Cold Fire

20

Later, it was quiet, a hint of breeze pooling around my face.

“Aunty, it was the worst moment of my life, when she slipped away from me down the well. I thought I’d lost her forever. And then, when I took off her jacket and saw that bite…”

“Don’ borrow trouble, lad. The behique say she is clean. Anyway, better if yee go on to yee work, else yee shall be a nuisance all day. See how she stir, because she hear yee voice? She need to sleep, for she is sorely tired and worn. Go on. I shall watch.”

I woke to daylight and a stifling heat like sludge in my lungs. Rain broke overhead, a downpour so torrential I could hear nothing but its drumming on the tile roof. The air cooled. My headache eased. The rain stopped.

I lay on a cot. I wore only drawers and a thin muslin blouse. There had been a cover over me but I had kicked it off. My cane was tucked along one side. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and cautiously rose, but my head seemed fit on properly. I found a pagne hanging over the screen that divided the little room into two, with a cot on either side and baskets hanging from the center beam. A sheathed sword lay tucked into the rafters, safe from stealing because no one could touch Vai’s cold steel except him. A basket on the floor contained my folded clothing. I bound on the bodice and wrapped the pagne. The blouse’s sleeves were long enough to cover the healing bite.

My mouth tasted of unpleasant memories. Drake had deserted me to make my own way to the Speckled Iguana, where I would have fallen sick all alone. Not like here, where people-Vai-cared what happened to me. Blessed Tanit! The thought of possibly carrying Drake’s child and what would become of me if I did made me determined to forge my own path. I was not going to crawl to Drake to beg for help.

“Ja, maku!” One of the girls peeked in at the open door. She looked a bit older than Bee’s sister Hanan, perhaps fifteen, and with her springy black hair and brown complexion resembled Aunty. “Yee feeling better? Eh! Never mind the question. Yee look not so like fouled cassava paste. I thought sure yee would faint right away last night.”

“I am better, thank you. Never mind what question?”

“Vai say never to ask yee a question. ’Tis almost supper, if yee’s hungry.”

I had to pee, and I realized I was, indeed, hungry as well as furiously thirsty. “My thanks for the folded clothes. What’s your name? If you told me, I forgot.”

“Lucretia.”

“No. Really?”

She grinned. “Me dad’s a Roman sailor. He turn up once a year, all faithful like. ’Tis why I have eight little sisters.”

I laughed and followed her downstairs into the courtyard where men and boys were setting out benches and hauling in barrels, and women and girls were cooking. Aunty Djeneba ran not only a lodging house but an eating and drinking establishment as well, the sort of place people, mostly men, came to relax after a day’s hot work. The low-hanging sun peeking out from a tumult of clouds gave the light a muted glow.

In the outdoor kitchen, Aunty Djeneba greeted me by looking me over. “Yee stay quiet this evening. Tomorrow we shall talk. Here come Vai.”

He had wood shavings caught in his hair, and a residue of sawdust streaked his bare arms. He gave me a long, searching look, which I endured by drawing out my locket and playing with it. “You look like you feel better.”

“I slept all day.” I wanted to say more, but my tongue had turned to stone.

“You know, Aunty,” he said, “I need to go out to the Moonday gathering, if I can.”

“I shall see she come to no harm.”

“What gathering?” I asked.

“I’ll take you another time. If you’ll excuse me. I’ll just stow this in my room.” He had a canvas apron slung over his back with tools tucked into sewn compartments. He hurried upstairs, and when he came down, his friends, including Kofi, had appeared at the gate. They stared curiously at me but did not approach, and they left with Vai.

“I reckon yee shall be most comfortable by Aunty Brigid,” said Aunty.

I crept to the sling chair in the shelter behind the kitchen, next to the toothless old woman who smiled and spoke no word. There were always at least two children hovering, anxious to fetch me juice. I was not hungry, but I could have drunk the sea and then some.

