Cold Fire

CONSIDERATIONS IN DRAFTING A CHARTER OF RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES

Blessed Tanit had smiled on me!

“As it happens, I was forced to leave the city of Adurnam most precipitously just after I was offered employment with the radical movement by Kehinde Nayo Kuti and Brennan Du.”

Had I on the spot burst into fragrant bloom like a nymph seeking refuge from a persistent suitor, they could not have been more startled. Suspicion and reserve melted like ice under Expedition’s sun.

“La Professora?” exclaimed the old man. “Yee have met her? What is she like?”

I was not going to let this advantage lie. “Can one truly say one knows a personage of such distinction? Yet might I say she is modest in demeanor and brilliant in aspect?”

“Have yee news of she progress in Europa?” asked Jasmeen, looking flushed.

“What did yee speak of??” asked the old troll.

I racked my mind for memories of that evening at the Griffin Inn. “Was it the color, texture, weight, height, volume, and consistency of ice?” I said ruminatively. Vai was no help because he was staring at me with eyes narrowed. “Isn’t she a printer, by trade? Didn’t she get a jobber press from Expedition?”

Everyone turned to look at the trolls, then back at me.

“We heard the airship was destroyed,” said the old troll.

I did not meet Vai’s gaze. “Yes, it was, but she managed to recover enough of the parts from the remains that it was likely the press could be reconstructed.” I pressed fingers to my forehead, dredging up words. “‘We dispute the arbitrary distribution of power and wealth, which is claimed as the natural order, but which is in fact not natural at all but rather artificially created and sustained by ancient privileges.’”

“That yee is acquainted with La Professora is quite unexpected,” said the middle-aged man, this being the first time he had spoken. His voice was a bass rumble.

“Everything about Catherine tends to be unexpected,” muttered Vai.

The young woman called Livvy had shifted to the edge of her chair. Quite beside herself, she spoke without asking permission. “Black-haired Brennan! Have yee really met him? I hear he is the most charming and handsome man imaginable, and that he have never lost a fight.”

How I hated my blushes! I smiled at her anyway, gal to gal, and she grinned back. “Well, he’s not got black hair. It’s likely true about the fighting. Anyone who met him would believe it. And he does have a most enchanting smile and a way of making you feel you are the only person in the room when he speaks to you. My cousin called him the handsomest man she had ever met.”

Vai had developed what I could only describe as a thunderous frown.

The young woman clapped her hands together. “Tell me more about him! I mean, begging yee pardon, Grandfa’, for the interruption.”

“Yee said nothing about a cousin,” said the old man, exchanging glances with the old troll.

“I have one,” I said hastily. “My cousin and I made our way to the radicals because we had heard the words of La Professora. My cousin and I have been chained by obligations fixed on us by others. Surely we may wish to contest a vexatious legal code that allows others to bind us without our consent. Surely we may wish to have our dignity respected. To secure the freedom of our families and lineages and clans. And if we wish these rights for our communities, should we not therefore strive to see that other communities and clans also have what we ask for?”

“Bravo!” said the young woman.

But they were a hard, canny lot. I might have amused them, but I was not sure I had convinced them. I sat, quite out of breath. Frown banished by my passionate speech, Vai took my hand in his.

“Very stirring,” said the middle-aged man. “So tell me, fire bane, tell me true, is yee sure she is on we side? She who washed up on the jetty in a canoe that came from Cow Killer Beach?”

“She was lost,” said Vai.

“Was she, indeed? Yee’s sure? Absolutely sure?”

Letting go of my hand, Vai stood. With him rose the candle lantern, drifting off the shelf and twisting like a creature transformed by the tide of a dragon’s dream. From candle lantern it bulged into a sphere of glowing lacework, spinning slowly upward to the eaves, and melted into a perfect illusion of a cobo hood glass lamp. If astonished expressions were anything to go by, they had never before seen such a display of cold magic, as modest as it was. As the light floated beneath the eaves, casting oddly distorted shadows across us, I saw that the rafters needed to have a broom taken to them to wipe out the cobwebs. Strange what the eye catches on.

“You have my apologies if it seems my action in bringing Catherine here was reckless or ill considered,” he said with a hauteur appropriate to his spectacular jacket and casual exercise of magic. “Or if I seem to have been keeping secrets from you. If you feel you cannot trust my judgment, which I admit must seem to be compromised, then I will understand.”

“But yee need us,” said the middle-aged man. “Is that not what yee said? That yee would prefer to accomplish yee goals with no killing?”

