Cold Fire

27

For a night and a day and a night, I lay immobilized in a bed of unspeakable luxury, unable to think or talk or move. He thought I had betrayed him.

I did drink, because he would have insisted, and eventually I got bored of sleeping and staring. So on the second day I rose in the momentary cool of dawn and washed my face in a ceramic basin while Bee sat on the big bed we had shared, watching me with a gaze I might have described as wary.

“I could not have taken one more day of that,” she said. “I didn’t know you could stay silent for that long. Even that one time when we were thirteen and you were ill with that terrible fever, you babbled nonsense nonstop sleeping and waking.”

I examined her. “You look thinner.”

“I was beastly sick on the Atlantic crossing. I only survived because the general sat with me every day and coaxed water and gruel down my throat. He told me about his wife. He told me what he knows about walking the path of dreams.”

“You like him!”

She tucked her legs up to sit cross-legged. “I do. I admire him.”

“You admire the Iberian Monster?” I looked around the room. “I hope this chamber isn’t in the nature of a bribe.”

The whitewashed walls had been ornamented with a mural depicting a trellis of flowers swarmed by butterflies in vibrant blues, greens, and golds. The sideboard on which the basin stood had carved legs, the kind of work that took an artisan weeks to finish. The ceramic basin was painted inside and out with an intricate Celtic knotwork with neither beginning nor end. The windows were open, and there was of course no fireplace or brazier, only a gas lamp in each corner.

“It is a fine chamber, is it not?” said Bee. “But I am squelching a horrible temptation to paint nasty pointy-toothed sprites flitting through the trellis. They could be skewering the butterflies with little javelins and darts.”

“Javelins and darts? You should give them rifles!”

“Of course! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!”

“Neither can I! How did you end up here? What happened to Rory?”

“Questions I might also ask you.”

I was so tired of questions! “You tell first!”

“There’s the temper! Frustrated, Cat?”

I flung myself onto the bed, which was so spacious and inviting…

“Cat, dearest, you’re flushed.”

“What can I do, Bee? He asked me straight out if there was anything I needed to tell him.”

“And you kept silent, exactly as you should have done.”

“Yes. No! Yes, I kept silence, but no I shouldn’t have. I should have told him everything.”

“Of course you shouldn’t have!”

“You don’t marry someone with the intent of concealing things from him! To withhold trust until there is no doubt is not trust. He trusted me, but I didn’t trust him. Don’t you agree he must hate me now?”

“That didn’t look like hate to me. And if he really trusted you, he wouldn’t have run off like that. So if you ask my opinion-”

“Did I ask for your opinion?”

“Yes, you just did. Blessed Tanit, Cat! Marry him? Don’t tell me you had actual sexual congress with him!”

“I didn’t! But I was going to!”

“I don’t understand. The head of the poet Bran Cof said if you don’t consummate the marriage, then after a year and a day you’ll be free. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be released from the marriage?”

Without realizing, I had ruched up parts of the thin blanket in my fists. “Do you think I would walk free if he could not? That I’d take my pleasure, and leave him in chains?”

“Dearest Cat, I always knew you were secretly romantical.” She smiled in a way that reminded me of Aunt Tilly at her most tender, and stroked my hair to calm me. “My story is more easily told, which, I note, is commonly true when it comes to your stories and my stories. You witnessed my compulsion to unearth those slimy grubs. I knew I was leaving you behind when I waded into the river but I simply couldn’t stop. I floundered to shore in the Temes River of all places, on the wharf in that town Londun. No sign of the grubs. I must suppose they dispersed in the water. As for me, I almost froze to death while choking on rubbish and sewage. But I talked my way into a ride-”

“I’m sorry I missed that!” I found I could open my fists and let go.

She smirked. “I discovered a fatherly carter on his way to Adurnam and weepingly informed him my callous lying sweetheart had abandoned me on the wharf. I went straight to the Buffalo and Lion Inn. You’ll be relieved to know I found Rory there.”

“Thank Tanit.” My heart eased. No matter what else, we had not lost him. “And my father’s journals?”

“Rory had everything. He’s cannier than he looks and acts, you know. Anyway, six days had passed while we were in the spirit world. Riots still wracked Adurnam. The prince and mages had discovered the general was in the city. There were also broadsheets out with a substantial reward for our capture accompanied by very unflattering sketches, I must say! And of course I couldn’t trust the headmaster. Rory kept insisting the headmaster is a dragon, but surely he’s a mage.”

