Cold Fire (28 page)

“Catherine, what an expression you have on your face!” he said softly. “Please tell me what I can help you with.”

I looked up. He had cleared the bowl of skin and seeds and core, leaving a creamy pulp to eat, but it was me he was considering.

I shook my head. “I just miss my cousin. And my half brother, who’s probably getting into all sorts of trouble. Don’t you have two sisters younger than Kayleigh? Do you miss them?”

He smiled wryly. “The little lasses. They’re a bit saucy and impudent, those two. I do miss them. Here. Try it.”

“Impudent toward you? Now you simply must tell me about them. Oh, and give me the spoon while you’re talking.”

But later, I wrote what I had to write: “I am safe but I can’t come yet as I must find a way or make one to save you. Meanwhile, throw yourself on the mercy of the headmaster. If he saved his assistant, then we must pray and hope he can protect you.”

I accepted Vai’s money and made the delivery. I established a routine: batey practice before the children went to school, sewing and visiting in the morning, the afternoon nap, and an evening of serving and listening to the answers to the cautious questions I asked. Each passing day brought me farther from Salt Island, together with the unpleasant thought that I might be pregnant, and closer to Hallows’ Night. I had arrived on Salt Island on August second, and now August was drawing to a close.

“I hear the cacica has twenty husbands,” I said one evening as I arranged empty mugs on the tray. “Why would the cacica send her husbands to their deaths? Are they soldiers, sent to die in battle? Maybe that’s why she’s negotiating with General Camjiata, so he can fight for her. Or maybe men are married to her so they can serve the powerful court behiques as catch-fires—”

“Hush with that talk!” snapped Brenna.

All within earshot glanced toward the gate, as if expecting trouble might burst in like sharks to the taste of blood in the water. Heat boiled in my cheeks.

“My apologies,” I said in a choked voice, “if I said something I oughtn’t.”

“Here, gal,” called Uncle Joe from the counter, “cups to serve.”

I hurried over and set down my tray, my hands trembling and my belly in knots.

As he replaced empty cups with filled ones on the tray, he spoke without looking at me. “Speak no careless word about fire mages and behiques, Cat. They guide a dreadful power. Best not speak of them at all, any more than we speak of the unseen spirits who trouble the world.”

“Are there powerful fire mages at the cacique’s court?” I whispered, for the ugly little hope would not die. Was Prince Caonabo strong enough to interest my sire? What about the behica who was training him? What about Drake? It seemed my sire had caught the scent of a powerful mage, and I had to figure out who it was.

Uncle Joe shook his head as a warning. The regulars had gone strenuously back to their cups. At a table too far away to have heard the exchange, four young men with the corded arms of laborers bent together, whispering as they cast glances my way.

“What?” said the youngest of the four. “The Sweet Cat and she man not living as husband and wife? Might there be a chance for me with she?”

The thin one snorted. “Sure, if yee want to risk a chisel through yee eye. None of us reckon ’tis that maku being stubborn. He used to go out every night, he and he radical friends. He don’ hang around here for the conversation.”

The third, his hair bound back in a dusty kerchief, chimed in. “He bring she a present of fruit every day, like he is courting she, if yee want me opinion on it. I don’ fancy she, me own self. Did yee hear she scold that sailor yesterday who put he hand on she ass? Yee want a wife who shall talk to yee like that?”

“She talk to me that way and I shall do she a rudeness,” said the fourth and largest, with a crude laugh.

Really, this spying business wasn’t so difficult, as long as you could control your betraying blushes and vexed grimaces. Like he is courting she! I sashayed over to the table, enjoying their consternation as I closed in. Even the big, crude fellow looked unsure of how to react.

“Not done with those drinks yet? I’ve never seen men drink
so slow
.” I offered a cutting smile to the big man, who smiled sourly.

“Drink with us, Sweet Cat, and we shall drink faster,” said the nice one who admired me.

“What? While I’m working? I’d like to keep my job.”

