Cold Fire (26 page)

“It’s not my place to speak of such intimate matters,” I said in a tone I hoped walked the fine line between being polite and absolutely crushing this subject into oblivion. “I was hoping to ask to borrow thread. I’ll pay you back, of course. I can salvage a great deal from my skirts and petticoats by piecing together one skirt from the remnants. I could manage a few work vests—singlets, I mean—from the scraps if your little lads have need of such. It’s quite good quality wool challis…” I trailed off, surprised to find my hands in fists, buttons biting into my palms.

She gave me a measuring look. “Happen that young man ever hit yee?”

“Hit me? Like, beat me?”

“He don’ seem like that kind. But I reckon I best ask.”

“No. That’s not what happened. Although he’s said some pretty awful things to me.”

She smiled wryly. “I admit, that lad have a sharp tongue when he wish, not that he ever use it on he elders! And he think very well of he own self.”

“That is a way of describing it,” I agreed.

She chuckled. “Yee may use any of the thread in the copper tin. If yee’s feeling up to it, I reckon I shall set yee to serving food and drink in the evenings. Yee’s a pleasing gal to look on, and yee have a bold way of speaking. ’Tis hard to get help these days with the factories hiring so many.”

“I can do that. Aunty, I’m grateful to you for taking me in. I mean to earn my keep.”

“Seeing that look on Vai’s face when he brought yee back is keep enough, but fear not, gal. I shall see yee earn yee bed.” She laughed merrily at whatever expression blanched my face.

I fetched my ruined skirts and borrowed scissors from one of the neighbor men. At a table in front of an interested audience of children and the regular customers who always came early, I began dismantling the ripped and torn remains while I spun a carefully worded tale that left out Salt Island, James Drake, and Prince Caonabo, and jumped straight from the watery attack to my beach rescue by buccaneers. The rains came through, as they did every afternoon, and more people gathered as folk left off work for the day and came to drink and relax.

“Yee say yee was attacked by a shark? Describe what yee saw, gal.”

“It was very large, and a nasty shiny gray, and it had dead flat eyes. I must say, I’ve never been so terrified in my life.”
Except standing before the creature who sired me.
“I punched it, and it swam off.”

They laughed and whistled. Several began debating whether it was a
carite
or a
cajaya
, two different kinds of sharks known to attack people. I looked up to see Vai standing in the back with arms crossed, glowering as if I had personally offended him. By the evidence of sawdust dusting his skin, he had only recently come in and not yet washed; he’d tied a kerchief over his head today, making him look very buccaneer-ish, a man about to sail off in an airship except of course for the minor issue of his deflating the balloon and thereby causing a spectacular crash.

“That shark is not the predator yee shall have been feared of, gal,” said Uncle Joe. “’Tis they buccaneers yee shall have feared more. Seem yee was rescued off the beach by the Barr Cousins. They is called Nick Blade for he knives and the Hyena Queen for the way she laugh.”

“The Barr Cousins? Likely so. We were never formally introduced.”

“Yee’s killing me, gal!” said some wit in the crowd. “‘Never formally introduced!’”

“She said her grandmother was a Kena’ani woman. That makes us cousins of a sort. Maybe more, since I’m a Barahal. We might be truly cousins, if their ancestors shortened the Barahal name to Barr. That must be why we got along so well.”

My bravado sent my audience into gales of laughter as I measured cloth against the waistband. As Vai’s gaze swept across my audience, they stepped back just as if he had pushed each one. Maybe he had, for the air had a sudden bite. All hastily moved away to other tables.

He sat down opposite me, arms still crossed. “You’ll get sick again if you overdo it.”

I kept my voice low as I pinned cloth to the waistband, for although the customers had gone to sit elsewhere that did not mean they weren’t watching. “I need to earn my keep, Vai, not as your kept woman. It does amaze me how you felt able to tell everyone the gripping tale of how you lost your darling wife and have searched for her ever since. How heartbreaking. How noble.”

