Cold Fire (48 page)

I pulled off his boots and unbuttoned his dirtied jacket and pried him out of it as he made a faint protest and promptly passed out. I pressed my cheek against his. His breathing remained even and steady, so I stepped back and let him sleep. I scarcely noticed that I handled both my cane and his cold steel until I propped them against the wardrobe and realized his sword had not stung me.

The door opened and Bee appeared. “Blessed Tanit! There’s blood on your sleeve!” She ran to me, but stopped before embracing me. “Your skin looks flushed.”

“Drake used me as a catch-fire.” The words were strangely easy to say, as if I were speaking of someone else. “Vai, too, but it didn’t burn him.”

She swayed, and it was I who maneuvered her to the bed, where she sat with a look of stunned horror. “What happened to Andevai, then?” she whispered.

“He drained himself to stop Drake. He just fell hard asleep.”

She grasped my hands convulsively. When I whimpered, she released me. “How bad is it?”

“I feel like I came up one spit short of being cooked. But it’s not too bad, more the shock.”

“I should never have sent that note. I mentioned it in front of Drake. I will kill him myself !”

“Leave Drake alone, Bee. I’ll take care of him. Believe me, I can.”

She had left the door open. Juba appeared at the threshold. He carried a tray with a pitcher and basin, a vial, a ceramic jar stoppered with a bit of cork, strips of linen, and a small glass bottle. With a surgeon’s knife he cut away the blood-soaked cloth, careful of my modesty, and washed the wound, which was more of a gouge along the skin. I had been fortunate. Just below my elbow, he paused as a swipe of the cloth cleaned a smear of blood off to reveal the bite scar. He looked up, meeting my gaze although I could not guess what he was thinking. He glanced at Bee and, without a word, finished his nursing. After painting the gash with a white salve, he bound it with linen.

“For the skin,” he said, indicating the ceramic jar. He picked up the bottle. “A cup eases the inflammation. Maybe it makes her drowsy or gives her vivid dreams.”

He and Bee stood together like lovers who mean to argue. Bee glanced at me and back at him from under hooded eyes, and he nodded and left.

“Did you?” I asked.

“I did not.” She turned the key in the lock.

I stripped. The jar contained a sticky clear ointment that cooled my skin gloriously. Bee rubbed it on my back and then combed a light layer of olive oil through my hair, glancing at Vai all the while. “For if he were to wake up and catch you naked, it would embarrass me beyond belief.”

“He’s clothed!”

“Yes, but it is one thing for you and me to bathe and change together, and another for there to be a stranger in the room with one or both of us in that condition.”

“He is no stranger,” I murmured. He looked like a man who ought to be woken with a kiss.

“I take it by that cryptic utterance and unrelentingly fatuous expression that you and he are
reconciled
. Be sure I wish to know no details whatsoever.” She filled a cup from the bottle and handed it to me. “Nap for a few hours. I’ll wake you. We leave mid-afternoon to take a carriage to the festival gate. The cacica has declared she must undertake my final instruction herself.”

“In Sharagua?”

“No. There is a palace at the border, where the areito will be held. It isn’t far, but I have to stay there. Cat, you must nap. You look exhausted and stunned. But I must selfishly ask…I can have one attendant with me for the twenty days. I know that you two…it’s a long time to be away from him…”

“Of course I will go with you! I have to stay with you until after Hallows’ Night no matter what, with or without Vai. But you’ll have to tell me what I need to do and not do.”

“Don’t worry. You know how I love to boss you about. And to show you how much I love you for coming with me, let me take that jacket of his downstairs so the laundresses can clean it.”

She departed with the jacket, and I locked the door. After braiding my hair and drinking the liquid with its sweetly chalky taste, I lay down. An attempt to clasp the sleeping Vai met with success: The lotion had soothed my inflamed skin enough that the touch of cloth did not chafe. But when I closed my eyes, I remembered the fire bursting in my heart.