“I’m no longer ruling out any possibilities. You met the general again?”

“Eventually, yes. He told me his wife had seen in the path of dreams that I would lead him to you. La Professora and Brennan Du had to leave Adurnam also, and they invited Rory and me to go with them to Massilia. But naturally I sailed with the general to Expedition to look for you.”

“Where is Rory?”

“He could not bring himself to get on the ship. He’s afraid of the ocean. I kept the journals, which are here, and sent him with Brennan.”

I closed my eyes. Blessed Tanit! How Vai had kissed me! He couldn’t really believe I cared about Brennan Du the way I cared about him!

“Cat, are you blushing again? I hope you’re not carrying a torch for black-haired Brennan. I suspect he carries a torch for La Professora. But she is married to another, alas.”

“That doesn’t stop people,” I muttered, looking up at the whitewashed ceiling. How must Vai have felt, waiting for me all those months only to discover me with another man?

“It seems La Professora is quite the traditionalist in some ways despite her radical philosophies. Anyway, how would you know about…Cat! You can’t hide from me!” Bee grabbed one of my fingers and bent it back. “You said you hadn’t done it with him.”

“Ouch! I haven’t. Although I cursed well wish I had. Ah! Let go!”

“Tell the truth!”

Through teeth gritted against the pain, I said, “James Drake. But I can explain.”

She released my finger, and whistled. Wincing, I rubbed my abused hand.

“ James Drake,” she said in an altered tone that made me cringe. She stretched out with elbows planted next to my head. “Gracious Melqart! But then why were you mauling your husband? And why is a cold mage of such rare and exceptional power here in Expedition anyway, where it is against the law to be a cold mage? Most importantly, did you find your sire?”

Like a thwarted child, I rolled over, and pounded my fists and kicked my feet, savoring the smack of my hands and legs on the mattress. I had never hated my sire as much as I hated him at that moment.

“Cat, you’re having a temper tantrum.” Bee’s laughter so sang in my heart that I began to choke and gurgle. I stopped hitting and rolled onto my back to laugh with her.

“Oh, Bee, how I missed you!”

She embraced me, and we laughed until tears ran. Finally, she went to wash her face in the basin. My cane had gotten wrapped up in the blanket, so I stuck it under the mattress.

“What happened to you, Cat?”

I clapped a hand over my mouth and, as she stared at me with an exaggerated expression of surprise on her face, I pointed with my other hand to my mouth. Waggled the fingers covering my mouth. Bit on them, feeling a question rising. Any question. It didn’t matter, as long as it threw people off the scent. Curse him!

“You are hungry? No, you are crazed? You’ve lost the power of speech? You have to pee? You have developed a strange but debilitating desire to inflict pain on yourself?? You are trying to tell me something with these bizarre gesticulations that you can’t put in words? Ah!”

She dashed to a tall wardrobe. The door was carved with a gourd upended and spilling fish, the sides and top elaborated to resemble a leafy tree. She returned to me with her sketchbook and a lead pencil. The pages fell open to a sketch depicting a man and a woman forcefully intertwined in a kiss. The angle concealed most of the man’s face, but the jacket gave him away. I slammed the book shut, embarrassed by the intimacy of the pose.

Bee sighed. “Now you see why I did not want to have had that dream. It was positively lurid. The only identifying mark is the cobo hood gas lamp above your head. It’s of a type you will find in every establishment in Expedition, so it was hard to identify the place. Try writing.”

I grabbed the pencil out of her hand and opened the book to a blank page. At once, I began shaking, awash in sweat. I bit my lip. The pain allowed me to scrawl: I cannot speak of what happened after you left. It is worse than we feared.

“Blessed Tanit, you’ve drawn blood,” said Bee, wiping my lower lip with her thumb. She snatched the pencil and drew in a length of chain like shackles, then handed the pencil back.

I wrote, Yes.

She sketched the jetty and harbor of Expedition, as seen from offshore.

Ocean, I wrote, licking a drop of blood off my lip. Shark. Salt Island. Bitten. Healed. Drunk. Lies. Drake. Rescued. Buccaneers. Cow Killer Beach. Jetty. Vai. Vai. Vai. You.

She blanched and took in several deep breaths. After, she turned to me with the same look I imagined a surgeon would give a patient who has survived an amputation. “This is quickly going to become tedious.”