“It keeps away the women.”

Irritation marred the features of most men, making them look small-minded or ill-tempered. Not Vai. Irritation sharpened his features, made a woman want to kiss him until he relented. I imagined hungry young women buzzing like bees to a succulently annoyed flower.

He raised an eyebrow, in supercilious query.

“How nice for you,” I said, since he was clearly expecting a response to a statement meant to provoke me. “Or not.”

“Don’t change the subject, Catherine. I don’t see how the tale I told is much different than the one you just embroidered.”

“It’s all true!”

“I’m sure it is. If anyone could punch a shark in the eye and survive to tell of it, it would be you.”

“I would thank you for the fine praise, except you looked so annoyed when I was telling that part of the story.”

“Yes, annoyance was certainly my first reaction on hearing you had been attacked by a shark. I couldn’t possibly have been shocked or terrified on your behalf. Although you left out the part about exactly how you found yourself floating in the middle of the sea in the first place.”

“Would you have turned me over to the wardens if I hadn’t been clean?”

His chin raised as sharply as if I had slapped him. A breath of ice kissed my lips.

Because I was suddenly, inexplicably furious, I pressed my attack, leaning closer with an aggressive whisper. “You would have been right to do so. I was on Salt Island.”

He stood so quickly that all around the courtyard people jumped, and looked forcibly away. He grabbed my arm and dragged me closer, across the table. The table’s edge dug into my thighs.

His voice emerged in a hoarse murmur. “You just dreamed that.
You were never there.
”

“Let go,” I said, rigid beneath his hand. All I could see was Abby’s face.

He released me. Sat down. Shut his eyes, breathing hard, as the cold eddy of air around us faded. I fought to recover my composure. As I straightened out the disturbed fabric, I wondered what people were making of all this. It would be an easy plate to garnish: The long-parted lovers quarrel over the circumstance that precipitated their separation.

When his breathing had settled, he opened his eyes and considered me with the haughty arrogance I knew best. “Which explains the presence of the fire mage. Although I can’t quite figure how a fire mage might have come to be working with the notorious Barr Cousins.”

I parried. “I don’t think the Barr Cousins liked the fire mage much.”

“Good for them. I don’t like him much either.”

“I didn’t ask you to like him. You don’t even know him.”

He set his elbows on the table, heedless of the fabric I was neatly piecing back together. “There is where you are wrong. I met him in Adurnam. In the entryway of the law offices of Godwik and Clutch. Where I also found you. I remembered that when I saw him again today—”

Jerking up, I stabbed myself with a pin. “Ah!”

“—Wandering around the harbor with a ridiculous cap pulled down to cover his red hair and asking about a girl he had lost track of after he had rescued her from a shipwreck on a deserted islet. I’m surprised you forgot to mention the shipwreck in your otherwise flamboyant tale.”

I licked a spot of blood from my finger.

“I must wonder why he was in Adurnam then, and why he came here now,” he finished.

Vai didn’t know General Camjiata had been in the law offices in Adurnam. And I wasn’t about to tell him since it was none of his cursed business and nothing to do with me anyway no matter what the Iberian Monster claimed.

“I never met Drake before that day in Adurnam,” I said quite truthfully, “and then not again until that which we won’t speak of.” But I sat down, resting my head in my hands because otherwise I was going to touch my belly. “Blessed Tanit! Did anyone tell him where I’d gone?”

“No one did in the carpentry yard. I did find out you can leave a message for him at the Speckled Iguana. Shall we go over there now?”

I found the courage to look at him. “Can’t I just stay here?”

He exhaled sharply. Then the self-satisfied lift of his mouth betrayed him. “You can, if that’s what you want.”

I began to tremble. “You couldn’t just come straight out and ask me what you really want to know, which I must suppose is whether I want to go back to James Drake. At least the infamous murderer Nick Blade was honest with me!”

That made him sit up straight. “Do enlighten me!”

