He shrugged, humor flashing in his good-natured face. 'A man has to try, when he is smitten. Your gold eyes are a treasure as grand as they are precious. And twice as hard, for the cruel words with which you reject me.'
I laughed.
'Yannic! Get those drinks pulled!' shouted the innkeeper from the other side of the room above the hubbub of the crowd.
One of her daughters sashayed over and shoved a tray onto the bar before the man. 'You can flirt when there's no customers.'
'How can I do that if no customers means no flirts? You can't be expecting me to take up with Em again, can you? After she threw me over for Daithi, thinking him likely to gain a fine proud position as cavalry man for Falling Star House? Which he did, and more fortune to him, for he'll need it. Whilst I drown my sorrow as I may. What am I to do when a fine proud gel fetches up at my bar and talks to me with her pretty ways and golden eyes?'
'Get on with you,' she said to him. Then she winked at me.
It got quite busy, with folk calling for drink. I moved to the end of the bar and found a stool on which to perch. The innkeeper had left her ledger forgotten at one end while she bustled out among the tables as the crowd settled and more folk pressed inside having heard, I supposed, that there was music to be had for the evening. The fiddler began tuning his instrument, although how he could hear in the din I could not fathom. Idly, I flipped through the ledger's pages, for I cannot resist a book set before me no matter its kind. Writing draws my eye; I am impelled as by sorcery to read even if it is an accountant's list or a solicitor's instructions or, as here, nothing more than a record of travelers who have passed through this inn. The first entry was dated to the year of May 1824 in a hand more slanted and spiky-exceedingly old-fashioned, like that of an elder taught to write in the previous century-than the penmanship of the current landlady.
Eighteen twenty-four had been the year of Camjiata's downfall. The beginning of the end had come on Hallows Night, at the very start of the new year, with the destruction of the only mage House that supported him; his wife, Helene, had perished in a mysterious conflagration that had also consumed the estate buildings of the House. Months of battles, each more desperate than the last, had followed until his final surrender on Lughna-sad, in the month of Augustus. I noted how few travelers had stopped at the inn in the months of Maius, Junius, and Julius. No doubt folk feared moving on the roads when they could not know what trouble they might stumble upon. But in mid-Augustus, after the news of his capture spread, the dam burst. The flow of travelers picked up, hastening to do their business before the cold set in. Peddlers, coal and iron merchants, people who could not afford the toll roads, local traffic: all passed through Lemanis. Where were they going? What were they coming from? I could see the birds fly, but at this remove of years and with no more information on the page than name and date, I could have no idea what eggs if any they had in their nest.
The drummers hastened in to cheers and jibes; a swirl of frigid air kissed my nose and faded as the door was shut against the winter night. Good cheer, ale, and music will keep away unwanted spirits and untimely wraiths. Rory still sat on his bench, a giggling young woman on either side. He caught my gaze on him, lifted the mug, sipped, and made a comical face. I grinned. He did not like the ale, although I thought it a perfectly good country brew.
My gaze dropped back to the ledger, the column of dates and names.
Where I saw one entry among many, written no differently than any of the others except in my heart: 3 September 1824. Daniel Hassi Barahal, Tara Bell, and child.
26
Although the music was still playing, I went upstairs to my empty chamber and stripped down to my shift. I tossed and turned on a narrow bed but could not sleep. On midmorning of 9 September 1824, a ferry carrying upward of one hundred passengers had nosed out onto the Rhenus River on a routine crossing in fair autumn weather. It had not reached the far shore. Every soul aboard the ferry had drowned except for one child, who had been plucked by a fisherman from the deadly current.
Daniel Hassi Barahal and Tara Bell had stayed in this inn on their final, fateful journey, with a child in their care. Me. In this inn. Perhaps in this bed. I sought in my memory but found only blank pages. No, there was the man's laugh and the way my mother had held me tightly against her in a rocking coach. If she had been my mother.
Blessed Tanit! What if the real Catherine had actually drowned and Aunt and Uncle had simply found an orphan to pretend to be her? Wouldn't that make more sense?
Burrowing under the wool blankets as though safety or answers could be found beneath, I dozed fitfully and within the weaving of sleep and dreams, I found myself sailing across a blinding expanse of ice in a schooner that skated the surface of a massive ice sheet. Behind, a pack of saber-toothed cats as black as if dusted in coal pursued the ship. A personage stood beside
me. Light glinted on his brow, as if a shard of ice had gotten embedded in his forehead. I knew he was my father, and of course he looked nothing like the man named Daniel Hassi Barahal whose portrait I had once worn in a locket at my neck. I'd given away that locket to a pair of girls in Four Moons House in exchange for an open door.
An open door meant something, surely, but in my dream I could not work out the connection.
A light scratching, a rustle as the door opened, a giggle: these woke me. I buried my head under blankets, feeling the presence of too many people in the room and them engaged in rumpling the bedding.
'Rory,' I said into the blankets, 'I'm trying to sleep.'
Voices murmured, his and hers, breathy with desire; the door clicked shut, followed by footsteps slipping away to some other private place. I was, again, alone. A dreamy languor swallowed me. What would it be like to kiss Andevai? Surely he affected that trim line of beard because he knew it emphasized the aesthetically pleasing line of his jaw. A few people, like Bee, were beautiful because they were so vibrant that the gaze is drawn to them whenever they are nearby; a few have become accustomed to being praised for beauty and expect those around them to be grateful to dwell in beauty's shadow. Andevai was, apparently, vain enough to care how he looked, but what I had taken at first for arrogant vainglory I now suspected had more to do with insecurity. He did not undervalue his cold magic, but he hauled other burdens. He, too, seemed not entirely sure of what he was, caught between his village and his House.
He had pulled me back within the wards, when he might have left me out to be swept away by the tide. The ghost of the memory of his fingers entwined with mine had left its imprint on my skin.
He hadn't meant to cut me. He'd stopped himself. He'd said,
'No.' It had been an accident. He was ashamed. That's what made him act that way, gates closed and guard up.
What an idiot I was! Falling into sleep making up stories about a man I did not know and who had been commanded first to marry me, a woman he had never met, and then who, having botched the task, had been ordered to kill me. He had destroyed the airship, and perhaps lives with it. I had seen him kill two men; I knew what he was capable of. His blade's cut would have dispatched me if-for this was the only conclusion I could reach-my true father's blood, knit into my bones, had not protected me from the cut of cold steel.
His face meant nothing. It was just a face. He was a cold mage, even if he was not the actual son of Four Moons House, even if the magisters scorned him for his birth in a village they considered bound to them as unfree people little better than slaves. He was bound to the House by old laws; he was theirs to claim, to raise and train, and to unleash on the world when they needed his magic to enforce their will. Or, to be fair, to curb the excesses of the princes and lords as the magisters were said to have done in the early days of the mage Houses. As the old saying went, 'Fear the magister, but if you pay him what he demands, he'll give you what you need. If only the prince's hunger could be satisfied as easily.' Yet in these days, many hated the cold mages as much as they hated the princes and the old hereditary councils. The radicals said that those who had little because they were denied more than a pittance would, in time, rise up to demand a larger share.
1 had been content once with what I had. Now it seemed I was caught in the flooding current of a river, torn away from all I had once thought was mine. The Barahals had sacrificed me. Four Moons House wished to kill me.
