Cold Fire

24

I woke up.

A shutter was banging rhythmically in a pounding, relentless wind. Rain sheeted on the roof like a downpour of pebbles. Dawn’s light suggested the outline of the shuttered windows. Because I had slept in my clothes, everything was rumpled and creased. My braid had begun to unravel, and I had to wipe strands of hair off my sweaty cheek. Kayleigh slept so soundly it was the work of a moment to shift her cot, crack the door, and squeeze through. I paused at the top of the stairs.

The battering gusts of wind forced me to grip the railing. Rain pelted sideways. Uncle Joe, Uncle Baba the fisherman, and Aunty’s unmarried son emerged from rooms downstairs, followed by several of the men who rented hammock space. I helped them lash down everything that was not already tied down. The canvas roof over the restaurant was rolled down, leaving a stripped rectangle of ground soon churned to mud. Even the ceiba tree in the courtyard had netting thrown over it and staked to the ground.

“Where is Vai?” I shouted.

“He is gone down to the jetty!” shouted Uncle Joe. “We shall go as soon as we is done here. Got to move people inland. The Angry Queen come. Someone have offended her. Listen.” A deep dull boom rolled in the southeast. “Her herald speak. Then the flood-bringer shall come.”

I did not ask permission to go to the jetty with them. I simply went. After they had asked me twice to go back, they gave up and let me walk with them if you could call walking what was really leaning into the howl and shuffling forward as against a hand that kept trying to sweep you back. We passed groups of people trudging inland hauling belongings, trundling carts, or carrying cages with bedraggled birds. The city hunkered down like an animal hoping to survive.

When we came to the wide avenue that fronted the jetty, the wind-lashed waters greeted us. Waves clashed and roiled out on the churning brown waters of the bay. Clouds towered along the horizon, as dark as an angry heart.

The wind screamed, blowing my braid parallel to the ground. I could scarcely stand upright as I struggled in the wake of the men toward a damaged building shoreside-one of many boathouses-where folk were trying to hoist a fallen beam. Carpenters had brought tools to cut and split, working beside the wardens they had fought last night. By the evidence of their frantic activity, they were aiming to free people trapped inside as waves pounded at the shattered plank flooring.

A man was laughing.

A lofty shape strode across the bay, flinging shafts. These insubstantial spears ghosted past, curling to become the wind that tore through the streets. The man stood not taller than me, and yet his shadow spanned the sky. His long beautiful black hair writhed, its tendrils growing to engulf every building, every tree, every frail struggling person.

“Run, little sister,” he called mockingly. “I’s the storm’s herald. The Angry Queen follow close behind me. Run if yee can.”

Waves rushed up over the revetment and the wharves and onto the avenue, sizzling around my ankles. He stepped out of the air beside me. His face was scored and scarred by zigzag lines so scintillant I had to look away lest I be blinded. A shaft drove into my flesh, and I found myself on my knees in the rising water. The wave that washed around me sucked out, pulling me toward the sea. By the time I struggled gasping to my feet the shadow had walked at least half a Roman mile west along the shore.

A shout rose from the boathouse as three men were carried out of the building, injured but alive. I ran over. Straddling the fallen beam, men were arguing over whether anyone was left inside. The floorboards had cracked to create a splintering hole in the floor beneath which soughed seawater. An arm appeared, tossing a saw and an axe up into the light. A head appeared, and Vai levered himself up to sit on the edge.

An older man shouted to someone still below. “Kofi-lad! Come up! The flood is coming.”

I pushed through men stowing their gear.

Vai looked up. “I should have known you’d walk straight into danger,” he shouted at me. Then he looked into the hole. “Kofi! You’re the last one. Come up!”

In a wreckage of shattered boards and boats below, Kofi slipped and cursed. “I’s coming. ’Tis just that he is like my uncle.”

“Is someone missing?” I yelled.

Vai said, “The owner is missing. We only found his nephews and the hired boatman.”

Before anyone could stop me, I swung my legs over and dropped. Vai swore, and I had no sooner gotten my balance atop a sliding mass of planks than he hit beside me, the heap shifting. I slid. He caught himself on a hand. A bulb of cold fire cast a glow across the carnage. A wave bubbled up from beneath broken boards. Kofi turned.

