Cold Steel

“I am puzzled that you speak of unscrupulous spies as if you are innocent in this regard, since we have already established that you sent the cold mage to spy in Expedition,” retorted Bee. I could tell by her flushed cheeks and brilliant gaze that she was just getting warmed up. “Or do you mean to advance the argument that what is wrong for us to do is right for you to do? If we even were spies for General Camjiata, which we are not. I do not know what arrangements the Hassi Barahal clan made in the past with the general, but I assure you, Magister, that the day my parents handed Cat over to Four Moons House to spare me from being married off to a cold mage against my will, was the day I considered myself emancipated from their selfish affections.”

His eyes narrowed. “A fine and affecting speech, but I must suppose that legally you are still bound to them because you are an unmarried woman and such maidens can never be guardians of themselves.”

Bee laughed so sarcastically that everyone in the kitchen jumped as at a gunshot. “By which you mean to say, men like you do not wish such women to be guardians of themselves.”

He ignored her in favor of measuring my body. “I must assume you seduced Andevai in the usual way. You have that look about you that may make a young man feel hunger.”

At the boardinghouse I had learned to scold any man who ogled me in such an insulting way, and I usually succeeded in getting the other customers to laugh at him.

Bee murmured, “Cat! Don’t!”

But I did.

“Rather, I would say that radical principles seduced him. Really, Your Excellency, you have only yourself to blame. Why should he serve an unjust system as if he were a horse placed in harness who has no choice but to pull lest he be whipped if he balks? Even so, Vai made you a vastly generous offer. If you would release the village of Haranwy from the clientage it has labored under for generations, he promised to serve you loyally. He would have sacrificed his own freedom and happiness to assure their liberty. You laughed at him.”

“I did nothing so crude as laugh. I gave him his sister’s freedom, when in truth she ought to have been bred to see if more cold mages could be produced out of that family. It was far more than I needed to do!”

“Kayleigh is not a brood mare!”

His lack of recognition betrayed that he had no idea that Vai’s sister was named Kayleigh. “That I released her shows my appreciation for his value to Four Moons House. We may hope he will sire children on you who have some measure of the strength he has—”

“I’m not a brood mare either!”

“—but the genealogies sung by the djeliw tell us that cold mages with such deep roots rarely breed children who possess as much potency. To think how many advantageous matches the House lost now he is wasted on you! We might have sent him on a successful Grand Tour and afterward prosperously negotiated for three or even four wives for one such as him. Even if he does not sire powerful children, many Houses are willing to make the try for grandchildren out of such a mage. Each marriage creates a rope that binds us and makes us stronger for the coming war.”

“Vai is not a stallion to be put out to stud!”

“He is what I choose to make him.”

Bee tapped me sharply on the forearm to shush me.

“Are you saying your own children are not as potent cold mages as you so obviously are, Magister?” she asked with a sweet smile that startled the mansa and made the old djeli make a sign to avert disaster. “Have you no lofty sons to inherit your princely seat as mansa of Four Moons House? Are you forced to conceive the awful thought that the young cold mage best suited to become mansa after you is a humble young man born to people who have been enslaved by clientage for so many generations that you cannot think of them as anything except lowborn inferiors whom you may breed like livestock? Yet think! The son of a prince may rule whether he do so wisely or well, and he shall have advisors and kinsmen to steady him. But the son of a magister who has no magic cannot be given magic, can he?”

The temperature in the room dropped precipitously, making my eyes sting and my lips go dry. The mansa strode to the stove. With a look, he drove the soldiers from the kitchen. Accompanied by a horrible groaning strain, the door of the stove buckled.

I kicked over the table and dragged Bee down behind it just as the thick iron door shattered like the hull of a boat shot to splinters. Bee screamed. Shards of metal thunked into the table so hard that a few almost pierced through, their jagged blades the visible threat of his astonishing power. My ears rang. My breathing was all torn to pieces.

“Blessed Tanit shelter us,” whispered Bee, her complexion gone a sickly gray-white.