I slept, and I dreamed I was waking Vai with passionate kisses, and he said we can’t it will hurt you and I said we have to because what if I’m dead tomorrow and he gave way cautiously and tenderly, and then I woke up. To discover Vai asleep beside me and yet somehow his clothes had come off, which forced me to revisit my memories of what had been dream and what had been real. A sound of clicking and rustling had woken me. The key in the lock was being jiggled from the other side of the door. I slipped out from under the thin cotton blanket and dashed for the wardrobe to grab Vai’s sword. Then I picked up my rumpled pagne and tied it hastily over torso and hips as the key worked loose and dropped with a clunk to the floor. Vai stirred. The latch turned, and the general came in.

He closed the door, taking in the scene. “The vigor of youth never fails to amaze.”

Vai blinked several times as in confusion, and then recollection settled his expression. Sitting, he caught sight of Camjiata, realized he was uncovered from the hips up, and, after a moment, smiled with the comfortable bravado of the man who knows he looks well in any outfit.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” he said, making no effort to cover his bare torso or the two chains and rings, one ice lens clear and one cloudy.

The general smiled. “Which you may suppose is deliberate. I must use what advantage I can make for myself, for I am not a cold mage of rare and unexpected potency.” I flushed, not that one could tell, as I was already pinked. “As for you, Cat, I trust you are not too badly injured.”

“Do you? Drake tried to kill Vai, too.” I placed the sword on the bed next to a startled Vai before I stalked to the wardrobe to get a blouse, pagne, and clean bodice and drawers.

“He will not do that again.”

“How can you possibly be sure?” I demanded as I took the clothes, and the ceramic jar of ointment, behind the screen for privacy. Vai kept his gaze fixed on the general.

“I hold the power of life and death over James Drake in ways I am not about to share.”

“You’ll excuse us,” said Vai, “if that seems a slender reed on which to cross this river.”

“‘
Us
,’” murmured the general as I poured water into a pitcher. “How interesting to phrase it that way. I should like to know how you managed to kill Drake’s fire and save Cat. You should not have been able to do that.” A chair scraped along the floor and I heard him settle onto it.

“I should like to get dressed,” said Vai, “but in all honesty, General, I’m not going to do it in front of you.”

“I don’t like to have a sword held to my throat, Magister, so I admit to enjoying placing you in a position of discomfort. We’ll have the talk here. You may dress, or not.”

“Bastard,” said Vai, perhaps appreciatively.

“I was very close to my mother,” replied the general in a tone so genial it made me pause.

“Then we have a thing in common. My apologies. No offense was meant to your
mother
.”

I began dabbing again; the ointment worked quickly; my skin was already better.

“Understood. So, thanks to the mothers who raised us, here we are, Magister. Why did you not kill me when you had the chance?”

“I am not that man.”

“Yet you could have been that man. Any reasoned assessment of the situation suggests I will bring war to Europa and many will die in blood and fire. You could have stopped that.”

“People already die. There will be a conflagration sooner or later.”

“You are the rich and privileged son of one of the most powerful mage Houses. Are you willing to give that up?”

“I am one of their weapons, rather as James Drake seems to be one of yours. I haven’t finished discussing the man who tried to murder my wife.”

“What do you want, Magister?”

“I want to kill him.”

“But not me?”

“You have something I want. The means to abolish clientage.”

“A legal code is not the means to abolish clientage. One must have the means to enforce such a code. I can say or write anything I want, and that does not make it happen, or make it true. Why should princes and mage Houses abolish clientage? Whatever your origins, Magister, you have benefited by your association with Four Moons House. You, and your people as well.”

“I may have. But they have gained material benefit, nothing else.”

“I would not call material benefit ‘nothing.’ I have seen a man holding his dying child, the one he could not feed because his crops failed and the share for his lord must be met regardless. I have seen a wife hold the broken ruin of her husband crushed in a fall of rock in a mine whose bounty enriches the mine’s owner but not those who work in it. Sometimes the gods are cruel, but more often it is the cruelty and greed of men that kills us. You stand in a high place with the waters rising. I would not be so quick to give it up merely for principles.”