“Get out of here, gal!” His contemptuous grimace brought me up short. “Yee’s not impressing any man except Vai.”

With the water coming up, I had no time. “Quiet!”

I balanced across the back of a smashed boat and in a crouch crept up into the nether shadows where the back part of the boathouse had collapsed. I set my hands against one of the ground stilts and leaned there as another wave hissed in, swirling my pagne up to my knees. As the wave subsided, I drew the threads that bind the world into my heart and my ears. And I listened. Nails creaked and groaned as the wind slowly pried at them. Soon the whole edifice would tear loose. Waves slurped beneath the debris. Kofi muttered a complaint, but Vai shushed him.

Human breathing had a distinctive flavor that might flow fast or slowly but that could not be mistaken for a cat’s prim proud air or a dog’s slovenly panting. Another body dwelled here. Blood tainted the air like a sliver of salt. A heart’s erratic pulse cast a fragile line into my hands.

“He is here. Still alive.”

I crawled over the wreckage until I found the spot. I began to pull out boards. The bauble of cold fire drifted down to light my way, for Vai had taken no effort to make it appear like a lamp. Kofi and Vai appeared with an axe and a pry bar. We cleared boards to find another overturned boat beneath, with which we grappled until it became clear it was stuck.

“His head is up under the bow,” I said.

With four powerful swings, Kofi smashed a hole in the half-buried stern, then used the pry bar to clear out the splintered boards. Vai clambered back over the debris to shout up at the remaining men, asking for rope and a net.

“I’ll go,” I said to Kofi. “You’re too big.”

After a hesitation, Kofi stepped back. I squeezed through and crawled up into the marrow of the boat, up beneath the ribs to where a man lay unconscious. I felt along a skinny body to a sunken chest which barely rose and fell. A sticky mat of blood covered his hair, but his skull seemed intact. The ribs of the boat shuddered as Kofi axed a bigger hole in the stern.

“Cat!” he shouted. “Water is rising! Can yee hear me?”

“I’ve got him!” I tugged him through a slime of mud down to the opening. They got hold of his feet, so I shimmied back to cradle his head as they started to pull him out.

A wave poured in, dragging at Kofi and Vai as they braced to hold on to the old man. I lost hold as water surged into the cavity and slammed me into the ribs of the boat.

Then it sucked out. My foot caught and twisted on the rower’s bench above, trapping me under the boat. Spewing and choking, I freed my foot and pushed up to hands and knees. A skin of grime coated my lips. When I breathed in through my nose, a spike of salty water lanced up behind my eyes in a hot knife of pain.

“Cat? Cat!” A shadow blocked the hole. “Throw me some cursed rope, Kofi!”

I heaved, lungs spasming.

Barely heard over the rough tearing rumble of the wind, men cried out in warning.

The whole building rocked as the flood slammed into it and boiled up underneath, filling the entire overturned boat, which was my prison. I had time to suck in one gasp of air before the slippery grasp of the water embraced me. Its moist mouth fastened over my lips to inhale the breath out of my lungs. A liquid voice murmured in my heart: “Let go, little sister. Walk with me and me brother who is the thunder. Walk with us into the storm.”

I open my mouth to call for my mother, for it is her hand clutching mine, but the furious water wrenches her away and I am drowning in the churn of the flood.

My head hit a corner and my knee scraped up splinters like a nest of prickling burning bites. I fought, but fear tore out my courage as water streamed through my parted lips.

Then Vai’s arms held me, and he dragged me out. Foam popped at my nostrils. My head breached. I gasped in air. Vai hauled me up. I hung on him as a dead weight, for I was a quivering frightened drowning child who had lost her papa and mama to the flood.

He carried me over the wreckage of the under-space, slipping and sliding. Kofi had already gone up with the old man. Distant shouts barked a warning.

Another huge wave slammed into the building, shuddering the structure half off its stilts as the entire building groaned. Water gushed into the under-space, rushing up to engulf everything including us.

My ears popped as the temperature dropped. The wave crackled into a ragged, rippled curtain of ice, stopping just short of washing over us. Above, water poured down through the hole on top of us and slapped into the ice wall, hissing and grinding.

