Cold Fire

28

I am not a young woman who craves attention. Although people have at times suggested that I talk a great deal, I could maintain silence with the best of them. A stony silence, accompanied by an offended glare, worked wonders on most people when they had insulted me.

Unfortunately, it had no effect at all on Camjiata. He smiled in an accommodating way. “I mean no offense, Cat. Nor do I mean to accuse you or even to suggest that I feel any hostility toward you. I am simply telling you what Helene told me.”

I set fisted hands on the table. “You’re trying to intimidate me. I won’t betray him to you.”

“You already have, or so he must believe.”

Had he slapped me, it would have hurt less.

“Amazing!” Drake’s lips curled into a sneer. “A more pompous, conceited, self-admiring ass I have never before encountered, and yet after all if you add to that a handsome face and expensive tailoring, the gals will crawl at his feet. Really, Cat, I’m disappointed in you.”

I slipped the cane from its loop and set it on the table. He looked suitably startled, and shifted his chair away. “I should be careful if I were you, Drake. Because what you don’t understand is that I can be the instrument of your death. And if you anger me enough, I will. In fact, I’m thinking about it right now.”

Heat stung the air. “Don’t try to duel with me.”

“James!” said the general.

“Why do you always scold me and never her?” he demanded as the spark vanished. “Anyway, what do you expect a man to do when an attractive gal throws herself at him? By the way, that object she carries around so casually is pure cold steel. She’s no doubt in league with that cursed cold mage and means to hand him the sword to do you in the moment he gets close enough.”

I set my hands on the table and leaned toward him. “He’s worth a hundred of you.” I took in a few breaths to calm myself, then looked at Camjiata. “No wonder you wanted my mother to die if you believed she would give birth to a child who would kill you.”

“It does not work that way.” He had the means to hold your gaze even when you wanted to look away. This, too, was a form of sorcery: the ability to command. “Anyway, we do not execute pregnant women. You would have been born regardless.”

I pressed a hand over the cane, feeling the quiver of its magic through my sweaty skin. “Babies are easy to dispose of.”

“The djeliw teach us that our destiny is already written. As long as you are alive, I can be alive. But if you are dead, then I must already be dead.”

“I suppose that’s meant to be reassuring. What is your destiny, General?”

“To free Europa from the petty quarrels and greed of princes and cold mages. To unite all its peoples under one just code of law.”

“With you conveniently seated as emperor.”

His easy smile made my lips quirk despite my mistrust. “I am meant to sit in an emperor’s throne. It is the role my mother raised me for.”

“How can she have raised you for that?”

“She was the favored daughter of the patrician Aemillius lineage. They cast her off when she betrothed herself against their wishes to an Iberian captain. He was highborn enough. His mother was an Iberian princess and his father was born into the princely Keita lineage. But her people scorned all Iberians and desired her to marry to suit their schemes, so they cast her off in the most public way imaginable. They stripped her naked and whipped her onto the street as a whore. You should have some sympathy for her plight, Cat.”

I frowned, thinking of the way Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan had given me to the mage House in Bee’s place. At least they had wept.

“She raised me to be the instrument of her revenge. I dare not dishonor her memory. But I have no child to foist off as my heir. The imperiate will dissolve after I am dead, leaving behind a better legal code and the abolishment of clientage. So you must ask yourself if the people of Europa will be better off or worse off than they are now. I must wonder, Cat, if there is something your cold mage wants very badly that I could offer him in exchange for his support.”

I sat down as hard as if all the air had been punched from my lungs.

The abolishment of clientage.

Bee placed a hand over mine. “Let’s go out to the balcony to get some air.”

An uneasy feeling rippled down my spine. I nodded. We rose and went out into a patch of shade. The air was sticky with humidity and thick with the scent of flowers. I closed the doors behind us. A guard clothed in a dark blue tabard and holding a rifle glanced up at us from his station at a gate set into the back wall; his gaze widened; then he looked away.

Bee wasn’t looking into the garden. She stared at the railing, her mouth twisted down with shame. “I’m sorry for the part I played in all this. I did truly think you wanted out of the marriage.”

“You couldn’t have known I changed my mind.”

“I truly didn’t know most of what was going on. Obviously I was just being tremendously naive. And he did say he wanted the cold mage alive, in his army.”

I leaned against her shoulder in the familiar way. “I’ve already forgiven you, Bee.”

“He doesn’t want to harm you, Cat. He told me so many stories about your mother. He speaks of her with the greatest esteem. I think he looks on you as he might look on a niece.”