Kayleigh came in as night fell, wearing a pretty pagne, her locks brightened with ribbons. She looked exactly as she had last year: tall, robust, and if not as stunning as her brother, still she was a good-looking young woman, one who had not fully left girlhood behind. As she came closer the lines of weariness on her face became evident.

After a hesitation, she came over. “Cat Barahal. You must be feeling better.” She mopped her brow with a scrap of cloth. “Vai went out. He’d not have if he thought you were sick.”

Lucretia appeared with a cup of the cloudy ginger beer everyone here drank. “I hear a rumor the general came back today.”

Kayleigh accepted the cup with a grateful smile. “He is still in Taino country.”

“Me father said the cacica would kick him out when he came a-courting.”

“Your father is Roman, Luce. He sees the general as the enemy. Word at Warden Hall is that the cacica and the general are negotiating. That has made the Council very nervous.”

“Do you mean Camjiata?” I asked. “This cacica, would that be Prince Caonabo’s mother?”

Both girls looked at me as if I had sprouted wings and a third eye.

Kayleigh drained the cup and handed it to Lucretia. “I’ll go wash up.” She strode off.

“Have I done something to offend her?”

“Never mind she,” said Lucretia. “She do work very hard at Warden Hall.”

“What is Warden Hall?”

“Ja, maku! Yee know nothing! The wardens keep order in Expedition and enforce the law.”

I could not help but think that working as a servant at Warden Hall would be a cursed good way to eavesdrop on delicate conversations.

“So I’s just saying,” Lucretia went on, “that she is nice. Truly. Not so charming as she brother, but…I mean, all they women come around all the time. Yet he never look twice at any! Being he sister, she always that one who count with him. And now here yee come.”

“Washed up on shore like a three-days-dead fish.”

She giggled. “Yee’s so funny.”

I went back up to the room with a candle. Kayleigh had fallen asleep on the other cot, which meant I had slept on Vai’s cot last night. Tomorrow we would obviously have to discuss other sleeping arrangements. I slept soundly. When I woke the next morning, Kayleigh was gone. I didn’t know where Vai had slept.

The courtyard had a calm beauty in the soft light.

“Where are all the children?” I asked Aunty Djeneba, who was grating the white root called cassava. “Where is Lucretia?”

“At school. They finish at noon. As for yee, we shall start yee easy today. Yee said yee can sew. I have got some mending by. Usually we take it down to Tailors’ Row but it would be a quiet job for yee in the shade.”

I pulled a bench over so I could sit under the kitchen roof. We were alone in the courtyard.

She said in a low voice, “One thing first. Yee must keep that arm covered until the wound heal. Yee must never speak of what happened. Never.”

I touched my sleeve, feeling the tender wound beneath. “Vai must have seen the bite when he took my jacket off.”

“Yes, and came to me at once, exactly as he should. I went out me own self and brought in a local behique, a good man, very discreet. Only we four know.”

We four, and everyone on Salt Island, but I didn’t volunteer the information. “I know what will happen to me if the wardens track me down. But would something happen to you, Aunty?”

She paused in her grating. “It speak well of yee that yee ask, gal. I would be arrested and lose everything I own.”

“That is a terrible risk. Why take me in?”

She indicated the sewing basket and a folded stack of old clothes. “Here is a great lot of torn hems, ripped sleeves, and holes worn in elbows and knees. We people who live outside the old city have come to believe Expedition’s Council see us as these old clothes to use and throw out. If yee was the daughter of a Council family, we would hear no talk of sending yee to Salt Island.”

“My father wrote that if all are not equal before the law, then the law is worth nothing.”

“A wise man, that one who sired yee. Walk he still among the living?”

I looked away because I could say nothing.

“Seem the grief is still fresh,” she said kindly.