“If yee fancy going to a batey match, I’s yee man for it. I play on the Anoli third team. I know moves yee have never been taught.”

“There’s a bold boast.” I could not help but smile, for besides being an amusing flirt, he was very well built, clearly a young man who knew how to use his body.

His friends glanced toward the table where Vai was drinking and talking with friends. By not a flicker of his gaze did Vai show interest in my doings. Yet Kofi, sitting beside Vai with arms crossed, looked at me with a frown that made me feel queasy, as if he thought I was deliberately making a scene. What had I ever done to Kofi? I wasn’t obliged to never even smile at another man just because Vai had found me on the jetty. Everything tonight was making my belly ache.

“I’ll bring yee back a round,” I said quickly to the table, gathering the cups and taking them to the two women who washed up. Then I kept going to the washhouse because something was going on to upset my stomach. Just inside, I leaned against the wall, stricken by cramping and a sudden feeling I ought to at least respect Vai’s kindness by not flirting with other men until after Hallows’ Night, when I would be free, and Bee would be safe or she would be dead.

Even at this distance I could still hear them talking, more belligerently now, louder, fueled by too much drink and too much male posturing.

I recognized crude man’s voice. “If the gal don’ want him, why shall she not be free to go with another man? Everyone know that maku never went walking out with other gals. Like he figure Expedition gals not fine enough for the likes of him. Me, I reckon he got nothing in his rifle to shoot.”

“No need for this talk,” said my nice admirer. “Let’s just have another drink.”

“Yee reckon I fear him?” Crude man raised his voice another notch. “He got a smart mouth and a pretty face and fancy clothes on festival nights, and what else? For he surely don’ got that gal in he bed! Maku! Ja, maku! Yee reckon yee scare me?”

“I reckon either you’re very drunk,” said Vai, “or you’re an ass, or likely both, if this is your best attempt to start a fight. Let’s go, lads. I’m of a mind to drink elsewhere tonight.”

Was he? I peered out past the washhouse curtain just in time to see Vai, Kofi, and the lads rising from their table. But the moment Vai took a step toward the gate, the crude fellow deliberately placed himself in his path. He topped Vai by half a head, and he was considerably bulkier, with meaty hands and a sneering face.

“Best if yee run, maku,” he said. “I shall just give yee a pat on the ass as yee go.”

The air changed, charged with a spike of cold that made everyone in the courtyard shiver and look around in surprise.

“Vai, don’ do it,” said Kofi suddenly. “Yee know why yee shall not.”

But he was going to do it. The set of his shoulders, the lift of his chin, and the arrogant curl of his lips betrayed him: He had lost his temper, and now the prideful fury of a roused and exceedingly powerful cold mage was about to hit.

My nice admirer and his friend with the kerchief grabbed their companion and hauled him back. With a confidence that astonished me, Kofi propelled Vai in the opposite direction, murmuring in his ear. Uncle Joe stepped out from behind the counter. Before any of the men could look my way, if they even meant to, which I doubted, I let the curtain drop, my heart pounding.

A moment later, Aunty pulled the curtain aside and looked in. A pale light in the form of a lamp hung from a hook on the wall, but it was not real fire; it was an illusion shaped to resemble it.

Aunty was frowning. “I’s telling yee right now, gal, don’ come out ’til this blow over. Joe shall take care of this arseness. Bless, gal! Yee reckon this is somewhat to laugh at?”

For I was laughing softly. I was staring at the inside of my ankle, at the smear of blood oozing down the skin. I hadn’t been made pregnant with James Drake’s seed.

It was like feeling the first chain slip off my body.

The next afternoon after work, Vai brought a fruit he called mamey. The smooth pink flesh had a rich flavor, spiked with the lime juice he squeezed over slices scooped out of the rind.

“Perhaps you would like to attend a batey match,” he said.

“Perhaps I would. Mmm. The texture is like cream.” I licked my lips. “But I have to work.”

