Cold Steel

Page 106

He got back out of bed and pulled on trousers and shirt before opening the curtains. The view revealed a snowy meadow and ice-spackled stream but no people, although I heard the hum of troubled voices. “I had hoped to stay here a few days to rest, but we’ll have to move on at once. If you feel strong enough after staying awake all night and stabbing miscreants.”
“Of course I feel strong enough! Do you think I am some delicate flower?”
He buttoned up the dash jacket. “Of course not, love. Delicate and flower are two of the last words I would ever consider using to describe you, along with quiet, placid, cautious, and frail.”
“That’s six words.”
“So it is. You did a fine job mending the jacket, love.”
“My thanks,” I replied primly, although I was secretly relieved the work satisfied his fastidious eye. “By the way, the town’s djeli spent the night in the passage.”
Vai drew his cold steel and spun a shiver of cold magic so I could draw mine. Then he pulled the chair away from the door and threw it open.
Seen through the open door, the djeli rose from the bench. “My lord!”
“Is this the hospitality your village offers?”
“My lord! We feel nothing but shame. The malcontents who attacked you are dealt with.”
“As they should be. By what means will you see us safely conveyed to our destination?”
“The headman has already told me to offer his carriage and outriders to convey you to White Bow House in Sala, my lord. Will that be acceptable?”
“At once! We require provisions for the journey. I assume there are staging points and mage inns along the route?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Vai shut the door and turned to me. “The sooner we’re out of here, the easier I’ll feel.”
“Probably he means the outriders to slaughter us on the road.”
“I doubt it. This is a well-maintained cottage. The arrangement with the cold mages must benefit the headman enough for it to be worth his while to take so much care. Our gear?”
“Everything has been capably cleaned and repaired.”
The coach arrived so quickly that I suspected they had been waiting for us to wake up, meaning to get us out of town before there was more trouble. People gathered under the cold lens of the sky to watch as we left the cottage. Women covered the eyes of their children, as if my gaze might wither the innocent. At the back of the crowd, thin young men stared at the coach with sullen contempt. The djeli handed in heated bricks, a basket of provender, and a bottle of wine while offering a fulsome apology for the disrespect we had endured. Vai thanked him, shut the door, then leaned across me to close the shutters as a whip snapped and the coach began rolling.
“I see no point in allowing them to stare. We can’t change the minds of the ones who hate and fear us, not like this. Are you feeling better, love? I mean, after everything we saw.”
“If you mean the ugly words that hateful old man said to me, I see he meant to poison me against my mother. All he did was make me love and admire her more. Do mages simply kill anyone who tries to assault one of the Houseborn?”
“At Four Moons House, criminals were sent to the mines.”
“I wonder under what conditions they labor there.”
“I don’t know,” admitted Vai, “but everyone in my village knew that people sent to the mines never returned.”
On the first day the carriage rolled uneventfully through the winter countryside. An outrider went ahead to alert each next stage that we were coming. By the second day I was surprised at how good the roads were, until the coachman informed me that they had been built in the last ten years with indentured local labor under the supervision of soldiers. Before that, he said, the journey would have taken a month on a cart track.
At dusk on the third day we rolled into the courtyard of an isolated inn out in the middle of nowhere. No one bustled to assist us. The watering trough had been smashed to pieces.
An outrider came running from the stables. “My lord, the place has been ransacked and defaced.”
Vai and I drew our swords. Under Vai’s mage light we investigated the two-room inn and the stove house and kitchen behind. Every piece of furniture had been stripped out except a wooden slops bucket with a leaking bottom, filled with frozen excrement. Shattered floorboards exposed the pillars of the hypocaust system, on which were painted curses. Amulets plaited with animal bones, withered leaves, and chicken feathers caked with dried blood hung from the lintels.
Outside, Vai called over the most senior outrider, a quiet man who performed his duties and kept the younger men in line. “Speak honestly and I give my word I will hear your speech without reprisal. Why do the people here hate cold mages so much they would do this?”