She returned to cutting, grating, and grinding, while I found peace in mending as she talked about how her people could trace their descent to sailors on the first fleet. She had herself married a man whose grandparents had left Celtic Brigantia to make their fortune in the markets of Expedition. Her husband had passed on a night three years ago when an owl had roosted atop the roof. Her three sons worked a fishing boat with their uncle her brother, and her only surviving daughter Brenna, the one with the Roman sweetheart, helped her run the lodging house. Uncle Joe, widower of Aunty’s sister, oversaw the part of the establishment where folk came to eat and drink.

“Do you have gaslight on all the streets in Expedition? Only a few places have gaslight in Adurnam.”

“All of the old city and the harbor district and troll town, of course. We here in Passaporte District got the street lighting three years ago. Only because we took to the streets in protest that we pay land tax and excise tax and we shall see something for the coin we pay to the Council’s treasury. But Lucairi District and them on out there? Nothing. They must still rely on fire banes to light they way at night.”

Here was my chance to find out more about mages in this part of the world.

“Fire banes work like common lamplighters and linkboys here?” I finished off mending a threadbare elbow with a pattern darning and held it up.

She looked surprised. “’Tis as good as tailor’s work. Yee have a neat hand for a woman. Fire banes likewise work for the fire wardens and at areitos and other night gatherings.”

“What’s an areito? A festival of some kind?”

“’Tis the Taino word for a sacred or community gathering, what the Romans would call a festival. As for the other, all fire banes must register with Warden Hall. That is the law. At that time they swear never to enter any association with other mages.”

“I’ve seen the power the mage Houses hold in Europa, so I can understand people in Expedition might be cautious about mage associations. Is there a button for this?”

“In the tin. It need two. If yee’s not registered as a fire bane, yee can be arrested. If yee go to register, yee’s not yet registered, so yee can be arrested if they want to arrest yee.”

“That’s exceedingly unfair! Why would the wardens want to arrest fire banes anyway?”

“Because they sell them to the Taino. The proceeds go to Council’s treasury.”

“Why would the Taino want fire banes?”

“Why, as catch-fires. No Taino fire mage take a first breath come the morning without a catch-fire nearby.”

I paused, needle frozen in midair, remembering the three salters Drake had used to catch the accelerating fire of his magic so it wouldn’t consume him. “That’s awful! Why would anyone let fire banes be taken and sold?”

“Because the wardens only take them who have no one to protect them. Fire banes born into a family with much money or a big house in the old city never go missing, never is sold out, nor never is they forced to work for the fire wardens. There is one rule for the rich and another for the rest. So a maku come to these shores is easy game. Yee shall find, Cat, that folk round here say nothing to the wardens no matter what we go a-seeing. Yee understand?”

Since I understood she was telling me that she knew Vai was a fire bane and that I was never to mention it to anyone, I nodded. I fished out another button and began sewing it on. “Are there many powerful fire mages in the Taino kingdom?”

She lowered her voice. “’Tis best be cautious and not speak of behiques, Cat. Yee would not want to come to they notice.”

I moved on, for now. “When did General Camjiata come to Expedition?”

“He and his people landed in Februarius. That man have caused so much trouble over where yee come from. And now he come here and go asking for we help. He want us to pay for he to start up a new war back there in Europa.”

“He traveled here to get aid from Expedition’s Council?”

“He asked. ’Tis one thing the Council done right. They said no.”

“They refused to help him! Is that why he went to the Taino capital? To seek Taino aid?”

“So it look. Any reckoning we look at it, ’tis bad news for Expedition. One time long ago there was many caciques on Kiskeya. Now there is only one, and that one rule over all the islands of the Antilles. I foresee nothing but trouble if the Taino decide to look this way.”

“So they’re an empire, like the Romans. But if the Taino cacique and his clan are so powerful, why don’t they just take over Expedition Territory and its factories and port?”

She smiled. “A smart gal, too, to ask that question. No wonder Vai is so smitten with yee.”

I pawed through the tin looking for a button I did not need. Feeling her gaze on me, I poured buttons onto my palm and scrutinized them.