“He scolded me. He said, ‘Don’t you go getting drunk around men. What do you think will happen?’”

“Did he, now?” said the arrogant cold mage thoughtfully, drawing forefinger and thumb down the line of his jaw in a way that dragged my gaze toward his lips.

“Do you think I’m lying about that?” I snapped.

“Did I say I thought you were lying?”

“Are you going to ask me questions to annoy me?” I considered stabbing him with a pin.

“Who do you think can keep this up longer?” he said with an aggravating smirk. He rose, snagged a cup from a tray being carried past by Brenna—who smiled on him as if wishing him good fortune!—and handed it to me. “Have a drink?”

“Are you trying to get me drunk?”

“Why would I want to get you drunk, Catherine?”

“Isn’t that a way men seduce women—?” I broke off, so flustered and ashamed that all I could do was take a drink. It was juice, sweet and pure.

“I’ve heard it is the only way some men can manage to seduce women.” He took the cup from my hand, drained it, and mercifully changed the subject. “I wish I could know how you are able to stand hidden in plain sight in a chamber where I can see you but others cannot.”

I leaned toward him confidingly, and he caught in a breath.

In a low voice, I said, “The secret belongs to those who remain silent.”

He laughed quite charmingly, curse him, for it was the laugh of a man willing to be amused at his own expense. “How long have you been waiting to say that to me?”

“How long do you think I’ve been waiting?”

“I would suppose, since the very first time you heard me say it. Well, Catherine, I am nothing if not persistent. I
also
wish I could know if you sailed from Europa to the Antilles, or if you made the journey here while still in the spirit world.”

“And I wish I could know why you and your sister are here. I don’t believe the mansa is generous enough to let go of a girl who might be bred for the hope of more potent cold mages.”

He smiled in a way that made me wary. “There show the cat’s claws. It’s a fair assessment. I will not lie to you, Catherine. Like you, I have things I am not free to speak of. Let me know what I can do to help you with settling in.”

I bundled up the skirts. “I’ll sew in the mornings and serve in the evenings. I start tonight.”

I challenged him with a glare to protest that I needed to rest another day. He merely smiled a soft smile that made my heart turn over, an anatomically impossible maneuver that had the unexpected consequence of heating my blood to a boil.

I had been bound into marriage against my will and chained by magic in ways I did not understand. If the head of the poet Bran Cof had told the truth, I could be released from the marriage as long as I did not succumb to an inconvenient attraction to his physical form. I had a dreadful task assigned me. I could not afford sentiment, or distraction. The master of the Wild Hunt was not interested in sentiment, nor would he be distracted. Bee had already called me heartless, and years of living in an impoverished household had taught me how to be sensible.

Taking a deep breath, I began folding up the fabric. Having to be careful with the pins was good practice. Pins drew blood if they pricked you hard enough.

“Just so you understand, Vai. I am grateful for your help. But nothing has changed between us that we have not already discussed.”

I glanced up to see how he was taking my implacable declaration, only to surprise a look on his face which I could only describe as calculating.

“What?” I demanded. “You look like you’re plotting a crime.”

He looked away so quickly it was as good as a confession.

“We’re finished here.” I pressed cloth to my chest like a shield and stepped back from the table. Around the courtyard, people were pretending not to watch, but they were watching.

He let me go without saying one more word.

To wait tables, you had to have a good memory, be quick on your feet, and know how to keep men laughing while you avoided hands touching you in places you weren’t keen on being touched. Whatever tips they gave me—small coins but solid—were mine to keep. And I needed money, for Aunty was paying me in room and board. So I worked long hours, every afternoon and evening from the first arrival to the last departure.

At first I stuck close to the boardinghouse, going out only with Aunty, Brenna, or Lucretia as I got to know Tailors’ Row, the local market, and the larger neighborhood. I needed to reconnoiter my ground. Above all, I did not want to stumble across James Drake.

