As he trudged away, I called after the wagon. “Rory! Bee! Bring the lantern. We’ll know a cold mage is close if the flame dies.”
“I can’t smell anyone in this nasty stench,” muttered Rory as he handed the lantern to Bee. “But maybe I can find him by his clothes.”
“Blessed Tanit! How many dead there are!” Yet Bee gamely brandished the wrought-iron candle lantern over corpses laid in neat ranks like firewood. “Wouldn’t it be easier to go to the manor house and find the cacica?”
A hundred paces away, soldiers were searching through a roadside ditch. “Ah! Curse it! The cursed sword bit me!”
“Here, stand aside, you prickless worm. Let me—Ah! Curse it! It burns!”
With drawn sword I ran to their lamps. “What have you there? Let me see.”
“Oo! What pretty girl assaults us…?”
I bared my teeth at their insolent grimaces. Something in my demeanor made the men retreat. The sword lay grimed by dirt, but I knew it as Vai’s cold steel instantly. I snatched it up with my right hand. Such a black tide of wild anger swept me that for a moment I went blind.
Rory shouldered up beside us. “Cat, best we move out of here before there is trouble.”
“I’ll cause trouble,” I said, taking a step toward the men that made them hurry away.
Bee and Rory pulled me back and led me along the drive to Red Mount. Wounded men lay on the gravel of the two courtyards, packed like fish in a barrel. The awful stink blended with their cries and groans. Surgeons and healers worked by lamplight, assisted by soldiers and by elderly women bringing water for the injured. Mostly men just lay there, awaiting some distant hour when an exhausted doctor would finally take a quick glance at them.
“Cat, what about the cacica?” Bee repeated. “I tried to say this before, but you don’t listen. If you can talk to her in a mirror, perhaps she can see the well of Andevai’s power and lead you to him.”
Blessed Tanit! Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I swayed, leaning on Bee. “Rory, go and fetch our things. We’ll meet by the well. Bee, you look through the sheds. I’m going to see if I can find Lord Marius. I give this sword into your hand, Bee, into your hand only, until we find Vai again.”
Holding her breath she touched the hilt with a finger. When it did not spark or sting, she slipped it out of my hand. “Cold steel! Does this mean I need only draw blood to kill?”
“No. Only if you are a cold mage. But no weapon will shatter this one.”
She tested its balance, then both she and Rory hurried off.
With shadows drawn tight around me, I crept into the stone house to see if I could find Lord Marius. He was still alive, lying on a couch in a sitting room with eight wounded officers. To my surprise Marshal Aualos was seated in a chair beside the couch, joking with Lord Marius as they shared a bottle of whiskey. Lord Marius’s color was sallow, and his eyes glazed with pain, but he could still laugh as the Iberian officer told a lewd story about a man who had mistaken his wife for a sheep. Lord Marius’s left arm had been mangled into a pulp.
Doctor Asante and her attendants entered. She spared only a glance for Marius’s arm before she examined the other wounded officers. “Your arm will have to come off, Lord Marius. Marshal, please leave. I prefer to do my work without an audience.” As the marshal and his aides left, she examined each man. “This one is dead. Take him out. Those two I cannot help and this one…”
Lord Marius had not the strength to heave himself up on his good arm but he watched her with a keen gaze. “Doctor, is there nothing you can do for my aide, young Butu? He’s not sixteen. My cousin’s son.”
“My apologies, Lord Marius, but his belly has been opened. I have no way to heal such an injury. However, with some luck and a little cooperation, you may recover.”
“But never fight again.”
“Men battle with their minds far more than with swords. Do you mean to retreat to your country estate and never again involve yourself in politics?”
“Are you an Amazon, Doctor? Why else would a woman walk the battlefield?”
“I was an Amazon for many years, but now I am chief of the general’s medical corps.”
“He has placed a woman in charge?”
“I am a woman,” she agreed with the raised eyebrows of a person who has heard the comment once too often to be amused by the necessity of explaining one more time. “I also am a doctor. If you have some objection to my expertise, I can send another person to tend to you.”
“No, no.” He chuckled although it hurt him. “I am sure you will treat me as tenderly as would my mother, were she still with us. The folk in our villages would come to her for lotions and compresses and such healing craft. I do not fear your touch. I am just surprised by the presence of women in the army. Women give life. It is not their place in the world to kill.”
“Only to be killed? I do not like the sound of that conundrum, my lord. So I will ask you this: Does the she-wolf not hunt the same as her mate?” She spoke the words while staring straight at me, then crossed the room to the hearth where I stood out of the way. Setting her bag on a table, she pretended to look through it while speaking in a whisper. “What creature are you, that carries a spirit blade and waits in the shadows?”
“You’re a fire mage,” I breathed. “Only trolls and fire mages can see my sword when I’m hidden.”
“Sharp Diana! It is you, little cat!”
“Why do you call me that?”
“It is what Daniel called you after I had washed you and placed you yowling in his arms. Know this, Catherine. He loved you the moment he saw you. We all did.”
“What happened? Who are you?” I whispered. “What is your place in all this?”
She smiled affectionately, allowing me to glimpse pieces of a story Camjiata had never known and I had never suspected. “I loved your mother, and she loved me. But under the law you could only be claimed and protected by male guardianship, and we had to get Tara out of the prison quickly, for she was to be executed at dawn. Fortunately she loved Daniel also, and I trusted him. The general has promised me the new code will change the law so that women may stand equally in guardianship to men.”
For the space of several breaths I had no words. But at length I murmured what abruptly seemed clear. “After Camjiata’s defeat and capture, they were coming to find you, weren’t they? When they died.”
Truth is written in the face. Hers had measured suffering, others and her own, and she had kept walking to do the work she felt called to do even though she, too, had lost the ones she loved.
“Yet why are you here, child?” she asked gently. “I sense you are come in some desperation. You may always apply to me for aid, little cat.”
My heart beat so hard. “Some day, Doctor, I pray we will have time to speak at length. But right now I’m looking for my husband.”
She nodded. “The cold mage whom James Drake hates so very much.”
“Doctor! Why do you mumble? What am I seeing there, a sword and a shadow…” In his grievously wounded state, Lord Marius had slipped partway into the threads that bind the worlds. “Camulos’s Balls! It is Cat Barahal! Have you crept in to kill me? Is this what became of Amadou?”
Doctor Asante’s two assistants were busy preparing the table for the surgery. I unwrapped the shadows and crossed to kneel beside the couch. “I told you the truth about Amadou Barry.”
“He was ever a fool about that girl,” he murmured, eyes rolling back at a stab of pain.
The doctor said, “We need to operate.”
Desperate, I grasped Lord Marius’s uninjured hand. “Please. I’m looking for my husband. I heard he was last seen going to aid some cold mages seconded to your battalion.”
“Ah!” Was that a wince of physical agony, or had he seen a sight he dreaded to tell me of?