Cold Fire

by Kate Elliott

  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.”

  Keer exuded an odor, like sun-dried grass, that made me think of a creature waiting for its prey to creep into view. “Tell me a story of Godwik.”

  A cautious smile carried me forward. “He told me a tale about his fledging trip with his age cohort. Six to a boat and six boats in all, north to the shores of Lake Long-Water. They planned to battle into the teeth of the katabatic wind that sweeps down off the vast cliff face of the ice. But I never heard about that, for meanwhile, and before they even reached Lake Long-Water, he and his thirty-six companions were reduced to twenty-seven after battles with saber-toothed cats, foaming rapids, a marauding troo, gusting winds, and a party of young bucks from a territory whose boundaries they had violated. You may wonder how it all started!”

  Keer chuffed, crest rising. “I hear his voice in yours. Therefore, I will help you. A sloop may be embarking this coming Venerday if the weather holds. Have me your letter before then, and I shall see it posted with we usual pouch.”

  “How long will it take to get there, and an answer to return?”

  “Who can know? A month each way, if the weather holds fair and the winds cooperate and the ship does not sink. So, likely it will be longer.”

  A month each way! That would be barely enough time for me to hear back from her before Hallows’ Night at the end of the October, and then only if all went well. What choice did I have? I had to try. “In truth, Maestra, I am destitute. I have neither pen nor paper, nor payment for delivery costs.”

  Keer bent forward, examining me in the same way, I imagined, that a bored and fed hawk considers a squirming mouse trapped within reach of its talons. “I can offer you work in our clutch’s corporation. In recompense for the employment you were not able to take up in Adurnam. The cost of letter and dispatch can come out of your earnings. You can nest in a room above our offices.”

  The words hit me like a blow. Employment. A room. I need never see Vai until a year and a day were up and our marriage dissolved. Never again.

  “Here is more tea,” said Keer.

  I had to drink another cup, because I could not speak.

  “My offer has surprised you,” Keer said at length.

  I dredged for words. “I am unexpectedly overwhelmed, Maestra. But I already have employment and a room.” I could not bear to disappoint Aunty Djeneba. Surely it was easier to hear all the gossip at the boardinghouse than confined in an office. Surely. What if the wardens caught a glimpse of me so close to the gates? Where was Drake, anyway? “Let me start with a letter,” I finished weakly. “I’ll bring one before Venerday.”

  “No one enters into an association without a great deal of negotiation and thought.”

  “No, of course not.” My thoughts tangled and collided as if I stood in a maze of mirrors, staggering from Bee to Vai and back again, she whom I might not be able to save and he with whom I had no future.

  Keer let out a hiss of breath like steam escaping from a kettle. “You rats. If you simply agree, without contesting, then I will always stand above you in the—as you call it—the pecking order. Really, where is the fun in that? You rats are too fond of your entrenched hierarchies.”

  The words charmed me into a grin. “My apologies. I was preoccupied by another matter.” I roused the part of me accustomed to being sensible. “I assure you, I will return ready to duel.”

  The teeth showed again. “That, I will enjoy. Now. You require paper, pen, and ink.” Was it my imagination, or had her way of speaking changed as she spoke to me, vowels shifting sound, cadence altering?

  We began bargaining over the cost. The troll did not strike me as discourteous or greedy; if anything, I sensed that each transaction was a chance to play a game I could barely perceive whose rules I did not understand. Even after hard bargaining, the few coins I possessed did not suffice to buy a sheet of foolscap and a dram of ink, much less the dispatch service.

  With polite words I took my leave, in my confusion turning the wrong way. The crowded shop fronts and offices debouched into a square on the north vault of the old city walls where rose a huge gate carved with a lion on one side and a buffalo on the other. A hulking palace sprawled along one side of the square, marked with the lamp and staff of the warden’s service. This edifice was Warden Hall. A tall, powerfully built young man with scarred cheeks was pushing a flat cart laden with baskets of fruit toward a side entrance. After a moment, I recognized Vai’s friend Kofi.

  Wreathed in shadow, I followed him. Clouds were piling up in the east, heavy with rain and streaked with gray smoke rising from the factory district. I sneezed, grit in my eye. Kofi paused at the corner, wiping his forehead with a kerchief as he studied the clock tower of Warden Hall.

  When the hour tolled nine, he pushed his cart to the kitchen entrance. Kayleigh came down steps hauling a bin of rubbish, which she set beside a stinking wagon hitched to a sleepy donkey. Pretending to be nothing more than chance-met servants, they exchanged murmured words.

  “Word has come by bird that the cacica and the general have concluded their negotiations. He and his people will set out on the next auspicious day to return to Expedition.”

  “What manner of deal have the general struck with the Taino?” he asked.

  “No one knows. But everyone is very nervous. The five Council members who voted to support the general are scolding the twelve who voted to reject him. The five say that by refusing to aid him, the Council has driven the general into Taino arms.”

  “I wonder what other services the cacica demanded of him.”

  “That’s very rude.”

  “Rude? She have taken more than twenty husbands, and sent eight to they deaths.”

  “I won’t gossip, for it is wrong to do so. There was another thing I overheard. The Commissioner was talking to one of his deputies. Two salters, both women, escaped from Salt Island. The wardens fear riots if the news leaks out.”

  As my heart stuttered, Kofi whistled, then bent to rearrange the baskets as an older woman came out to examine the fruit. He turned his whistle to a merry tune, while Kayleigh dumped the bucket into the rubbish wagon as if she had just this moment come out.

  The woman scolded her. “Get on then, maku. Yee’s so slow. Housekeeper say yee have not even finished the grates yet today.”

  Kayleigh went in just as the wagon’s driver came out munching on a roll. Between bites, the wagoner engaged in a peppershot round of casual batey team gossip with Kofi: so many Blues, Greens, Barracudas, Cajayas, Anolis, Rays, and Guinchos that my head reeled. After the older woman picked through the fruit, Kofi trundled off. I shadowed him along the jetty to the Passaporte market, where he delivered the cart to a compound
whose family rented out transport. By the way they treated Kofi, he seemed to be a son of the house.

  Aunty Djeneba looked up when I came in, nose wrinkling as if I’d brought a whiff of rubbish. “Yee was gone so long I sent Luce out to look for yee. Never could she find yee.”

  My parents had drowned when I was six. My father had left behind his journals, which I had read over and over again, but there were only five words I remembered my mother saying to me:

  Tell no one. Not ever.

  My expression must have changed, for Aunty set aside the bread she was slapping into shape and came over to me. “Is yee well, gal?”

  “Do you suppose I’m tired, or is it just the heat?”

  Yet I was tired, after my duel with Keer. A nap with one of the toddlers tucked alongside refreshed me, and I went down as the early regulars came in to start on their ginger beer. Vai appeared with a net bag of guava. After getting Aunty’s permission, he distributed them to the children before sitting at a table and smiling at me until I sat down opposite.

  “Papaya is good for the digestion,” he said, cutting in half a large yellow-orange fruit to reveal round black seeds clustered moistly in orange flesh. “Aunty said you were tired.”

  I could not decide whether he was irritating or sweet. “You’ll share it with me?”

  “Of course.” He scooped out the seeds, took a bite with evident pleasure, then handed me the spoon.

  I could never resist food. “It’s delicious! Vai…”

  He looked a question, but did not ask it.

  “I should have said something sooner. The sandals are comfortable and sturdy. Luce scolded me into accepting them. Thank you. But she says they weren’t cheap.”

  He scraped seeds out of the other half of the papaya, his mouth turned in a faintly mocking grimace. “If you spent the coin I have become accustomed to on clothing, you would have thought them inexpensive.”