Cold Fire

26

“Vai. Ja, maku! Me wholehearted apologies, but I need a word with yee.”

How long Kofi had been standing about ten paces from us, I could not guess. The dance and the drums, the polyrhythm of conversation and laughter and song, the press of bodies and the smell of pepperpot mingling with the kick of dust slammed back up against my awareness.

Vai dragged his gaze away from mine. “I’ll be right back.” He released me, rose, and walked over to Kofi.

I dredged for a semblance of thought. The intricate voices of the drums throbbed up from the earth. My feet twitched as if drums were a partner who led you into the dance, and of course they were. Rhythm was another thread wound through bone and blood to weave together existence. For one night I could set aside my worries about Bee and Rory. For this night.

I watched as Kofi spoke urgently into his ear. I needed to listen, yet it seemed wrong to eavesdrop on a man who had just confided his secret hopes and dreams. At first he was smiling as if expecting to hear how his conspirator’s machinations had brought him triumph. His brow furrowed. Then his eyes widened, and he frowned and shook his head.

I heard him say, annoyed and thus a little loud, “This is not a good time.”

With an unreadable glance toward me, Kofi said, “’Tis the message I’s told to give yee.”

As Kofi hurried off, Vai strode back, pulled me up, and brushed off the burlap. I trotted beside him to the food cart whence he had borrowed it.

“You’d hate it if the last of this pudding dribbled down that gorgeous jacket. What were you thinking to wear it to an areito?”

The coy glance he gave me from under half-lowered lashes was enough to make my breathing stutter and my heart flame. “Only of you. Whatever is necessary, I will do.”

Suspicion flowered into a burst of vibrant certainty. “You blinded Aunty Djeneba and Brenna with your good manners and your appealing way of confiding in them. Uncle Joe was right. You haven’t been crying in your pillow at all. You’ve been biding your time. Plotting my downfall.”

“You think with your feet, Catherine. That’s how you escaped the mansa and fought off a shark. But I”-he offered me the last slice of papaya, his gaze fixed on my mouth as I tried to eat it up delicately and quite failed-“ I think with my mind.”

I should have been angry, but instead I was delirious. I laughed.

He smiled as he wiped out the bowl with a wedge of maize bread and fed it to me. After slinging bowl and spoon on the cord, he twined his fingers intimately through mine and we walked to the jetty. He wore a busy, thoughtful expression, so I let him think and enjoyed the pleasure of walking hand in hand. It was good to have a chance to catch my breath.

After a while, he spoke. “Kofi was just given an unexpected message.”

“From the radicals. The Assemblymen.”

“Yes.”

I recalled I had seen Kofi at the areito earlier with one of the women who had shown up at the gate last night. “Are those two gals really part of the organization?”

“Is there some reason they shouldn’t be?” He pressed a fleeting kiss on my mouth without breaking stride. The touch of his lips made me quite forget who I was for at least ten heady steps. “Were you jealous when I went off with them?”

“Why would you think I was?”

“Why did you wait up, then?”

“Were you drunk when you came back?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

“Only intoxicated by thinking of you.”

“I thought so. I could hear the liquor in your voice. Why do the radicals trust a maku who has only been in Expedition six months?”

We turned onto Breakwater Street, the boulevard that ran all the way to the old city. Here in Lucairi lay work yards opposite the stone jetty shore where local canoes and boats came and went. Vendors had set up stalls, selling fried fish, cassava bread hot off portable griddles, green mango on sticks, and roasted crab in the shell whose shattered remains crunched underfoot.

“Kofi trusts me, just as I trust him. I’m an unregistered fire bane. That makes me a good risk because anyone could have me arrested. Also, as a true cold mage, I have something they didn’t know they wanted. I’ve been instructing local fire banes in the most basic teachings any child at a mage House is taught in the schoolroom. Obviously that is also against the law.”

“How did you find the radicals in the first place?”

“Chartji’s aunt introduced me to Kofi. Trolls have a complex net of affiliations.”

“Chartji’s aunt? Is she related to those two trolls who come every Jovesday?”

“Why, Catherine, have you been watching me?”