The intensity of his serious gaze disturbed me more than did the sweetness of his charming smile. “You work hard, Catherine. You’ve sewn singlets for the little lads, and blouses for the little lasses. If I ask, Aunty will say no harm to miss one afternoon’s work.”

“If
you
ask?” I examined him. “Does this have anything to do with last night?”

The flare of his eyes told me something, only I did not know what. He obviously did not intend to discuss the incident with me. “Let me know.”

“I’ll go with Luce and her friends,” I said with a defiant lift of my chin.

He agreed so quickly I wondered if this had been his plan all along. “Yes. They’re tall gals, too. You won’t stand out so much.”

“Do I stand out?”

He rose and took a step away, and just as I thought he was going to leave without answering, he paused and looked back as if he knew what I was waiting for. “Always, Catherine. Always.”

With that parting shot, more like a taunting volley of stinging crossbow bolts in advance of a battle, he deserted me for the company of his friends who just then surged in through the gate. After an excited conversation they hurried out. For the next three days I barely saw him. Our regular customers talked of nothing except a huge outdoor meeting planned in support of the call for an Assembly. They began a betting pool on how quickly violence would break out and how many would be shot or arrested by the wardens.

“Can I go?” Luce asked plaintively, to which her mother and grandmother united in a staggeringly firm “No,” after which they confiscated the money collected by the betting pool and distributed the coins to the beggars and mothers of twins in the local market.

“Yee shall not go either, Cat,” Aunty said to me later, “for there shall be wardens out in plenty. Yee must do nothing to come to they attention.”

“I won’t go,” I promised her.

The morning of the day planned for the demonstration dawned red. The winds died, and the air’s flavor deadened and then came alive with an odd anticipatory snap. People hurried home early from work, and at the boardinghouse we shuttered all the windows and braced doors and furniture and storage barrels as well as tightly roping down the roof cistern.

I overheard Uncle Joe say to Vai, “They shall have to cancel the demonstration.”

At dusk a storm blew through with gusting winds and pelting rain. Flying above it, a shuddering voice sang in a language I did not know, with words like drumrolls and trumpet shrieks whose cadence made me twist and turn all night until dawn came and the winds calmed and the rain ceased. The storm had torn down a few trees and damaged a few roofs.

“Was that a hurricane?” I asked Luce as her little sisters swept away leaves and broken branches while we took down the shutters and unstacked tables and benches.

She grinned cheekily. “Yee’s such a maku. That was nothing. I’s so angry. I was all set to sneak out to the demonstration. Yee shall not tell, will yee?”

“Will you promise me you’ll never go to such a demonstration without permission and someone to keep an eye on you?”

She frowned. “Yee’s no help! Anyway, Vai say yee want to go to a batey match. There is a women’s game here in Passaporte come Venerday. Yee shall go with me and me friends.”

“I’d like that. Luce, how did Vai and Kayleigh get here?”

Two of the little lads had begun bashing each other with broken branches. She chased them down, took the branches away, and returned to me. “Yee can ask him that question.”

“I can, but I’m asking you instead of telling Aunty that you meant to sneak out.”

She rolled her eyes in that way she had. “Yee just don’ want to ask him. I don’ know what yee and he fought over—”

“Which is none of your business.”

“Ooo! That is a sour face! Can yee make goat’s milk curdle with it?”

I laughed, spotted the little lads digging for branches in the sweepings, and gave them
the eye
. They ran off giggling, without branches.

“They came in on the fourth day of Martius.”

“You remember exactly?”

“Me father is a sailor. Of course I know all the shipping schedules.” She levered up a bench and I caught the end to help her carry it. “They two came here to the boardinghouse on the fifth of Martius. They came in on a vessel out of Porto Dumnos ’twas hauling barrels of salted fish. No chance of missing that, for they clothes stank of herring.”

No wonder Vai had been unable to follow me into the spirit world. By Imbolc, at the beginning of Februarius, he had already been at sea, undoubtedly at the mansa’s command.

