A spill of water woke me. He stood naked at the side table washing his face at a basin. Seeing me awake, he slipped back into bed.
“Vai!” I cradled his face in my hands as I studied him for lines of illness. “I was so worried about you. How do you feel?”
“Rested and warm, although I’m hungry. Why would you be worried about me?” I loved the way his hands roamed, knowing just how to touch me. “Ah! You’re worried because I fell asleep last night instead of—”
“Last night? You slept two nights and a day!”
“Did I? I collapse sometimes when I weave too much cold magic for too long without rest.” His casual tone reassured me, as did the kisses he flew along my cheek. “It’s no wonder you’re disappointed and fretful.”
“To be sure! Now that you mention it, I suppose I am a trifle sulky and out of sorts, and not just because I spent all day yesterday as an adoring wife ought, lovingly mending your dash jacket while watching over you in your sickbed, and afterward stabbing a man in the hand.”
He drew back. “What?”
“Last night I stopped three men from breaking into this chamber and killing you.”
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.
“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?”
The man considered his gloved hands. “My people have been living in these lands since the dawn of time, my lord. Then in my father’s youth, the outsiders came. You mages brought down the anger of the god over all the countryside.” He glanced at me. “The mage houses and their princely allies rule us now. They take our young men to build roads and to fight, and our young women to be servants and to be shamed. For this privilege, my lord, we must be paying a tithe of our furs and meat to the mages likewise.”
Snow dusted down over us. The men watched with the caution of servants. They were five and we were two, and yet they showed no sign of being eager to attack us.
Vai spoke. “Did you know there is a man, General Camjiata, who has written a legal code that outlaws clientage? A law that says no person may own another person as property or claim another community as its possession?”
“Do you mean the Iberian Monster, my lord?” asked the senior man. Unaware of how he was twisting his hands, he had almost pulled off one of his gloves.
“You have the look of a soldier about you,” I said. “Perhaps you fought in the war twenty years ago.”
His gaze flashed to me before settling back to Vai. “We should go on, my lord. We’ll nurse the horses along and get to the next hostel. There is moonlight, and your magic, to light our way.”
“I’ll scout ahead.” In full sight of the riders I wrapped the shadows around me. They exclaimed as I vanished, and I was glad of it, because if they refused to like or trust me, then I wanted them to be scared of me.
Vai walked in front of the horses with a lamp fashioned of cold fire. The clop of horses’ hooves and the stamp of the men’s footfalls faded into winter’s silence as I ran ahead. It was so quiet that the ambush revealed itself by the heavy breathing and restless shifting of men hiding alongside the road in a ditch. There were only ten, armed with iron weapons. I trotted back to the coach.
“Wait here,” Vai said to the attendants. “By no means come forward until you hear sounds of fighting. Catherine, no killing unless we have no choice.”
“They mean to kill us!”