The following Jovesday afternoon Vai returned from work carrying a pair of sandals. I delivered a tray of ginger beer to a table of men arguing over the results of a batey game and brought a cup of juice to Lucretia and her next youngest sister. Under the shade of the big tree, they were straining pimento-soaked rum through cheesecloth for liqueur. Luce accepted the cup with a smile, then glanced toward Vai, who was waiting by the stairs. I went over.

He held out the sandals. “Catherine, these are for you.”

“I can’t afford them. And I won’t accept gifts from you.”

He glanced up at the tapering, oblong leaves of the ceiba tree as if to find patience hiding in the lofty branches. “Don’t take them for your own sake. Do it for Aunty. You’re walking around here all day and night, and to the market and up and down Tailors’ Row—”

“How do you know what I’m doing during the day when you’re at work?”

His glance toward Lucretia betrayed him. “If you cut your feet, you can’t wait tables…” He paused.

I turned to see two trolls standing in the gate, looking around with predatory gazes. One was tall, drab, and likely female, and the other was short, brightly crested, and likely male. They wore the long cotton jackets commonly worn by men of business in Expedition, the cloth a plain dark green, smeared with soot and oil stains. The customers looked toward them with the same mild disinterest they showed when a street vendor appeared with a tray of cigarillos or taffy, and then at Vai.

He said in a low voice, “Catherine, don’t be an idiot. You’ve been walking around barefoot for over a week.”

“I can’t wear my winter boots.”

“I didn’t say you should. These are cheap sandals. Just take them. I have to go out.”

I took the sandals. He joined the trolls at the gate and left. Why would a cold mage be fraternizing with trolls?

“Oooh me stars!” Lucretia sidled up beside me, smelling of pimento, cinnamon, lime, and rum. After prying the sandals out of my hands, she found the maker’s mark on the sole. “These cost him a pretty bit of coin!”

“He said they were cheap sandals.”

She rolled her eyes as she handed them back to me. “Yee believe that if yee wish, Cat.”

I measured them against my dust-smeared feet. “How did he know my size? Luce? Did you sneak him my boots and then put them back? Are you telling him tales on me?”

She grabbed one of the sandals and whacked me on the hip with it. “Yee’s so stubborn. Just wear the sandals and be glad yee have such, since there is many who have no shoes.”

It was, I realized, a point of pride in Aunty’s household that all the children had shoes and could afford the fee for the district school. For however busy the courtyard was every night and however full the boardinghouse stayed, signs of economical living crept out everywhere, things I recognized from my own upbringing. Chastened, I washed my feet, put on the sandals, and went back to work.

“Sweet Cat, a round of beer! I see yee have new sandals.”

Sweet Cat was what the elderly regulars had decided to call me. “Nice of him to bring them round before he had to go off again.”

“Yes, he go every Jovesday with those two. Yee know them, I suppose.”

“The only trolls I ever knew were lawyers.” I cast my lure. “Are there many troll lawyers here?”

“Many troll lawyers! Yee’s such a maku, Sweet Cat! Now, yee listen.”

They liked to explain things to me, because I listened so well. Trolls loved the law the way batey players loved the game. They were known as specialists in scratching over the finer points of the law and pecking through every least step in the contractual procedures on which legal arrangements were created and implemented. Troll-owned law offices tended to congregate in areas by specialty; law houses that worked maritime law or that anchored branches gone overseas could be found in the harbor district just outside the old city.

By the end of the second week, I had begun to make friends with several of the tailors. Useful and pleasant of themselves, these acquaintances allowed me to have an excuse one morning to depart with apparent innocence on a stroll down Tailors’ Row, where I might chat the morning away over the intricacies of patterns, stitches, and the weight and tensile strength of threads.

As I walked away from the boardinghouse, I turned over in my mind the things I had learned. The old city was ringed by an old fortress wall, and these days only families eligible to serve on the Council were allowed to own property there. East and north of the city, along the river, lay the burgeoning factory district. West lay the sprawl of residential districts like Passaporte, where Aunty Djeneba had her boardinghouse. Beyond the city lay farming country, and beyond that the border with the Taino kingdom.

