Cold Fire (34 page)

“So you were never given a choice, only a sort of a bribe.”

“That is how the mansa thinks, because it is the only way he knows how to think. But you must understand, Catherine, that while it is certainly true I am an exceedingly rare and unexpectedly potent cold mage—”

I rested a hand against his cheek, the touch silencing him instantly. The bristle of his beard on my palm made me want to purr. “Such rare potency matched by the inverse of your modesty.”

He drew my hand away, his breathing ragged as he went on even more pedantically. “It is also true that in Four Moons House I paid closer attention to our lessons and practiced more diligently and asked more questions and experimented more freely than the others did. Their expectations hurt them, I suppose. They knew what seat of power and wealth was theirs to sit in. It was nothing to them. A few enjoyed the challenge of weaving cold magic. Some felt the weight of duty. But no one worked harder than I did. No one. Maybe my reach is that much greater than the others of my age group. Or maybe I simply am more disciplined and responsible. That being so, how can the children born into the House believe they are somehow in blood better, if my own experience shows they are not? So after the things you said to me, after the mansa commanded me to kill you, I began to question. Why should my village remain under a system of clientage that’s little better than slavery just because it has always been that way?”

“You truly listened to me?”

“I did.”

“That’s why you went to Godwik and Clutch?”

“Yes. I found Chartji’s legal knowledge most helpful. She said I could learn a great deal in Expedition, and so I have. All people have a right to liberty. They have a right to the dignity and security of their own persons. Why must we remain chained to an antiquated system that benefits a few on the backs of the many?”

“Are you a radical now?”

He gathered me close, an arm around my back, his lips against my ear. “Oh, yes, Catherine. I am a radical now. I will unbind my village from the chains of clientage. I may not manage it this year or the next, but I will not rest until I find a way to do it, legal or otherwise. I am nothing if not persistent. My village will not be chained forever. Nor should you be. Chartji is still looking into the matter of dissolving a chained marriage. If you wish to wait until I receive word from her, of her findings, then so be it. I will wait for you. And if you do not want me, then you shall not be forced to have me.”

He said it not knowing what the head of the poet Bran Cof had told me, words my sire’s binding prevented me from repeating to him. Blessed Tanit! I was not drowning. I was being dragged along by the unerring tidal force that was him, or us, or destiny, or—whispered the shade of Heartless Cat—nothing more than proximity and lust.

For it was not that his eyes were beautiful, although they were. It was not that his features were symmetrically pleasing, although they surely were. It was not that his body, which I by now had an arm around, felt so very promising held close against mine, although I could scarcely think of anything except how I yearned to touch him all over.

After all, I had only to wait, hold on for seven more weeks, and then I could get what I wanted from him without being chained by it. If physical love was the only thing I wanted.

Four Moons House owned Vai through his village’s clientage, but even so, his magic gave him access to immense status within the House. Yet he had not abandoned and would not abandon his family and his entire village, although he could easily have left them behind for the wealth and privilege his power as a mage granted him. Instead, he made their burdens his own. He intended to risk his own security and no doubt his life to free them. That was the man he wanted to be.

I could take what I wanted as I walked free. Or I could share the burdens and risks with him.

I felt my lips part, as if to speak, but all that came out was a mute exhalation.

He drew back slightly, studying me with the serious look that seemed to see not just me but all the things that made me what I was. That seemed to offer not just him but all the things that made him what he was.

“We can walk our paths each alone. Or we can walk this unknown road together. If anyone can find a way through, it will be you. If you will walk with me, my sweet Catherine, then I will never let go of you. And I promise you that together we will get there.”

I thought he was going to kiss me, but that was not what he was about. He brushed a hand along my hair and drew his thumb down the side of my face until I could not remember how to breathe.

Eyes half closed in a way that made me wonder how he might look if I woke up beside him made all drowsy and contented, he whispered, “And I do here ask you if you will come home with me, tonight, to the bed I built for us.”

Blessed Tanit, how I wanted him!

Wanting is like the tide of a dragon’s dream, sweeping away the safely familiar landscape and all the cautions with which you have so carefully guarded yourself. Those who are caught in the tide can never come back. But maybe they would not regret being changed.