“Are you a radical, General? Or just an ambitious man who plans to use the blood of others to wash his hands at the altar of victory?”

“As you say, there will be a conflagration sooner or later. Which do you want, Magister? I will bring it sooner, and before the old order is quite ready to combat it.”

“They are ready,” said Vai. “They will fight you to the last drop of their blood.”

“I would expect nothing less. Yet it is long past time for the old order to be strangled in its amply feathered bed of unspeakable luxury.”

“You live well,” said Vai.

“And I am given to understand that you tailor well. Don’t trouble me with the tired old argument that a radical must be poor to be pure. Nothing bores me more than the man who makes a parade of his austerity. You do not trust me, Magister. Yet I have something you want which the mansa will not give you. Since you are talking to me instead of killing me, for I see you keep your cold steel close at hand, I must assume you have already made your choice.”

“I have made my choice,” said Vai.

I had finished smearing myself with ointment and wielded a cloth fan to dry. From behind my screen, I asked, “General, did you know that Juba and Prince Caonabo are twins?”

“Why, yes, Cat, I do happen to know that.”

“Why not marry Bee to Juba? He could come back from exile and take the cacique’s seat of power with Bee at his side. Why marry Bee to a fire mage, when she might be caught in the conflagration? Can you imagine I would wish even the chance of this on Bee?”

“Do not think every fire mage is like Drake. Juba’s exile is permanent. That is the Taino law. As for Caonabo, recall that he has a catch-fire. More importantly, he is now the cacica’s only other living son. But he is said to have the temperament of an unworldly scholar. You see, Juba was the one meant for the throne. Now the cacica fears an attempt by factions within her court to install a different claimant. That is why Caonabo needs the alliance with a dragon dreamer.”

Juba’s interest in Bee suddenly took on a much more ominous cast. Did he support his brother, or hope to undermine him? I pulled on my blouse and tied my pagne around my hips. “How providential for you, General, that you stumbled upon my cousin so early in your campaign.”

“Providential? Never forget that I am an accomplished campaigner.” When I stepped out from behind the screen, the general walked to the door and opened it. “Cat, we leave in an hour. I hope you are fit for it.”

“I will stand beside Bee for as long as she needs me. But you must promise me, General, that no harm will come to my husband in the twenty days I am with her.”

“I promise on my mother’s grave that no harm will come to your husband by any intent, plot, knowledge, conspiracy, or neglect of mine. He is too valuable. Magister, will you stay? Ah. I see by your wounded look it was a foolish question. Naturally you will be remaining where you can most quickly be reunited with your wife. Just as well, since I took the liberty of sending for your things.”

From the hall came the sound of footsteps. Captain Tira appeared, casting a doubtful glance at Vai and an interested one at me. She ushered in men who were carrying Vai’s chest, several baskets, and the bed. Vai and I must have appeared like academy students flummoxed by an unexpected exam they had not prepared for. The four soldiers retreated with disciplined haste and poorly suppressed grins.

“Did someone betray Vai?” I demanded.

“No. I took the liberty of looking through Beatrice’s sketchbook. On a page with four phases of the moon, which clearly represent Four Moons House and thus the cold mage, I recognized the bench.”

“Bastard!” I said. “That’s put us in our place.”

“Now, Cat,” he said with a smile as sharp as a splinter, digging deep, “were I you, I would not be precipitous in throwing around that particular word. One hour. Captain, shall we go?”

The closed carriage rumbled along for what seemed hours. My bold, fearless Bee sat with hands neatly clasped on her lap as she and I poured forth a stream of unenlightening babble about the baubles and fabrics we had admired on Avenue Kolonkan. It passed the time, and alleviated our nerves. We were dressed in the local style, in simple blouses and pagnes. Captain Tira sat at attention in the facing seat, too much like a jailer for us to speak openly about the things we most wished to discuss. Vai had accepted the general’s invitation to ride in the other carriage, since he wasn’t allowed to travel with Bee.