Vai was shaking all over, his skin as cold as winter. He had his free arm outstretched. In the curve of his forefinger and thumb, he was holding a necklace chain with a round metal ring like the eye of a spyglass. Within the ring was a circle of what looked like cloudy glass. He released the ring, and the chain dropped limply against his wet singlet.

“I can’t use that a second time,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You’ve got to stand, Cat.”

The rippled curve of the ice wave began to pit and sink as a fresh swell surged up below.

“Ja, maku!” Kofi stuck his head down. “Hurry, yee jackass. Another wave coming.”

I was not a jackass. I jumped; Kofi caught my hands and hauled me up as another man cast down a net for Vai. I had used the last of my strength. Kofi threw me over his broad back and ran, me retching as water chased us across the avenue.

The tearing baleful wind, most frightfully and dreadfully, ceased.

I wriggled and slipped, and landed on my knees as pain pierced into my brain and every joint in my body screamed with a bone-drilling ache. The sky turned yellow. I looked up into the eye of the Angry Queen. The spirit of the hurricane was a woman, a vast looming face with a brow of thunderclouds and a mouth of lightning. The curve of her arms was the tearing circle of the howling winds. Here, under her face, the world lay still.

Vai splashed up carrying rope, net, and tools.

“She have got the kick of a mule, I swear!” said Kofi. “I shall have a bruise.”

“Why did you let her crawl under the boat?” Vai demanded. “She almost drowned!”

“I was too big to fit through. But maku, tell me now, have yee ever tried to stop her doing some thing she mean to do? Had yee much fortune with that? Hurry! The worst is coming, and it shall hit like the hells.”

The woman loomed over us. They did not see her, for she was a spirit, not a body.

She bent down and, with a lick of her salty tongue, she ate me whole.

I stood on a beach of fine white sand as cool as silk beneath my bare toes. I wore nothing but a gauzy shift like a caul of light. My lips were cold, and my feet, sipped by wavelets, were warm. The Angry Queen stood on the surface of the water. She was tall, with broad shoulders and powerful arms ropy with muscle, and the girth of one whose appetite makes her strong. Her eyes flashed with lightning, and her presence was the gale.

“Yee sire is waiting. Go to him.”

“No.”

Thunder growled although the sky lay so clear and blue above me that one might believe it as bottomless as trust.

“Yee cannot fight him. He is stronger and have always been stronger and shall always be stronger. The great ones stir in the abyss. Can yee not hear them?”

On the water’s tickling swell I traveled far and deep into the crushing trench of an abyss where the twinned beasts called leviathan shuddered as they struggled to wake from the stupor that bound them.

“Do yee serve the master still? That is the question he ask of yee. He alone must hold yee allegiance or there shall be ill to pay. Yet yee have a defiant heart. ’Tis a spark easily seen, little cat. Better if yee extinguish the spark than if he do, for he shall not suffer rebellion.”

“So must we fight,” I whispered, “rather than submit.”

A turtle rose out of the glassy blue waters, its blocky head a stub above the waves, eye staring until with a flip and a roll it sank back under. For some reason, its presence heartened me.

“Do you serve him, too?” I asked her.

Her laughter boomed, the sound cracking so hard I was driven to my knees. Her fingers like the grasp of death closed over my face.

“Yee talk too much. The secret is not yee own to share.”

A mask of water hardened over my face. The foul liquid coursed into my eyes and nose and mouth. But the flood had not ripped me away. Vai had saved me from the drowning waters.

Water splashed in my face. I was being carried through the rain-washed streets.

“Let me down. Let me down!” I struggled free and landed on my knees, first coughing, then heaving uncontrollably until I thought I would retch the entire sea out of my lungs.

Vai knelt beside me. His skin was hot, or mine was cold. “Catherine, we have to keep moving. The sea is flooding inland.”

“I have to save Bee!” But when I tried to rise the darkness beneath the overturned boat engulfed me until I saw nothing. Perhaps I flew. Perhaps it was all a nightmare.

For then I was sitting in the chair under the shelter by the kitchen with my muddy wet blouse stuck to me and a dry pagne draped modestly over my soaked drawers. A poultice soothed my scraped knee. One of the toddlers cuddled in my lap, a comforting presence.

“’Twas bravely done,” said Kofi, behind me, “but I still reckon that gal be hiding the truth from yee.”

