Cold Fire (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  But it was already too late. As the sun rose, so a shore rose before us, a band of white beach lapped by blue water. Below, a signal flag was raised from within a familiar half circle of houses.

  The airship descended, and the anchor was dropped, the prow swinging clockwise as they lowered me down.

  To Salt Island.

  34

  First they placed me in an enclosure with stout wooden bars, packed earth as a floor, an awning to protect me against rain and sun, and a bucket for waste. But after a day of kicking, prying, digging, chewing, and climbing, I was clouted over the head. While I was stunned, they locked me in a metal cage set on stone with no protection from sun or rain and nowhere to relieve myself except where I crouched. The cage was so small I could not stand straight nor stretch out.

  My head ached, and I vomited all down my front.

  “Don’ fight it, gal,” said a woman from behind me. “Yee only harm yee own self.”

  The ground reeled, only it was me and not the ground reeling. I leaned against the outer wall of the enclosure and shut my eyes as the sun set.

  The sun rose. A hand poked me. A cup swam in front of my face. I was so thirsty I drank without thinking, but it was guava juice with lime and pineapple, my favorite that Vai had so often brought me. Such a riptide of longing and fury and fear dragged through me that it was all I could do not to fling the cup at the bars in the hope it would shatter into as many pieces as my broken dreams. Instead, I choked down my rage and said, “Might I have more, please?”

  My voice scraped horribly. But they gave me more. They pulled a length of canvas over the bars so the sun did not cook me. I swallowed as much as I could of the yam pudding my captors offered. My stomach churned, but nothing came back up. In my stinking clothes, I rested to gather my strength. The enclosure sat in a clearing surrounded by trees and backed by a rocky ridge. I saw no sign of habitation. Yet from the distance, sounds remarkably like those of the commonplace work of a village floated on the breeze: grain being pounded with women singing in accompaniment; wood being chopped; a strap being stropped.

  The next day they allowed me back into the first enclosure. A crow landed on the palisade, measuring me as if to remind me to measure once again the height of the walls. Then it flew off.

  About midday, three shackled women were shoved into the enclosure, one weeping copiously, one stunned, and one with the resigned air of the condemned whose reprieve has run out. They sat as far from me as possible.

  “Are you from Expedition?” I asked.

  The resigned one called to the man fastening the locks on the gate. “That one stink. Can yee wash her, or put her elsewhere?”

  “We got no other cage,” said the man. “Women come to this side of the island shall stay in the cage ’til we see if they’s pregnant.”

  “What happens if they’re pregnant?” I called, but he was already walking away.

  “How did you come here?” I asked the others in a voice I hoped was mild.

  After eyeing me suspiciously, one answered. “The Taino arrested us.”

  “Did the Taino occupy Expedition?”

  “That talk of a wedding areito was nothing but an excuse to bring in they army. On the Council steps they read out a proclamation. It say Expedition’s Council broke the First Treaty because folk bitten and healed were let stay in the city, not sent to Salt Island. The Taino behiques and soldiers hunted down all them who was bitten and healed. Like us. ’Tis how we come here.”

  I thought of the way the occupying soldiers had looked at Luce in my dream, and such a spear of killing rage pierced my heart at the thought of the liberties soldiers might take when they had the right of arms, that the three women shrank away from me as if I had snarled.

  So I did. “Give me your pagnes. You do not want me to get angry.”

  I tied the lengths of cloth into a makeshift rope as they cowered in the corner. I dumped out the contents of the bucket and tied the cloth to the handle. It took me six tries to get the bucket over the palisade and properly hooked to take my weight. Though I was shaky, it was not so difficult to climb the rope of pagnes and heave myself over the wall. They began yelling as I lowered myself to the limit of my hands and dropped the rest of the way. I landed on my feet.

  Shadows drawn around me, I ran down the path. I had not seen this side of the island before. I was surprised to find a pretty community with fenced compounds strung alongside stands of fruit trees and mounded fields. Flower and vegetable gardens offered a fine view over the sea. Fish and meat dried on racks, but I saw no fishing boats. A plaza, small batey court, and thatched-roof assembly house linked together the sprawling wings of the village. I could, just barely, hear the captive women shouting, but no one here seemed to notice. In the village, folk napped in the heat of the day. Crows fought over a slip of silver ribbon. A woman grated cassava root, chatting with a companion who was plaiting a basket out of reeds. The one thing I did not see was children.