I wrote, Don’t ask questions.

“That’s an odd sort of binding,” she remarked, taking pen and sketchbook from me.

“I do have to pee,” I said, rolling off the bed. I trotted to the wardrobe and reassured myself that my father’s journals had indeed survived our separation. “And I’m hungry.”

With a grandiose sigh, she stowed her sketchbook back in the wardrobe and tossed clothing at me: a featherlight shift and my very own skirt, bodice, and jacket, washed and the wool ironed to a glossy sheen. Over her own shift she buttoned a skirt sewn from strips of gold, gray, and blue cloth. The bodice she wore had sleeves to the elbow and was embroidered with an entanglement of flowering vines and axes.

“Where did you get that?” I asked. “I might murder you in your sleep to steal it.”

“I like the axes in particular,” she said with a smile that could have killed a man at twenty paces. “They remind me of the head of the poet Bran Cof. I had it done here, at a very nice shop on Avenue Kolonkan. That’s where all the best clothes and finery may be purchased.”

“It’s very pretty.” But I was swamped by a swell of nostalgic regret for humble Tailors’ Row.

“You’re not usually this slow to get ready. There will be food.”

Our chamber was one of four on the second story of a town house whose clean tile floors slipped blessedly cool beneath my bare feet. Bee handed me the sandals Vai had given me, now cleaned and oiled. After I slipped my cane through its loop, we hurried down a stairway at the back of the house to the ground floor. She showed me into a tiny room with a water closet and then into a washroom where one had only to turn a spigot to allow water to flow into a basin while one washed one’s hands.

“How many times do you have to turn that on and off??” she demanded, clamping her fingers over the faucet to turn it emphatically off.

“How does it do that?” I bent over, trying to look up into the pipe.

“Gravity. The water tank is on the roof. We can go look at it later. Come on.”

She led me back up to the first floor and into a chamber that ran the length of the back of the house. Glass doors opened onto a narrow balcony overlooking a garden so green one could almost breathe the color. Guards paced beneath the walls, swimming in and out of view beneath flowering trees and vines.

The general sat at a table. He set down the broadsheet he was reading, rose with a grave smile, and took my hand between his as he examined me with deep-set, almost black eyes whose gaze penetrated astonishingly. “You are better. Please, join me. I expect you are hungry.”

He nodded toward a sideboard laden with covered dishes, a basket of bread, a platter of fruit, a bottle of liquor, and a white ceramic teapot flanked by six white cups on white saucers.

He released my hand and, to my shock, gave Bee a kiss on each cheek in quite an intimate manner. She did not even have the grace to blush. Indeed, she seemed to expect this familiarity.

“I’ll pour,” she said, going over to the sideboard. “Sit down, Cat.”

Steps sounded in the hall. A woman swept into the chamber. She wore a fabulous deep orange boubou of starched, waxed cloth, although instead of a head wrap she wore her black hair uncovered the better to display tiny braids woven with beads and medallions. I gaped at her.

“Darling,” she said, kissing Camjiata on the lips.

“Jasmeen!” Never let it be said I could not tally up the numbers. “You’re the one who betrayed the radical leadership! Called in the wardens! Why?”

She was not easily discomposed. “The fire bane was sent here to assassinate Leon. Obviously I don’ intend to let that happen. Also, as yee own self must admit, he is an unusually powerful fire bane. Such a dangerous sort of man cannot be allowed to run around like a wild stallion with no bridle.”

I fixed a glare on Bee, who had paused in the act of pouring tea. “Bee? What do you know about this?”

The general steered me toward one of the chairs. “Sit down, Cat.”

I wrenched myself away. “I don’t want to sit! I want to know what happened!”

An aroma of wood ash tickled my nose. I sneezed. James Drake walked into the chamber, looking crisp and attractive in a white jacket and gold trousers, his red-gold air agleam in the morning sun. After all, I sat, for my legs had just gone boneless.

“Cat!” Drake strode over and pressed his lips to mine. I jerked away, ramming up against the back of the chair. He smiled. “No need to be so formal with me, darling. Why did you take so long to come to the Speckled Iguana? And then run away?”

I glared. “Can it be possible you think you have a grievance?”

Drake chuckled. “Must I tender my heartfelt apologies? Were you so hurt by my leaving you on the jetty? Weren’t you worried I would be arrested?”