“This is the not the time to speak of it,” said Vai. “She saved your uncle’s life when we all would have left him there not knowing he was trapped.”

“’Tis true. She saved him. I shall go over to he daughter’s place to see how he fares.”

Their voices faded. The wind mocked me in its singsong chant: We want one of they, do yee hear, me sissy-o?

The old man was dead. The spirits had taken him. The thread that linked him and me unraveled and its last tendril snapped like a hand slipping out of the hand that seeks to hold it in this world. His spirit sighed, and crossed over. A crow perched on the open sill and watched me as the sun behind it made a cowl of golden light for its form. Weary beyond measure, I went to bed.

I woke the next morning on the cot, wearing fresh drawers and a clean blouse I had no memory of putting on. The sound of hammering and sawing beat at my aching head. My mouth tasted of a vile brew that I could only imagine had been fermented from a stew of rotted worm guts and moldy rat droppings. Gagging, I fastened my spare pagne around my hips and, aching in every battered muscle, creaked down to the washhouse to do my business. After, I hobbled to the kitchen, where Aunty Djeneba greeted me with a cup of fresh juice and a kiss on each cheek.

I drained the cup.

She grated cassava in her calm way. “That was a fierce night and day. Uncommon thing, though. The storm sheared off right after all that happened on the jetty. There was wind, but nothing like what there should have been. Unexpected good fortune for us. How is yee, gal?”

A basket of fruit sat on the kitchen table. “Been shopping already?” I asked.

“That was brought at dawn by the daughter of the man yee found in the boathouse. ’Twas a brave act, Cat.”

“But he died anyway.”

She paused. “He passed in the arms of he family, not trapped in the flood.”

A mask of ice stiffened my face, and my sire’s claws sank into my beating heart. Now she was wondering how I’d known, because no one could possibly have told me.

“Is there some mending I could do?” I said hastily.

She studied me. “Yee need mend nothing, gal. Yee rest.”

“I just need to do something.”

She nodded. “Yee know where the basket lie.”

I darned as my heart raged. How I hated them! My sire who had bound me to serve him and sent his servants to mock and torment me. The mansa who had been willing to kill me and didn’t even care that he owned me. He only cared that Vai was forced to obey his commands because the mage House owned Vai and his entire village. Princes and Romans who played a game of plots and scheming to which only the powerful were invited. Hidden masters who directed Bee’s fate. The Council who sent out its wardens to track down fire banes and arrest people who wanted a voice.

No wonder folk lashed out, rebelling against their chains.

I did not ask where Vai was. I did not have to. I could hear the sounds of repair work all around as the people of Expedition mended the damage done by the storm. He would be working.

For even if he was out hammering and sawing, he was working in the service of the mansa. He was a cold mage first and always. He was bound, as I was bound because I was bound to him.

Today was the eighth of September. What day had we married? It had been late in October, the evening of the twenty-seventh, to be exact. Yet what did that date matter? On the last day of October, the Wild Hunt would ride. I didn’t have much time left. I had to stop thinking about anything except Bee.

Aunty Djeneba let me mend in silence as she chatted companionably about the prospects for an areito’s being held the next day as usual in honor of the annual Landing Day, the day the first Malian ships had made landfall on Kiskeya. I ate rice and peas although without cassava bread, for the last few days’ flour so painstakingly grated and squeezed had been spoiled by the storm.

In the late morning, Luce came running in. Uncle Joe looked up from polishing his best cups. Aunty and Brenna came out of the back, where they had been straining cassava.

It was to me Luce ran. “Cat, wardens is making a sweep. I sneaked out of school. They’s looking for a maku gal. They don’ say why, except to arrest her.”

Uncle Joe set down cloth and cup as Aunty and Brenna looked at me.

“I promise you,” I said, seized by reckless fury, “the wardens shall not find me.”

I put away the mending and went up to my room to bundle up the clothing I had sewn from my old skirts and jacket, for the wool challis in weave and color was markedly different from any material sold here. Not that wardens would necessarily notice cloth, but I could not take the chance. A trample of wardens announced themselves at the gate before I left the room, but it was no trouble for me to draw shadows around me and walk into plain view, nothing more than the railing on the stairs. I descended to the courtyard as they searched, and I stood right out in the open against a stretch of wall, one that providentially captured the afternoon shade.