She said, “If the Taino is one thing, they is holders of the law. In the First Treaty, the Taino caciques swore they shall never cross the border between Taino country and Expedition Territory. So by Taino way of thinking, to break the treaty is to dishonor the cemi. Yee know, they ancestors. By the by, Cat. When I speak of agreements, it remind me. Vai ask me last night about renting a hammock in the common hall. I thought he mean for Kayleigh, but he mean for he own self. Yee and she is to share the room, which he pay for, and he to sleep elsewhere.”

The buttons were bronze and formed out of the same mold. In a household practicing economy, it was wise to buy plain buttons so they could be interchanged on various garments.

“Not that ’tis any of me business,” she added in a tone that implied the opposite, “but peace in the house make peace in the heart.”

The buttons stared back at me. Not that it was any of their business!

“It’s not my place to speak of such intimate matters,” I said in a tone I hoped walked the fine line between being polite and absolutely crushing this subject into oblivion. “I was hoping to ask to borrow thread. I’ll pay you back, of course. I can salvage a great deal from my skirts and petticoats by piecing together one skirt from the remnants. I could manage a few work vests-singlets, I mean-from the scraps if your little lads have need of such. It’s quite good quality wool challis…” I trailed off, surprised to find my hands in fists, buttons biting into my palms.

She gave me a measuring look. “Happen that young man ever hit yee?”

“Hit me? Like, beat me?”

“He don’ seem like that kind. But I reckon I best ask.”

“No. That’s not what happened. Although he’s said some pretty awful things to me.”

She smiled wryly. “I admit, that lad have a sharp tongue when he wish, not that he ever use it on he elders! And he think very well of he own self.”

“That is a way of describing it,” I agreed.

She chuckled. “Yee may use any of the thread in the copper tin. If yee’s feeling up to it, I reckon I shall set yee to serving food and drink in the evenings. Yee’s a pleasing gal to look on, and yee have a bold way of speaking. ’Tis hard to get help these days with the factories hiring so many.”

“I can do that. Aunty, I’m grateful to you for taking me in. I mean to earn my keep.”

“Seeing that look on Vai’s face when he brought yee back is keep enough, but fear not, gal. I shall see yee earn yee bed.” She laughed merrily at whatever expression blanched my face.

I fetched my ruined skirts and borrowed scissors from one of the neighbor men. At a table in front of an interested audience of children and the regular customers who always came early, I began dismantling the ripped and torn remains while I spun a carefully worded tale that left out Salt Island, James Drake, and Prince Caonabo, and jumped straight from the watery attack to my beach rescue by buccaneers. The rains came through, as they did every afternoon, and more people gathered as folk left off work for the day and came to drink and relax.

“Yee say yee was attacked by a shark? Describe what yee saw, gal.”

“It was very large, and a nasty shiny gray, and it had dead flat eyes. I must say, I’ve never been so terrified in my life.” Except standing before the creature who sired me. “I punched it, and it swam off.”

They laughed and whistled. Several began debating whether it was a carite or a cajaya, two different kinds of sharks known to attack people. I looked up to see Vai standing in the back with arms crossed, glowering as if I had personally offended him. By the evidence of sawdust dusting his skin, he had only recently come in and not yet washed; he’d tied a kerchief over his head today, making him look very buccaneer-ish, a man about to sail off in an airship except of course for the minor issue of his deflating the balloon and thereby causing a spectacular crash.

“That shark is not the predator yee shall have been feared of, gal,” said Uncle Joe. “’Tis they buccaneers yee shall have feared more. Seem yee was rescued off the beach by the Barr Cousins. They is called Nick Blade for he knives and the Hyena Queen for the way she laugh.”

“The Barr Cousins? Likely so. We were never formally introduced.”

“Yee’s killing me, gal!” said some wit in the crowd. “‘Never formally introduced!’”

“She said her grandmother was a Kena’ani woman. That makes us cousins of a sort. Maybe more, since I’m a Barahal. We might be truly cousins, if their ancestors shortened the Barahal name to Barr. That must be why we got along so well.”

