“It will take weeks of travel even if the weather improves. I don’t dare wait so long. We don’t even know if the headmaster can help me. I have to go to Haranwy to ask Vai’s brother for help. His people know how to hunt in the spirit world. Once we get to Haranwy, you and Rory can go on to Noviomagus. Anyway, it’s better to go to Haranwy first now that the mansa and the legate know we’re here. They’ll be watching the roads. But we can walk by back lanes and footpaths, where it’s easier to hide. We’ll need only food, for we can beg shelter in haymows and stables. I remember the route well enough, past Cold Fort and through Lemanis…” I trailed off, remembering Cold Fort.

Never before marrying a cold mage had I had to consider the uses of illusion. In Southbridge Londun, Vai had woven the illusion of a troop of turbaned soldiers riding down a road, a feat that would have impressed me more had I liked him at the time. In Expedition he had done nothing but play with the illusions of small objects, forming light into the shape of lamps or a gleaming necklace with which to adorn me, because in Expedition cold mages had less magic to draw on. Yet he had woven illusions out of cold fire so skillfully they had seemed like solid objects, impossible to know as intangible unless you tried to touch them.

Rory and I had almost been caught near Cold Fort by a troop of mage House soldiers under the command of a cold mage. They had ridden across a field under a mask of illusion that made them invisible to unsuspecting eyes, but not to cold steel.

Too late, I closed my fingers over my cane. The ghost hilt buzzed with the energy of cold magic pouring into it.

“Quiet.” I got to my feet. “Abandon everything. Go out through one of the windows. Meet me at the hat shop.”

Bee grabbed the little knit bag with her sketchbook. I crept to the carriage house door. The cistern was covered by a plank lid. Unswept leaves from the apple and pear trees littered the ground. The big brick oven was closed tight. Behind, Bee stuffed the flasks and my sewing kit into the knit bag as she eased toward the shuttered windows.

I wrapped shadows around myself and padded under chill daggers of sleet to the basement steps. The hiss of sleet and the whine of the wind drowned all other sounds. I pressed numb fingers against the door. I drove my awareness down the fraying threads of magic that had once protected the house from intruders. A foot scuffed faintly on damp leaves over by the cistern. An exhalation stirred in the passage beyond the door.