So I said, “Yes.”

“Vai. Ja, maku! Me wholehearted apologies, but I need a word with yee.”

How long Kofi had been standing about ten paces from us, I could not guess. The dance and the drums, the polyrhythm of conversation and laughter and song, the press of bodies and the smell of pepperpot mingling with the kick of dust slammed back up against my awareness.

Vai dragged his gaze away from mine. “I’ll be right back.” He released me, rose, and walked over to Kofi.

I dredged for a semblance of thought. The intricate voices of the drums throbbed up from the earth. My feet twitched as if drums were a partner who led you into the dance, and of course they were. Rhythm was another thread wound through bone and blood to weave together existence. For one night I could set aside my worries about Bee and Rory. For this night.

I watched as Kofi spoke urgently into his ear. I needed to listen, yet it seemed wrong to eavesdrop on a man who had just confided his secret hopes and dreams. At first he was smiling as if expecting to hear how his conspirator’s machinations had brought him triumph. His brow furrowed. Then his eyes widened, and he frowned and shook his head.

I heard him say, annoyed and thus a little loud, “This is not a good time.”

With an unreadable glance toward me, Kofi said, “’Tis the message I’s told to give yee.”

As Kofi hurried off, Vai strode back, pulled me up, and brushed off the burlap. I trotted beside him to the food cart whence he had borrowed it.

“You’d hate it if the last of this pudding dribbled down that gorgeous jacket. What were you thinking to wear it to an areito?”

The coy glance he gave me from under half-lowered lashes was enough to make my breathing stutter and my heart flame. “Only of you. Whatever is necessary, I will do.”

Suspicion flowered into a burst of vibrant certainty. “You blinded Aunty Djeneba and Brenna with your good manners and your appealing way of confiding in them. Uncle Joe was right. You haven’t been crying in your pillow at all. You’ve been biding your time. Plotting my downfall.”

“You think with your feet, Catherine. That’s how you escaped the mansa and fought off a shark. But I”—he offered me the last slice of papaya, his gaze fixed on my mouth as I tried to eat it up delicately and quite failed—“
I
think with my mind.”

I should have been angry, but instead I was delirious. I laughed.

He smiled as he wiped out the bowl with a wedge of maize bread and fed it to me. After slinging bowl and spoon on the cord, he twined his fingers intimately through mine and we walked to the jetty. He wore a busy, thoughtful expression, so I let him think and enjoyed the pleasure of walking hand in hand. It was good to have a chance to catch my breath.

After a while, he spoke. “Kofi was just given an unexpected message.”

“From the radicals. The Assemblymen.”

“Yes.”

I recalled I had seen Kofi at the areito earlier with one of the women who had shown up at the gate last night. “Are those two gals really part of the organization?”

“Is there some reason they shouldn’t be?” He pressed a fleeting kiss on my mouth without breaking stride. The touch of his lips made me quite forget who I was for at least ten heady steps. “Were you jealous when I went off with them?”

“Why would you think I was?”

“Why did you wait up, then?”

“Were you drunk when you came back?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

“Only intoxicated by thinking of you.”

“I thought so. I could hear the liquor in your voice. Why do the radicals trust a maku who has only been in Expedition six months?”

We turned onto Breakwater Street, the boulevard that ran all the way to the old city. Here in Lucairi lay work yards opposite the stone jetty shore where local canoes and boats came and went. Vendors had set up stalls, selling fried fish, cassava bread hot off portable griddles, green mango on sticks, and roasted crab in the shell whose shattered remains crunched underfoot.

“Kofi trusts me, just as I trust him. I’m an unregistered fire bane. That makes me a good risk because anyone could have me arrested. Also, as a true cold mage, I have something they didn’t know they wanted. I’ve been instructing local fire banes in the most basic teachings any child at a mage House is taught in the schoolroom. Obviously that is also against the law.”

“How did you find the radicals in the first place?”

“Chartji’s aunt introduced me to Kofi. Trolls have a complex net of affiliations.”

“Chartji’s aunt? Is she related to those two trolls who come every Jovesday?”