“One with a sword in her hand?” I glanced through the closed glass doors. Inside, Camjiata was working through a second plate of food with the pleasure of a man who enjoys eating, while Drake was picking through fried slices of potato as if looking for an elusive shard of triumph.

“I will tell him I will break off the marriage arrangements if anything happens to you.”

“I think he believes what he said, about me needing to be alive. Not that I’m going to turn my back on him. What worries me is that I think you’re a little in love with him. I worry he is using your admiration to coerce you into a marriage that benefits him.”

She put an arm around me and held hard, whispering. “That’s not how it is. Cat, you know me. No matter what it looks like to people outside you and me, you know I’ve thought this through. Yes, I can learn from the behiques. Yes, I gain an alliance to a powerful kingdom, one which respects and honors the very curse which puts my life in danger. There is one thing else. I was allowed to meet one time privately with the cacica, Queen Anacaona. She is a very powerful woman. I said, what use to me a marriage if I am torn to pieces by the Wild Hunt at year’s end? She claimed the behiques have a means to protect dream walkers. This is good for us, Cat. This is hope.”

I had met the Master of the Wild Hunt, so I was pretty sure the cacica was wrong. But I wanted Bee to live in hope, not fear. “Then of course I understand why you agreed.”

She released me. “As for the other, I think the general will put in place a radical civil code.”

“Just for the sake of argument, let us say it is true. What if he changes his mind, marries again, and produces a child to raise up as heir? Or what is to stop his captains from electing one of their own to rule as emperor after he dies? Because he will die. Everyone dies. He said so!”

The general was watching us. Seeing us look his way, he raised the cup to salute our machinations and conspiracies. Drake was crisping bacon into charred strips.

I turned back to Bee. “What is to stop princes and mage Houses from biding their time and restoring the old order with a lot of blood and carnage after he dies?”

Bee’s gaze hardened, reminding me of an axe. “Did you listen to nothing that Kehinde and Brennan said? With the right weapons and allies, we can bring them down. A legal code matters.”

“You’re a radical, too! You and Vai both!”

Her gaze softened. “So it is more than just his looks!”

I fastened my fingers around the wrought-iron railing. The vivid memory of his passionate, angry kisses mocked me. “I wonder how far I’ll go to convince him I did not betray him.”

“There is something Andevai wants you think the general can give him. Offer him that.”

“Oh, Bee, I thought I was offering Vai so much, to share both the burdens and the risks of trying to break the chains of Four Moons House, when I could have been free of them. But he doesn’t even know it. Why should he listen to me now?”

“If he is not willing to listen to you, then he isn’t worth suffering over. Really, dearest, this isn’t like you. You know you have to try.”

Who was I, to feel fear? I, who was the weapon of the Master of the Wild Hunt? In the heart of me, like a shard of obsidian, lay a cruel gleaming kernel that would allow me to do what I must to save those I loved. I need only grasp it, cut my skin on it, and let it drink fully of my blood.

“I’m going to save you, Bee,” I said. “I’m the only one who can.”

Her lips twisted up. “Really, Cat. The man’s vainglorious arrogance has been rubbing off on you. Now, follow my lead.”

She opened a door and swept into the chamber, leaving me to follow in her wake like so much wind-chopped flotsam. She threw a smile at Drake that made him wince, and addressed the general. “We are going shopping.”

“Of course, my dear.” Camjiata began reading a pamphlet whose title was On the Dynamical Theory of Heat: Some Experiments and Conclusions as Delivered by Professora Habibah ibnah Alhamrai at the Expedition Society of Natural Historians.

We cut a swath through the shockingly expensive shops of Avenue Kolonkan. After a strenuous morning of examining fabric, smallclothes, footwear, kerchiefs and head wraps and hats, as well as ribbons and beads, necklaces, earrings, and painted gourds suitable for storing such treasures, we rested our feet in the shade of an arbor in a private courtyard. Well-dressed and well-groomed women-no men-drank carafes of sweetened lime juice garnished with mint leaves.

After we had quenched our thirst with an obscenely pleasurable and hotly spiced drink called chocolatl and worked through a platter of pastries, Bee nodded. “We have suitably bored the two men who are following us. Take yourself to the toilet and vanish. The gates into the old city close at sunset. I believe there are secret corridors in the house, so anything we say can be overheard. I should have told you before.” She pressed a coin into my hand. “For the washroom attendant.”

“The washroom attendant?”

“She has to earn her living, too. That way.” She pointed toward an archway set under whitewashed walls, then returned to nibbling on a custard tart layered with slices of star-apple.

