Cold Steel

Devyn translated into his weirdly archaic and broken Latin. “To you, Magister, we are honored to be giving guest rights. Your magic is strong. You have captured the god’s beast and trapped her in the form of a woman. But in this village the beast cannot be staying. She bears malice toward us by wearing the face of one of our dead.”

“She is my wife,” Vai repeated. “Not a beast. We need shelter for the night. We will go on in the morning.”

“No shelter can we be giving you unless the priest pours the offerings and the god grants his blessing.”

Vai’s lips thinned. I had a feeling that he was trying to decide whether to terrify them with a frightening display of cold magic.

“It can’t hurt to go to the temple.” My teeth were beginning to chatter even with the fur blanket wrapped around me.

“Very well, love. But only because you say so.” He turned to the headman. The arrogant tilt of his chin lent curtness to his words, reminding me of when I had first met his withering disdain. “Because the hour is late and I do not engage in debate on the street, I will allow you to escort us to the temple. You personally will attend me, as befits my consequence and your hospitality. I expect a decent meal, hot drink, and fur cloaks and gloves to make up for this unwarranted insult.”

The old man was obviously unaccustomed to being spoken to in this manner, but he touched hands to his bowed head and, to my surprise, himself took the reins of Vai’s horse as would a servant. Villagers followed us in procession: women draped in long shawls, men wrapped in wool capes, children swaddled in pelts. At the outskirts of the village we passed between a row of granaries set up on stilts. Beyond the granaries a lane entered a rocky pasture. The moon’s light was so bright I could see the shape of every rock tumbled in the field, every face breathing into the frigid night.

The temple grounds were surrounded by a ditch and stockade. The procession halted in front of a plank bridge that spanned the ditch. Vai dismounted, so I did as well.

He turned to the headman. “You will accompany us.”

The man answered, and Devyn translated. “We are forbidden.”

“Then we will go alone.” Vai took the reins of the horse that carried our gear and led it over the bridge. Moonlight gleamed on the skulls of cattle set in rows at the bottom of the ditch. I touched the hilt of my sword.

“Do not draw your blade in this holy place unless you are threatened,” he said softly.

“I feel threatened.”

The stockade had no gate, rather an opening framed by two stone pillars. The pillars each had three niches, and in each niche rested a human skull. Their staring silence made my skin crawl.

“Let me sneak in ahead to make sure there’s no ambush,” I whispered.

His cold fire vanished, leaving him and the horse like ashen ghosts under the moon. I wrapped myself in shadows. Beyond the gate a path sprinkled with white stones led down by stair-steps into a hollow. I crept not into a stone building as Romans would have built nor the kind of open-air sanctuary lined with pillars in which Kena’ani worshiped.

I walked into a grove of oak trees. Oaks certainly could not flourish this far north, yet here they were, fully leafed as if with summer, their canopies meeting over my head. Between the trees rose poles from which hung lamps, each one burning a sweet-smelling oil. The smoky heat breathed like summer. Had I passed back into the spirit world?

No. For they were not living trees. They were dead trunks decorated with tin and copper foliage. Wind brushed a tinkling whisper through the metal leaves.

Beside a bricked-in hearth, a man sat on a stool. A huge bronze cauldron hung over the fire. Its polished surface glimmered in the twisting light of the flames. The face of a horned man shone in the curve of the cauldron, and it watched me as with living eyes.

The man at the fire turned. He heard me, although I could sneak as quietly as any mouse. He saw me, although I concealed myself within the shadows. I knew at once who he was. I resembled him in some ways more than I did my mother, for he was darker than his children. There was mage House blood in him.

I did not know what language he spoke, yet I understood him perfectly.

“Beast, we have not invited you to enter. Trouble us no longer, you who come to haunt us wearing my dead daughter’s face. Begone. I banish you.”

“I’m not a spirit! I’m Tara Bell’s child. You are my grandfather.”

“Tara is no longer my daughter. Her home and her family she gave up to follow the Roman goddess Bellona, the lady of war. All men she foreswore except the captain who took her oath to serve him, Captain Leon. She marched south into his service. Her child you cannot be, because the Amazon soldiers bear no children.”