“What makes you think I thought of you at all?”

“No,” he said thoughtfully, with a conspiratorial glance shared with Jasmeen, “I suppose there were other men to embrace.”

I leaped up and punched him, my fist slamming solidly into his jaw. He reeled back, caught himself. A hot spicy scent sparked in the air as his eyes lit and his mouth thinned.

The general said, “James, calm down. You clearly did not tell me everything. I strongly suspect your conduct in this matter deserves rebuke.”

“I want that cursed cold mage,” said Drake, his pale skin gone a blotchy red as he pressed fingers along his jaw. “You told me that if I fetched her and dumped her on the jetty, we would flush him out of hiding and catch him. Instead he escaped.”

I made a sound, like choking on the suppurating taste of my own naivete. Bee dropped the teapot, which shattered on the tile floor, fragments skittering everywhere on a sheen of fragrant liquid. She looked as if someone had stabbed her.

The elegant woman spoke in a plangent tone, as if sorry to be witnessing such unpleasantness. “I shall let yee sort this out, Leon. Send for me.”

“Of course, Jasmeen.” He took her hand, pressed lips to her knuckles, and released her.

She swept out, gracious enough to close the door behind her to spare the rest of the household my histrionics.

“ How could you??” I shrieked.

Bee burst into wrenching sobs. “You didn’t tell me this was all part of a plot to trap him!”

“Sit down,” said the general with no change of expression or tone.

I saw as down a narrowing tunnel a brick wall rushing to meet me. “ You used me to get to him!?”

Drake studied me. With a twisted frown that was almost more of a grimace, he looked at the broadsheet. “For information leading to the capture of the rogue fire bane, a significant reward. That’s all very well, but how are we meant to arrest him now he knows we know of him? He had to have been living somewhere, and yet no one turned him in. I find it difficult to believe a cold mage of so much power could have hidden his craft. The wardens followed those weather disturbances two nights ago, but they lost his trail, and now…nothing. No word. No whisper. No ice. No one will talk. We’ve lost him.” The corner of the broadsheet began to singe and crumple to ash.

“James!” said the general sharply.

Drake exhaled. Shaking flakes of gray from his hand, he stepped away from the table.

Cheeks wet with tears, Bee got down on hands and knees to sweep up the fractured pot with her hands. My flaring exploding rage collapsed as into a dagger of anger, honed and glittering.

“ You,” I said to the general. “What did you do?”

The door opened and three women came in. Two cleaned up the shattered pot and spilled tea, while the third brought a fresh pot and poured four cups for the table. The general thanked them politely. They left without remarking on Bee, now slumped on the floor in the spread of her skirt, like a crushed flower.

The general went to the sideboard and uncovered a rasher of bacon and a plate of poached eggs surrounded by fried potatoes. He began to load up a plate as he talked.

“Beatrice assured me you were eager to be rid of the marriage. Now it seems you aren’t.”

He looked at me as with a question. I stared sullenly back, lips pinched shut.

“Jasmeen says he’s quite handsome and clearly madly in love with you. Youth, looks, and admiration are an intoxicating combination that is difficult to resist.” He returned to the table and set down a heavily-laden plate between a knife and a spoon. Then he steered me to the chair in front of the plate. “Sit.”

I did not sit. “I’ll never let you kill him.”

The general sat opposite me, touched the rim of a teacup to his mouth, then lowered it. “Ah! Still too hot.”

Drake put a hand on the back of my chair, as if to pull it out for me. I grabbed a knife. He retreated.

“Where you are under a misapprehension, Cat,” the general went on, “is in your belief that I want to kill the cold mage. What is his name again?” he asked Drake.

“ Fucking arrogant bastard is his name. Was there another name that mattered?”

I waved the knife. “What has he ever done to you?”

The general spoke in the voice of command. “Cat, sit.”

I sat.

“James, you especially must learn to control that Celtic temper.”

Drake pulled a hand back over his hair, mussing it, then paced the length of the chamber.

“Cat, hear me out. First, I escape the prison where the mage Houses have held me for almost fourteen years. Quite without legal precedent, I note. I sail to Expedition because my army in exile has taken residence here, out of the reach of my enemies. The Council receives me with great interest, for they recognize that aiding me will open up trade in Europa. Then a man tries to shoot me. Suddenly the Council votes against my request for support, undermined from within. I hear rumor of another plot to assassinate me, one that may involve a cold mage who wields cold steel. Surely you understand I would be unnatural if I did not defend myself.”

