Cold Steel

“Did you?” said Bee, shifting excitedly beside me on the facing bench. “What did you do?”

“Everything will be different here because of the proximity and mass of the ice, but…” He described how the troll scientists he had worked with had set different combinations of things on fire and adjusted him for distance, angle, and substances placed between him and the fire. They had tested his ability to manipulate cold fire at distance, and how long the brightness would last after he had let go of it. “And both the feathered people and the dragons have an effect on my cold magic.”

As they talked, I shut my eyes and pretended we were in a carriage.

After another hour we put in at an isolated sandbank. The boat became our roof as we huddled beneath like kittens under the beaver-pelt blanket and our winter coats, with Vai and Rory on the outside and Bee and me snug between them. Rory fell asleep at once.

“No kissing,” said Bee.

Vai kissed me anyway. The touch of his lips was as soft as the caress of flowers.

“The cacica warned we must beware cold mages pretending to be our friends,” I said. “But we already know the mansa of Five Mirrors House sent word to Four Moons House.”

He sighed. “Yes. I should have known better than to believe I could return to the Houses.”

“To think dragons walk among us and we never knew!” whispered Bee. By the lilt in her voice I could tell she was wide awake. “It seems to me the spirit world and the Great Smoke are locked in a struggle that neither can win. One grows powerful while the other grows weak, and then they reverse, back and forth endlessly.”

“Perhaps the interlocked worlds are like steam engines, ever heating and cooling,” said Vai.

“Gas expands as its temperature goes up, and a balloon deflates as its temperature goes down,” she murmured. “What if cold mages are moving the vital energy from one place to another?”

“I’m trying to sleep,” said Rory, and they lapsed into silence.

Tucked against Vai, I listened to him think by listening to the way he breathed steadily, sucked in a breath as a thought struck him, then slowed again as his mind waded through the possibilities. The river flowed with a soothing voice that pulled me into its drowning waters. Held in his arms and with Bee’s back pressed against mine and Rory’s soft snuffling just beyond her, I did not fear. My mother’s hand and my father’s voice had guided me home. I slept.

I woke alone in the frosty chill. A pallor of gray brushed the edges of the night, promising dawn to come. Wisp-lights trailed along the far bank.

Vai knelt beside me, a gloved hand shaking my shoulder. “Catherine, wake up.”

“I’m awake. What are those lights?”

“Troops searching the shore. We’ve got to get back out on the water.”

The Rhenus River flowed north before its final curving southwest plunge toward the vast marshy delta we in Adurnam called the Sieve, which poured through a hundred channels into the Atlantic Ocean. On this stretch of the river the current was steady but not treacherous. Vai gave us each turns at the oars. The banks were overgrown with bushes and woodland. All morning we saw no villages or fields, and only once a rider on horseback.

Just past midday and by now exceedingly thirsty and hungry, we spotted a village on the western bank marked by the round houses typical of northwestern Celts. It appeared to be a peaceful place, folk about the spring business of sharpening plowshares and milking ewes. We pulled into a backwater and tied up.

The village was larger than it seemed from the river, with a pair of temples and a blacksmith’s forge at the intersection of two cart tracks. The crossroads was marked by a stone carved with the image of a seated man with antlers on his head, who held a snake in one hand and an armband in the other. Called Carnonos in my mother’s village, he had other names elsewhere and was often called a god, but I knew the figure was a depiction of the Master of the Wild Hunt, who in the old tales guided the souls of the dead across the veil that separates this world from the spirit world. My father had recorded one such tale in a journal: Everyone knew the worst thing in the world was to walk abroad after sunset on Hallows’ Night, when the souls of those doomed to die in the coming year would be gathered in for the harvest.

The Hallows’ Hunt was, my father had opined, a way for people to comprehend the unexpected nature of death. The old tale had not spoken of blood and chains. Had the Wild Hunt always hunted blood to feed the courts? Not according to the old tales. Likewise, had young women always walked the dreams of dragons? For it certainly seemed that dragons had somehow planted a seed whose fruit had become dragon dreamers.