“Why, Catherine, have you been watching me?”

His dash jackets were tailored so exactly to him that they didn’t bind, and he knew perfectly well how good he looked. The red and gold of the magnificent fabric set off the deep brown of his complexion most flatteringly. “Why do you ask when you know the answer?”

“Just to hear you say it.”

I laughed again. “You are such an irritating man. Where are we going?”

“We’re going to Nance’s. The boardinghouse down by the gates of the old city.”

He drew me over next to the rock wall against which waves slurped so noisily that it would be difficult for passersby to hear. “The radical leadership has finally agreed to talk with me. It’s taken months for me to get this invitation. You’re right, they’re cautious. They can’t afford to trust anyone new. They’re very close to calling a general strike and bringing the city to a halt until their demands are met.”

“What are their demands?”

“The establishment of a committee to compose a charter for the establishment of a new government for Expedition Territory. And a time span to accomplish it in: three months. The Council would arrest them in a heartbeat if the wardens knew who the leaders actually were. In fact, the radicals were ready to call the strike last Martius. But the arrival of General Camjiata threw the whole city into an uproar. Meanwhile here I am, an unknown agent. That’s why I have to meet with them now, at such short notice. If I refuse, they’ll think I’m plotting something and won’t give me another chance.” He looked searchingly at me. “Catherine, I need to know if there is anything you want to tell me about all this. Anything it would be better for me to know now, before the meeting with the radicals. I see you brought your cane—your sword, I mean—as if you are expecting trouble.”

The Hassi Barahal house had spied for Camjiata. My mother had fought for him, and then escaped imprisonment at his hands. In the entryway of the law offices of Godwik and Clutch, he had told me he was looking for Tara Bell’s child.
Me.
I touched the ghost hilt, for twilight had brought the sword to life even though to the eye it still appeared as a black cane. Was it truly a cemi, of a kind? Was it my mother’s spirit that touched me when I felt the shiver of its cold steel? She who had left me with a memory of only five words?
Tell no one, not ever.

“I always bring my cane because I’m always expecting trouble,” I said.

He pressed his cheek to my hair. “There is surely a great deal about you I do not understand.”

Water slapped across the rocks. In the distance, thunder rumbled like a warning. I turned my face into the curve of his neck, remembering the voice of the hurricane’s herald and his taunting words. The spirit had told me to run, but I was not going to run this time from those chains.

“Vai, I want you to understand—”

Ice weight choke dread throat closing mask blinded. I couldn’t breathe. I was slipping below the surface of the water without a sound as my sire dragged me down.

“Catherine! I have you! Don’t faint.”

I sucked in air, holding on to him as if to my life. “I have to get away from the water.”

He eased me away from the rocks and, once we reached the edge of the boulevard, looked me over carefully. “Catherine, I’ll never let you drown, if that’s what you fear. After I lost you in the well, I swore I would not let go again. Not if you wanted me.”

I had my breath back. And I thought: The time to decide about a man is before you sleep with him, not afterward.

“And if I didn’t want you?”

He smiled in the most aggravating way. “How could you not want me, Catherine?”

I laughed, because only Vai could have spoken those words in a way that made it seem he completely believed them while at the same time he was making light of his own vanity in needing to believe them. “How much time do I have to answer the question?”

“My sweet Catherine, I suggest we go to this untimely meeting so we can get it over with, the sooner to go home to our bed. And then…then you have as long as you need.”

Quite the most reckless surge of feeling swept through me. Before I could kiss him, he slipped out of my grasp.

“We can’t start that or I won’t get through the evening and neither will you. Let’s keep walking.”

Walking warmed the cold right out of me and loosened the chains that had been strangling my tongue and my heart. His long stride matched well with mine. I felt comfortable with his silence even if my thoughts wandered all over his body, wondering just exactly how long it would be before we could return to the room and what on Earth we were meant to do with Kayleigh. Being Vai, he had surely already arranged something. Honestly, I could not imagine otherwise.

“Vai, there’s one thing, though.” I had to say it. “I don’t want to get pregnant right now.”

