Cold Fire (37 page)

Arguments erupted from the private parlors above. A fight broke out, chairs crashing over.

“Cat!” Vai flexed a hand.

I ran forward and grabbed his arm. “You’ve given yourself away. You’ve got to get out of here. Let’s go.”

He stared at me, eyes dilated and expression wild. “I don’t know you. How many lies have you told me, Catherine?”

“What makes you think I’ve told you any lies?”

He yanked his arm out of my grip only to grab my hand and pull me past Kofi toward the curtain and the howling clamor of the main hall as people called for light, any light, please light. “We’re going to find out, aren’t we?”

“How are we going to do that?” I retorted.

At the look he gave me, I ran suddenly so hot that I tripped over my own feet. He wrapped an arm around my back and pulled me against him.

“You know exactly what we’re going to do,” he murmured, as if he intended to start interrogating me now.

“Ja, maku!” Kofi rubbed his head as he staggered to his feet. “What was that?”

Vai pulled away without releasing me. “My apologies, Kofi. I am overwrought.”

“That is not what I would call it,” said Kofi. “Yee’s going to get taken down for assaulting a warden. Not to mention arrested for being an unregistered fire bane. I did not know anyone could do that. Is they dead?”

Vai barely glanced toward the wardens. “Only stunned.”

“I never saw…” Kofi eyed my sword warily but did not mention it, as if it would be bad manners to call attention to an object of such power. The light that gleamed along the blade was beginning to fade as Vai’s cold magic eased. “What yee going to do?”

Vai’s arm tightened around me as he started walking, hauling me with him. “I really can’t think past the unfinished business I need to take care of.”

“Vai, that is not thinking.” Kofi hurried after us with hands raised as if to show himself unarmed, although I abruptly realized by smooth lines in his jacket and sleeves that he was concealing at least four knives. “A bucket of cold water first, and then a plan. ’Tis possible the wardens did not get a good look at yee, but we cannot risk it. We shall have to get yee out of Expedition. What a disaster. I told yee she was sent to trap yee.”

We reached the heavy curtain that separated the corridor from the main hall of Nance’s. Before Vai could grasp it, another hand swept it aside. Beyond lay a churning sea of shadowy movement, the growling murmur of a crowd whose brawl has been dampened by an unexpected change in the weather, and Beatrice’s shockingly familiar and beloved face.

“There you are, Cat! The general promised me we would find you tonight. Did I miss it? You two kissing under the lamp, I mean. If you call that kissing! I would have called it more of an act of sexual congress with clothes on, and if you think that’s the kind of thing I want to dream about, you are quite
quite
mistaken. I swear an oath I will never again be able to look at you in the same fondly affectionate but innocent way. I woke up blushing!”

My legs gave out. Vai caught me as I sagged against him. My vision hazed into a blurry smear of light, and I thought I was perhaps finally fainting. But it was an actual light, wavering beyond Bee’s black curls and dear face. An actual lamp, kindled by James Drake. The fire mage was standing on the speaker’s crate looking around as if searching the crowd for someone. For
me
.

Against me, Vai tensed.

The crowd quieted like a hungry beast before it springs. Drake jumped down. Holding the lamp, General Camjiata climbed on the crate with the lamp ablaze as a beacon. By its flame he surveyed the restless murmuring crowd. Or perhaps he was letting them examine him, with his mane of silver-and-black hair hanging to his shoulders, his broad frame, thick arms, and powerful hands, and the sheer penetrating force of his fearless presence.

“Will you let me speak?” the general called into maw of the surly beast. “For I have something to say, if you will hear it. I have something to say which you do not expect to hear.”

Vai’s grip on me tightened. “Is he your father? Your true father?”

“Why would you think so?” I whispered, trying to answer in a question, but I could not make words fit together. My sire’s masked face swam in and out of my mind’s eye.

His words struck my heart like a deadly bolts. “Because it would explain why the Hassi Barahals wished to be rid of you. How you escaped from the custody of Four Moons House. The riots in Adurnam to cover Camjiata’s venture into the city. How you got here with his help. You going out this morning to confirm the plans! Kayleigh was right. How could I have thought so well of myself to dream it was any kind of spirit thread pulling us together? That I could feel your soul reaching out to mine? That our reunion was meant to be simply because I woke up every morning thinking this might be the day I would find you? You were seen to be abandoned in the harbor. All part of the plot to infiltrate the radicals. How easily you managed it, thanks to me and my illusions.”

“If you would stop to think, you would know that’s not how it was. You’re wrong.”

“There’s the truth at last. I was wrong.”

Upstairs, footsteps thundered as the wardens called for reinforcements and jailers. They had made arrests.

“We have got to go,” said Kofi. He halted dead on Vai’s other side to gape like a fish at the sight of Bee in all her sumptuous, poet-defying glory.

She offered him a smile that made him choke and take a step back as she stepped forward. “Cat, I despaired of finding you, but the general assured me he knew exactly where you would be when the time was right.” She looked Vai up and down. “Stunning jacket. Are you coming with us? You needn’t worry about arrest once you’re under Camjiata’s protection.”

“No.” He released me.

As he took a step back to join Kofi, I swayed. Bee put an arm around my waist, tucking me neatly against her.

“You may wonder that I concern myself in the affairs of the common laboring folk of Expedition,” began the general in the hall behind us in a wonderfully carrying voice whose musical lilt had a stirring, martial rhythm that caught at the heart and loins. “You may wonder, and even be suspicious, knowing I am born into the Keita lineage. But is it not the concerns of the common laboring folk that propel the ship of revolution out of the night of the old ways? If we say a rising light marks the dawn of a new world, which new world do we mean to measure and describe?”

The gleam of my cold steel dimmed as feet scraped along the darkening corridor.

“Vai,” I said.

He was already gone.

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.