  I slipped through the village, stole two pagnes and a blouse from a clothesline, a knife and a machete, a stack of cassava bread, dried fish, and gourds that I filled with fresh water from a cistern. I stashed my bundle in the crook of a tree at the forest’s edge. Then I crept to the field farthest from the village, where four men with hoes and machetes sat amid cassava mounds and drank maize beer.

  I said, “Know yee of a man named Haübey, or Juba?” They leaped up in consternation, for they could not see me. “Don’ bother seeking me, for I’s an opia. He made promises to me cousin.”

  Three of the men looked Taino, and although it was clear they could barely understand me, they set down their machetes. One held out a ripe guava. My mouth watered, but I did not take it.

  The fourth man had a shaved head and a bushy beard. “You don’ scare us, opia. We who live here is dead to we other life, just as yee is. That Haübey came here on the boat two years back. We knew he was noble-born, but even they nobles is treated the same under Taino law.”

  “Where is Haübey now?”

  “He is gone.”

  “How could he leave the island?”

  “I reckon that question is one we all shall wish an answer for.”

  “Me thanks.” I snatched the guava, startling them. “I crave yam pudding and rice porridge. Just set a big bowl out every night in the ball court, and I shall be no bother at all.”

  Soon after I reached my stash, a bell began to ring. They had discovered my escape. Yet with no dogs on the island, how could they track me? I walked west toward a rocky out-runner of the ridge that rose like the spine of the island’s back. In a tiny cove, I rinsed and wrung out my pagne and blouse. Where a rivulet of fresh water trickled down through a set of rocky pools, I scrubbed my face and hands. The rocks offered a route to the promontory, whose narrow headland broke the waters like the prow of a ship.

  I climbed. The wind rippled through my clothes; the sun beat down on my back; the sea shone. White-winged birds sailed above me, riding the currents of air. From that height I could see the contours of the island, with the village on one side and the quarantine pens on the bay on the opposite side: As with life and death, it was a short walk from one shore to the other.

  Yet my spirits lifted with the swooping play of the birds. Let them come. They would not catch me.

  As the sun set I made my way down. Dusk smeared gold onto the waters. I found a sheltered beach, and there I stripped and waded in. In the sea, I washed fear and doubt from my heart and emerged with the water streaming off me.

  So much for Camjiata’s promises. Had his wife truly told him I would be the instrument of his death or had he just said that to intimidate and fluster me? Had he been plotting to get rid of me all along, after he had used me to flush out Vai? Was that why he had thrown me into the path of the cacica? She had exiled her own son to Salt Island, and I could not know whether she had engineered Juba’s rescue or if another person had. Maybe she had truly acted in the cause of justice, that the law apply in equal measure
to all. I did not know her, so I could not be sure.

  But I was sure of this: The general had betrayed us. Vai thought I was with Bee, and Bee would think I was back with Vai. They had walked straight into the trap. And while Bee had gone in as a willing pawn with the intent to become a queen, Vai had followed merely to stay near me.

  “There is no fire bane I cannot control.”

  The memory of the cacica’s words burrowed into my heart. First they scoured me with despair. Then I got angry.

  So be it. My enemies had no idea what anger they had woken. Hard to imagine I would ever be glad to have an opportunity to say it:

  My sire is the Master of the Wild Hunt. And Hallows’ Night is coming.

  35

  The last day of October dawned with rain and blood.

  On the previous night, I had crept to the assembly house to eat my nightly bowl of porridge only to find the village gathered to discuss the weather. A red dawn and the afternoon’s steadily rising swells foretold the coming of the Angry Queen. I slept in the rafters of a roofless, abandoned shed, and woke at daybreak soaking wet from a squall of rain and bleeding with my monthly courses. I endured the rain but was glad of the blood.