“Of course. We’ll take precautions. We want no children until we’re free of clientage.”

“Blessed Tanit! You’ve already thought about this, haven’t you?”

His fingers squeezed mine as he smiled without looking at me. “I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, if you must know. But besides that, I also suspected…it was something you were worried about before.”

Before
, meaning Drake. I did not want to discuss Drake with Vai.

“If he hurt you, I wish you would tell me.”

I really did not want to discuss Drake with Vai, but I owed him an explanation. “He got me drunk. And he lied to me. He implied he could only heal me if I had sex with him. I suppose that is a form of harm.”

“I’d call it harm,” Vai muttered.

“Did he
force
me? No, I was willing. I won’t lie to you. It was nice.”

“
Nice?
 ” He laughed in a way that made me flush straight through the center of my body. “I would pity the man you said that of, if I didn’t know he’d gotten you drunk and lied to take advantage of you. Because I promise you, Catherine, that afterward you won’t say it was
nice
.”

The air changed not as with anger but with a force so primal I felt I’d been turned inside out and every part of me tuned to him. I had no words, but I did have an overpowering foreboding that the next hour or two was going to advance like molasses down the shallow slope of a platter.

At length and with the grace of a man shifting directions in a dance, he said, “You did a remarkable job piecing that skirt together.”

“I am a seamstress of rare and unexpected potency. Vai, when are you going to tell me what you are doing with the trolls?”

“I’ll bring you along next Jovesday. And teach you a better thing to call them than
trolls
, which is a human word. Here’s a simplified version of what they call themselves.” He whistled something short but grand.

“That’s not a word.”

“It’s not a word as we think of words. But it makes you wonder if they dislike being called trolls as much as Kena’ani dislike being called Phoenicians.” He tugged me to the left. “Here we are.”

Gas lamps burned on the old city walls. We turned aside before we reached the wide plaza, the main batey courts, and the harbor. The boardinghouse was the one I had noticed before, a sprawling edifice raised on squat stilts, its main floor a huge open-air wooden deck flanked by two-story wings. I smelled pepperpot, rum, and urine.

Folk packed the place, many young and plenty male, although more women than I had expected plied their way into the crowd with men on their arms or their arms on men. It was an agitated press lit by cobo hood lamps set along the railing of the outer deck. A burly fellow stood on a box shouting over the noise.

“Yee mean to say yee shall serve in an army overseas for a scrap of pay, the hope of loot, and a dram of rum each night? While meanwhile yee brothers and sisters at home still don’ have the right to vote on the Council? That same Council who claim to govern us as citizens but who act to rule us as subjects? Is yee so easily bribed? Shall yee not stand
here
and fight for the rights we shall hold
here
? Do yee know what they mean for yee to earn there, in they Europan war? Death! Death, for the merchants to get fat off. ’Tis not worth it, lads! ’Tis past time to fight at home.”

Vai pulled me close as if to make sure he wouldn’t lose me. Rising voices swelled like a gust of wind over us as the one fellow stepped down and another bounded up to take his place.

“I say different! I say, this is opportunity! Yee really believe people shall not be fooled or they vote bought in this thing yee call elections? They who talk of Assembly is either witless or cunning. Let the Council have they triumph now, for I tell you, the Taino shall come soon enough to claim we factories. Them who want to remain free must get out of Expedition—”

Still holding on to me, Vai cut a path through the seething crowd with his stare and, perhaps, a pinch of cold magic.

A wide formal staircase led to a series of upstairs rooms, private parlors whose windows looked over the deck and the sea. He headed for the serving counter in the back, which was mobbed with drinkers. Kofi was leaning over the bar, talking to one of the men pulling drinks.

Appreciative whistles erupted from the area around the crate as the two speakers began talking over each other.

“—These vexatious laws put in place by a Council for which we cannot vote. Why shall we listen to them tell us what to do?”

“Would yee rather have beggars and layabouts rule yee?”

Kofi turned away from the bar with four brimming cups in his big hands as he steered toward a pair of sour-looking men who were scanning the crowd. Were they looking for fire banes? The man behind the bar looked our way, and nodded at Vai.