His dash jackets were tailored so exactly to him that they didn’t bind, and he knew perfectly well how good he looked. The red and gold of the magnificent fabric set off the deep brown of his complexion most flatteringly. “Why do you ask when you know the answer?”

“Just to hear you say it.”

I laughed again. “You are such an irritating man. Where are we going?”

“We’re going to Nance’s. The boardinghouse down by the gates of the old city.”

He drew me over next to the rock wall against which waves slurped so noisily that it would be difficult for passersby to hear. “The radical leadership has finally agreed to talk with me. It’s taken months for me to get this invitation. You’re right, they’re cautious. They can’t afford to trust anyone new. They’re very close to calling a general strike and bringing the city to a halt until their demands are met.”

“What are their demands?”

“The establishment of a committee to compose a charter for the establishment of a new government for Expedition Territory. And a time span to accomplish it in: three months. The Council would arrest them in a heartbeat if the wardens knew who the leaders actually were. In fact, the radicals were ready to call the strike last Martius. But the arrival of General Camjiata threw the whole city into an uproar. Meanwhile here I am, an unknown agent. That’s why I have to meet with them now, at such short notice. If I refuse, they’ll think I’m plotting something and won’t give me another chance.” He looked searchingly at me. “Catherine, I need to know if there is anything you want to tell me about all this. Anything it would be better for me to know now, before the meeting with the radicals. I see you brought your cane-your sword, I mean-as if you are expecting trouble.”

The Hassi Barahal house had spied for Camjiata. My mother had fought for him, and then escaped imprisonment at his hands. In the entryway of the law offices of Godwik and Clutch, he had told me he was looking for Tara Bell’s child. Me. I touched the ghost hilt, for twilight had brought the sword to life even though to the eye it still appeared as a black cane. Was it truly a cemi, of a kind? Was it my mother’s spirit that touched me when I felt the shiver of its cold steel? She who had left me with a memory of only five words? Tell no one, not ever.

“I always bring my cane because I’m always expecting trouble,” I said.

He pressed his cheek to my hair. “There is surely a great deal about you I do not understand.”

Water slapped across the rocks. In the distance, thunder rumbled like a warning. I turned my face into the curve of his neck, remembering the voice of the hurricane’s herald and his taunting words. The spirit had told me to run, but I was not going to run this time from those chains.

“Vai, I want you to understand-”

Ice weight choke dread throat closing mask blinded. I couldn’t breathe. I was slipping below the surface of the water without a sound as my sire dragged me down.

“Catherine! I have you! Don’t faint.”

I sucked in air, holding on to him as if to my life. “I have to get away from the water.”

He eased me away from the rocks and, once we reached the edge of the boulevard, looked me over carefully. “Catherine, I’ll never let you drown, if that’s what you fear. After I lost you in the well, I swore I would not let go again. Not if you wanted me.”

I had my breath back. And I thought: The time to decide about a man is before you sleep with him, not afterward.

“And if I didn’t want you?”

He smiled in the most aggravating way. “How could you not want me, Catherine?”

I laughed, because only Vai could have spoken those words in a way that made it seem he completely believed them while at the same time he was making light of his own vanity in needing to believe them. “How much time do I have to answer the question?”

“My sweet Catherine, I suggest we go to this untimely meeting so we can get it over with, the sooner to go home to our bed. And then…then you have as long as you need.”

Quite the most reckless surge of feeling swept through me. Before I could kiss him, he slipped out of my grasp.

“We can’t start that or I won’t get through the evening and neither will you. Let’s keep walking.”

Walking warmed the cold right out of me and loosened the chains that had been strangling my tongue and my heart. His long stride matched well with mine. I felt comfortable with his silence even if my thoughts wandered all over his body, wondering just exactly how long it would be before we could return to the room and what on Earth we were meant to do with Kayleigh. Being Vai, he had surely already arranged something. Honestly, I could not imagine otherwise.

“Vai, there’s one thing, though.” I had to say it. “I don’t want to get pregnant right now.”

“Of course. We’ll take precautions. We want no children until we’re free of clientage.”

“Blessed Tanit! You’ve already thought about this, haven’t you?”

