Cold Fire (39 page)

“Our agreement with the Taino,” he said, as if such an alliance was foreordained and natural.

“The Taino rule the Antilles! You’re nothing but a dispossessed general hoping for troops and money to fight a war in a land an ocean away! What can you have that they want?”

“Besides the spoils of victory to fill a treasury emptied by decades of expansionist wars? An opening of significant trade and export without too much risk to the cacica’s authority?” He walked to the sideboard to make another plate of food.

“Is that enough to interest them?” I demanded.

Bee set down the cup and stared at the polished tabletop. Never in my life had I seen her shy from anything. Never. She managed a tremulous smile. “I am to get married.”

I sat back, hard, in the chair. “Married!”

She glanced toward the general. He nodded exactly in the manner of a professor encouraging a favored student as she gropes her way toward the correct answer.

She reached across the table to lay a hand atop one of mine. “If the price of hope is marriage, then so be it. To a man of high rank and good manners, so I am assured.”

“You agreed to marry him sight unseen?”

“Don’t be so naïve, Cat! That’s how such things work. You should know! They want me because I am a dream walker. Here in the Antilles, dream walkers are honored because they are so rare.”

“I should think they are rare everywhere, given their likelihood of an untimely demise. If that’s the only reason you are marrying, you might as well have been handed off to Four Moons House to be their prisoner. What obligations will the Taino place on you?”

She let out a gusty sigh. “Would you please listen for once? They have traditions here about the lore of walking the path of dreams. Once I am married, I will be allowed to learn.”

“While you’re imprisoned in some hot, dusty palace. Couldn’t you have stayed with Brennan and Kehinde?”

“I would have loved to do so, with their fine revolutionary notions and legendary fistfights and buckets of whiskey and beautifully written pamphlets filled with radical sentiments. But that doesn’t solve my other problem, does it? Perhaps you have a brilliant plan to stop the Wild Hunt from ripping off my head!”

I jumped up, the chair tipping over to clatter to the floor behind me. “Yes! I do!”

Drake stepped in off the balcony. The door opened and the Amazon captain appeared, sword drawn. The general gestured, and she retreated, closing the door.

“I would be glad to hear your plan,” he said, walking over to place the plate in front of Bee.

I dug my nails into my palms, but pain wasn’t enough to loosen my tongue. And it was a lie. I couldn’t protect her. Only my sire could, and then only for as long as it suited him to do so.

Bee looked at me and blinked twice as a signal. “She’s just exaggerating in her usual way.”

“Ah, I understand now.” He walked back to the sideboard, where he heaped bacon, potatoes, and eggs on a plate. “Helene told me never to ask questions of Tara Bell’s child because she dreamed the child was chained by some manner of magical binding.”

The chains that bound me to my husband? Or the ones that bound me to my sire? He didn’t know everything! I righted the chair and sat with hands clasped in my lap as the general returned to the table with a plate for himself. Drake ventured to the end of the table farthest from me.

“Anyway, Cat,” said Bee, barreling on like a fully laden rail car rolling downhill with no brakes, “you’re the one who will never be free of Four Moons House because you are married to one of its cold mages.”

“I know what I know,” I muttered.

“I can’t argue with that mulish truism! Anyway, the Taino won’t hold me prisoner. The general needs me for the war.” She went charmingly pink, like a rose blooming. “The prince is to travel with us. You see, the heir to the cacique’s duho, the king’s seat of power, is chosen from the cacique’s sister’s sons. This prince was never considered a favorite because there was a brother better suited for the task. But now he seems likely to inherit so it is felt he must gain worldly experience to prove his fitness and worth.”

“What changed to make him worthy?”

She glanced toward the general, and then at Drake. “For one thing, he’s a fire mage.”

I laughed a little hysterically.

Drake raised a cup of tea to his lips, watching me over the rim. The general ate methodically with only a lift of the eyes to show he had noticed my untimely levity.

Bee scooped up an egg in her spoon and levered the spoon backwards, aiming its trajectory at me. “Tell me why you’re laughing, or you’ll get egg all over your face.”

I needed a drink to settle my nerves. I got up and went over to the sideboard. The bottle had sherry in it. I jiggered out the cork, poured the deep red liquid to the brim of the last teacup, and gulped it down in one go. Turning, I saw Drake frown. I stuffed the cork back into the bottle.

“Cat!” said Bee. “It’s still morning!”

The general finished his potatoes.

