Cold Steel

7

I had to trust in the plan hatched by Kofi and Keer. With Rory wounded, I had few options.

We spent the rest of the afternoon quietly. When Rory woke up, he seemed far better than he had any right to be, but he developed a sulky whine that Luce was better able to tolerate than I was. She demanded that wash water be brought so I could bathe and change my clothes. I sewed buttonholes on the two winter coats because the tailors hadn’t had time to finish them. To pass the time, she and I discussed the chamber murals. The paintings depicted the history of the First Fleet: the eruption of the salt plague out of the salt mines of the Sahara Desert; the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by the multitudes fleeing with the Malian fleet; landfall on the southern shore of the island of Kiskeya in the Sea of Antilles.

Luce traced the adventures of her ancestors with a look of dizzy excitement. “I shall have an adventure, too. I shall come with yee to rescue Vai. I’s old enough to leave home. I always wanted to travel, like me father!”

“No, you shall not!” Leaning my forehead against hers, I captured her gaze with mine to bind her to my will. I was implacable; I had to be, because she was a sheltered girl with a sunny good nature from having grown up in a loyal household whose family members cared for each other. “We can’t afford your passage to Europa. You can’t walk into the spirit world anyway.”

Her frown developed a stubborn kick.

“Rory and I can cross into the spirit world because of what we are. People aren’t meant to walk there. Hunters apprentice for years to learn the secret lore passed down among them. You will die, or be changed beyond recognition.”

Luce glared, trembling. “Everyone say I shall be a great help to me mother to run the boardinghouse. But what if that is not what I want? I don’ want to work in them factories neither. And the ships me father sails don’ accept women as sailors, for that is the Roman way. I don’ have the connections nor the apprentice fee a gal need to get a berth on a ship run by a troll consortium.”

“It would just kill your family if you left, Luce. They love you!”

Her dark gaze accused me, as if I had betrayed her.

Rory stirred. “I’m thirsty,” he whimpered. She went to him.

At nightfall I went to the doors that looked over the courtyard. Kofi joined me.

“How old is that ceiba tree?” In the night breeze stirring its branches I was sure I felt the breath of the spirit world. Its scent wound through my bones.

Kofi rocked from toe to heel and back. “’Twas a sapling planted here on that very day the Taino caciques and the captains of the fleet met to seal the First Treaty. The story go that they who ruled chose one beautiful gal who did come over with the Malian fleet and one handsome lad who was Taino-born upon this island. They two were sacrificed and their blood and bones set in the earth to feed the tree and bind the treaty.”

I pressed a cheek into the glass. I tasted on the air the ancient power of blood to bind the living and the dead.

He put a hand on my forearm. “The Taino believe the ancestors hold them to the right and proper way of living. There was never one thing to stop the Taino all these years from invading Expedition except so far as they held to the law.”

“No, I suppose not. The Taino kingdom is so powerful, and Expedition Territory is tiny in comparison. But I must say, Kofi, I really think their greatest strength is their fire mages. If I’m found guilty, will the provisional Assembly allow the prince to take me away into Taino country? Will they hand me over to James Drake? Will they support me or sacrifice me?”

The scars on his cheeks made him seem forbidding until he smiled. “They shall have to find yee guilty first. I tell yee, gal, I have heard yee scold men before, but to watch yee tear into that fire mage Drake made me skin turn cold.”

“I know I shouldn’t have spoken like that. I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on.”

He laughed.

I leaned my head against Kofi’s shoulder, so broad and solid, but I wished it were Vai I was leaning against. The shock of Caonabo repudiating Bee and her departure with him on a journey sure to be miserable and unpleasant had torn away my shield of determination. All my ugliest fears surfaced like Leviathan breaching the waves.

“Vai’s so accustomed to being the most powerful magister, to winning. What if my sire breaks him? What kind of man will he be? And will I still love him?”

“Peradventure Vai shall not survive this. But I reckon I have never met a man with such a high opinion of he own consequence. In such a dark place, a man’s vanity and arrogance can be what save him.”

I sniveled out something meant to be a chuckle. “If any man’s conceit can survive captivity by the Master of the Wild Hunt, it would be his.”

“There. Yee have brought yee fear out into the light. I reckon yee have been fretting.”

I sniffled, wiping my eyes. “Now Bee’s thrown away her future trying to save me.”

A windblown branch tapped on one of the glass doors that led out to the courtyard.

“Cat, she done no different a thing than yee did for her. Chance it shall even be for the best. The Taino nobles is a high and mighty people who look down on folk like us. Maybe she would fancy a life in their court, or maybe she would find she own self in a cage that squeeze like a trap. Vai told me one time that the day he was brought up from the village to Four Moons House and taken before the mansa, he reckoned he was the most fortunate lad alive to have such a chance. He came to find they did not want him but dared not turn him away. They treated him like the worst kind of mangy cur. So he decided to become better at being one of them than any of them was at it. Yee said to me one time that the worst thing for Vai shall be if he go back to the mage House and become a cold mage like to what he was when yee two first met. I see now what yee meant. ’Twas no good home for him at the mage House. So why is yee so sure the Taino court would be a good home for yee cousin?”

“Do you think they could crush her?”

He chuckled. “That gal? I reckon not. But that don’ mean she shall for a surety live a happy life there. Had she married a Taino man of the common run I reckon she should have as good a chance as any to have a good life, for the Taino live as well and justly as any folk do. But I’s not a man to choose a palace of gold and precious shells over a humble room if the first come with a knife in the back and a foot on me heart and the second come with a smile and a kiss. I don’ know what yee cousin wish for above all else. She may be glad later to have another choice.”

