Cold Steel

A moment later several young fire mages and a few more soldiers came running around the side of the building, chased by a saber-toothed cat. They, too, surrendered in abject fear, but the instant the cat saw the Master of the Wild Hunt, he turned tail and ran.

I knelt beside Vai and bent to rest my cheek lightly against his lips. The whistling of his labored breathing calmed me. He was alive. Yet that was not his breath whistling. A teakettle hiss shivered the air. Pinpricks of ice jabbed my skin. Crystals grew out across the scorched and blackened front of the building. Ice spread in curves and scallops, cones and six-sided lacework.

Years ago ice had devoured Crescent House.

Now ice was engulfing Four Moons House.

I could no more stop my sire than I could stop winter.

“Bee!” I cried, waving her forward from where she peered out the coach door. “Hurry!”

Without looking to see if she followed, I ran over the threshold into the building, looking neither to my left nor to my right. The path I had taken on the day the husband I had not wanted had brought me here remained fixed in my mind so clearly it took no effort for me to turn right, left, left, and then right to reach the long salon I recalled all too well. Its glass doors looked onto an interior garden enclosed by the wings of the House and a high stone wall behind.

The mural painted along the salon’s walls, depicting the Diarisso ancestors guiding their kinsfolk and retainers and slaves along the hidden paths of the waterless desert to safety, had peeled and smeared and turned brown in patches where flames had begun to eat through the walls. Yet the strong-as-iron women and handsome men clothed in gold and orange strode undaunted, their chains of magical power and secret knowledge wreathing them like vines. The paint glittered with flashes of light as ice penetrated the walls. It made the mural seem to move, as if the ancestors were walking still into the future they had made for themselves out of the devastation of what they had been forced to leave behind.

The glass doors opening onto the garden had cracked and shattered from the heat. I wrapped the hem of my skirt around my hand and opened metal latches so hot they burned, then kicked down the framework of glass doors sagging on their hinges.

I could not count the number of people trapped in the garden. Some had been trying to lift others out over the back wall, but judging from the shouts beyond the wall and the scorched tops of trees, I guessed that several fire mages and soldiers had been stationed there to prevent anyone from escaping. Nearby a big cat roared.

I hated Drake all over again. What manner of man cared more for his own perverted sense of honor and pride than for people’s lives?

Winter chased through the doors and kissed the air. Snowflakes drifted prettily through the chamber on a lazy wintry breeze. I shivered.

Bee did not need to be told what to do. How someone so small and lovely could bellow in quite that ear-shattering manner never failed to astound me. “Everyone! Listen! You will immediately follow me out the front doors. Now! If you stay behind, you will die.”

Her honeyed voice had the rare gift of impelling people to obey without pausing to needlessly quibble. Nor were the people of Four Moons House fools: A fire-ravaged structure would soon collapse. We did not have time to explain the real danger.

More than a hundred people had taken shelter in the garden, many of them children, women, and elders. The djeli Bakary leaned on his cane, so stiff with age he had not been able to ride with the mansa to war. I waved Bee over to help him. The old steadied the young. The young assisted the old. I sought out Vai’s mother and sisters, almost lost in the midst of the crowd as the flight began. Vai’s mother was wracked by coughing.

“Bintou, help your mother. Wasa, that’s a very fine new crutch you have. Don’t let go of it. Yes, you can take the puppy, too. I’m going to carry you.” Wasa’s weight felt like nothing when I hoisted her into my arms. Fortunately the puppy was frightened enough that it did no more than whimper in her thin arms.

Other people led the way out. Bee stayed with Bakary and the slow-moving elders at the rear. The building creaked and moaned around us. Ice bloomed in feathered ridges. Thin blades of cloudy ice popped out from the walls.

“Move! Move!”

A booming roar shuddered through the fragile chambers as part of the building collapsed. The ice kept spreading. Glittering spires grew up from the floors. Clear branches snaked down from the broken ceilings.

We staggered out onto the portico and its terraced steps. The cold mages were beginning to shake themselves, to rise, to drag their unconscious and injured brethren away from the building. I helped Vai’s mother and his sisters down to the gravel driveway, then ran back up the steps.