Cold Magic

“What a fool you are!” said the mansa.

“Mansa,” said the djeli, “you can send out a young person on your errand to rest your feet, but it won’t rest your heart. Let me discover what has happened.” He turned to face me, extended a hand palm up in a gesture that might have seemed reassuring if it were not a spell to call my voice to speak truth. “Is yours the blood of the Hassi Barahal clan?”

I opened my mouth to speak, and then I closed it, because the word I wanted to say would not come out. All I could say was, “So I have always been told.”

A sick dread crawled in my belly. I swayed, sure I was about to faint. Andevai stared at me as if I were a serpent that had reared up to confront him. To contest him.

To cheat him.

“They said—!” he exclaimed. “They said she was the eldest Barahal daughter.”

“Is that what they said?” asked the djeli. “They must have chosen their words carefully, knowing the contract was sealed by magic.”

“What are you saying?” Andevai whispered, face ashen, his triumph in ruins.

“It seems there is no Barahal blood in her at all,” said the mansa in a voice so soft it should not have made me shudder like a leaf tossed in a tremendous gale, and yet it might as well have been a roar. “And you, Andevai, you are too much a fool to have seen the trap even as they sprang it. How they must be laughing now. I wonder, how have we transgressed that a child born into a village of simpleminded field hands, the children of the children of slaves, should be a vessel of such abundant cold magic? And yet, in the end, one may as well have tried to train a dog to dance.”

“But I destroyed the airship—”

“That was the lesser of your assignments. The marriage was the crucial one. So much at stake! And you brought us this useless female!”

“Mansa,” Andevai said desperately.

“Get rid of her.”

Andevai grabbed my arm and dragged me to the door, pushed it open, and shoved me out. I staggered a few steps before I caught myself short and turned, knowing I must go back inside and ask a question or demand an explanation.

Andevai shut the door in my face. I sank to my knees, sagged against the door, and winced back from the touch of iron bands so cold they burned.

There is no Barahal blood in her at all. All strength sapped from me, I collapsed forward along the floor. No Barahal blood at all.

I lay this charge on you as well, Aunt had said to me when I was only six years old, when I had come to live with them, that you must protect Bee, for there will come a time when she will need your protection.

Four Moons House had wanted Bee all along.

That being so, what did it make me?

The sacrifice.

17

Lying against the door, too weak to rise, I could hear them perfectly.

“How can it even be possible that you—even you—after all the struggle we’ve undertaken to educate you properly—could have made such a fundamental and devastating error?”

“Mansa,” interposed the djeli. “There is no canoe so big that it may not sink. Also, he is young.”

The magister snorted. “You have always favored him. Did you breed the filly who birthed him?”

Air can change consistency when the temperature drops suddenly, as it might once a year when the rare ice blizzards swept down off the glacial shelf. My lips stiffened and I thought for an instant I could lick ice out of the air.

“Andevai!” The djeli spoke firmly. “Control yourself!”

“My mother did not—”

“Do not wield your anger against the mansa. It is forbidden.”

“My mother did not—”

“Your mother,” agreed the djeli, “is by all reports a woman as strong as iron, industrious, forgiving, even-tempered, and loyal. Mansa, it serves no purpose to insult a woman who does not stand here to defend herself. The young man knows who his parents are. That is all I have to say on the matter. Now I am finished with it.”

“I hear what you have said, Bakary,” said the mansa. “Yet can it be that in his arrogance he has forgotten his mother is alive only due to our generosity? It is we who obtain at much difficulty and cost the medicine that staves off her illness. Has he forgotten what his village owes Four Moons House? Remind him!”

The djeli sighed, then spoke in a cadence something like song and something like poetry.

“It is the Diarisso lineage that possessed the handle of power, the essence of spirit, which in the old country we called nyama.

“It is the Diarisso who warded off the terror that came out of the bush, that which attacked the great empire, the cities and towns and villages, the fields and houses.