“That is what I want. No killing.”

“But what do yee think will happen, fire bane? People shall die regardless. All that will happen is that blood will not stain yee hands.”

“Blood has already stained my hands. I’d rather not repeat the experience. Killing the general does not change your circumstances in Expedition. That’s why the best solution is to leave him alive but without support. If he cannot return to Europa, that serves me just as well.”

“Alive but without support? No change in circumstances?” The middle-aged man laughed without humor. “Don’ yee understand? When he first came and placed he request before them, all the Council could see was trade and profit. The Council would have voted to support him. Expedition is a small place. We’s like a basket, all woven together. We radicals is the ones who got that vote to turn against him. And then what did he do? He went running to the Taino. And now he is back, with some manner of agreement with them. That make things worse for us. For the Council can now say ’tis the fault of the radicals that the general made a pact with the Taino. As for the Taino, who know what they mean to do?”

“What are you trying to say?” Vai asked, looking at each one.

The old man gave Vai a bitter look. “Yee have boasted yee have a certain means to kill him.”

“It is no boast. It is the truth.”

This was not only too much, it was terrifying, for they meant to throw away Vai’s life!

I jumped to my feet. “Vai is worth far more to everyone alive. If you demand he try to assassinate the general, you’ll only be making him throw away his life on a task he can’t accomplish.”

“Catherine!”

“One man with adequate fighting skills, pitted against trained soldiers who will have crossbows? The mansa can’t have known cold magic is so weak here or I can’t believe he’d have sent you. In Europa, there’s no one you could not destroy. Here, without truly powerful cold magic to protect yourself, the general’s people will cut you down before you can get close enough to draw blood.”

I desperately needed some way to persuade Vai away from this foredoomed course of action. I recalled Brennan’s words when we had been digging through the wreckage of the airship. “Why do you radicals see the general as your enemy? Why do you want him dead?”

The old man waved a hand like wiping away a stain. “We ancestors escaped an empire. Shall we help raise another? A man who is on his father’s side a Keita, a descendant of the Malian royal lineage? Even from over the ocean, such an emperor can come back and say he have the right to trample us because we ancestors once served his.”

“Brennan Du told me that if you examine Camjiata’s legal code, you’ll see he understands he can only succeed by offering rights and privileges to the common people that their masters have denied them. Why kill him? Have you considered making an alliance with him against the Council?”

“A question,” said the old man, “made more interesting by the fact that yee is the one who have posed it.”

“Yee do know, fire bane,” remarked the middle-aged man, “that this gal is known to have arrived on the jetty in the company of James Drake, a notorious fire mage?”

Vai’s mouth turned down, and his shoulders stiffened. “I know that. Have you a point?”

“Beside the point ’tis rumored he have used unwilling people-dying people-as catch-fires to absorb his magic?”

I choked, but no one was watching me. They were all watching Vai.

“I have heard such a rumor.”

“Don’ yee know that the reason he is not in prison for these crimes is because he have a powerful protector? One he is careful to hide? He serve General Camjiata. He was one of the people sent to Adurnam to fetch the general out of Europa and over to here.”

Vai looked at me.

I swallowed.

“Drake, in the entryway of the law offices,” he breathed, as one after another of the connections hit home. “Was the general there that morning, too? Catherine, did you know he was there? Do you know him?”

I shut my eyes rather than answer.

His tone cooled. “I had no idea.”

“Seem to me,” remarked the middle-aged man, “yee’s in bed with yee own enemy.”

The temperature in the room dropped so precipitously that everyone, except for the trolls, cried out in alarm. Several leaped to their feet. The hilt of my sword flowered under the breath of cold magic. I had almost forgotten the way the air bit into the skin, the tingle of power rising from the sword’s hilt to sting my tongue. I opened my eyes to see them all chafing their hands.

“What is this?” whispered Livvy, shivering.

I grabbed Vai’s wrist. “ This is an extremely angry cold mage. Come, Vai.”

I tugged. He did not budge. Nor did he speak. Had we been in the north, I did not doubt the building would have crashed down around us, but we were not in the north. We were here.

I surveyed the radicals with what I hoped was a look portentous enough to make them let us go without forcing me to fight a way out.

“I’m not part of the general’s army. I didn’t ask to be brought to the Antilles, or to this meeting for that matter. I won’t betray what I’ve heard here because I know what it means to be betrayed, and I will never do that to another. But let me tell you this. You don’t know what you’re dealing with, not with Vai and not with the general. And you certainly have no earthly idea of what you’re dealing with, with me.”

