Cold Steel

I pushed down the latch as we rumbled along the drive. As the door swung open I leaned out, feet in the coach and body braced on the door. The coach came to a halt just out of sight around the last curve of the drive from the House.

I hopped out. The coachman touched the brim of his cap in salute. The eru leaped onto the roof of the coach in a tremor of unseen wings. I wrapped the shadows around me and ran alone up to the House.

45

Four Moons House resembled a princely palace, with a broad forecourt, a grand portico reached by a series of stepped terraces, and an imposing building anchored by round rooms at either end and wings stretching behind to enclose interior gardens. A curtain-like shimmer of heat pushed smoke skyward from the back of the building. With cracks and bangs, windows, walls, and furniture shattered, broke, fell as the flames ate forward through the structure like a fiery leviathan devouring its helpless prey.

A troop of soldiers stood on the portico facing toward the House, their rifles trained on the doors to prevent anyone inside from venturing out. Six young fire mages were ranged along the steps, each with a cold mage huddled in front being used as a catch-fire, although it seemed to my eye that they weren’t trying to raise fire as much as simply control the six magisters. Most likely there were other fire mages elsewhere around the estate. I had no idea how many had followed Drake and how many had been left behind with Camjiata’s army.

About thirty people, mostly women, knelt on the highest terrace. White-haired elders and slender youths were treated with equal disrespect. I recognized Serena among them, but I did not see Vai’s mother or sisters.

Drake stood like a hero on the topmost step. Wrapped as I was within the threads of the worlds, I could easily see the geometry of his fire magic, the way he cast threads of backlash into all thirty of these mages. He had not the cacica’s skilled and delicate touch. In her hands catch-fires were lit with a nimbus glow as the threads of their magic spun north to the far ice and through the spirit world and back again into the mortal world. These catch-fires blazed too brightly, flooded with more power than they could channel even though it was shared between them.

Only one mage still stood, braced upright by sheer force of will.

The well of Vai’s power shone as radiant a blue as the sacred wells of the Antilles. Given so much fuel to burn, Drake’s fire raged. He was pouring his fire into the palace and his backlash into the thirty cold mages. Even split among them it was obviously too much for them to handle, for many were too young or too ill or too elderly to sustain the heat. Vai was pulling streams of backlash out of them and into himself, to stop any one of them from flooding and thus dying.

That was how Drake was controlling Vai: Not by using him as a catch-fire but by forcing him to protect the people he felt responsible for. Of course the mansa had named him heir! The mansa had finally understood that once saddled with the burden, Vai would never lay it down.

I ran back to the coach, hopping up onto the sideboard.

“Mansa! Drake has trapped many of your people inside the house. If the fire isn’t killed at once, they’ll all die. But he’s using all the remaining magisters as catch-fires. I don’t know how you can possibly kill that much fire.” I looked up at the eru, standing on top of the coach. “Cousin! Can you raise a storm?”

Cold wings opened as the eru bloomed into her true face. Her third eye blazed, blue ice. “Best hasten,” she said in a ringing bell voice. “The fire grows.”

Blades of sleet sliced the air as the coachman whipped the horses forward with a “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!”

As we swung around the corner, heat poured into my face and dark clouds surged overhead. The coach pulled up. The mansa climbed out and strode forward to face the man who was destroying his home. I leaped out after him, wreathed in my shadows, unseen.

Soldiers spun around to aim rifles at the coach, but every rifle clicked dead, for the mansa’s cold magic killed their spark. Snow hissed across the burning building. The flames began to die.

With an ease that astounded me, Drake flung a thread of backlash into the mansa. At once the falling snow ceased, and the mansa staggered as a twisting skin of light surged around his body. He had no choice but to let the backlash pour through him, because if he did not allow it to kill his magic, it would kill him.

“Now, Cousin!” I called, closing the door of the coach to protect Bee.

Drake’s eyes widened as he took in the sight of the eru standing atop the coach.

She spread her wings, their span like winter. Ice glittered along the manes and coats of the horses as she beat her wings to fan the storm. Cold cracked down over all, flames wavering beneath blasts of snow.