The liquor’s heat rushed through me, and subsided. “I met Prince Caonabo.” She gasped. “He seemed…pleasant. He was certainly inquisitive. And he’s good-looking, if not nearly as pretty as Legate Amadou Barry. No hardship there.” I wiped my brow, for it was already getting warm. “So, General, what exactly is it you want from me?”

He patted his lips with a linen cloth. “That depends on what you want, Cat. Although your choices are constrained.”

I wanted to be released from my sire’s rule, but I couldn’t say that. I wanted a chance to walk beside a man I was finally getting to know, but I refused to speak of that. Maybe the sherry had shortened my temper. Really, I had nothing left to lose except Bee’s life.

“What I want to know is why I should trust you when you placed my mother under sentence of death and would have killed her if she hadn’t escaped.”

“Why, Cat,” he said, and I could have sworn he was taken aback, “the matter is entirely different. She was a sworn lieutenant in my Amazon Corps and thus subject to the rules and regulations of that corps.”

“Including imprisonment and execution should she become pregnant?”

“The conditions and regulations of service were public knowledge. No woman took the oath of enlistment without fully understanding what was expected of her and where her responsibilities and loyalties lay. Those who serve in my army serve freely, but they are bound once they join to follow the code of conduct. As am I, and any person enlisting. For the Amazon Corps, that code included celibacy. Any woman who had served out her period of enlistment might apply for a discharge if she wished to have children, marry, or make some other change in life. A legal code is worthless if those who enforce it treat persons differently according to consequence, status, kinship, or wealth. All must be equal before the law, or the law is worth nothing.”

“That’s what Daniel Hassi Barahal wrote.”

“In fact, that is what I said when I addressed the committee gathered to write a comprehensive new legal code. Perhaps Daniel recorded my words, and you read them later and thought they were his.” An odd sort of smile animated his face, one I could not read. Anger? Amusement? Calculation? He was masked rather as my sire had been: I simply could not fathom what drove him. Except maybe irritation at remembering my mother had escaped the law.

“Tell me what you meant when you said my path will change the course of the war.”

“Those are not Helene’s precise words, nor did I say them that way.” He did not raise his voice, but I realized that something about the turn the conversation had taken was making him angry. “Find a way to win the cold mage to my side, Cat.”

“I’m sure she’s found a way to prick the man’s interest,” muttered Drake.

I fixed my gaze on Drake and stalked back to the table. He stared me down, gaze almost fevered.

“Be calm,” murmured Bee.

Camjiata said, “Enough!”

Drake leaned back and propped his sandaled feet up on the table. I remained standing.

“Now listen carefully, Cat,” the general went on. “A living cold mage serves me much better than a dead one. I would value the services of a powerful cold mage when I return to Europa.”

“One like your wife?” I asked.

“She was not a powerful cold mage. She had only a minor gift, enough to call a wisp of cold fire, which was ironic considering how poor her vision was. She was as close to a castoff as a child can be who is born into a mage House. Her House, and she, had no idea she walked the path of dreams. Everyone just thought she recited the most execrable poetry to get attention. But when she was about your age she heard her destiny in her own words.”

Despite my irritation, I was drawn into his story. “What was her destiny?”

“Why, I was. Or she was mine. Hard to say. Maybe I should say, we were meant to be together, being each other’s destiny.”

“That’s very romantical,” I said caustically. Bee caught my eye, and I knew she was thinking,
Didn’t that cold mage call you the other half of his soul?
I narrowed my eyes to let her know that if she spoke one word I would make her life so miserable that dismemberment would seem a mercy.

She ate her egg.

“I meant,” I added, “considering what happened.”

“Perhaps you mean to note that I am alive while she is dead. Quite true. Believe me, Cat, I intend to do everything I can to keep Beatrice alive. It was what Helene would have wanted. For they are all sisters of a kind, the women who walk the path of dreams.”

“Like in one of those quaint cautionary folktales,” remarked Bee, “in which everyone dies.”

“Yes. Which brings me back to the point I have been trying to make. Cat, my dear, I fear you have not heard me, so I will say it again. If you do not bring the cold mage to me, then I will have to kill him. If that is what you want, then by all means, rid yourself of the magister and your marriage by refusing to cooperate with me. But do not make the mistake of underestimating me.”

“Unless he kills you first.”

“He will not kill me because I know who will kill me. And it is not him.”

“How can you know?”

“On the day Helene and I first met, it was the second thing she said to me. That she had seen the instrument of my death.”

“And you married her?” I demanded.