I thought of how I had given Vai my sword that night in Southbridge Londun. He had killed two men rather than let them kill us. Blood on his hands. He didn’t want to kill again.

I thought of the two salters I had killed on the beach of Salt Island. Even as one begged for release. Even so. I would kill them all and more rather than let one bite me again.

I set down the knife. Let out my held breath. “Go on.”

He examined me as he sipped at his tea. “Yes, you do understand. Second, Beatrice has a most vivid dream of you and a man.” Briefly he looked so sympathetically amused, as if he had been caught kissing once, that I wanted to like him. But I knew better. “By the cobo hood gas lamp in the sketch, we were fairly certain we would find you in Expedition. Soon after this, Beatrice sketched you standing on a beach, little enough to go on. James approached me privately to tell me he recognized the beach, for he had been to Salt Island as part of his healer’s apprenticeship.”

Bee looked up, mouth a grim line. “You never told me that beach was on Salt Island!”

“I did not want you to worry, Beatrice. You can imagine our concern, Cat! Had you been bitten, you would have been doomed. We had to get you off the island as soon as you arrived. It was easy enough to arrange for James to go there and wait for you.” He took hold of my arm. He was a big man, and he had a strong grip. He slid my jacket sleeve up to uncover the scar. “But I was wrong. You were bitten.”

“Cat!” Bee scrambled to her feet, to come over to me, but the general raised a hand, and she halted, eyes wide, hands gripping the fabric of her skirt.

“Beatrice’s dream saved you, Cat. We saved you. Imagine what would have happened had James not been there to heal you!”

I pulled my arm away and tugged down my sleeve. “He didn’t heal me. No matter what he may have told you.”

“Then someone did. The salt plague is a terrible thing, as you now understand too well.”

“Better than you do.” Horribly, the aroma of the salted bacon had begun to snake its way invitingly down my throat. I licked my lips. He was watching me, perhaps waiting for me to explain how I knew Drake hadn’t healed me, but I kept silent.

He went on. “Nevertheless, I knew how to turn the situation to my advantage. Expedition is a city in ferment. Young men and women join radical circles and agitate against laws that vex them. People have new ideas about what rights communities ought to demand. Those outside the old city want assurance the laws will serve all equally. The story of this unusually powerful maku fire bane excited people’s interest. It’s a nice story, isn’t it? Having come to Expedition, the proud Europan lord is bitten by the local radical philosophies. Infested by them, he rebels against the chains that bind the unfortunate and chooses to join those who agitate against the privileges reserved for a few. He comes to see the justice in the complaints of the plebeians and propertyless and laborers. We knew he was here, waiting to strike at me, but we couldn’t find him.”

He raised the cup to his lip. The tea smelled of flowers.

Hands in fists, Drake muttered, “Dear Lady of Fire, must we hear this entire recital?”

The general lifted his gaze to follow the pacing fire mage. “ James. ”

With a look shot at me, Drake walked out to stand on the balcony.

The general returned his attention to me. “No one knew what this cold mage looked like, except he was a man of noble station, like to a prince in bearing and disposition. Because of Bee’s dream-it was the jacket more than the kiss-we realized it was the cold mage you were married to.”

“Bee knew what he looked like,” I said in a low voice.

She wiped her nose with the back of a hand. “I’m so ashamed, Cat. I tried to draw him, but none of the sketches looked right. I thought you truly didn’t care for him.”

“Because I would kiss someone like that if I didn’t care for them!”

She glanced toward the balcony, and Drake’s slim back.

“I didn’t kiss him like that!” I cried. “He got me drunk!”

The general turned his cup once all the way around before he directed his gaze toward the balcony. “James? Are you telling me you took the liberty of your isolation on Salt Island and used it to seduce this innocent young woman by getting her drunk?”

Drake turned, chin lifted as if he had absorbed another blow. “She said yes! She wasn’t that innocent, if you ask me.”

“There’s a tale you told yourself to justify your actions,” said the general in a disgusted way that made me understand why Bee liked him. He looked at me. “Cat, eat.”

The two poached eggs stared at me as if begging to be devoured in all their exquisite flavor. My stomach growled. Vai would urge me to eat. I set spoon to eggs.