I made my way seaward. The jetty was both a stony barrier between land and sea, and a long avenue running along the shore. It linked the old city with the districts that had sprouted up outside the original walls. I set my path east past the squat clock tower and toward the airship towers and the ships in the main harbor, which lay perhaps a league away. It felt good to stride. Because it was early, the heat hadn’t grown too thick.

I bound threads of magic around me, not concealing myself so much that a cart might ram into me but shifting myself into that space of things no one much notices: I was nothing more than the cobbled street, or a dog curled up in the shade of a mango tree, or a burgeoning of weeds down a disused lane where four soldiers were taking a piss against a wall.

Trolls passed in small groups and never, ever alone. Often they glanced my way as if they could sense me, but I felt it safest to ignore their glances. I sidestepped a dog-cart whose driver had not seen me, and hurried out of the way of a wagon pulled by one of those sleekly astonishing dwarf mammoths. Its stubby trunk swayed in my direction, and the trunk’s lip delicately brushed me as it lumbered past. An earthy scent washed over me. I hurried on, heart pounding.

I crossed in front of a huge boardinghouse with an open deck and bar overlooking the bay. Beside it lay a raised plaza and a batey court whose length was lined with raised stone seats in the manner of a Roman amphitheater. A team of young women was practicing. They wore sleeveless bodices and short skirts dyed green to mark their affiliation. I drifted to the side of the road so I could watch, a wistful longing rising in my heart. They were astonishingly good, bouncing the ball off legs, arms, shoulders, and even their heads and never letting it touch hands or feet, as they sought to claim a goal through stone rings.

Onlookers sat in clumps on the stone seats, watching the practice. A slender man with flame-red hair and suntanned white skin stood toward the rear among a retinue. I lost track of my breath, clenched my hands, and backed up so quickly I almost collided with five trolls. They parted around me with admirable agility. One looked at me and said, as Caith had that long-ago day in Adurnam: “Ooh! Shiny!”

I tugged the edge of the pagne over my cane. When I glanced back toward the ball court seats, seeing the man from a different angle proved him to be not Drake at all. He sauntered down the risers with a coterie milling admiringly around him. The way he carried himself, expecting a degree of deference as cold mages did in Europa, reminded me of Vai.

“Whhh!” whistled a passing woman to her companion. “Isn’t that Jonas Bonsu?”

Her friend nodded. “They say the Greens shall pay the transfer fee to get him as striker. Them Anolis shall be called fools if they let him go.”

Bold Astarte! Surely I had done enough maudlin dwelling on my own troubles today.

Ahead, the boulevard ended in the old city gate, a lofty stone arch fitted with warden’s boxes on either side and lit, even in broad daylight, with eight lamps, four on each side. Traffic flowed through the gate unimpeded, but once a warden stepped forward to question a man pushing a cart heaped with cassava. The harbor’s stone piers and wooden wharves pushed beyond the walls along the river’s wide mouth.

Before I reached the gate I turned landward into the harbor district. Densely packed with three-story buildings, this commercial district filled the gap of land between the ball court and the city walls. Alongside sailors with their rolling gait and merchants briskly about errands, I walked down a street lined with a raised walkway on each side and gaslights awaiting nightfall. I perused the streets and peered into each side lane, mapping my ground and noting signs and businesses. Down one side lane hung a weathered sign with orange letters against a feathery brown background:
GODWIK AND CLUTCH
.

My pulse raced. I had not quite dared hope, but Gracious Melqart had smiled on me.

Two steps led to a shaded porch and a slatted door. A bell tinkled as I pushed into a chamber fitted out with so many mirrors set at angles that I gritted my teeth. Clerks labored at sloping desks set as haphazardly as though someone had shoved them in at haste and forgotten to tidy up. All looked up from their ledgers, then bent back to work. A troll appeared from behind a screen. Approaching me, it whistled.