They searched through every room and shed as Aunty and Brenna and Uncle Joe demanded by what authority wardens came trampling into their boardinghouse where they had never had a hint of trouble and paid their excise tax just as all folk did.

The wardens left. I waited, leaning against the wall with my mind a fuming blank, until another brace of wardens showed up. Had I been a warden, I would have used the same trick, hoping to take my fugitive by surprise after she was sure she had escaped capture. The children clamored home from school. The afternoon drifted heatedly past, and folk whom I had never before seen came in for a drink. They did not stay long, having not seen a maku gal.

Yet all the local people knew a maku gal waited tables at Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse.

Did folk just not talk? Did the secret truly belong to those who remained silent?

In the late afternoon Vai returned, shoulders slumped wearily. After washing and speaking with the others, he dragged over a bench as if to take advantage of the shade and placed his tools in a tidy row along its length. He gently shooed off the little lads who followed him around and set to work sharpening. The scraping covered his low voice. “I suppose you’ve been hiding right here all day. People are furious the wardens made a sweep of the district. I knew they wouldn’t find you.”

I whispered. “You look tired.”

He looked right at me, surprised by my concern, and as quickly away.

Luce had been surreptitiously searching for me all afternoon after returning in the normal manner from school. She strolled over and sat on the bench where Vai had laid out his tools: chisels, planes, three axes, two saws, an auger, an adze, a drawknife, a mallet, and a gauge.

“I shall help yee,” she said to Vai, picking up a file.

He smiled. “When a gal offers to sharpen a man’s saw, it means she is courting him.”

She giggled, a shy smile flashing. I thought: She thinks of him as I think of Brennan Du, a man wholly out of her reach and not meant for her anyway.

He plied a rasp on the edge of his chisel, his hands sure and strong, the muscles of his bare arms tensing and contracting, his lips slightly parted as if he was just about to tell me something. I could not bear to look at him. The sound of the rasp scored a runnel across my heart.

I slunk away and crept up to my room, where I unwound the shadows, stowed my things, hardened my heart, and went back out.

Luce saw me descending the stairs and ran over. “Where’d yee hide?”

“Don’t you think I have to keep that a secret?” The others had seen me come down. I walked over to the bar. “Will anyone come tonight, Uncle Joe?”

“Sure.” He looked me over with a frown. “Most shall come to drink in thanks we was not harder hit by the hurricane. The rest shall come to talk revolution, for the Council have overreached it own self with this raid.”

I ran my fingers along a tray’s well-worn rim, smooth from years of use by serving gals before me. “I shall eat something now, and serve if folk do come. If you think it’s safe.”

Vai had followed me. “Catherine, you took a beating in the storm. Shouldn’t you rest?”

Words flooded like the storm’s surge in a wild burst of anger that took me utterly by surprise. “Rest? Do you think there is rest for the likes of us? Aren’t we the ones at the mercy of the flood and the hammer of the wind? How can it be right that a cold mage who can turn a wave into ice and shatter iron is nothing but the mansa’s property? And why would you think you truly own me, Vai, just because your mage House does own me due to a contract I never signed or agreed to? Why would I wrap myself in more chains?”

Leaving everyone gape-mouthed, I ran to the washhouse and blew my nose. A rime of emotion I could not describe or acknowledge coated me, so I stripped out of my clothes and washed myself and my hair and, braiding it wet, fixed it under a kerchief after I dressed. Luce looked in once but left me alone. Everyone else pretended not to see me.

At length I ventured out to a courtyard ringed by soft lamps, an illusion testifying to the power of Vai’s cold magic, he who had yesterday said he had nothing more to draw from. Unless that wasn’t what he had meant with the words “I can’t use that a second time.”

Folk came, as Uncle Joe had predicted. The crowd conversed in agitated murmurs. With a laden tray I walked among them as always, and I was grateful to do this ordinary work, just another gal making her way in the world.

Vai had put away his tools and gone over to talk to Kofi, their heads together like conspirators’. Who was this man who looked exactly like my husband? Once or twice or ten times he glanced toward me when he thought I wasn’t looking at him-not that I was looking at him all the time-and each time he would look away with an imperious lift of his chin as if to remind me of the way I had raged at him an hour ago in front of everyone. There was the Andevai I had married! I could dislike the arrogant cold mage. I had to.