“As soon as I could.” He laughed. “Wouldn’t you?”

Bee stirred. “You’ve lived with that knowledge all this time? That’s remarkable.” She stared at him with none of the sledgehammer intensity that usually characterized her glares and looks. She looked as admiring as an actress in a stage play simpering at the steadfast prince whom she lovingly serves for the duration of the implausible plot.

A chill, as the broadsheet poets wrote in their cheaply inked stories, ran down my spine.

He sipped at his tea as if considering Bee’s praise was the weightiest task on his mind, far more than death, war, revolution, love, cold mages, and dream walkers. “Is it? We all live with the knowledge of impending death, do we not?”

“Did she tell you who?” I asked.

He looked at me. But he said nothing.

“Who will be the instrument of your death?” I added, in case he had not understood me.

He poured more tea into his cup, set the ceramic pot back on its trivet, and turned the cup’s handle so it lay parallel with the table’s edge. His gentle smile had such power that I leaned toward him as if he were about to confer on me a great honor or the princely kiss of approval.

“Why, you will, Cat. You will.”

I am not a young woman who craves attention. Although people have at times suggested that I talk a great deal, I could maintain silence with the best of them. A stony silence, accompanied by an offended glare, worked wonders on most people when they had insulted me.

Unfortunately, it had no effect at all on Camjiata. He smiled in an accommodating way. “I mean no offense, Cat. Nor do I mean to accuse you or even to suggest that I feel any hostility toward you. I am simply telling you what Helene told me.”

I set fisted hands on the table. “You’re trying to intimidate me. I won’t betray him to you.”

“You already have, or so he must believe.”

Had he slapped me, it would have hurt less.

“Amazing!” Drake’s lips curled into a sneer. “A more pompous, conceited, self-admiring ass I have never before encountered, and yet after all if you add to that a handsome face and expensive tailoring, the gals will crawl at his feet. Really, Cat, I’m disappointed in you.”

I slipped the cane from its loop and set it on the table. He looked suitably startled, and shifted his chair away. “I should be careful if I were you, Drake. Because what you don’t understand is that I can be the instrument of
your
death. And if you anger me enough, I will. In fact, I’m thinking about it right now.”

Heat stung the air. “Don’t try to duel with me.”

“James!” said the general.

“Why do you always scold me and never her?” he demanded as the spark vanished. “Anyway, what do you expect a man to do when an attractive gal throws herself at him? By the way, that object she carries around so casually is pure cold steel. She’s no doubt in league with that cursed cold mage and means to hand him the sword to do you in the moment he gets close enough.”

I set my hands on the table and leaned toward him. “He’s worth a hundred of you.” I took in a few breaths to calm myself, then looked at Camjiata. “No wonder you wanted my mother to die if you believed she would give birth to a child who would kill you.”

“It does not work that way.” He had the means to hold your gaze even when you wanted to look away. This, too, was a form of sorcery: the ability to command. “Anyway, we do not execute pregnant women. You would have been born regardless.”

I pressed a hand over the cane, feeling the quiver of its magic through my sweaty skin. “Babies are easy to dispose of.”

“The djeliw teach us that our destiny is already written. As long as you are alive, I can be alive. But if you are dead, then I must already be dead.”

“I suppose that’s meant to be reassuring. What is your destiny, General?”

“To free Europa from the petty quarrels and greed of princes and cold mages. To unite all its peoples under one just code of law.”

“With you conveniently seated as emperor.”

His easy smile made my lips quirk despite my mistrust. “I am meant to sit in an emperor’s throne. It is the role my mother raised me for.”

“How can she have raised you for that?”

“She was the favored daughter of the patrician Aemillius lineage. They cast her off when she betrothed herself against their wishes to an Iberian captain. He was highborn enough. His mother was an Iberian princess and his father was born into the princely Keita lineage. But her people scorned all Iberians and desired her to marry to suit their schemes, so they cast her off in the most public way imaginable. They stripped her naked and whipped her onto the street as a whore. You should have some sympathy for her plight, Cat.”

I frowned, thinking of the way Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan had given me to the mage House in Bee’s place. At least they had wept.

“She raised me to be the instrument of her revenge. I dare not dishonor her memory. But I have no child to foist off as my heir. The imperiate will dissolve after I am dead, leaving behind a better legal code and the abolishment of clientage. So you must ask yourself if the people of Europa will be better off or worse off than they are now. I must wonder, Cat, if there is something your cold mage wants very badly that I could offer him in exchange for his support.”