“And then I said, ‘Looking is not spending!’”

“Cat, did he really say it would offend his radical principles to shop on Avenue Kolonkan?”

“Yes, and worst of all, Bee, he meant it in that pedantic way he means things.” I glanced at Captain Tira, who met my gaze with the same interested look she had thrown me when she had entered the bedchamber accompanying Vai’s belongings. “Not that I can afford to buy anything on Avenue Kolonkan anyway.”

“I’ll buy you whatever you want, dearest. Never mind what he says!”

I had a sudden and horrific image of being caught between Vai and Bee arguing, a precise cold steel blade pitted against the blunt trauma of an axe. I temporized, because while I agreed with Vai, there had been such lovely trinkets and ribbons. “I thought the Taino treasury was empty.”

“I think the situation is more complicated than that phrase makes it sound. We traveled halfway across Kiskeya, to Sharagua and back. I have never seen a more prosperous, orderly, and healthy people. No one stopped me from going anywhere I wished. I saw not a single starving child, and I assure you, I was looking for the wretched and the poor because I wanted to gauge exactly how powerful and rich the Taino kingdom was if I was to ally myself with them.”

Despite Captain Tira’s presence, I decided to say what really weighed on my mind. “An alliance brought about by the general. He is half
Roman
. We can’t trust him.”

“Roman on his mother’s side. Iberian and Mande on his father’s. That makes him of mixed lineage. Just like you. Should I therefore not trust you?” Her curls swayed around her face as she smiled impishly at me. Her hands clutching mine were the only hint of her anxiety at what lay ahead and the huge gamble she had taken. “Of course he is using me to get what he wants, which is the cacica’s airships and access to Expedition’s wealth and factories because the Council daren’t say no to him once the Taino support his cause. I don’t care. Because it gets me security. If the cold mage truly loves you, and you love him, then you are both fortunate and cursed, because you two will never be secure. People who want to use one of you can threaten the other one. And they will. But when I am a powerful noblewoman and respected seer among the Taino, I can protect you both. Always, Cat. Always.” She embraced me. “And buy you whatever you want on Avenue Kolonkan.”

The captain had folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes, as if the maudlin outpourings of gals like us commonly bored her to sleep.

I muttered, “You would think Captain Tira often delivers innocent young brides to strangers meant to become their husbands.” A flicker of movement twitched in her cheek, and her right foot shifted, heel raising and lowering. “Captain, did the general really figure out where Vai was all that time from Bee’s sketchbook? Or did someone inform on him? No harm in telling me now.”

She opened her eyes. Her silence was her answer.

A growing clamor of sound greeted us: drums, rattles, horns, and singing swelled and ebbed like the sea’s surge. We had reached the border, and it sounded like an areito had already started.

The carriage halted.

Bee took in a shuddering breath. We locked gazes.

“Always, Bee,” I said. “Always.”

The door was opened from outside. The captain went out first.

Bee took advantage of her departure to draw me close and whisper. “Remember, say nothing and do nothing except what I tell you to do. Don’t speak unless I tell you to. And especially, don’t take orders from others, only from me.”

“That shouldn’t be difficult, accustomed as I am to you bossing me around.”

As Captain Tira looked back in, Bee released me to wave an imperious hand. “You first, dearest, for the last and most dramatic entrance shall be mine.”

“You always hog the dramatic entrance, Bee,” I said as I clambered out. “Maybe next time I’ll steal it from you.”

I had not once ventured out of Expedition’s sprawl in the weeks after Drake had dumped me on the jetty. Its streets and courtyard gates, untidy alleys and well-groomed ball courts, cheerful markets and the shimmering presence of the sea and the masts of ships, and even the whistling parties of trolls hurrying about their business, had become my landscape.

We had fallen into another world.

