the open window, rapped the side of the carriage.

“The beacon!” he called.

The coachman cracked his whip, and horses and coach swerved off the road. I braced myself for a jolting fall, but rather than crashing down into a ditch, we rolled along two dirt strips with grass grown between that cut through the pinewoods. The air grew abruptly colder. Under the dark thatch of branches, the rain ceased prattling on the roof. We scraped along dry ground that hadn’t seen rain this day and shortly afterward jerked to a halt.

He opened the door without waiting for the footman, leaped out, and strode away. I sat shivering. When nothing happened except for the horses stamping and slobbering, I slid along the seat to the door and jumped to the ground. The dense pinewoods lay behind and somewhat below us. I gazed onto a landscape empty of human presence, a rolling, open countryside of smooth-shouldered hills and a single high beacon of a hill—Brigands’ Beacon, most likely—rising where a pale chalk track wound up its grassy slope. He was walking up the slope toward the crest of the hill.

The carriage rested near a fire circle, a neat ring of stones within which lay the charred remains of branches and, beside it, a small byre sheltering stacked firewood. The coachman walked among the team, offering the bucket to each beast in turn, and although the liquid was clear as water and sloshed in a waterlike manner, I could not help but think there was something strange about the way the cloudy light glinted in the drops that spattered from the horses’ muzzles after they’d had their drink.