As Bee would say, know when to stop talking and leave.

The cold had intimidated them. I released Vai and headed for the door. He followed me, as I had hoped he would. I got out the door and started down the corridor.

Verus said, “Ja, maku!” but someone called urgently to him from down the main staircase and he stepped out of view.

With his longer stride, Vai caught me just as I pushed past the beads and set foot on the back staircase. He grabbed my shoulders and pressed me back, trapping me between him and the wall, beneath the dead gas lamp.

“It isn’t like it might seem,” I said. “I can explain.”

His cold fire blazed through the gas lamp above us. “I gave you a chance to explain. So why start now when you let me walk blind into that meeting and look like a complete fool?”

I managed words. “What do you wish you knew?”

“What do I wish I knew? Where do I even start? You had no trouble telling them everything you knew about Camjiata, so if you didn’t tell me before, it was certainly on purpose. For that matter, why should I believe your story about the binding from the spirit world? You could have made up the whole thing to stop me from prying!”

Such cold surged around him that my breath steamed as mist. “But I didn’t make it up!”

He wasn’t listening as he stormed on in a voice made icy by fury. “And why stop there? Maybe Drake wasn’t the first. I have to wonder about black-haired Brennan, although he doesn’t have black hair. The handsomest man alive. A very persuasive man, with his enchanting smile.”

My heart was galloping in my breast, crashing between chagrin and exasperation. “I never! Drake lied to me. You know that. Anyway, Brennan Du is the sort of man who isn’t interested in a callow young female like myself.”

He was absolutely crushing me against the wall, his body pressed against the length of mine. I had never known you could be so agitatedly abashed and yet recklessly excited at the same time. For I wasn’t scared of him. I just needed him to slow down and listen to me.

He whispered, his lips a kiss away from my mouth. “And what sort of man do you think would be interested in a callow young female like yourself??”

Frost crackled up the wall behind me. My lips had parted but I could not speak. All I could do was tip my head back and lick the corner of my mouth in a way that made him suck in a breath.

“An infatuated dupe?” he continued hoarsely.

I slid my hands up his back. I couldn’t breathe properly, much less talk.

He raged on. “Can’t think of any questions to retort with? Cat got your tongue?”

He was pressed so closely we might almost have been engaged in sexual congress.

“How many nights have I dreamed of doing this?” he murmured in the tone a man uses when contemplating the necessity of cutting into his own flesh to excise a festering wound.

He caught my face in his hands and kissed me.

And he kissed me.

And he kept kissing me.

Nothing existed outside of my body straining into his, his mouth and tongue a glorious pressure on mine. I wrapped my arms around him, explored the breadth and strength of his shoulders. One of his hands splayed along my neck while the other dropped to the curve of my hip, pressing us together. We could have moved closer only if we had taken off our clothes.

“Magnificent Jupiter with he lightning!” said a cheery male voice that sounded a cursed lot like Kofi. “Is there no rooms for that?”

Vai was planting kisses on my lips and my cheek, and my lips and my chin, and my lips and my eyes, incandescently oblivious to his friend’s arrival. Hazily, I opened my eyes, trying to recall where I was. Hadn’t we been alone in an entirely deserted stairwell? Footfalls thumped along the corridor below. An unknown number of men in wardens’ tabards had clustered up behind a big, broad-shouldered man who was blocking the lower stairwell.

Eyes still closed, Vai drew back just enough to whisper. “Wardens. Kiss me so they don’t realize we know they’re there.”

“Yes,” I murmured with my lips moving against the caress of his mouth. I could barely grope for and fasten my left hand around the ghost hilt of my sword, but I knew I had to, so I did.

“Move aside, yee lout,” said a man below. “I’s a warden and we is come to make an arrest.”

Another warden chimed in. “Oh, by Venus Lennaya! Have they no rooms for that? Curse it! My wick died.”

Kofi laughed with utterly false heartiness. “His have not yet, fortunate man. Good view, too, with that gaslight burning right above him.”

“I said to stand aside!” said the first warden. “We have arrests to make upstairs.”

“So this is where yee got to, Cousin!” Kofi stumped up the stairs making a foul echo of noise. He slammed into us. Vai stepped back so swiftly I realized he’d braced for it.

I sat down on a step, shuddering all over.

