Cold Fire

16

“I have to go,” he said afterward, rising and pulling on his clothes. “Salters are most active at night.” He lit a glass-shuttered candle set on a shelf fixed to the wall by the door. “There are centipedes and scorpions. You’d best sleep in the hammock.”

Then he was gone. I barred the door as I wondered what a hammock was. The gleam offered enough illumination for me to use basin and pitcher to wash myself with water drawn from the big bronze pot. I pulled on my shift and drawers so as to be decently covered. The air inside the chamber was like hot viscous porridge. How could I possibly sleep?

Fingers scratched at the barred door. Had my heart not been firmly embedded in my chest, it would have slammed back and forth around the room like a rabbit gone wild. After the rabbit calmed down, I picked up my sword and leaned an ear against the door.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Abby.”

As my left hand tightened on the hilt, my right crept to my throat. The only sound I could get out was a soft “ Gaaah. ”

“I not here to bite yee. Mebbe after we chat.”

Horribly, we both started giggling. I fumbled with the bar, set it aside, and opened the door.

She slipped in. “I don’ have permission to walk out at night. They put we in di pens. Most times dat change come at night.”

“Sit down. Although it’s horribly hot in here.”

She looked surprised. “Think yee so? If yee want, we go up a di roof.”

I laced on my bodice, and she tied the pagne for me. We climbed a rope ladder and settled side by side on a ledge rimmed with a railing. I sat cross-legged with my sword across my thighs. The clouds were breaking up, mottling the sky. Waves soughed on the beach. The sound was restful until you began to wonder if the steady lift and drag of the waves was really the breathing sleep of leviathan.

“When were you bit?” I asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind speaking of it.”

“I don’ mind. Dat bite sit on me thoughts all di time. Di teeth of di ghouls eat me.”

“Are there ghouls here? I thought they only lived beneath the sands in the Sahara Desert.”

“Dey behiques tell dis story. First time, di salt miners in dat place Mali broke open dat ghoul nest. Di ghouls wake and dey bite. Dey left dey teeth in di miners. Dem teeth a go eating all through every person, every man and gal dat wen bitten. One person bite another person and dey ghoul teeth keep eating on and on.”

“Blessed Tanit.” I took her hand in mine.

A howl that like of a beast with its leg caught in a trap rose from behind us, and fell away.

“What was that?” I am sure the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

“After di teeth eat yee mind, yee don’ have no more thoughts. But mebbe for one moment yee wake up and yee remember and dat make yee scream. Don’ cry, Cat’reen.”

I wiped my cheeks. “It’s so terrible.”

“I mean, yee tears have salt.” I felt her lick her lips, as if she wanted to lick my cheeks to taste the salt of my tears but had enough control to restrain herself.

With an effort, I kept hold of her hand and did not shift away. “If Drake can heal you, why hasn’t he done so already?”

She remained silent for a long time. He had kissed her forehead, so it wasn’t as if he recoiled from touching her. Far out over the sea, a light winked and vanished. Perhaps it was the lamp of the moon shining on the water, for where the clouds shredded away at the zenith, a quarter moon watched. Under its light, Abby’s skin took on a peculiar crystalline gleam, and her eyes showed no irises, only a flat white circle.

“I don’ like dat dis man Drake decide so quick to make yee he sweet gal.”

“I said yes! He didn’t force me, if that’s what you mean.” A certain giddiness, and the rum, still warmed my flesh. Yet a new uneasiness crept like gossipy whispers along my ears. Now that I was no longer terrified and disoriented, it seemed unlikely that the only way for a fire mage to heal someone was to have sexual congress with them. Had I mistaken his words? Because I certainly hadn’t mistaken his intentions. “He told me that to heal me he had to touch my skin with his.”

Startlingly, she laughed. “Di kiss of life. We call it by dat name. But I reckon dat maku give yee di kiss of life and den take a little something more.”

“Bold Astarte!” I muttered. A little something more.

Abby patted my arm. “Dem fire mages reckon dey can take what dey want. So he tell you dat, and den he get you drunk and he take it all. I don’ like it.”

“Oh,” I whispered. “Was I an idiot?”

“Not a bit like dat, Cat’reen!” Her quiet compassion shamed me, for in the midst of her own terror she had opened her heart to feel for me. “If dat man said so to me, right after I got bit, I a done di same as yee for dat chance he heal me. But I don’ like it.”

I leaned against her as I often leaned against Bee, and her smile was all the gift I could ask for.

Out of the darkness, a male voice spoke.

“Salve, Perdita.”

Abby hid her face behind crossed hands in an awkward genuflect. I looked over the railing to see two figures standing below. One was a stocky adolescent wearing as ornament a blocky stone collar. The other was a man perhaps ten years older than me with impressively heavy gold armbands on his bare upper arms and a gold pendant around his neck. He was dressed in white cloth draped over his body something in the manner of a Roman toga. He looked oddly familiar, and not just because I thought he was one of the mages I had faced on the beach.

“I intend to speak with you. I will climb up so we may have privacy.” The man spoke in a formal Latin whose antiquated flavor heightened the princely expectation that he was not asking but telling me.