“Do you know the exact date General Camjiata arrived?” When she gave me a curious look, I hurried on. “He is quite the villain in Europa. No wonder the Council isn’t happy he came.”

“That man shall bring all kind of trouble,” she agreed. “He made landfall on the nineteenth day of Februarius on a schooner registered to a local shipping house.”

Which meant his breakout had been planned long in advance.

“He came looking for yee, Cat,” said Luce with a frown.

“The general?” I asked with real alarm. I did not need that complication on top of all else!

She rolled her eyes again. “Yee’s an escaped Amazon from he army?”

“Can’t I have made a joke?” I said with a false smile as I realized what she had meant.

“No joke to he who traveled so far to seek yee.”

“Is that what Vai told you?” It was a foolish question, answered by the very fact of my asking it. Vai had told everyone he had come to the Antilles to look for the perdita, his lost woman.

Which meant Kayleigh and I were the only ones who knew it for a lie.

Why had he really come to Expedition? More importantly, why had the mansa allowed it? Commanded it?

What did the mansa want that was also in the Antilles?

There was only one thing I could think of:
Camjiata
.

Vai had brought with him a sword forged of cold steel. Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage severs the soul from the body with a cut: They need only draw blood to kill you.

The mansa had sent Vai out to do his dirty work before. Vai had destroyed a magnificent airship and then gloated over his triumph. “
They were sure I was too inexperienced to manage it!
 ”

Yet he was not a heartless killer. He had refused to kill me. Surely I was the one bred and raised to be a heartless killer, not him.

“Cat, can yee help me with this table?”

My thoughts slammed back to earth. “Where do you want it?”

Because Venerday was Kayleigh’s usual half day off each week, she accompanied us to the batey match. Vendors had set up on the open ground outside Passaporte’s ball court, selling baked yams, roasted corn, and cassava bread, things that could be eaten with the fingers. A few sold kerchiefs in the colors and patterns by which a person advertised allegiance to one of Expedition’s teams. Some kerchiefs bore unusual sigils that marked teams from within the Taino kingdom.

“Do Taino teams play here as well?” I asked.

“Assuredly. And if there is a celebration in the Taino kingdom, like a noble marriage or birth, there shall be games at the border plaza.”

Not for us the vendors’ expensive food; we’d eaten before we left the boardinghouse. In a jostling delight of girls of whom Luce at almost sixteen was the youngest and I at twenty was one of the eldest, we paid our entry fee for the cheap seats and climbed to the top row. I enjoyed the feeling of being half hidden among them, because the young women of Expedition were, on the whole, tall and big and healthy, quite unlike the frailer, sallower, shorter women of cold Adurnam. I was so accustomed to men and women seated separately in public venues that intermingling forcibly recalled to me how foreign a place Expedition was. Yet my companions felt no compunction about pushing their way through the ranks of young men, seeking a spot where we could all sit together. They were the boldest girls I had ever met, and I loved them for it, and for the way they took me in as if I were Luce’s cousin and treated me as if I were no different from one of their own.

We crammed in shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, and I found myself between two tall girls of about my age named Tanny and Diantha.

“Yee husband is uncanny handsome,” said Tanny, taking my hand and using it to point toward a group of young men below and to our left, standing in dusty trousers and singlets as if they had just come from the carpentry yard. Vai was fake-boxing with Kofi, laughing, quite at his ease. “Good fortune for yee.”

“And you wonder how it is he comes to think so well of himself !” said Kayleigh from the row behind me in a tone accompanied by a long-suffering sigh.

Tanny was a heavyset, handsome young woman who had, I’d been told, cast off two husbands already although she was no older than I was. “Carpenters have the best tools.”

I stared at my hands, which had evidently lost hold of my entire store of witty rejoinders.

“Stop! Please!” exclaimed Kayleigh as the girls around her laughed.

“Don’ tease Cat,” said Luce, popping forward from the row behind us.

“If yee decide to rid yee own self of he, Cat,” said Tanny with a shrug, “I shall take a try.”