“I did not recognize yee at first, yee being so intertwined with the gal.” Kofi made a show of grabbing Vai by the back of his jacket. Surely Vai hadn’t doused the warden’s lamp on purpose; the uncontrolled surge of his emotions would, like a riptide, drag everything with it. But the false cobo hood lamp still shone, to confuse them into thinking he was no fire bane.

“Kofi,” I whispered, trying to tell him to warn the radicals. “The meeting…you know…”

“I have no mind to listen to yee, bitch,” he hissed in an undertone. Kofi supported Vai down the stairs while talking in a very loud voice to the wardens pushing up impatiently below. “Newly wedded and living with we aunt but no private room for they own selves. No wonder they took advantage of a dark stairwell. Just give them a moment. Would that not be a mercy? Don’ yee recall being newly wedded yee own self?? Or do yee lot get any pleasure? Or only pleasure from interrupting the pleasure of others?”

“What arseness! I can arrest yee as quick as I can some other lad. Get out of the way. We’s here at the order of the Council. Curse it! Cannot even get a spark!”

“Sorry to hear it, Warden,” said Kofi with a laugh. “Nothing worse for a man than no spark.”

“Let up,” muttered Vai. “I can walk…Where is Catherine?”

“There is not enough cold water in this world to cure yee of yee illness, Vai.”

Ten wardens crowded at the base of the stairs as if waiting for a signal. I smelled the steel of their unsheathed swords, and felt the exhalation of men waiting to strike.

“ All we cursed lamps went out,” said one at the rear of the group.

Kofi shouldered past them, propelling Vai forward.

“Look down there in the courtyard,” the warden went on. “That cursed gas lamp is wavering, too. Here, yee.” I could not tell if he was addressing Kofi or Vai. “Is yee a fire bane?”

I shrieked and leaped down the steps, flailing into the throng of wardens and throwing myself from side to side to knock them off balance. “Spiders! All over me! He shoved me into a web and they’re crawling all over me!”

The moaning voice of a conch shell rose from nearby, stark and powerful, as Kofi shoved Vai through the wardens toward the curtain that led to the bar.

“There is the signal,” said the first warden. “Yee four, arrest them. The rest, with me.”

Six wardens pounded up the stairs. One of the remaining four flung me to one side. I slammed into a wall, pain exploding in my shoulder. Vai jerked away from Kofi and turned. Cold fire sparked, and ballooned. When by its light he saw the wardens with drawn swords threatening me, the air changed, all heat sucked from it. I knew what he was going to do before he did.

I drew my sword. My blade sheared the dark with a flare of light so strong it momentarily blinded me. The hammer of cold hit as icy wind, but the sword protected me. I blinked as the impact slammed into me, but I did not go down. Shouts of consternation rose from the main hall, cries and calls about the lights’ going out. My blade’s glow lit the corridor. The four wardens lay prone on the floor. Behind Vai, Kofi had fallen to his knees.

Upstairs, the wardens were shouting:

“Yee’s all under arrest by order of Warden Hall!”

“Line up, there! Yee, there, don’ move!”

“What right have yee to disturb our dinner! What in the ten hells did yee do to the lights?”

“We have orders to arrest an unregistered fire bane and seditionists in league with-”

Arguments erupted from the private parlors above. A fight broke out, chairs crashing over.

“Cat!” Vai flexed a hand.

I ran forward and grabbed his arm. “You’ve given yourself away. You’ve got to get out of here. Let’s go.”

He stared at me, eyes dilated and expression wild. “I don’t know you. How many lies have you told me, Catherine?”

“What makes you think I’ve told you any lies?”

He yanked his arm out of my grip only to grab my hand and pull me past Kofi toward the curtain and the howling clamor of the main hall as people called for light, any light, please light. “We’re going to find out, aren’t we?”

“How are we going to do that?” I retorted.

At the look he gave me, I ran suddenly so hot that I tripped over my own feet. He wrapped an arm around my back and pulled me against him.

“You know exactly what we’re going to do,” he murmured, as if he intended to start interrogating me now.

“Ja, maku!” Kofi rubbed his head as he staggered to his feet. “What was that?”

Vai pulled away without releasing me. “My apologies, Kofi. I am overwrought.”

“That is not what I would call it,” said Kofi. “Yee’s going to get taken down for assaulting a warden. Not to mention arrested for being an unregistered fire bane. I did not know anyone could do that. Is they dead?”

Vai barely glanced toward the wardens. “Only stunned.”