The huge plaza reminded me of paintings I had seen depicting the great public spaces of Rome and Qart Hadast when those empires were in their heyday. The paved open space stretched so far that tendrils of dusk hid its boundaries. Ahead lay entrances to four monumental ball courts, two on either side of a long stone building painted red and blue and pierced with nine narrow archways. The central arch was surmounted by an elaborately painted scene depicting fish spilling from an overturned gourd.

Music, drumming, and singing came from the ball courts. Oddly, the only Expeditioners I saw were a single troop of wardens standing off to my left, and a few local vendors who had set up along the plaza with fried plantains, cassava bread straight off the griddle, seafood being cooked over charcoal, and mounds of fruit. Their customers were Taino streaming out from the ball courts, men from the courts to my left and women from the courts to my right. They wore loosely draped cloth in an antique Roman-like way, although both young women and men wore only a pagne-like cloth wrapped around their hips and no shirts at all, casually bare-chested.

But none of these things robbed me of words. What rendered me speechless were the thirty or more airships tethered at the border between the Taino kingdom and Expedition Territory. Some were scout ships no larger than the one navigated by the Barr Cousins. Many were the size of the ocean-crossing airship Bee and I had seen in Adurnam, the one Vai had destroyed. Among them floated three leviathans monstrous in their glamour. It was a stunning show of wealth and force.

Bee slipped an arm around me. “I have a fancy to be like the didos of old, the queens of Qart Hadast who sailed at the head of a mighty fleet. I shall draw my fleet as a school of bloated silvery fish released from a vast heavenly gourd.”

“I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to sail the seas of a noble court, when any courtier is ready to stab you in the back or flatter shamelessly for a step up the ladder. I would far rather wait tables at Aunty Djeneba’s.”

“Where the customers try to put their hands on your ass? How is that different? Do not worry for me. I shall crush my rivals with smiles and the axe blow of my indomitable will.”

“I can’t bear it if they take you away from me, Bee.”

“Dearest, we shall all return to Europa together like conquering heroes.”

The other carriage rolled in, and the general emerged, followed by Vai wearing the dash jacket he had worn the night of the areito. He marked me with the smile that belonged to me alone.

As the sun shimmered against the horizon, the central gate opened. A procession of women appeared. They were dressed in skirts that lapped their ankles and in bodices like wide belts woven with beads. Feathers adorned their long black hair, which they wore unbound. Two at the front walked with hands outstretched and fire—actual flame—rising from their palms as if they contained the oil that lit the lamps. The two fire mages were flanked by four women equally richly garbed, one of whom was not Taino but red-headed, pale, and freckled like a refugee from the Europan north. Were they catch-fires? Hard to tell. By the elaboration and richness of their clothing, they seemed equally honored. Behind walked three more women heavily draped with thick stone pendants and gold bracelets on their bare arms, their skin patterned with lines and dots. When they reached a raised circular platform in the middle of the plaza, they halted.

My sword bloomed against my hand as day crossed twilight’s border.

“Come, Cat,” Bee said regally, squaring her shoulders.

“Aren’t we underdressed?”

“You haven’t noticed that many of the Taino women are far more underdressed? I certainly have! I do not intend to emulate them!”

“Beatrice.” The general offered his arm. She took it, thus allowing me to drop back next to Vai. I twined my fingers through his as we followed them toward the Taino noblewomen. Captain Tira paced at our backs. I saw no sign of Drake or Juba.

“If you need anything, go to Keer at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch,” I murmured. “She’ll drive a hard bargain, but I can trust the trolls to like the game better than the prize.”

“Tell me how you are feeling, Catherine.”

“Well enough. I’m fine, Vai. I don’t know how I can bear being apart from you for twenty days.”

His fingers tightened over mine. “It’s right that you go with your cousin. I’ll just hope you come back dressed like those Taino women out there.”

“Vai!”

When he smiled, I was so smitten by a rush of affection and desire that all I could do was stare at him in the most besotted manner imaginable. “My sweet Catherine, we won’t be apart for long. We are truly married now, love. Nothing can change that.”

