Cold Magic

Out of the crowd pushed a young woman who looked a few years younger than I was. She hurried over to the tall man and his companion. After being invited by gesture to approach, she spoke in a voice so quiet even I could distinguish nothing above the murmur of conversation among the people watching me. But she threw glances in my direction as she addressed the hunter and the woman I guessed was likely Duvai’s wife. I began to think this newcomer also looked familiar, because this was the kind of night in which I was bound to see everything in a suspicious light.

“I won’t!” said the wife with an audible anger that startled her companions.

Duvai said, “She has already asked for and been offered guest rights. To cast her out would offend the ancestors….” Again the words flew beyond my comprehension.

The girl beckoned, and I went to her. She led me to a low door set back from the main ground by a tiny, private courtyard. This was the only house with two tapers on each side of its entrance. Before we reached the threshold, the door was opened from the inside and an elderly woman looked me up and down. Before I could start with a new round of greetings, she opened the door wider and made it clear I should enter.

The earthen walls were so massively thick that the chamber within was smaller than it seemed from outside. Its single room lay mostly in shadow, and it smelled of fresh pine wreaths overlaying a tincture of soured milk and the bite of recently peeled onion. Four benches were stacked beside the door. A bed stood opposite the door. An old chest was set at the foot of the bed, and five bundles of herbs hung from the rafters. Besides the hearth set into the wall and a spinning wheel, that was all.

The elderly woman offered a bowl filled with water. I was so thirsty that I drank it all, but before I could speak to thank her, a quavering voice spoke from the bed.

Her dialect fell too thick for me to penetrate. Instead, the girl spoke for her. “Let Andevai’s bride approach the mother of this compound, if she wishes to speak.”

I would have—should have—bolted, but the words chained my heart and my feet. Maybe it was only curiosity that would kill the cat, or perhaps she who lay invalid on the bed had power enough to hold me here, even if she seemed to give me a choice in the matter. The girl I recognized too late: She was the girl I had glimpsed striding through the orchard with the other workers. Duvai, then, must be Andevai’s older brother. Impossibly—or perhaps not—I had run to exactly the wrong place. Could it be the eru and coachman had betrayed me? Yet why bother to stage an elaborate escape? More likely the mansa, or the djeli, had power enough to direct my steps this way.

The shape in the bed spoke again, and the girl repeated so I could understand.

“Just because you think you see a wolf does not mean one is there.” She added, “Mother possesses sight.”

I was breathing hard and fast. “That’s your mother? Andevai’s mother?”

“Our father’s mother, so our mother. Go to her. She won’t bite, Catherine. Your name is Catherine, isn’t it? I asked already, in the orchard—my brother’s wife will surely become a sister to me!—but he refused to let me meet you.”

The old woman spoke as in answer, and the girl grimaced and shrugged. “He’s ashamed of us. That’s what they’ve taught him there, to feel ashamed of his people.” She glanced at me sidelong and the next words were not unfriendly precisely but with a bite I had not heard in the grandmother’s tone. “Do you look down upon us also, Catherine?”

“No, no, not at all.” Now I had to approach the old grandmother lest my behavior be deemed haughty. What had I to lose by being friendly when I now knew he had rejected them? I knelt beside the bed on a pillow set there for visitors. “Grandmother, my greetings to you on this evening. Is it peaceful with you?”

We went on in this way for a while, and the longer we spoke the stock phrases that were easiest for me to understand, the better I could tease out meaning from her country way of speaking and the gaps made by words that I simply did not know. Andevai’s sister filled in what I missed. I was not even aware when the long ritual of greeting shifted into another type of conversation entirely, for ancient grandmothers generally feel they can interrogate those who enter into their circle, and I was her grandson’s wife and therefore now her daughter.

“Duvai’s wife naturally believes her husband brought a spirit woman home from the bush to take in as his second wife,” she told me, with help from her granddaughter. “That is why she took so badly against you. She is not a mean or ungenerous woman, but she is jealous of his attentions, for she believes he is a man whom all women—especially spirit women who see him walking in the bush—must desire as a husband. Also, he will become head of the family one day soon.”