His fingers squeezed mine as he smiled without looking at me. “I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, if you must know. But besides that, I also suspected…it was something you were worried about before.”

Before, meaning Drake. I did not want to discuss Drake with Vai.

“If he hurt you, I wish you would tell me.”

I really did not want to discuss Drake with Vai, but I owed him an explanation. “He got me drunk. And he lied to me. He implied he could only heal me if I had sex with him. I suppose that is a form of harm.”

“I’d call it harm,” Vai muttered.

“Did he force me? No, I was willing. I won’t lie to you. It was nice.”

“ Nice??” He laughed in a way that made me flush straight through the center of my body. “I would pity the man you said that of, if I didn’t know he’d gotten you drunk and lied to take advantage of you. Because I promise you, Catherine, that afterward you won’t say it was nice.”

The air changed not as with anger but with a force so primal I felt I’d been turned inside out and every part of me tuned to him. I had no words, but I did have an overpowering foreboding that the next hour or two was going to advance like molasses down the shallow slope of a platter.

At length and with the grace of a man shifting directions in a dance, he said, “You did a remarkable job piecing that skirt together.”

“I am a seamstress of rare and unexpected potency. Vai, when are you going to tell me what you are doing with the trolls?”

“I’ll bring you along next Jovesday. And teach you a better thing to call them than trolls, which is a human word. Here’s a simplified version of what they call themselves.” He whistled something short but grand.

“That’s not a word.”

“It’s not a word as we think of words. But it makes you wonder if they dislike being called trolls as much as Kena’ani dislike being called Phoenicians.” He tugged me to the left. “Here we are.”

Gas lamps burned on the old city walls. We turned aside before we reached the wide plaza, the main batey courts, and the harbor. The boardinghouse was the one I had noticed before, a sprawling edifice raised on squat stilts, its main floor a huge open-air wooden deck flanked by two-story wings. I smelled pepperpot, rum, and urine.

Folk packed the place, many young and plenty male, although more women than I had expected plied their way into the crowd with men on their arms or their arms on men. It was an agitated press lit by cobo hood lamps set along the railing of the outer deck. A burly fellow stood on a box shouting over the noise.

“Yee mean to say yee shall serve in an army overseas for a scrap of pay, the hope of loot, and a dram of rum each night? While meanwhile yee brothers and sisters at home still don’ have the right to vote on the Council? That same Council who claim to govern us as citizens but who act to rule us as subjects? Is yee so easily bribed? Shall yee not stand here and fight for the rights we shall hold here? Do yee know what they mean for yee to earn there, in they Europan war? Death! Death, for the merchants to get fat off. ’Tis not worth it, lads! ’Tis past time to fight at home.”

Vai pulled me close as if to make sure he wouldn’t lose me. Rising voices swelled like a gust of wind over us as the one fellow stepped down and another bounded up to take his place.

“I say different! I say, this is opportunity! Yee really believe people shall not be fooled or they vote bought in this thing yee call elections? They who talk of Assembly is either witless or cunning. Let the Council have they triumph now, for I tell you, the Taino shall come soon enough to claim we factories. Them who want to remain free must get out of Expedition-”

Still holding on to me, Vai cut a path through the seething crowd with his stare and, perhaps, a pinch of cold magic.

A wide formal staircase led to a series of upstairs rooms, private parlors whose windows looked over the deck and the sea. He headed for the serving counter in the back, which was mobbed with drinkers. Kofi was leaning over the bar, talking to one of the men pulling drinks.

Appreciative whistles erupted from the area around the crate as the two speakers began talking over each other.

“-These vexatious laws put in place by a Council for which we cannot vote. Why shall we listen to them tell us what to do?”

“Would yee rather have beggars and layabouts rule yee?”

Kofi turned away from the bar with four brimming cups in his big hands as he steered toward a pair of sour-looking men who were scanning the crowd. Were they looking for fire banes? The man behind the bar looked our way, and nodded at Vai.

“Fight! Fight! Punch him in the nose!”

Excitement gripped the crowd as a boxing match broke out at the speaker’s crate. Kofi spilled the cups over the two men, who sputtered and shouted. We ducked under the counter and behind a curtain into a corridor that let out into a courtyard in back. The gas lamp burning at the far end of the corridor wavered as Vai paused beside a second curtain.