The gravity and formality of the occasion prevented a kiss, and I would not have tried anyway, not with some of those Taino women staring at me as if I had two faces. Night fell as we reached the platform. The general let go of Bee, and Vai had therefore to let go of me.

The Taino women escorted us under the central arch and through a masonry tunnel across the border and into the country Bee had determined to take on. The smell of tobacco permeated the air. On the other side of the arch lay another huge plaza. From the ball courts rose the joyous sound of people singing and dancing with rattle and drum. Our party walked on a raised walkway to a single-story building. We entered a long room lit by what seemed a hundred lamps hissing as oil burned. Our attendants spoke to Beatrice.

“They are asking if you are my cemi,” she said.

“If I am your cemi?”

“They want to see your hair unbound, and if you have a navel. Why would they think you didn’t have a navel?”

“They think I’m a spirit of the dead.”

“I won’t let them bully you. You need show them nothing. Otherwise Juba says they will think I can forever be pushed around.” Her reply to them, in Taino, was precise and slow.

They merely shrugged, taking off their sandals and washing their feet before they escorted Bee up onto a carpet of reed mats. Under the heat and light shimmering out of the lamps, they stripped her naked, wiped her down with damp cloths, perfumed her with sweet-smelling oils, and painted her bare arms with lines that crawled up the curve of her flesh like serpents. Then they dressed her in a long wrap skirt of pure white cotton; red and gold feathers for her hair; a bodice woven of cotton and beads; a stone collar carved with turtles and frogs; and wreaths of bells for her ankles and wrists. When they had finished, I could believe she had become someone else, crossing into a new world.

I followed, as ignored as a cane that hides a sword. Her attendants did not speak to me, and she indicated by occasional glances and nods that I was doing exactly as I should. We proceeded down a corridor on soft matting. Bee and the Taino women walked barefoot; I was the only one shod, in the sandals Vai had given me. We came to a porch that overlooked a courtyard crowded with men standing on one side and women seated on the other. Our escort moved aside to reveal Bee. I stayed at the back.

The many elders and proud nobles examined Bee in her finery. The men had stern, striking features; most wore feathers and stone collars. Opposite, women looked us up and down with solemn gazes. They were beautifully adorned in feathers and beads and pure white beaded bodices and skirts. No overt hostility marred their expressions. Neither did they seem overawed by the presence of a woman who walked the dream of dragons. It was hard to judge.

One face caught my eye among the women. I saw the very behica who had grasped my arm on Salt Island and informed me through Caonabo’s translation that Drake had not healed me because I had never been infested. Instinct jolted me.
Hide.
I caught a few threads of magic to obscure myself.

Yet the behica saw me at once. She saw me, and she knew me. But she said nothing.

The assembled people sang in call and response. The melody seemed familiar, a tune I heard whistled on Expedition’s streets, but the pulse and winding rhythm of the song made it seem like a proclamation. Only I did not know what for.

When they finished, we proceeded along another walkway to a large wooden building raised on stilts and surrounded by a veranda lit by gas lamps. Bee strode toward the building as toward her destiny, head high. She was so beautiful.

We climbed three stairs onto the porch and its carpet of matting. Past open doors lay a large room draped with fine netting over the furnishings, a lovingly lathed and polished table set with gold-plated dishes and shining silver utensils that was flanked by two Europan-style chairs, and a matched pair of plush Turanian couches suitable for conversation. On the far side of the chamber, hands clasped behind his back, Prince Caonabo stood looking out a window onto the night beyond. He turned, hearing us. He was so like to Juba in feature that it was only by the length of his hair that you could tell them apart. Incongruously, he wore trousers, and a dash jacket that had certainly been tailored in Europa—or on Tailors’ Row in the Passaporte District from a pattern off one of Vai’s jackets—out of sober sea-green cotton. One might think he was endeavoring to make his foreign bride comfortable with familiar things, although he was also, even more incongruously, barefoot.