“We realized you could lead us to the cold mage, if we laid our course properly. I thought if we could capture him, then we would persuade him that the mage Houses were mistaken in their goals-obviously he already thought so-and that he should join us.”

“What if he said no?”

“You have me there, Cat. I don’t intend to die. But I prefer allies to enemies.”

“You used me. You might as well have thrown me into the sea not knowing whether I was going to drown.” I set to work on the potatoes and bacon.

“We are not so careless. Whether or not James healed you, he did save you from Salt Island. For I assure you, you would not have left the island once you were bitten. The Taino are very strict about that law. We delivered you to Expedition. We didn’t realize none of the locals would talk. By then I had gone to Sharagua. We returned to Expedition only three nights ago.”

Which Kayleigh had told Vai. In fact, the general appeared to know very little about Vai’s situation.

“How did you track us down?” I asked.

“Early on, Jasmeen told me the radical leadership had been informed that a maku fire bane wanted to meet with them to discuss his mission to end the threat I posed to Europa. They didn’t want to meet with him because the first assassination attempt was so crudely done that some suspected it was meant to fail in order to raise sympathies for me.”

“So after all,” I muttered, spearing a piece of bacon as I contemplated Kofi’s suspicions, “they might have suspected the meeting with the maku fire bane was a trap. How odd!”

A smile flashed on the general’s face. “Spoken like Daniel. But after I left for Taino country, the radicals began to discuss more seriously the need to meet with a man who claimed to have the ability to kill me. Jasmeen heard from one of the young women some trifling gossip about the maku’s lost woman. The gal had turned up unexpectedly. Jasmeen sewed the pieces together. With her help, I arranged the meeting and raid the moment I returned to Expedition.”

I choked on the last of the bacon, but I forced it down. Then I picked up a roll, still warm from the oven, and I shredded it into tiny pieces.

“The wardens were not going to kill him, Cat. They were simply going to take him into custody and bring him to me.”

He returned my gaze with a clear, unguarded look. Either the man was a shameless liar, or he was so deluded that he believed everything he said. Or maybe, just maybe, he was telling the truth. “You make it sound as if the wardens are working for you.”

He drained his cup and, turning in his chair, addressed Bee instead of answering me. “Beatrice, the world has not ended, dear girl. Your cousin still loves you. Both of you have been sorely used, and it is no wonder you are angry. May I have some more tea? Do come eat.”

How any person could say these words and not sound condescending I am sure I did not know, but he did say them, and they were not condescending.

Beatrice brought over the new pot and sat next to the general instead of me. Drake eyed the teapot with longing. Meeting his gaze, I licked egg yolk and bacon grease off my knife. He grimaced before turning back to his view of the garden.

The general set down his cup, and Bee filled it.

“All has been resolved. Once the necessary ships and troops are fitted, the Council will release the arrested radicals into my custody. I’ll take them with me to Europa. Otherwise they would be hanged. Everyone benefits.”

“If that’s what you call benefit. Aren’t people afraid the Taino will invade Expedition?”

“That hasn’t been announced yet,” he said. “We’re keeping it secret for now.”

“What hasn’t been announced yet? An invasion?”

Bee’s face flooded with color. She downed a cup of tea in one gulp as if she wished it were rum.

“Our agreement with the Taino,” he said, as if such an alliance was foreordained and natural.

“The Taino rule the Antilles! You’re nothing but a dispossessed general hoping for troops and money to fight a war in a land an ocean away! What can you have that they want?”

“Besides the spoils of victory to fill a treasury emptied by decades of expansionist wars? An opening of significant trade and export without too much risk to the cacica’s authority?” He walked to the sideboard to make another plate of food.

“Is that enough to interest them?” I demanded.

Bee set down the cup and stared at the polished tabletop. Never in my life had I seen her shy from anything. Never. She managed a tremulous smile. “I am to get married.”

I sat back, hard, in the chair. “Married!”

She glanced toward the general. He nodded exactly in the manner of a professor encouraging a favored student as she gropes her way toward the correct answer.

She reached across the table to lay a hand atop one of mine. “If the price of hope is marriage, then so be it. To a man of high rank and good manners, so I am assured.”

“You agreed to marry him sight unseen?”

“Don’t be so naive, Cat! That’s how such things work. You should know! They want me because I am a dream walker. Here in the Antilles, dream walkers are honored because they are so rare.”