How old men did ramble! Yet their words had a toothsome bite as they discussed why the Council hadn’t supported General Camjiata’s original bid for troops, money, and weapons.

“I reckon,” said the oldest uncle, “the Council feared the general would-a just turned troops and weapons around against the Council to overthrow them and sit he own self in they place.”

“So he is now run to the Taino? The cacica shall be glad to use the excuse to invade.”

Several shook their heads. “The Taino shall not invade. They hold their virtue very high. They shall never be the ones to break the First Treaty.”

So why would the Taino help the general? Everyone agreed: trade to Europa with no tariffs or wharfage fees and no restrictions as there were now. They could flood the Europan market with sugar, tobacco, and Expedition’s cheap cloth, and with the profits fund a war against their perpetual rivals, the Purepecha kingdom.

Oldest uncle considered. “The Council shall get those same benefits if they support the general. Except for the war with the Purepecha. The Council could likewise send over the ocean in the general’s service the very lads who trouble the city most with discontent. Yet they refuse to help him. Sweet Cat, yee is from Europa. What yee reckon?”

I paused beside the table, tray balanced on one hand, aware that Vai had looked around to see how I would deal with a question. “Does anyone think the general can defeat the Roman Alliance with a single small fleet from Expedition? Didn’t he lose the first war with a significantly larger army? But have you all forgotten there are radicals in Europa, too? Wasn’t it twenty years ago that General Camjiata wrote a legal code codifying the natural rights due to men? Wouldn’t the existence of such a legal code scare the Council?”

“Gal have a point,” said the oldest uncle. “The Council don’ like kings, but they like talk of equality less.”

“Maybe the Council refuses to help Camjiata because they fear the radicals support him.”

Brenna came over to pour more beer. “I hear Camjiata’s legal code don’ give rights to women. Like the Romans in that, yee know, for on he mother’s side he is of patrician descent.”

The oldest uncle answered her with a kindly nod at me to show he meant no offense. “Yee know how they is in Europa, very backward. Yee should, with that Roman mariner yee keep.”

“Which is why he and me never signed a marriage contract. He is a good man, yee all know it, but he got no rights over me share of this house and me money. Which will all go to me girls.”

“With yee permission, Uncle,” said Kofi, looming up beside the table. When the old man nodded, he went on. “I don’ know what they radicals in Europa reckon, but if the general wish for the support of we Assemblymen, he shall have to change he code. No troll clan will put a single ship or sailor at he disposal if females got no rights. And neither shall we.”

“Not to mention no man in this city who speak against such shall ever again enjoy the favors of he wife or gal,” Brenna added before she glided off like a ship under sail.

A judicious silence calmed the courtyard’s chatter. Then the men chuckled nervously and got going again. I moved on, and Vai caught the eye of a new customer who had been about to pat my backside but decided to pat his kerchief instead. Vai looked away before I could skewer him with a chiseled glance meant to inform him that I had to take care of myself, not be beholden to him.

“Say, is it true? After all that big talk about he search for she, the lost woman.” The speaker was a young man I did not know, talking in a low voice to his lads. He did not see me passing behind him although his companions had begun gesticulating wildly. “Now the maku found she, he is not getting any-?” He yelped as I upended my tray over his back.

“Oh! My apologies! I tripped.” I wasn’t sure he could hear me over the guffaws and snorts of laughter that exploded around the courtyard. “Let me get you something to wipe up with.”

At the counter, Uncle Joe handed me a cloth. “Yee know, Cat, beer is not cheap. Don’ go trying me patience.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Vai slid in beside me. “Did he say something to you, Catherine?”

“The gal just tripped,” said Brenna, stacking coconut shell bowls on a tray for me to take to the women who did the washing up back by the cistern. “Happen sometimes, don’ it?”

“Not with Cat it doesn’t,” he muttered. Then he looked past me, and his eyes widened as he smiled in a disconcertingly anticipatory way.

I turned. Over at the gate, Kofi was greeting a pair of vivacious young women who had the bearing of clever girls who assume men will listen to their words and not just stare at their breasts.