The washroom lay tucked in the back beside a lattice that screened off the kitchen. Women worked, chopping, grinding, and conversing about the highest-scoring member of the Anolis women’s team, who had begun to hook her elbow shots in a manner that suggested a hidden injury would soon put an end to her glory days. An elderly woman in a faded but scrupulously clean pagne dozed in the shade beside the tiled entrance to a little toilet.

A piercing shriek from the courtyard brought a crashing halt to the kitchen conversation.

“It stung me!” screamed Bee. “The pain! I feel…so sick…I’m going to throw up!”

I dropped the coin into the gourd, drew the threads of shadow around me, and slipped out through the kitchen into a side street. I had left my cane in Bee’s room, shoved beneath the mattress, so even the trolls ignored me as I strode along the busy streets of Expedition. Only the occasional dwarf mammoth showed a tendency to probe in my direction with its exquisitely sensitive trunk. Folk worked on roofs and walls, repairing the damage from the hurricane. Mostly people were muttering about the warden’s arrest of an elderly man known to broadsheet readers as the Virtuous Rock, who had spearheaded the radicals’ drive for an Assembly. The Council had made it known that in the event of a general strike, the man and his granddaughter would be hanged.

Nerves made me sweat more than the sun. I was chewing on my lower lip as I halted before the gate to Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse. It was propped open just enough for a child to slip through, a sign that the establishment was not yet open for business although I could hear the comforting flow of voices as the family made ready. I waited until the street lay momentarily empty, then dropped my glamour and squeezed past the gate into the courtyard.

Luce, sweeping, saw me first. The scrape of her broom ceased as her lips parted. Uncle Joe, at the bar, looked up. In the kitchen peeling sweet potatoes, Brenna paused.

Silence in surprise has a quality as loud as a scream. Like a ripple from a thrown stone, it soon laps over the entire pond. The children, busy braiding streamers as for an upcoming festival, fixed their hands in their laps as if they thought crows were about to swoop down and rip them clean off. In her shaded sling chair, old Aunty Brigid cackled with a frightful rasp in her sleep, “nr nr not the owl. Leave me be. I’s not ready to go yet.”

Aunty Djeneba turned. For an eternity her gaze measured me as her expression congealed into disgust. Every voice faded. All movement in the courtyard ceased except for the drip of water from the rain-soaked leaves of the ceiba tree.

At last she spoke. “Sly women like to yee is not welcome in this respectable establishment, maku.”

My lips had gone numb and my feet turned to dead weights, impossible to shift. My cheeks flamed. I opened my mouth but no word came out for there was nothing left on my tongue except shame and hurt as they all stared at me until I wished only to sink into the dirt and be obliterated.

All but Aunty Djeneba pointedly looked away, and that was worse.

“Yee reduced him to tears, if that is what yee came to hear and gloat over, witch. He is gone and not coming back so there is no one here for yee to torment. Lucretia shall fetch yee things, for yee shall not bring the wardens down on us on a charge of theft.”

Beneath the throttling shock quivered words, barely deliverable in a hoarse mangled voice. “It isn’t what it seemed. I can explain. They used me to get at him. I didn’t know…I had no idea…” How pointless and stupid the words sounded. How pathetic and cheap. “I need to find him. I have to warn him he’s still in danger.”

“Did yee not get yee full payment because yee did not deliver up the fire bane?” Like storm clouds, she swelled in indignation as I cowered under the tumult of her anger. “How did we not see it, yee washed up with yee hair unbound on the jetty in the company of another man? With yee magics and yee hair like a net to catch him in? How yee blinded him, poor lad. I must wonder if any of it were true, or if yee even went so far as to bite yee own arm to make him worry for yee. Just get out, maku. We have no more wish to ever see yee again nor hear that lying voice.”

I slammed into the edge of the gate and, with eyes blinded by tears, groped onto the street. Yet I had not gone twenty paces when my legs gave out and I collapsed into heaving sobs. The worst of it was that the few folk out on the street passed me by and, recognizing me, walked on as if I weren’t there. Whispering. Look at she, that whore in the pay of the wardens. They say she is really a witch and shall drink yee blood and eat yee heart as she did to the poor deluded maku.

“Cat?”

I looked into Luce’s tear-streaked face. Ashamed, I looked away. I could not bear her scorn.

She pressed a bundle into my hands, my worldly goods as scant as the goodwill left to me. “Tell me why yee said that yee did not know. Please.”