Abby quivered but did not speak.

I had faced down the Master of the Wild Hunt with his evil crows, monstrous toads, frozen minions, and masked face. For that matter, I had dealt with Andevai Diarisso Haranwy. I knew how to handle a young man who might be arrogant, vain, and besides that a bit of an ass.

“We have not been formally introduced. In my country, a proper introduction is necessary before a man and a woman who are in no other way acquainted may speak to each other. But in deference to what I am informed is your exalted station in life, I will certainly agree to speak to you as long as my companion is allowed to climb down and go on her way unmolested and unpunished.”

Just as different fabrics have different textures, silence can display various qualities. In this case, I was sure that if astonishment were like rain, it would have been pouring sheets.

Yet he replied in the tone he had used before. “Your conditions prove acceptable, Perdita.”

Abby’s dry lips brushed my cheek, and she clambered down the ladder and tottered off.

My interlocutor climbed up and crouched beside me. Straight coal-black hair fell loose down his back. His dark eyes smoldered with the suggestion of buried heat. “You have a name.”

“I do have a name. You have a name as well.”

He blinked, as at an unexpected drop of rain in his eye. “I have learned to speak the Europan tongue. Perhaps I speak wrongly and you do not comprehend. Your name I wish to know.”

“In my country, it is usual for people to introduce their names each to the other. So if I say that my name is Catherine Bell Barahal, then you would say, ‘Greetings’ and afterward you would tell me by what name I can call you.”

“Perdita, it is not possible for you to speak to me as one of my kin. You must address me in the proper way.”

“Because you are a king’s nephew? He is not my king. We have no kings in Europa.”

“But many princes and generals, the histories tell. Perhaps for this reason you fight so much.”

“There is no answer to that! I feel obliged to remind you that you are the one who wanted to talk to me. I mean no offense.”

It seemed he had taken none, for all this time his manner had not changed. He was beginning to seem less like an arrogant and proud man and more like a reserved and formal one. “You speak with bold words. And you carry a cemi with you. Are you of noble birth?”

“What is a cemi?”

“It is that person you hold, who shows her power at night.” He indicated the sword.

“Why do you call it a person?”

“Perhaps you have a different name. Here, we say you are accompanied by one of your ancestors. This person travels with you in the form of a three-pointed blade.”

Even Andevai hadn’t been able to see the sword unless I unsheathed it, but it appeared fire mages could see it at any time. “You see it as a blade?”

“A puzzling question. I see what it is.”

“What do you mean by three-pointed? It has only two, the hilt and the tip.”

“This person has two points in this world, as you say, but a third point in the other world.”

Which was true enough, if you considered the hidden blade the third point. Could a person’s spirit live in cold steel? As some memory of the spirit of Vai’s grandmother might reside in the stone I had picked up, could some part of my mother’s strength reside in the sword? I stroked the hilt, wondering if her spirit walked with me, and it seemed I felt an icy radiance and a trembling sense as of a thin wall that kept me apart from the vast and echoing landscape of the spirit world.

“I wonder why a maku carries a cemi,” he went on. “Also, never have I met and spoken to a woman from across the sea. You are disrespectful, but I think that is just your way. My mother the cacica tells me I will marry a woman from across the sea. Maybe it will be you.” He did not speak the words lasciviously. He said it as he might remark that rain clouds presaged rain.

“I think it unlikely it will be me.” Two could play this game. “You call your mother the cacica. Is she queen? I thought your uncle was king.”

“My uncle is very ill. Because of his illness, my mother, who is his sister, rules as cacica.”

“Ah. I understand now. Then I expect a princely clan from Europa will send a princely daughter to seal a princely pact between your two noble houses. That daughter would not be me.”

Yet I eyed him, feeling quite like a vulture as I did so. Was his fire magic enough to attract the Wild Hunt? Could I sacrifice him to save Bee?

From the foot of the ladder, the stocky adolescent spoke in Taino.

A glimmer like the breath of a firefly resolved into James Drake and his lamp. Upon finding the door of the house unlocked and unguarded, he came around to the back.

“Here you are,” he said with a frown as he held up the lamp to examine us.

The prince regarded Drake with a splendid display of indifference.

Drake’s lamp flared. “What is Prince Caonabo doing here?”

“Why do you think I am obliged to answer for my actions to you?” I asked.

We spoke in the mixed speech common to northwest Europa, not in the formal Latin of the schoolroom, and my face was surely so red that its heat alone might have lit the night. Prince Caonabo glanced at me, then climbed down. He and his companion walked away into the night.

“Well,” Drake said grudgingly, “it isn’t as if he could be trying to seduce you.”

I thought of Abby’s words. “You would know, I suppose.”

“Dear me, Cat. Have I done anything to provoke such a mean-spirited reply? I only meant that a nephew of the supreme ruler is not in the business of marrying the daughter of an impoverished Phoenician mercenary house. But we have to speak of this later. Where is Abby?”

She would not get into trouble on my account! “Why do you think I know where she is?”

He sighed. “Your insistence on being contrary in every answer is really quite annoying, Cat. A woman who is always contrary is unlikely to please a husband.”