I sat down as hard as if all the air had been punched from my lungs.

The abolishment of clientage.

Bee placed a hand over mine. “Let’s go out to the balcony to get some air.”

An uneasy feeling rippled down my spine. I nodded. We rose and went out into a patch of shade. The air was sticky with humidity and thick with the scent of flowers. I closed the doors behind us. A guard clothed in a dark blue tabard and holding a rifle glanced up at us from his station at a gate set into the back wall; his gaze widened; then he looked away.

Bee wasn’t looking into the garden. She stared at the railing, her mouth twisted down with shame. “I’m sorry for the part I played in all this. I did truly think you wanted out of the marriage.”

“You couldn’t have known I changed my mind.”

“I truly didn’t know most of what was going on. Obviously I was just being tremendously naïve. And he did say he wanted the cold mage alive, in his army.”

I leaned against her shoulder in the familiar way. “I’ve already forgiven you, Bee.”

“He doesn’t want to harm you, Cat. He told me so many stories about your mother. He speaks of her with the greatest esteem. I think he looks on you as he might look on a niece.”

“One with a sword in her hand?” I glanced through the closed glass doors. Inside, Camjiata was working through a second plate of food with the pleasure of a man who enjoys eating, while Drake was picking through fried slices of potato as if looking for an elusive shard of triumph.

“I will tell him I will break off the marriage arrangements if anything happens to you.”

“I think he believes what he said, about me needing to be alive. Not that I’m going to turn my back on him. What worries me is that I think you’re a little in love with him. I worry he is using your admiration to coerce you into a marriage that benefits him.”

She put an arm around me and held hard, whispering. “That’s not how it is. Cat, you know me. No matter what it looks like to people outside you and me, you know I’ve thought this through. Yes, I can learn from the behiques. Yes, I gain an alliance to a powerful kingdom, one which respects and honors the very curse which puts my life in danger. There is one thing else. I was allowed to meet one time privately with the cacica, Queen Anacaona. She is a very powerful woman. I said, what use to me a marriage if I am torn to pieces by the Wild Hunt at year’s end? She claimed the behiques have a means to protect dream walkers. This is good for us, Cat. This is hope.”

I had met the Master of the Wild Hunt, so I was pretty sure the cacica was wrong. But I wanted Bee to live in hope, not fear. “Then of course I understand why you agreed.”

She released me. “As for the other, I think the general will put in place a radical civil code.”

“Just for the sake of argument, let us say it is true. What if he changes his mind, marries again, and produces a child to raise up as heir? Or what is to stop his captains from electing one of their own to rule as emperor after he dies? Because he will die. Everyone dies. He said so!”

The general was watching us. Seeing us look his way, he raised the cup to salute our machinations and conspiracies. Drake was crisping bacon into charred strips.

I turned back to Bee. “What is to stop princes and mage Houses from biding their time and restoring the old order with a lot of blood and carnage after he dies?”

Bee’s gaze hardened, reminding me of an axe. “Did you listen to nothing that Kehinde and Brennan said? With the right weapons and allies, we can bring them down. A legal code matters.”

“You’re a radical, too! You and Vai both!”

Her gaze softened. “So it is more than just his looks!”

I fastened my fingers around the wrought-iron railing. The vivid memory of his passionate, angry kisses mocked me. “I wonder how far I’ll go to convince him I did not betray him.”

“There is something Andevai wants you think the general can give him. Offer him that.”

“Oh, Bee, I thought I was offering Vai so much, to share both the burdens and the risks of trying to break the chains of Four Moons House, when I could have been free of them. But he doesn’t even know it. Why should he listen to me now?”

“If he is not willing to listen to you, then he isn’t worth suffering over. Really, dearest, this isn’t like you. You know you have to try.”

Who was I, to feel fear? I, who was the weapon of the Master of the Wild Hunt? In the heart of me, like a shard of obsidian, lay a cruel gleaming kernel that would allow me to do what I must to save those I loved. I need only grasp it, cut my skin on it, and let it drink fully of my blood.

“I’m going to save you, Bee,” I said. “I’m the only one who can.”

Her lips twisted up. “Really, Cat. The man’s vainglorious arrogance has been rubbing off on you. Now, follow my lead.”

She opened a door and swept into the chamber, leaving me to follow in her wake like so much wind-chopped flotsam. She threw a smile at Drake that made him wince, and addressed the general. “We are going shopping.”