“I should think they are rare everywhere, given their likelihood of an untimely demise. If that’s the only reason you are marrying, you might as well have been handed off to Four Moons House to be their prisoner. What obligations will the Taino place on you?”

She let out a gusty sigh. “Would you please listen for once? They have traditions here about the lore of walking the path of dreams. Once I am married, I will be allowed to learn.”

“While you’re imprisoned in some hot, dusty palace. Couldn’t you have stayed with Brennan and Kehinde?”

“I would have loved to do so, with their fine revolutionary notions and legendary fistfights and buckets of whiskey and beautifully written pamphlets filled with radical sentiments. But that doesn’t solve my other problem, does it? Perhaps you have a brilliant plan to stop the Wild Hunt from ripping off my head!”

I jumped up, the chair tipping over to clatter to the floor behind me. “Yes! I do!”

Drake stepped in off the balcony. The door opened and the Amazon captain appeared, sword drawn. The general gestured, and she retreated, closing the door.

“I would be glad to hear your plan,” he said, walking over to place the plate in front of Bee.

I dug my nails into my palms, but pain wasn’t enough to loosen my tongue. And it was a lie. I couldn’t protect her. Only my sire could, and then only for as long as it suited him to do so.

Bee looked at me and blinked twice as a signal. “She’s just exaggerating in her usual way.”

“Ah, I understand now.” He walked back to the sideboard, where he heaped bacon, potatoes, and eggs on a plate. “Helene told me never to ask questions of Tara Bell’s child because she dreamed the child was chained by some manner of magical binding.”

The chains that bound me to my husband? Or the ones that bound me to my sire? He didn’t know everything! I righted the chair and sat with hands clasped in my lap as the general returned to the table with a plate for himself. Drake ventured to the end of the table farthest from me.

“Anyway, Cat,” said Bee, barreling on like a fully laden rail car rolling downhill with no brakes, “you’re the one who will never be free of Four Moons House because you are married to one of its cold mages.”

“I know what I know,” I muttered.

“I can’t argue with that mulish truism! Anyway, the Taino won’t hold me prisoner. The general needs me for the war.” She went charmingly pink, like a rose blooming. “The prince is to travel with us. You see, the heir to the cacique’s duho, the king’s seat of power, is chosen from the cacique’s sister’s sons. This prince was never considered a favorite because there was a brother better suited for the task. But now he seems likely to inherit so it is felt he must gain worldly experience to prove his fitness and worth.”

“What changed to make him worthy?”

She glanced toward the general, and then at Drake. “For one thing, he’s a fire mage.”

I laughed a little hysterically.

Drake raised a cup of tea to his lips, watching me over the rim. The general ate methodically with only a lift of the eyes to show he had noticed my untimely levity.

Bee scooped up an egg in her spoon and levered the spoon backwards, aiming its trajectory at me. “Tell me why you’re laughing, or you’ll get egg all over your face.”

I needed a drink to settle my nerves. I got up and went over to the sideboard. The bottle had sherry in it. I jiggered out the cork, poured the deep red liquid to the brim of the last teacup, and gulped it down in one go. Turning, I saw Drake frown. I stuffed the cork back into the bottle.

“Cat!” said Bee. “It’s still morning!”

The general finished his potatoes.

The liquor’s heat rushed through me, and subsided. “I met Prince Caonabo.” She gasped. “He seemed…pleasant. He was certainly inquisitive. And he’s good-looking, if not nearly as pretty as Legate Amadou Barry. No hardship there.” I wiped my brow, for it was already getting warm. “So, General, what exactly is it you want from me?”

He patted his lips with a linen cloth. “That depends on what you want, Cat. Although your choices are constrained.”

I wanted to be released from my sire’s rule, but I couldn’t say that. I wanted a chance to walk beside a man I was finally getting to know, but I refused to speak of that. Maybe the sherry had shortened my temper. Really, I had nothing left to lose except Bee’s life.

“What I want to know is why I should trust you when you placed my mother under sentence of death and would have killed her if she hadn’t escaped.”

“Why, Cat,” he said, and I could have sworn he was taken aback, “the matter is entirely different. She was a sworn lieutenant in my Amazon Corps and thus subject to the rules and regulations of that corps.”

“Including imprisonment and execution should she become pregnant?”