Words shook out of half-controlled sobs. “It’s true James Drake found me on a beach…”

“Salt Island. So Gran’ tell me. But no one can leave there, and yee’s no fire mage.”

“I never lied about that! The Barr Cousins did bring me to Expedition from Salt Island. It’s true I knew Drake was working for General Camjiata back in Adurnam. But I didn’t come to the Antilles with the general. I wasn’t part of his organization. When Drake dumped me on the jetty, I didn’t know it was because they hoped Vai would find me and then they could find him by tracking me. I know it sounds impossible, but I didn’t know anything about it. Oh, no one will believe me, Luce. Why should they? I wouldn’t believe me. I have to find him, or the general will kill him.”

“After everything yee said to him and the way yee acted, I wonder why him dying should matter to yee. If yee’s really a witch, yee shall want him dead.”

My face was slobbery with self-pity and self-loathing. I could not get over the way Aunty Djeneba had looked at me as if I were a noxious vile cockroach crawling back into sight. But I owed Luce the truth. I wiped my eyes and nose, and I looked up into her solemn gaze.

“I am not a whore or a witch. I know it seems like Kofi was right, that I’m two-faced like a star-apple tree. But I was just confused. I meant to leave here, to take a room elsewhere, but I couldn’t bear to leave him. I said yes to him the night of the areito. I meant it, Luce. I love him. Then everything happened so fast.” Pain was a knife in my heart. I bit my lip rather than moan.

Her hand brushed my arm. “Venus Lennaya forgive me if I have made the wrong judgment, but I believe yee. He came that night, took he things, and left to go hide. Kayleigh live down by Kofi-lad’s people now. She and he is to marry. That is all I can say because it is all I know.”

She hurried off, back through the gates where I was no longer welcome.

Blessed Tanit, watch over your heartbroken daughter.

I yanked the threads of shadow around me to hide my shame. Clutching the bundle to my chest, I stumbled back to the old city and through gates guarded against fire banes by lamps. I took a wrong turn, and in retracing my steps found a stone gate overgrown with jasmine and hibiscus and marked by a modest stone column carved with the sigil of Tanit, the protector of women, She who is the face of the moon, sometimes bright and sometimes dark according to Her aspect.

I crept inside to find the place seemingly deserted, dense with flowers and fragrance. I washed my hands in a lustral basin fed by water trickling from a pipe. At the center of the open-air sanctuary, an arcade of pillars ringed a marble altar worn as smooth as if it had been polished for centuries by the hands of petitioners. I pressed my palms against it.

“What must I do, Blessed Mother? How can I be a better sister to Rory? How can I protect Bee without becoming a monster? How can I find him and win him back? How do I not despair? How do I look beyond my own troubles, as he does, to a path that makes a difference not just for our own selves but for others?”

The busy noises of the city had faded. A rain shower mizzled through, stippling the stone walkways. I rested my forehead on the marble.

Perhaps, through sheer emotional exhaustion, I dozed. Perhaps I dreamed that a woman with a brown Kena’ani face, clothed in robes the color of the balmy sea and wearing a crown as pale as the moon, cupped my face in her hands and kissed my lips as a seal to her promise.

Be heartened.

A cold touch on my cheek snapped me awake. I sat back on my heels to find an orange tabby cat nosing at me, tail lashing as it prowled the altar stone. With a disdainful flick of its tail, it leaped away and vanished into a hedge thick with white and purple flowers.

I found myself facing a votive stone I could have sworn had not been there before. A trellis arched over the stone, woven with a flowering vine resplendent in falls of purple flowers. Beneath the flowers, the peaceful stone face of the lady stared into the distance. She asked no questions. She waited with the patience of one who has all the time of passing centuries, as the ice creeps south and retreats north, and seas fall and rise and fall again, and volcanoes slumber or waken.

A five-petaled flower floated in the rainwater gathered in the shallow depression at the center of the altar stone, reminding me that it was proper to make an offering. I had come to the Antilles with nothing but the clothes on my back-and them shredded and since remade-the locket, and my sword. The last of my wool challis, two pagnes, a spare bodice and blouse and drawers, the boots, a comb, and the needles, thread, scissors, thimble, and pins I had purchased with my hard-earned coin were all I possessed besides the little coin purse. I fumbled at the purse’s tie to make an offering of coin, but my clumsy fingers could not get it loose.

Coin was not the offering she wanted.

I offered my voice. I gave her the truth.

“My sire is the Master of the Wild Hunt.”

In the isolation of the sanctuary, with only the stone to hear, his magic could not stop me.

Be heartened.

There will be a way.