  As the winds began to batter, folk hurried to lash down everything they could before they headed to the ridge for safety. The storm was coming in faster than they had anticipated. Already water flooded up the shoreline far past the high-water mark. The wind had risen to such a pitch that it rumbled. Branches whipped, tearing free. A roof  ’s thatch scattered in a bluster of debris. The sea was streaked with foam as the wind sheared the tops off the pounding waves.

  The Herald of wind and thunder strode past high in the sky, his black hair a sheet of darkness. The Flood with his blue-green arms washed around the curve of the promontory, spray spitting so high I thought it would speckle the feet of his heavenly brother. I wanted to be like them. I let go of the shadows and stood with my face into the wind and my braid flying out behind me, sure the gale was about to lift me off my feet. And then I would walk the storm.

  Only, of course, I was my mother’s daughter, composed of mortal flesh, so the wind shoved me stumbling back. I slammed into a tree trunk. A wind-shorn coconut smacked into the ground beside me, barely missing my head.

  A strong hand fastened harshly on my arm. “A remarkably pretty opia be haunting us,” said the shaven-headed man. Once I might have been frightened by his lustful sneer and his machete.

  I met his gaze. “The storm is coming for me. Do you want to be here when it arrives?”

  He did not.

  So I braved the day alone. I sheltered in the lee of the outer walls of the ball court. Rain tore in sheets driven horizontally by the gale. I could barely see the shoreline. A huge wave crashed across the lowest rank of houses, ripping them off their moorings in a splintering crashing roar. Yet the tremendous and unstoppable power of wind and rain and water transported me into a state of almost unendurable rapture. I was so alive.

  Dusk settled as the darkness of Hallows’ Night swept over the waters.

  My ears popped. The wind ceased between one breath and the next.

  A rip like a lance of light sliced through the massed clouds. Her eye opened, vast and terrible, and the spirit who was the hurricane saw me, an insignificant pest far below.

  She blinked.

  A shining coach pulled by four pearlescently white horses swept out of the embrace of the towering storm wall and coasted over the gleaming foam. The vehicle rolled to a halt on the wrack-ridden shore. Waves parted to flow around it. I ran down to meet them with my bundle of stolen belongings and purloined food slung over my back. The coachman raised his whip to greet me. The eru smiled as she swung down the steps and opened the door. She did not speak, so I merely nodded as I rushed up the steps into an interior lit by cold fire.

  I shrieked. “Rory!”

  He’d had his legs up on the narrow cushioned bench, lounging, but he swung them down to brace himself as I flung myself at him.

  “Oof !” he said, as I hugged him.

  “Rory!”

  “You already said that.” He fixed his big hands on my shoulders and held me away to offer a reproachful look. “I waited and waited for you but you never came. I began to think you just sent me away from that cursed old dragon because you were mad at me for trying to tear out his throat.”

  “I sent you away to save your life! So much has happened, I can barely remember that now! Why are you here?”

  His eyelids closed partway, giving him the hooded look of a man who wants to speak frankly but dares not. “Our sire came to Massilia a moment ago, and leashed me.”

  Another presence waited in the coach, facing us from the opposite seat.

  A young man studied me. A dash jacket, trousers, and kerchief of unrelieved black gave him the severe look of the accountant who comes to tell your aunt and uncle that they have lost all their money in an ill-advised speculative venture. Worn loose, his straight black hair fell to his hips, and there was something about its thick texture that made it seem it might writhe into life and choke me if I was foolish enough to anger him. I could not read his ancestry in his face, because while the hair reminded me of the Taino, his complexion made me think him Afric, and yet the cut of his nose and cheekbones might have been Celtic, and the epicanthic fold at his eyes reminded me of Captain Tira’s Cathayan origins. He certainly had the arrogance of the Romans! He was, in fact, remarkably good-looking and no older than Vai.

  He sniffed, inhaling with a lift of his chin. “A maiden no longer, it seems,” he remarked, “but not gotten with child.”

  “Cat,” said Rory, “your mouth is hanging open.”

  The coach rocked as we bucked back into the winds. I grabbed at a strap to steady myself as I gaped. How could I ever forget that voice?