“Good fortune to yee with that,” retorted Luce loyally. “He shall not bite. He is devoted to Cat.” She cast at me a baleful glare that made the other girls snicker all over again.

“We were married by our families,” I said, choking out the words in the hope that some kind Fate would sever the conversation. “I barely know him. Indeed, I scarcely think of him at all.”

Tanny buried her face in her hands, shoulders heaving. The other girls tried desperately not to laugh. I determinedly examined the seats opposite where well-to-do folk reclined on comfortable cushions beneath the shade of awnings while servants fetched them food and drink.

“Yee don’ want that man’s trouble anyway, Tanny.” Lanky Diantha had features more Taino than Celtic or Afric and hair as straight and black as mine, cropped short because she had aspirations to play on the Rays’ women’s team. “He is in deep with they radicals.”

“Exactly what radicals is that?” I asked.

“That Kofi-lad was arrested two times for he radical associations. Those is not clan scars on he cheeks, yee know. The wardens tortured him, but he would not talk.”

“Cat, close yee mouth,” said Luce. “I thought yee knew.”

Kayleigh was staring into the crowd to where Kofi was singing and dancing with Vai and the lads to the beat of a hand drum. Those young men could dance! They had the crowd around them getting into a call and response led by Kofi’s strong voice: “Give the man yee money, and what do yee get?”

“The wardens must act to keep the peace,” said Diantha. “If the radicals get their way, the whole city shall go up in flames.”

Luce leaned over my shoulder. “The Council rule unjustly and for they own benefit!”

“The Council was established at the founding to stop a king from taking over!” protested Diantha. “They did it for the best!”

“Just because that was true then, Dee,” said Tanny as the other gals nodded in agreement with her as she went on, “don’ mean we cannot want to change the way things is now. What chance have we in the districts to be heard by the Council? They line they own pockets with money and we get nothing.”

“Think of all the trouble that will come,” muttered Diantha.

“Trouble is here already,” objected Tanny. “General Camjiata got angry when the Council refused he request for support. Now he is run to the Taino.”

“Yee think if them radicals get in power with an Assembly, they will support the general and buy off the Taino?” cried Diantha. “The radicals don’ want a king either.”

“But the general wants to be emperor in Europa, not here,” I said. “You would think the Council, and the radicals, would want to encourage him to go back home, not to hang around because he can’t afford to return.”

“No one want him to hang around,” said Tanny. “There was one time already a man tried to kill the general.”

“What happened?” I glanced at Kayleigh but she was whispering to a friend.

“A man shot at the general when he went to Nance’s Tavern to meet with the local factory union people. The Council blamed the radicals. The radical leaders had broadsheets printed and blamed the Council. Truth is, the general was always a-meeting with both sides.”

The song swept up the risers as the gals joined in: “Give the man yee money, and what do yee get? Yee don’ get nothing, not even a kiss!”

A roar rose from the crowd, drowning out the song. Folk leaped to their feet as the two teams trotted out onto the ball court. Three women dressed in white tabards stood as arbitrators for the game, overseen by an umpire seated on a pedestal. Captains accepted the stone belts that marked their status; flags rose. Today, Rays played Cajayas, and the singing of team chants became deafening as the lead arbitrator tossed the ball into the air to launch the game.

At first, I stood with the others, swaying and shouting, yelping when the ball hit dirt, whooping when a well-placed elbow or knee kept play afloat, for teams lost points if a bad play caused the ball to touch the ground. Diantha offered a running commentary on the players.

Yet a disquieting murmur tugged at my ears. A whiff of burning tickled my nostrils. I pushed to the top of the stone edifice to look over the back wall to the ground below. A troop of wardens had gathered, some carrying lamps and the rest carrying staves and pistols.

I dropped down. Vai was easy to find, not because he was particularly tall but because I immediately recognized the shape of his head and the cut of his shoulders. He swung around to look at me, as if I’d spoken. I lifted my chin. He nodded and, with Kofi to cut a path, started up.