I experienced a sudden and painful revelation that it was important to converse with a man before you became intimate with him, or else never to converse with him afterward. “I am sorry to inform you that not every woman wants a husband.”

“You’re very young. And very naive.”

I felt my ears turn to steam. “All the better to be taken advantage of??”

The wick flared again, flame licking upward in a flash. Yes, he was definitely angry, and not in a way I found amusing. “Is that what you think? That I took advantage of you?”

I pinched my lips together. I had to accept that Abby was right: I had been bitten, and he had healed me. Anyone would have said yes. He had also promised to get me off this cursed island, on which I was, evidently, meant to be trapped for the rest of my life. I could be caged at the vast estate of Four Moons House in more gilded comfort than this! Best to keep silence.

He went on. “I saved your life, Cat. At considerable risk to my own! Do you know why Prince Caonabo walks everywhere with his young cousin?”

“How could I know that?”

“A rhetorical question, I assume. Really, Cat. This affectation of showing opposition to everything becomes ridiculous and does not do you any credit for you seem otherwise a sensible girl. Naturally, fire mages are rare. They are so revered among the Taino that even mages born among the naborias -we would call them the plebeians-are married into the noble clans. Each fire mage is given a catch-fire. The great risk of being a fire mage is that you overextend your power-”

“And burn up,” I finished. Yet I had felt his magic not as fire but as tendrils snaking through me, drawing my desire out of its innocent sleep.

“And burn up. I wish you would not interrupt me.”

“You have no catch-fire?”

“Who would volunteer to be my catch-fire? Would you?”

My fingers tightened on the railing. “Wouldn’t it be an awful way to die?”

“To burn to death? I don’t intend to find out. Anyway, in Expedition Territory, it is forbidden by law for any fire mage to employ or enslave a person as a catch-fire.”

“Is the prince’s catch-fire a slave?”

“No, he is a cousin. That is his family duty. Among the Taino, catch-fires are honored. If they die, as they often do, they become a god-as we might say-and their skull-if a skull is left-is woven into a figure of power which the Taino call a cemi.”

I lowered my gaze to the gleam of my sword. “Prince Caonabo said my sword was a cemi.”

“That’s probably why he came to talk to you. If he considers it a cemi, then you carrying it would make you seem a person of consequence, with powerful ancestors.”

“How do you know this is a sword?”

He glanced away as if thinking someone else must have spoken. “Because it is one. Now. Where is Abby?”

The question popped out unbidden. “Why do you think I know?”

Raising the lamp, he frowned as if genuinely puzzled. “Are you angry at me?”

I fisted my hands, suddenly furious at myself. Wouldn’t it be better to be honest about my anger instead of making all these petty retorts and always answering questions with questions?

The thought stunned me into muteness. Answering questions with questions?

He sighed, as if my silence was my answer. “I’ll get a hammock for you. It will be cooler to sleep up there, but I warn you, the mosquitoes will feast on you at dawn.” He went into the house and emerged with a bundle of netting, which he tossed to me. “There are loops at each end. String it from the hooks in the posts. Draw up the ladder. Salters can’t climb, and Taino princes are too proud to ask for a ladder to be lowered. Although I’m not.” He blew me a kiss as he left.

I strung up the netting. I had a difficult time finding a comfortable position because my sword kept getting caught against my body at awkward angles. Once settled, I stared at the sea as the breeze stirred my shift against my sticky body. My eyelids were sweating.

Footsteps paced nearby, wearing a circuit. A man sobbed, “Kill me, kill me before I rot,” but no one was listening. No one but me.

I wrapped my arms around myself, wishing I were not alone. Yet how could I wish Bee or Rory here on this terrible island? I thought of Drake and of Prince Caonabo. I did not think the prince was interested in seduction. I was pretty sure he had simply been curious about my cold steel and my foreign origins. Drake’s motives seemed simpler: He was a man who might die at any moment. He had risked his life to heal me, and evidently he was the kind of man who thought it fair to get something in exchange. I had my life.

I dozed restlessly, woken once by a resounding splash. I smelled smoke. A smear of light like the flames of a bonfire dusted the ridge. My elbow itched. An annoying buzz whined by my ear. A twisted wail of despair descended into heartbroken sobs. Shuddering, I closed my eyes.

The sway of the hammock lulled me. The night wind kissed my lips as I clutched the locket.

A thread of magic draws taut, a path down which I can feel the presence of a bright, proud, and rather arrogant soul whose light is balm to my lonely shadow. A figure remarkably like Andevai turns with a surprised exclamation, speaking in a tone that suggested I had deliberately encouraged this untenable situation. “Catherine? I’m looking for you! Where are you?”

Wasn’t I on Salt Island, wondering how I would save Bee and recover Rory? Had the locket’s touch made me think of Vai because the djeli’s magic bound us through the spirit world? Was I always going to have to answer questions with questions? Yet the first time the eru and I had spoken, hadn’t I asked her, “ Isn’t it said the servants of the night court answer questions with questions??”

Drowsily I smiled. The eru was a servant of the Wild Hunt, and now so was I. Drake was wrong. I wasn’t just being annoying. At last I slept and, thankfully, I did not remember my dreams.