  The amber gaze, so like mine, pinned me. “Tell me, Daughter. Whose blood shall feed me tonight? That of the girl who walks the path of dreams? Or some other? Son, open the shutters.”

  Rory slid open the shutter of the door that opened into the mortal world. A tumult of wind and rain shook the coach. Raindrops iced as they spattered inside. A surly little voice hissed displeasure. A glitter of eyes winked on the door handle. With my sleeve, I wiped away a frosting of ice from the latch. Its gremlin face glowered briefly, but it seemed too intimidated to speak.

  Rory leaned across and slid back the shutter on the door that opened into the spirit world. The hunt raced on the wind, tangling across the sky. Beasts clamored within the brawl of storm and surge. In their teeth I heard death: owls silent, snakes winding, hyenas cackling with laughter; the shrill of a hawk before it stoops, the pulse of fear that stops a beating heart, the festering that eats at flesh from within. If you are not to be killed then you must kill: That is the law of the hunt. Its drums sang in my heart, and the promise of blood tasted as sweet on my lips as a kiss.

  I had that bastard Camjiata now.

  “I know who it is, the power you sense rising.” I shouted to be heard above the din.

  “Lead on, little cat,” said my sire, his cruel smile burning.

  Expedition.

  I leaned out the window to see the jetty lights burning and the masts in the harbor swaying in a blustering wind. Lights riddled the walls that ringed the old city. Sparks spun across twisting braids of smoke from the factories. Like tethered fish, the Taino airships that had spread out to occupy the city bobbed and tugged against the rising wind. We had come in so fast and unexpectedly that the airmen realized the danger too late; Taino sailors began hauling down the smallest airships in a belated attempt to stake them down and save them. The others bucked and rolled. A cable snapped. A stubby prow dipped, slicing across a building’s roof and jarring a cistern off its moorings. Water poured down the walls as people ran to escape the crumbling roof.

  All across the city, people raced to shutter windows and tie netting over homes and roofs. Yet because of the speed of the storm, their efforts would not come qu
ickly enough.

  What must destroy the fleet would devastate the city.

  So be it. Ice rimed my lips and chilled my heart. I was the hunter’s daughter.

  But I was also Luce’s friend.

  I would have grasped my sire’s hand like a supplicant, but I dared not touch him. “Promise me the hurricane will not come here, only the wind of our passing.”

  He set a hand on the rim of the open window. “The hurricane will come someday, for the hurricane lives in this part of the world. But on this night the Angry Queen walks elsewhere. Then she will sleep until the season turns and the waters warm again.”

  He leaned out to look. The coach circled the factory district, and one by one every factory engine stuttered and, with a collapsing hiss of steam, died. Gas lamps exploded. All the street lightning went out. A dull boom shook through the air.

  He licked his lips with the precision of a cat. “Where is the dreamer? I cannot taste her.”

  The maze of troll town glittered below, cutting through the chains of the magic he used to track his prey. I sought for her in my heart, and for a moment I caught her, but a mirror’s reflected light spun her image away and I lost her.

  “I have hidden her from you!” I cried as my heart thrilled with triumph.

  “So the little cat bites back.” His gaze on me could not be shed. He might have drained dry my spirit as easily as cut my throat to feast on my blood. “Where is the blood I’m owed this night?”

  “I’m not sure how to find him.”

  “Hunt down the threads that bind the world to find him, Daughter.”

  Rory pressed fingers to my knee. “Scent is not only your nose, Cat. Who are you looking for? I can help you.”

  “Let her sharpen the blade of her senses on her own,” said our sire. “How can she hone her steel if you do the work for her?”

  My right hand I splayed over my breastbone. In the interstices that knit together the mortal world and the spirit world, I sought the ones I loved. Bee’s heart beat so close to mine it was as if my breath mingled with hers, even as mirrors shattered her image into a thousand shards. The locket tingled against my palm, and its warmth tugged me toward Vai’s bright spirit to the north. Rory was right here. I could even feel Bee’s little sisters, Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan, Luce and them at the boardinghouse, their lives like feathers tickling my skin. They were all safe.