“Of course, my dear.” Camjiata began reading a pamphlet whose title was
On the Dynamical Theory of Heat: Some Experiments and Conclusions as Delivered by Professora Habibah ibnah Alhamrai at the Expedition Society of Natural Historians.

We cut a swath through the shockingly expensive shops of Avenue Kolonkan. After a strenuous morning of examining fabric, smallclothes, footwear, kerchiefs and head wraps and hats, as well as ribbons and beads, necklaces, earrings, and painted gourds suitable for storing such treasures, we rested our feet in the shade of an arbor in a private courtyard. Well-dressed and well-groomed women—no men—drank carafes of sweetened lime juice garnished with mint leaves.

After we had quenched our thirst with an obscenely pleasurable and hotly spiced drink called chocolatl and worked through a platter of pastries, Bee nodded. “We have suitably bored the two men who are following us. Take yourself to the toilet and vanish. The gates into the old city close at sunset. I believe there are secret corridors in the house, so anything we say can be overheard. I should have told you before.” She pressed a coin into my hand. “For the washroom attendant.”

“The washroom attendant?”

“She has to earn her living, too. That way.” She pointed toward an archway set under whitewashed walls, then returned to nibbling on a custard tart layered with slices of star-apple.

The washroom lay tucked in the back beside a lattice that screened off the kitchen. Women worked, chopping, grinding, and conversing about the highest-scoring member of the Anolis women’s team, who had begun to hook her elbow shots in a manner that suggested a hidden injury would soon put an end to her glory days. An elderly woman in a faded but scrupulously clean pagne dozed in the shade beside the tiled entrance to a little toilet.

A piercing shriek from the courtyard brought a crashing halt to the kitchen conversation.

“It stung me!” screamed Bee. “The pain! I feel…so sick…I’m going to throw up!”

I dropped the coin into the gourd, drew the threads of shadow around me, and slipped out through the kitchen into a side street. I had left my cane in Bee’s room, shoved beneath the mattress, so even the trolls ignored me as I strode along the busy streets of Expedition. Only the occasional dwarf mammoth showed a tendency to probe in my direction with its exquisitely sensitive trunk. Folk worked on roofs and walls, repairing the damage from the hurricane. Mostly people were muttering about the warden’s arrest of an elderly man known to broadsheet readers as the Virtuous Rock, who had spearheaded the radicals’ drive for an Assembly. The Council had made it known that in the event of a general strike, the man and his granddaughter would be hanged.

Nerves made me sweat more than the sun. I was chewing on my lower lip as I halted before the gate to Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse. It was propped open just enough for a child to slip through, a sign that the establishment was not yet open for business although I could hear the comforting flow of voices as the family made ready. I waited until the street lay momentarily empty, then dropped my glamour and squeezed past the gate into the courtyard.

Luce, sweeping, saw me first. The scrape of her broom ceased as her lips parted. Uncle Joe, at the bar, looked up. In the kitchen peeling sweet potatoes, Brenna paused.

Silence in surprise has a quality as loud as a scream. Like a ripple from a thrown stone, it soon laps over the entire pond. The children, busy braiding streamers as for an upcoming festival, fixed their hands in their laps as if they thought crows were about to swoop down and rip them clean off. In her shaded sling chair, old Aunty Brigid cackled with a frightful rasp in her sleep, “nr nr not the owl. Leave me be. I’s not ready to go yet.”

Aunty Djeneba turned. For an eternity her gaze measured me as her expression congealed into disgust. Every voice faded. All movement in the courtyard ceased except for the drip of water from the rain-soaked leaves of the ceiba tree.

At last she spoke. “Sly women like to yee is not welcome in this respectable establishment, maku.”

My lips had gone numb and my feet turned to dead weights, impossible to shift. My cheeks flamed. I opened my mouth but no word came out for there was nothing left on my tongue except shame and hurt as they all stared at me until I wished only to sink into the dirt and be obliterated.

All but Aunty Djeneba pointedly looked away, and that was worse.

“Yee reduced him to tears, if that is what yee came to hear and gloat over, witch. He is gone and not coming back so there is no one here for yee to torment. Lucretia shall fetch yee things, for yee shall not bring the wardens down on us on a charge of theft.”

Beneath the throttling shock quivered words, barely deliverable in a hoarse mangled voice. “It isn’t what it seemed. I can explain. They used me to get at him. I didn’t know…I had no idea…” How pointless and stupid the words sounded. How pathetic and cheap. “I need to find him. I have to warn him he’s still in danger.”