Its height and the muted brown of its scale-like feathers decided me. “Greetings and good morning, Maestra.”

It bared fearsome teeth in what I desperately hoped was meant to be a smile. “This way, Maestressa. Yee’s a maku, I take it?”

“I am.” I followed her behind the screen to an area with a bench, three square high platforms cushioned with pillows, and a table set with a pitcher, basin, tray with cups, and platter heaped with nuts and fruit. “How did you know?”

She chuffed, which I took as the kind of laugh you make when you suppose the other person has made an obvious joke and you wish to be polite. “How may I help yee?”

This was not going to be easy. “Are you associated with the offices of Godwik and Clutch who have branches in both Havery and Adurnam?”

Her purple crest rose. “We is.”

I stuck out my hand in the radical’s manner. “I am Catherine Bell Barahal. I have met Maester Godwik. And Chartji. And Caith. That’s why I’m here.”

“I am Keer.” No feathers covered the palm of her taloned hand. The press of her skin against mine reminded me of summer in the north, when the long sun pulls the earth’s sweat up out of warm soil.

She released my hand and indicated the table.

“That’s right,” I murmured. “Wash, drink, and eat before beginning negotiations.”

I washed and dried my hands, after which Keer washed and dried her hands and rinsed her mouth, so I went back and copied the mouth rinsing. She settled on one of the high platforms. Her height and sleek predator’s muzzle made me feel I would be at a disadvantage if I sat lower, so I hopped up onto one of the other square platforms.

Her gaze flicked to my cane. “Shiny, that.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

She flashed me a view of sharp incisors, an intimidating gesture meant, I hoped, to express amusement at my laconic answer. I desperately wanted to know how trolls, like fire mages, could see my cold steel in daylight, but I sensed this was not the time to ask. A troll came in and poured us each a cup of a fragrant tea whose bitterness made my eyes water. We drank as the serving-troll peeled and cut fruit into ceramic bowls small enough to cup in the hand, and sprinkled it with nuts.

As we ate, I looked around. The office was fitted out with interior gaslight, which I had never seen in Adurnam. Slatted windows opened into a chamber where two trolls and a man wearing ink-covered aprons were setting type in a press. Discarded sheets of paper with uneven printing advertised a citizens’ meeting:
in support of the Proposal for an Assembly composed of Representatives elected from the entire Population of Expedition.

When we had finished eating and drinking, Keer cocked her head, looking at me first with one eye, then with the other, then full on, muzzle slightly pulled back to hint at teeth within.

I found my voice. “My business is this. I need to send an urgent message to two family members in care of the Adurnam office of Godwik and Clutch. Since your office must exchange dispatches with your Europan offices, I thought I might be able to include a letter with your post.”

“Yee shall have better fortune after hurricane season.”

“Hurricane? What is that?”

“
Hurricane
is the local word for cyclone. The cyclone is a violent storm which forms over water. Hurricanes rise most commonly in July, August, and September. Elsewise the ocean waters is too cool to sustain them. Therefore few ships risk the voyage to Europa until late October.”

Beyond the screen, pens scratched across paper.
Late October
would be too late to warn Bee. “Is there no way to send a dispatch now?”

Keer shifted her shoulders in a sliding way that struck me as quite inhuman. She said, “How met yee with Godwik and Chartji?”

A shiver of alarm crawled up the skin of my back, for with a lunge she could rip off my face with her talons and then eat me neatly down with those teeth, as long as I didn’t fix my sword through her heart first, if I could even find her heart and if she only had a single one. Instinct urged me to trade information for information.

“First, we were chance met at an inn. Later, my cousin and I went to the law offices because Chartji had told us to come to her if we needed legal services. We were offered employment. Not by Godwik himself, mind you, but by his associate, a professora named Kehinde Nayo Kuti.”