He passed over a huge cloth bag so weighted with coins I had to set it on the floor, for it was too heavy for me to easily hold. I picked out a denarius by feel, hopped out, and dashed into a benighted coffee shop where men whispered in frightened voices about the suddenly extinguished lights. With so much confusion it was easy to place the denarius on the counter and take four full mugs back to the coach, one for each of us. I wanted to be wide- awake.
As the horses stamped we stood on the street and drank our coffee.
“My thanks,” said the coachman.
“Sharp and nutty,” said the eru, “with a taste of sun.”
When I had drained my cup, I wiped a finger along the bottom and let the latch lick the last drops off my skin.
“Mmm,” murmured the latch. “I like that!”
“What do you think?” I asked my sire.
An owl swooped down out of the night and landed atop the coach, golden eyes unblinking.
“I think it is time to go,” he said. “The courts are waiting.”
I looked him in the eye. His amber stare was just like mine. “It’s what you made me for, is it not? To be the sacrifice.”
A smile ghosted across his lips, then vanished as he glanced toward the owl and shook his head to remind me that the courts heard and saw everything he heard and saw, just as he could hear and see through the eyes of his Hunt. “All the others before you died. So are you trapped, little cat. You will never be free…”
His voice faded as on words left unsaid, for there were words he dared not say within the hearing of the owl because he was not the owl’s master. The owl was spying on him.
But I could guess.
As a young man in the mage House, Vai had known in his heart all along that he might as a magister gain the power and glory granted him because of his magic, but he would not be free as long as his village was bound in clientage. A prince among slaves is still a slave. Freedom cuts in every direction. No one is truly free, if even one person lies in chains.
I knew what I had to do.
As the coach rolled on I unbraided my hair and combed it out with my fingers. Let the courts be dazzled by its beauty! I pinched my cheeks to make sure they glowed, and moistened and bit my lips so they shone. My sire watched in silence, his expression a mask of ice.
Feeling bolder, I opened the shutters on both doors and gazed out over both the mortal world and the spirit world. On Hallows’ Night, the coach traveled in both worlds at once.
The spirit world flashed past in changing aspects, all the possibilities that might ever have been and every gradient between: a world in which the mansa ruled, and one in which he suffered an early death in the hold of a ship, and one in which he owned a shop and sold white damask to women who would take it away and dye it into all the colors and patterns they could dream of.
In the mortal world we sped across the quiet waves of the Mediterranean Sea and past the spice-laden markets of Qart Hadast, the jewel of ports. The fields and trees of north Africa trailed away as bands of desert crept their fingers into the green. A long lonely stretch of golden rock and pale dunes passed beneath us until we reached a salt mine. The enterprising miners in the Malian Empire had broken through to an ancient gateway between the worlds and inadvertently unleashed the ghouls who craved the salt of mortal blood and being.
Wind blew grit into the interior of the coach. The land was so quiet where once people had lived and worked and thrived, where they would do so again. The coach rocked from side to side, bucketing as we descended into the pit. Salt links the worlds. Each gate swirls with energy, the power of transition and transformation. These threads bind us all.
The shutters slammed shut. I caught in a breath, the coach jolted to a stop, and all the air punched out of me. My entire body went numb.
My sire leaned forward until his face almost touched mine. “You must be what I made you to be, Daughter.”
“Yes,” I said, because I had finally understood what he wanted the day he had encased Four Moons House in ice. “After that, Sire, you will give up all claim to me and mine. For that matter, you will also give up any claim to bind any of your children who do not wish to be bound.”
He extended a hand in the radical manner, and we shook to seal our bargain.
“By the way, may I have that big bag of coin?”
“Yes. I have no use for it.”
The latch opened the door; the steps bumped down although the eru had not disembarked. That the eru acted as footman was a courtesy for mortal eyes, for the coach was as alive as I was.
My sire climbed out. I grappled with the bag of coins, slinging it over my back despite its distracting weight. No sensible young woman raised in an impoverished family walks away from a pot of gold, even if she may never get a chance to spend it.
I took in and released a breath for courage, and I went out after him. With a hand braced on the threshold of the coach door and my feet still on the steps, I paused to survey my ground as a general may do before a battle.
The palace of the courts lay before me, the realm of both shadow and light, as deep as the murkiest pit and as high as the brightest peak. What Vai had seen as a nest of starving ghouls determined to drain him of his blood, I had seen as a grand feast populated by elegantly clothed and peacock-feathered personages who had grown accustomed to their harvest. Hard to say which was true. Maybe they both were.
The Hunt surged in the air as a mass of boiling black cloud, my brothers and sisters. I saw crows and spotted hounds, smart-mouthed hyenas and silent vipers. A cloud of wasps and a spinning web of spiders jostled against women with lions’ heads and men with the bodies of fish. Dire wolves prowled in their packs shoulder to shoulder with the tawny beauty of the big cats. Yet the hunters had been bound to serve not nature’s course but the courts’ desire.
The coach and horses were not touching the ground. I was pretty sure they could not.
I glanced back at the eru holding on at the back and ahead to the coachman sitting on the driver’s bench at the front. The eru regarded me with all three eyes. “This is as far as we can take you, Cousin,” she said.
I smiled. “Whatever happens, I want to thank you for the trust you’ve shown in me and the trust I’ve been able to give to you. Should things fall out in such a way that you discover leisure to do as you wish at some later date, my solicitor can be found at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch in the city of Havery, where you picked me up.”
The coachman raised his whip in salute.
I jumped awkwardly down into the pit, shifted the heavy bag on my shoulders, and with my sword in hand walked forward after my sire. The pit had become a resplendent plaza crowded with hungry courtiers. They slipped and slid about so much I could not count them, but I began to think they were far fewer than I had first believed. They just took up so much room and never stopped grasping and moving. Eager to get their drop of the rich feast, they parted to make a path for us that led straight to the dais of glittering salt.
On the dais stood four chairs beaten out of gold and four stools carved from obsidian. As my sire approached, human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: they who ruled as the day court and the night court, for the spirit world was washed by both light and dark. What manner of people they were I could not tell: Were they spirit creatures who had begun to lose the ability to change and had thus become more and more solid? Ancestors who craved a rigid sort of immortality? Elders who stood in relation to humans much as dragons did to the feathered people? I did not know, and right now I was not going to find out.
The courts awaited the sacrifice. Chains like whips lashed my sire to his knees before them. He knelt, but he did not bend his head; his lips were drawn back as if he wished to growl. The Hunt stirred with myriad hisses and chortles and howls and snarls.
“Give us what is ours.” The voice of the courts thundered, many in one. “So you are required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”
They ignored me, so I walked past him and planted myself in front of the dais, facing up to their chairs.