“This is the servers’ stair,” he said, pulling the curtain aside to reveal a narrow stairwell illuminated at the top by one of the cobo hood gas lamps. The curtain slithered down behind us just as the lamp’s flame was sucked dead by Vai’s presence. Shrouded in the darkness of a stifling, windowless space, I halted to let my eyes adjust.

A wan spark of light caught and expanded like blown glass to the size of a fist.

“Oh!” I breathed, for the cold fire he could call never ceased to dazzle me.

Concentration creased his brow. He shaped the light until it appeared as a pewter holder with a candle framed by glass. Even the flame had a pulse and ripple.

“So beautiful,” I said in wonderment.

“Yes,” he murmured, brushing fingers lightly down my cheek, for he was now looking at me, not at the illusion. I caught in a breath because I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he stepped back and took my hand. “Upstairs.”

We climbed to a curtain made of long strings of beads. The beads rustled and clacked together as we pushed past into a corridor that ran the length of this floor, with closed doors on either side that led to private parlors. The corridor stood open-unwalled-at either end. The night breeze tickled down its length. At the far end, guarding the main stairs, a burly man with a bandaged head looked our way. He headed for us. He was wearing a singlet over trousers, and his arms were so corded with muscle I expected he could lift me with one and Vai with the other.

“Yee shall be the maku fire bane we have heard so many tales of.” He did no more than glance at the “candle” Vai was holding, seeing the illusion as real. By its nacreous light, I saw he had a pair of shockingly green eyes in a face otherwise Roman in its features. “Who is the gal?”

“This woman is my wife.”

“The gal was not invited, maku.” His appraising gaze lingered too long on my chest.

Vai stepped between us. “I said, she is my wife.”

A kind of heat flared that had nothing magic about it as the two men stared each other down. Vai did not have Kofi’s height. Although he had a carpenter’s back and arms and a dancer’s build, that was no match for the guard’s powerful girth and loose boxer’s stance, ready to land a punch. An eddy chilled around us as my laughing, teasing Vai transformed into the arrogant cold mage who had hammered the mansa to his knees. The guard gave ground with a startled look.

“Which door?” said Vai in an imperious tone that was not really a question.

A woman dressed in the local way appeared from the main stairs, fanning herself with a pamphlet which she lowered the instant she saw us.

“Thank Ma Jupiter yee have come, Jasmeen,” said our guard. “Yee’s late.”

“Who is this, Verus?” Her glance at me was swift and dismissive; she looked Vai up and down in the same way the guard had just measured me. “Surely the fire bane. Who is the gal?”

“His wife, he say,” said Verus.

“She was not invited,” said Jasmeen, pausing before a door, “although we heard a tale about the maku fire bane’s lost woman providentially washing up on the jetty.”

“What did you hear?” asked Vai, gaze narrowing.

Jasmeen was a handsome woman of middle years, old enough to have adult children and yet young enough that she might think about bearing more if the appreciative look she gave Vai was any indicator of her state of mind. She smiled, amused by my frown. “We hear everything. Let her come in.”

We entered a pleasant chamber with a long table and chairs set just inside the door, and divans and wicker chairs spaced along a row of open doors that let onto a balcony. The remains of a meal had turned the table into a complex pattern of abandoned platters and bowls plundered of their riches. The woman crossed to the divans and chairs, where she greeted the personages already in the chamber: three humans and three trolls; she made a seventh.

They watched Vai and me approach. The only illumination came from Vai’s illusory candle. Its pearlescent glow cast strangely distorted shadows along the crests of the three trolls and across the faces of the three rats. One was a vigorous-looking old man, the second a middle-aged man with such a pleasant expression and calm smile that I was instantly suspicious of him, and the third the young woman I had seen at Aunty’s gate the night before and walking with Kofi at the areito earlier this evening.

“This is the fire bane, Livvy?” said the old man, looking at the young woman.

“Yes, ’tis he,” Livvy answered. “Hard to mistake once yee have seen him. The gal is he lost woman.”

“She is the one yee other associate don’ trust?”