“The conditions and regulations of service were public knowledge. No woman took the oath of enlistment without fully understanding what was expected of her and where her responsibilities and loyalties lay. Those who serve in my army serve freely, but they are bound once they join to follow the code of conduct. As am I, and any person enlisting. For the Amazon Corps, that code included celibacy. Any woman who had served out her period of enlistment might apply for a discharge if she wished to have children, marry, or make some other change in life. A legal code is worthless if those who enforce it treat persons differently according to consequence, status, kinship, or wealth. All must be equal before the law, or the law is worth nothing.”

“That’s what Daniel Hassi Barahal wrote.”

“In fact, that is what I said when I addressed the committee gathered to write a comprehensive new legal code. Perhaps Daniel recorded my words, and you read them later and thought they were his.” An odd sort of smile animated his face, one I could not read. Anger? Amusement? Calculation? He was masked rather as my sire had been: I simply could not fathom what drove him. Except maybe irritation at remembering my mother had escaped the law.

“Tell me what you meant when you said my path will change the course of the war.”

“Those are not Helene’s precise words, nor did I say them that way.” He did not raise his voice, but I realized that something about the turn the conversation had taken was making him angry. “Find a way to win the cold mage to my side, Cat.”

“I’m sure she’s found a way to prick the man’s interest,” muttered Drake.

I fixed my gaze on Drake and stalked back to the table. He stared me down, gaze almost fevered.

“Be calm,” murmured Bee.

Camjiata said, “Enough!”

Drake leaned back and propped his sandaled feet up on the table. I remained standing.

“Now listen carefully, Cat,” the general went on. “A living cold mage serves me much better than a dead one. I would value the services of a powerful cold mage when I return to Europa.”

“One like your wife?” I asked.

“She was not a powerful cold mage. She had only a minor gift, enough to call a wisp of cold fire, which was ironic considering how poor her vision was. She was as close to a castoff as a child can be who is born into a mage House. Her House, and she, had no idea she walked the path of dreams. Everyone just thought she recited the most execrable poetry to get attention. But when she was about your age she heard her destiny in her own words.”

Despite my irritation, I was drawn into his story. “What was her destiny?”

“Why, I was. Or she was mine. Hard to say. Maybe I should say, we were meant to be together, being each other’s destiny.”

“That’s very romantical,” I said caustically. Bee caught my eye, and I knew she was thinking, Didn’t that cold mage call you the other half of his soul? I narrowed my eyes to let her know that if she spoke one word I would make her life so miserable that dismemberment would seem a mercy.

She ate her egg.

“I meant,” I added, “considering what happened.”

“Perhaps you mean to note that I am alive while she is dead. Quite true. Believe me, Cat, I intend to do everything I can to keep Beatrice alive. It was what Helene would have wanted. For they are all sisters of a kind, the women who walk the path of dreams.”

“Like in one of those quaint cautionary folktales,” remarked Bee, “in which everyone dies.”

“Yes. Which brings me back to the point I have been trying to make. Cat, my dear, I fear you have not heard me, so I will say it again. If you do not bring the cold mage to me, then I will have to kill him. If that is what you want, then by all means, rid yourself of the magister and your marriage by refusing to cooperate with me. But do not make the mistake of underestimating me.”

“Unless he kills you first.”

“He will not kill me because I know who will kill me. And it is not him.”

“How can you know?”

“On the day Helene and I first met, it was the second thing she said to me. That she had seen the instrument of my death.”

“And you married her?” I demanded.

“As soon as I could.” He laughed. “Wouldn’t you?”

Bee stirred. “You’ve lived with that knowledge all this time? That’s remarkable.” She stared at him with none of the sledgehammer intensity that usually characterized her glares and looks. She looked as admiring as an actress in a stage play simpering at the steadfast prince whom she lovingly serves for the duration of the implausible plot.

A chill, as the broadsheet poets wrote in their cheaply inked stories, ran down my spine.

He sipped at his tea as if considering Bee’s praise was the weightiest task on his mind, far more than death, war, revolution, love, cold mages, and dream walkers. “Is it? We all live with the knowledge of impending death, do we not?”

“Did she tell you who?” I asked.

He looked at me. But he said nothing.

“Who will be the instrument of your death?” I added, in case he had not understood me.

He poured more tea into his cup, set the ceramic pot back on its trivet, and turned the cup’s handle so it lay parallel with the table’s edge. His gentle smile had such power that I leaned toward him as if he were about to confer on me a great honor or the princely kiss of approval.

“Why, you will, Cat. You will.”