“My pardon, but I have to go.” He made his way to the gate.

With a lack of greeting I found peculiarly disturbing, for it made them all seem exceedingly familiar with each other, they went out.

“They radicals mean trouble,” muttered Uncle Joe.

“Trouble is what come before change,” said Brenna, “for yee know we is overripe for some manner of change.”

“How deep in is Vai with these radicals?” I asked, one eye on the gate.

“Why do yee care?” she retorted so tartly that my face flushed. “I reckon yee have made yee feelings known to all.”

“Good-looking gals, they two,” remarked Uncle Joe right over the top of Brenna’s comment. “I would surely have a mind to know them, was I a young fellow.”

Brenna snorted and slapped him on the arm. “A sad day for yee should yee be taken blind.”

“Surely true,” he said, gathering full cups onto my tray. “But I’s not blind yet.”

“Do you think the Council should be replaced by an Assembly?” I asked them.

Uncle Joe scratched his beard. “Hard to say how an Assembly shall be chosen, is it not? Fools and wise men look a lot alike. But listen here, Cat. Yee shall not go running after the radicals, for the wardens have they eye on them something fierce. Kofi-lad say we shall give the vote to every adult male and female, even the poor and the idle, with no regard to property or responsibility. He reckon it is the natural right of each person, troll or rat, to have a say in they governance.”

“ Vai agrees with that? Do you have any idea how much power he has in Europa as part of Four Moons House?”

Uncle Joe and Brenna exchanged a glance whose contours I could not fathom.

“And Kayleigh is working at Warden Hall, passing on information to Kofi, and thus the radicals, and thence to Vai.”

“Keep silence, Cat,” said Uncle Joe sternly. “Don’ draw notice to yee own self. Or to him.”

A memory of the conversation I had overheard in Chartji’s office swept over me, the words Vai had said just before Chartji had opened the door to reveal me eavesdropping: “ What if people bound by clientage could say they want to reclaim ownership of themselves??”

“Cat? Is yee well?” Brenna put a hand on my arm.

A man came in through the open gate. The man was not Vai. “Fine. I’m fine.”

“Take that cloth and these drinks over,” said Uncle Joe, “and be certain not to spill this lot.”

I walked off, measuring my steps because I felt disoriented, like I was losing track of my path. I had to concentrate on Bee. I needed more information on fire mages, in case Drake wasn’t strong enough to feed the Hunt. I heard them murmur, thinking I was out of earshot.

“That is not like him,” Brenna said, “to go running off like that with a pair of handsome gals. Not that I blame him, after what she said to him this afternoon.”

“Yee women underestimate him,” said Uncle Joe with a chuckle. “He know exactly what he is about. I suspicion he asked Kofi-lad to bring those gals by. Look at she, one eye on the gate. Now she shall wonder all evening what he is up to.”

With radicals plotting trouble. What else might he be up to?

They had been good-looking. Far worse than that, they had looked smart and lively. The kind of gals I might be friends with. That is, if I didn’t have to put a chisel through someone’s eye, most likely my own because I certainly could not succumb to this sort of pathetic jealousy over a man I had to set aside until Bee was safe and I was free. If he would even want me after that.

The hour grew late, and folk went home. We washed up and put the benches on the tables, and I swept. Everyone went to bed, but I was too restless to lie down. I sat in the sling chair under the shelter getting bitten up by mosquitoes and so perhaps that was why sleep did not claim me.

Very late, he came in whistling under his breath, tapping out a rhythm on one thigh. A tincture of cold fire hovered in front of him in the shape of a gas flame burning within a glass lantern latticed by gleaming metalwork in the shape of queen conch shell. He was actually spinning it slowly around, checking to make sure it looked real from all angles. And it did, for I would never have known it for an illusion if it had been stationary. Reflexively, without thinking, I drew threads of shadow around me, to hide myself. He paused halfway across the courtyard, and he chuckled in the manner of a man who, having had a little too much to drink, thinks too well of himself.

“There’s a Landing Day areito tomorrow out in Lucairi District. If you want to go, we can. There’ll be dancing and singing. And food.”

I didn’t want to go. I shouldn’t go. It was a bad idea to go.

“Yes.”

“Then we shall. Good night, Catherine.”