“Yes, the very one.” She considered me with a frown that shaded rueful, as if she was sorry to have to say such a thing. I was certainly sorry to have to hear it!

“Very well. Yee may remain for the meeting, Livvy.”

“Me thanks, Grandfa’.” She retreated to a chair in the shadows where she sat with hands clasped, leaning toward the conversation as toward a long-anticipated treat.

Outside, the long moan of a conch sounded. A high-spirited brawl had overtaken the wide deck while drummers out on the plaza started up a driving rhythm.

The old man sighed. “What is done is done. Sit, if yee please.”

Vai pretended to set the candle on a shelf by the window, although its light was surely too bright for anyone to be fooled into believing that it was real. We sat on a divan placed perpendicular to the others. The woman with the pamphlet, Jasmeen, sat between the men.

“Ooo. Elegant jacket,” said one of the trolls, by the brilliance of his crest likely elderly and male. He was flanked by two younger trolls, one of whom I guessed to be female by her larger stature. About the other I could not tell. “Silk. That pattern look like shiny chains. I love shiny chains.”

“Thank you,” said Vai so coolly I could tell he was pleased.

The elderly troll’s gaze flicked to me and then to my cane. He showed his teeth but made no comment. The old man and Jasmeen were looking at me the way hungry people look at food that is spoiled. The other man watched with that vaguely pleasant and thereby ominous smile.

The old man spoke. “Ja, maku, this is not a philosophical society where friendly debate is served along with beer and supper in a public venue. I don’ like that yee is told yee may meet with us, and then yee bring this gal without permission.”

“She is my wife. I have kept nothing from her.”

“She know why yee’s come to Expedition?”

“She knows everything.”

“That yee was sent here to assassinate General Camjiata?”

“That I was sent here to stop him from returning to Europa, by whatever means necessary. Yes, she knows.”

Jasmeen waved the pamphlet in Vai’s direction. “Our committee have taken a considerable chance in meeting with yee tonight. We have done it at short notice so as to protect we own selves from arrest and, most importantly, to protect the cause of liberty which we champion.”

The old man spoke as with the slash of a whip. “Yee services we can trust because yee’s an unregistered fire bane. We can turn yee over to the wardens if yee shall prove troublesome. But how can we trust she when we know nothing of she? Where did yee lose she? How did she reach the Antilles? Yee own associates don’ trust she, so we’s told.”

Vai stiffened, jaw tight, chin lifted. I knew that expression well. It often preceded his saying or doing something it would have been better for him not to. I had to help him.

I rose. “I have not formally introduced myself. My name is Catherine Bell Barahal. I was raised in the city of Adurnam, in a Hassi Barahal household.”

The middle-aged man started visibly, the first crack in his mask. The old troll’s crest rose.

“Some of you recognize the name.” I recalled what Chartji had said the first time we had met. “The old histories call my people ‘the messengers.’ I have been trained in all aspects of the business. My sword-craft is rusted, but decent. Also, I can memorize large blocks of text and repeat them later. So you see, I am perfectly suited for the work of radicals. These were my husband’s only considerations when the time came to decide whether to bring me along to your society.”

In the corner, the young woman made a noise more like a snort than a laugh.

“Have yee aught yee wish to say, Livvy?” asked the old man. “Speak.”

“After everything I have heard from me friends, I think it more likely he brought she along to impress her with daring revolutionary deeds.”

“That way, is it?” said Jasmeen with a cutting smile, again fanning herself with the pamphlet. “Not so sure of the gal, after all.”

The trolls’ half-lifted crests I could not interpret, but with the rats I had clearly dug Vai in deeper. I had to try again.

“I am in Expedition because I am a fugitive. If you wish to be rid of me, you need only turn me over to any representative of the prince of Tarrant. I arrived in Expedition because I…escaped from a ship and almost drowned.”

“An entertaining tale,” said the old troll brightly, although I did not like the look in his eye. Trolls seemed such hospitable companions until you realized they could eat you. “I hope there is more of it.”

To avoid the troll’s predatory scrutiny, I glanced at the pamphlet now resting on Jasmeen’s pagne, its title in bold print: ON NECESSARY