“I never saw…” Kofi eyed my sword warily but did not mention it, as if it would be bad manners to call attention to an object of such power. The light that gleamed along the blade was beginning to fade as Vai’s cold magic eased. “What yee going to do?”

Vai’s arm tightened around me as he started walking, hauling me with him. “I really can’t think past the unfinished business I need to take care of.”

“Vai, that is not thinking.” Kofi hurried after us with hands raised as if to show himself unarmed, although I abruptly realized by smooth lines in his jacket and sleeves that he was concealing at least four knives. “A bucket of cold water first, and then a plan. ’Tis possible the wardens did not get a good look at yee, but we cannot risk it. We shall have to get yee out of Expedition. What a disaster. I told yee she was sent to trap yee.”

We reached the heavy curtain that separated the corridor from the main hall of Nance’s. Before Vai could grasp it, another hand swept it aside. Beyond lay a churning sea of shadowy movement, the growling murmur of a crowd whose brawl has been dampened by an unexpected change in the weather, and Beatrice’s shockingly familiar and beloved face.

“There you are, Cat! The general promised me we would find you tonight. Did I miss it? You two kissing under the lamp, I mean. If you call that kissing! I would have called it more of an act of sexual congress with clothes on, and if you think that’s the kind of thing I want to dream about, you are quite quite mistaken. I swear an oath I will never again be able to look at you in the same fondly affectionate but innocent way. I woke up blushing!”

My legs gave out. Vai caught me as I sagged against him. My vision hazed into a blurry smear of light, and I thought I was perhaps finally fainting. But it was an actual light, wavering beyond Bee’s black curls and dear face. An actual lamp, kindled by James Drake. The fire mage was standing on the speaker’s crate looking around as if searching the crowd for someone. For me.

Against me, Vai tensed.

The crowd quieted like a hungry beast before it springs. Drake jumped down. Holding the lamp, General Camjiata climbed on the crate with the lamp ablaze as a beacon. By its flame he surveyed the restless murmuring crowd. Or perhaps he was letting them examine him, with his mane of silver-and-black hair hanging to his shoulders, his broad frame, thick arms, and powerful hands, and the sheer penetrating force of his fearless presence.

“Will you let me speak?” the general called into maw of the surly beast. “For I have something to say, if you will hear it. I have something to say which you do not expect to hear.”

Vai’s grip on me tightened. “Is he your father? Your true father?”

“Why would you think so?” I whispered, trying to answer in a question, but I could not make words fit together. My sire’s masked face swam in and out of my mind’s eye.

His words struck my heart like a deadly bolts. “Because it would explain why the Hassi Barahals wished to be rid of you. How you escaped from the custody of Four Moons House. The riots in Adurnam to cover Camjiata’s venture into the city. How you got here with his help. You going out this morning to confirm the plans! Kayleigh was right. How could I have thought so well of myself to dream it was any kind of spirit thread pulling us together? That I could feel your soul reaching out to mine? That our reunion was meant to be simply because I woke up every morning thinking this might be the day I would find you? You were seen to be abandoned in the harbor. All part of the plot to infiltrate the radicals. How easily you managed it, thanks to me and my illusions.”

“If you would stop to think, you would know that’s not how it was. You’re wrong.”

“There’s the truth at last. I was wrong.”

Upstairs, footsteps thundered as the wardens called for reinforcements and jailers. They had made arrests.

“We have got to go,” said Kofi. He halted dead on Vai’s other side to gape like a fish at the sight of Bee in all her sumptuous, poet-?defying glory.

She offered him a smile that made him choke and take a step back as she stepped forward. “Cat, I despaired of finding you, but the general assured me he knew exactly where you would be when the time was right.” She looked Vai up and down. “Stunning jacket. Are you coming with us? You needn’t worry about arrest once you’re under Camjiata’s protection.”

“No.” He released me.

As he took a step back to join Kofi, I swayed. Bee put an arm around my waist, tucking me neatly against her.

“You may wonder that I concern myself in the affairs of the common laboring folk of Expedition,” began the general in the hall behind us in a wonderfully carrying voice whose musical lilt had a stirring, martial rhythm that caught at the heart and loins. “You may wonder, and even be suspicious, knowing I am born into the Keita lineage. But is it not the concerns of the common laboring folk that propel the ship of revolution out of the night of the old ways? If we say a rising light marks the dawn of a new world, which new world do we mean to measure and describe?”

The gleam of my cold steel dimmed as feet scraped along the darkening corridor.

“Vai,” I said.

He was already gone.