My bravado sent my audience into gales of laughter as I measured cloth against the waistband. As Vai’s gaze swept across my audience, they stepped back just as if he had pushed each one. Maybe he had, for the air had a sudden bite. All hastily moved away to other tables.

He sat down opposite me, arms still crossed. “You’ll get sick again if you overdo it.”

I kept my voice low as I pinned cloth to the waistband, for although the customers had gone to sit elsewhere that did not mean they weren’t watching. “I need to earn my keep, Vai, not as your kept woman. It does amaze me how you felt able to tell everyone the gripping tale of how you lost your darling wife and have searched for her ever since. How heartbreaking. How noble.”

“It keeps away the women.”

Irritation marred the features of most men, making them look small-minded or ill-tempered. Not Vai. Irritation sharpened his features, made a woman want to kiss him until he relented. I imagined hungry young women buzzing like bees to a succulently annoyed flower.

He raised an eyebrow, in supercilious query.

“How nice for you,” I said, since he was clearly expecting a response to a statement meant to provoke me. “Or not.”

“Don’t change the subject, Catherine. I don’t see how the tale I told is much different than the one you just embroidered.”

“It’s all true!”

“I’m sure it is. If anyone could punch a shark in the eye and survive to tell of it, it would be you.”

“I would thank you for the fine praise, except you looked so annoyed when I was telling that part of the story.”

“Yes, annoyance was certainly my first reaction on hearing you had been attacked by a shark. I couldn’t possibly have been shocked or terrified on your behalf. Although you left out the part about exactly how you found yourself floating in the middle of the sea in the first place.”

“Would you have turned me over to the wardens if I hadn’t been clean?”

His chin raised as sharply as if I had slapped him. A breath of ice kissed my lips.

Because I was suddenly, inexplicably furious, I pressed my attack, leaning closer with an aggressive whisper. “You would have been right to do so. I was on Salt Island.”

He stood so quickly that all around the courtyard people jumped, and looked forcibly away. He grabbed my arm and dragged me closer, across the table. The table’s edge dug into my thighs.

His voice emerged in a hoarse murmur. “You just dreamed that. You were never there. ”

“Let go,” I said, rigid beneath his hand. All I could see was Abby’s face.

He released me. Sat down. Shut his eyes, breathing hard, as the cold eddy of air around us faded. I fought to recover my composure. As I straightened out the disturbed fabric, I wondered what people were making of all this. It would be an easy plate to garnish: The long-parted lovers quarrel over the circumstance that precipitated their separation.

When his breathing had settled, he opened his eyes and considered me with the haughty arrogance I knew best. “Which explains the presence of the fire mage. Although I can’t quite figure how a fire mage might have come to be working with the notorious Barr Cousins.”

I parried. “I don’t think the Barr Cousins liked the fire mage much.”

“Good for them. I don’t like him much either.”

“I didn’t ask you to like him. You don’t even know him.”

He set his elbows on the table, heedless of the fabric I was neatly piecing back together. “There is where you are wrong. I met him in Adurnam. In the entryway of the law offices of Godwik and Clutch. Where I also found you. I remembered that when I saw him again today-”

Jerking up, I stabbed myself with a pin. “Ah!”

“-Wandering around the harbor with a ridiculous cap pulled down to cover his red hair and asking about a girl he had lost track of after he had rescued her from a shipwreck on a deserted islet. I’m surprised you forgot to mention the shipwreck in your otherwise flamboyant tale.”

I licked a spot of blood from my finger.

“I must wonder why he was in Adurnam then, and why he came here now,” he finished.

Vai didn’t know General Camjiata had been in the law offices in Adurnam. And I wasn’t about to tell him since it was none of his cursed business and nothing to do with me anyway no matter what the Iberian Monster claimed.

“I never met Drake before that day in Adurnam,” I said quite truthfully, “and then not again until that which we won’t speak of.” But I sat down, resting my head in my hands because otherwise I was going to touch my belly. “Blessed Tanit! Did anyone tell him where I’d gone?”