When I thought about it, wondering what Bee would really want, I realized I wasn’t sure. If anyone had asked me a year ago if I hoped and dreamed a handsome, wealthy, and well-connected young man would fall in love with me at first sight, I would have laughed and said yes because it was the sort of thing a young woman was supposed to say yes to. But it wouldn’t have been true. Bee was the one who dreamed of a romantic story in which she figured as the principal heroine. I had wanted nothing more than to have a chance to follow in my father Daniel’s footsteps, to travel the length and breadth of Europa seeing new places and, if I was fortunate, have adventures as he had had. I would have wanted a romantic interlude… at some unspecified later date.

Bee had made her choice. She had chosen to be loyal to me.

I released Kofi’s hand and smiled crookedly at him. “Thank you, Kofi.”

Rory had fallen back asleep, so Luce took the first watch in a chair and I settled on a bed of blankets on the floor. I shut my eyes, but my mind kept pressing me back into the bitterly sweet memory of lying in Vai’s arms the one night we had shared. How he had kissed me! How was a gal meant to sleep if she could not stop thinking of his passionate caresses?

The scratching at the window just would not stop. I sat up. Luce slept, one arm curled against her chest and the other flung out to one side. Kofi was leaning against the interior door, eyes closed, napping on his feet. I crawled over to the drapes that concealed the glass doors. I twitched aside the lower corner to peer out into the night-swamped courtyard.

Shadows marked the glass in blotches and lines. Winged shapes flittered across the sky.

A slender green finger was tapping on the glass. I recoiled. A branch had elongated until it reached the doors, as if trying to find a path inside. A bat perched on the swaying end, staring at me with obsidian eyes. I blinked, and it vanished.

A man pressed against the door. He had Vai’s face and he wore a magnificent dash jacket printed with fishes spilling out of gourds.

“We shall find a way in,” he said in a low, sweet voice. The scent of guava penetrated the glass separating us. I wanted to kiss him to taste the fruit, but I knew better. “Yee cannot escape us. We know yee killed her.”

The latch turned but caught because it was locked. The key shuddered in a gust of wind.

“You can’t come in,” I whispered.

It was impossible to stare into those brown eyes and not be drawn closer; his lips tempted me; his hands reminded me of the kind of work they could do. But he was not Vai. He was an opia, the spirit of a dead man.

“Open the door,” he whispered, “and yee shall have what yee so badly desire.”

The hot look in his eyes drowned me. Next thing I knew, my hand was touching the key. I jerked away my hand and fixed it around the hilt of my sword.

“Cat?” The drape rustled away from me.

I jolted back as Kofi joined me. He looked into the courtyard with its dense shadows and a night wind trawling through the branches of the ceiba tree. The nearest branches of the tree waved twenty strides or more from the glass-paned doors. Of branch, bat, or male figure I saw no sign, although a small frog hopped along the paving stones along the side of the building.

“I reckon yee shall step back from there,” Kofi said. “That tree have a powerful spirit.”

Shapes were climbing in the tree, some grappling up and some slipping down. The movement made me dizzy.

“Do you see them?” I whispered.

Instead of answering, Kofi pulled me back, let the drapes cover the view, and settled me on the blankets beside Luce. I dozed off.

A mosquito buzzed by my ear, and I kept swatting it away and it kept coming back, until I opened my eyes. Both Luce and Kofi slept soundly. But Rory was gone.

One of the glass doors was open, its key fallen to the floor.

With my ghost-sword in hand, I ran out into the courtyard. It was so late I heard not a breath of sound from anyone living.

The soporific aroma of overripe guava drenched the air. As on a gust of wind, a cloud of bats poured down over the roofs that surrounded the courtyard. Their tiny bodies battered me. I drew my sword out of the spirit world where the blade resided and slashed at them, but they darted past into the shadow of the ceiba tree. A hundred ratlike rodents were hauling Rory up the trunk of the ceiba tree, calling to each other with whistling chirps and chortling barks.

I sheathed my sword and ran back into the chamber.

“Kofi! Luce!” No matter how I shook them, they did not wake. They slept the heavy sleep of the enchanted.

I dressed in skirt and sandals and grabbed the two flasks Uncle Joe had given me, as well as trousers, sandals, and a singlet from Vai’s chest. Then I raced back out. I could still hear them climbing. The scent of the spirit world breathed down over me. I tasted its dry chaff and a kick of dust, as if I had walked into a mown hayfield baking under a late summer sun. The massive trunk was covered with big blunt thorns. Even had I been able to reach the lowest branch, I would have torn my skin to ribbons and bled all over the tree.

Yet wasn’t blood the gate? I surveyed the courtyard: stone sculpture, cistern, tree. In the spirit world, stone, well, and tree set the three points of a triangle to create warded ground. Warded ground had the property of reaching into the mortal world, as if the touch of the mortal world anchored the wards in the ever-changing spirit world. I had crossed into and out of the spirit world through stone. I had crossed into and out of the spirit world through water. Why not through the tree?

The chortles of the thieves faded. I pressed my right arm onto the stinging tip of a thorn. It pierced my flesh with an almost audible groan. My blood trickled down the bark. Beneath my hand the tree smeared to shadow as the trunk became a ladderlike stair leading up into darkness. I tucked up my skirts to keep them out of the way, and I climbed.