“No one did in the carpentry yard. I did find out you can leave a message for him at the Speckled Iguana. Shall we go over there now?”

I found the courage to look at him. “Can’t I just stay here?”

He exhaled sharply. Then the self-satisfied lift of his mouth betrayed him. “You can, if that’s what you want.”

I began to tremble. “You couldn’t just come straight out and ask me what you really want to know, which I must suppose is whether I want to go back to James Drake. At least the infamous murderer Nick Blade was honest with me!”

That made him sit up straight. “Do enlighten me!”

“He scolded me. He said, ‘Don’t you go getting drunk around men. What do you think will happen?’”

“Did he, now?” said the arrogant cold mage thoughtfully, drawing forefinger and thumb down the line of his jaw in a way that dragged my gaze toward his lips.

“Do you think I’m lying about that?” I snapped.

“Did I say I thought you were lying?”

“Are you going to ask me questions to annoy me?” I considered stabbing him with a pin.

“Who do you think can keep this up longer?” he said with an aggravating smirk. He rose, snagged a cup from a tray being carried past by Brenna-who smiled on him as if wishing him good fortune!-and handed it to me. “Have a drink?”

“Are you trying to get me drunk?”

“Why would I want to get you drunk, Catherine?”

“Isn’t that a way men seduce women-?” I broke off, so flustered and ashamed that all I could do was take a drink. It was juice, sweet and pure.

“I’ve heard it is the only way some men can manage to seduce women.” He took the cup from my hand, drained it, and mercifully changed the subject. “I wish I could know how you are able to stand hidden in plain sight in a chamber where I can see you but others cannot.”

I leaned toward him confidingly, and he caught in a breath.

In a low voice, I said, “The secret belongs to those who remain silent.”

He laughed quite charmingly, curse him, for it was the laugh of a man willing to be amused at his own expense. “How long have you been waiting to say that to me?”

“How long do you think I’ve been waiting?”

“I would suppose, since the very first time you heard me say it. Well, Catherine, I am nothing if not persistent. I also wish I could know if you sailed from Europa to the Antilles, or if you made the journey here while still in the spirit world.”

“And I wish I could know why you and your sister are here. I don’t believe the mansa is generous enough to let go of a girl who might be bred for the hope of more potent cold mages.”

He smiled in a way that made me wary. “There show the cat’s claws. It’s a fair assessment. I will not lie to you, Catherine. Like you, I have things I am not free to speak of. Let me know what I can do to help you with settling in.”

I bundled up the skirts. “I’ll sew in the mornings and serve in the evenings. I start tonight.”

I challenged him with a glare to protest that I needed to rest another day. He merely smiled a soft smile that made my heart turn over, an anatomically impossible maneuver that had the unexpected consequence of heating my blood to a boil.

I had been bound into marriage against my will and chained by magic in ways I did not understand. If the head of the poet Bran Cof had told the truth, I could be released from the marriage as long as I did not succumb to an inconvenient attraction to his physical form. I had a dreadful task assigned me. I could not afford sentiment, or distraction. The master of the Wild Hunt was not interested in sentiment, nor would he be distracted. Bee had already called me heartless, and years of living in an impoverished household had taught me how to be sensible.

Taking a deep breath, I began folding up the fabric. Having to be careful with the pins was good practice. Pins drew blood if they pricked you hard enough.

“Just so you understand, Vai. I am grateful for your help. But nothing has changed between us that we have not already discussed.”

I glanced up to see how he was taking my implacable declaration, only to surprise a look on his face which I could only describe as calculating.

“What?” I demanded. “You look like you’re plotting a crime.”

He looked away so quickly it was as good as a confession.

“We’re finished here.” I pressed cloth to my chest like a shield and stepped back from the table. Around the courtyard, people were pretending not to watch, but they were watching.

He let me go without saying one more word.