Cold Fire

by Kate Elliott

  “I can’t use that a second time,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You’ve got to stand, Cat.”

  The rippled curve of the ice wave began to pit and sink as a fresh swell surged up below.

  “Ja, maku!” Kofi stuck his head down. “Hurry, yee jackass. Another wave coming.”

  I was not a jackass. I jumped; Kofi caught my hands and hauled me up as another man cast down a net for Vai. I had used the last of my strength. Kofi threw me over his broad back and ran, me retching as water chased us across the avenue.

  The tearing baleful wind, most frightfully and dreadfully, ceased.

  I wriggled and slipped, and landed on my knees as pain pierced into my brain and every joint in my body screamed with a bone-drilling ache. The sky turned yellow. I looked up into the eye of the Angry Queen. The spirit of the hurricane was a woman, a vast looming face with a brow of thunderclouds and a mouth of lightning. The curve of her arms was the tearing circle of the howling winds. Here, under her face, the world lay still.

  Vai splashed up carrying rope, net, and tools.

  “She have got the kick of a mule, I swear!” said Kofi. “I shall have a bruise.”

  “Why did you let her crawl under the boat?” Vai demanded. “She almost drowned!”

  “I was too big to fit through. But maku, tell me now, have yee ever tried to stop her doing some thing she mean to do? Had yee much fortune with that? Hurry! The worst is coming, and it shall hit like the hells.”

  The woman loomed over us. They did not see her, for she was a spirit, not a body.

  She bent down and, with a lick of her salty tongue, she ate me whole.

  I stood on a beach of fine white sand as cool as silk beneath my bare toes. I wore nothing but a gauzy shift like a caul of light. My lips were cold, and my feet, sipped by wavelets, were warm. The Angry Queen stood on the surface of the water. She was tall, with broad shoulders and powerful arms ropy with muscle, and the girth of one whose appetite makes her strong. Her eyes flashed with lightning, and her presence was the gale.

  “Yee sire is waiting. Go to him.”

  “No.”

  Thunder growled although the sky lay so clear and blue above me that one might believe it as bottomless as trust.

  “Yee cannot fight him. He is stronger and have always been stronger and shall always be stronger. The great ones stir in the abyss. Can yee not hear them?”

  On the water’s tickling swell I traveled far and deep into the crushing trench of an abyss where the twinned beasts called leviathan shuddered as they struggled to wake from the stupor that bound them.

  “Do yee serve the master still? That is the question he ask of yee. He alone must hold yee allegiance or there shall be ill to pay. Yet yee have a defiant heart. ’Tis a spark easily seen, little cat. Better if yee extinguish the spark than if he do, for he shall not suffer rebellion.”

  “So must we fight,” I whispered, “rather than submit.”

  A turtle rose out of the glassy blue waters, its blocky head a stub above the waves, eye staring until with a flip and a roll it sank back under. For some reason, its presence heartened me.

  “Do you serve him, too?” I asked her.

  Her laughter boomed, the sound cracking so hard I was driven to my knees. Her fingers like the grasp of death closed over my face.

  “Yee talk too much. The secret is not yee own to share.”

  A mask of water hardened over my face. The foul liquid coursed into my eyes and nose and mouth. But the flood had not ripped me away. Vai had saved me from the drowning waters.

  Water splashed in my face. I was being carried through the rain-washed streets.

  “Let me down. Let me down!” I struggled free and landed on my knees, first coughing, then heaving uncontrollably until I thought I would retch the entire sea out of my lungs.

  Vai knelt beside me. His skin was hot, or mine was cold. “Catherine, we have to keep moving. The sea is flooding inland.”

  “I have to save Bee!” But when I tried to rise the darkness beneath the overturned boat engulfed me until I saw nothing. Perhaps I flew. Perhaps it was all a nightmare.

  For then I was sitting in the chair under the shelter by the kitchen with my muddy wet blouse stuck to me and a dry pagne draped modestly over my soaked drawers. A poultice soothed my scraped knee. One of the toddlers cuddled in my lap, a comforting presence.

  “’Twas bravely done,” said Kofi, behind me, “but I still reckon that gal be hiding the truth from yee.”

  “This is the not the time to speak of it,” said Vai. “She saved your uncle’s life when we all would have left him there not knowing he was trapped.”

  “’Tis true. She saved him. I shall go over to he daughter’s place to see how he fares.”

  Their voices faded. The wind mocked me in its singsong chant: We want one of they, do yee hear, me sissy-o?

  The old man was dead. The spirits had taken him. The thread that linked him and me unraveled and its last tendril snapped like a hand slipping out of the hand that seeks to hold it in this world. His spirit sighed, and crossed over. A crow perched on the open sill and watched me as the sun behind it made a cowl of golden light for its form. Weary beyond measure, I went to bed.

  I woke the next morning on the cot, wearing fresh drawers and a clean blouse I had no memory of putting on. The sound of hammering and sawing beat at my aching head. My mouth tasted of a vile brew that I could only imagine had been fermented from a stew of rotted worm guts and moldy rat droppings. Gagging, I fastened my spare pagne around my hips and, aching in every battered muscle, creaked down to the washhouse to do my business. After, I hobbled to the kitchen, where Aunty Djeneba greeted me with a cup of fresh juice and a kiss on each cheek.

  I drained the cup.

  She grated cassava in her calm way. “That was a fierce night and day. Uncommon thing, though. The storm sheared off right after all that happened on the jetty. There was wind, but nothing like what there should have been. Unexpected good fortune for us. How is yee, gal?”

  A basket of fruit sat on the kitchen table. “Been shopping already?” I asked.

  “That was brought at dawn by the daughter of the man yee found in the boathouse. ’Twas a brave act, Cat.”

  “But he died anyway.”

  She paused. “He passed in the arms of he family, not trapped in the flood.”

  A mask of ice stiffened my face, and my sire’s claws sank into my beating heart. Now she was wondering how I’d known, because no one could possibly have told me.

  “Is there some mending I could do?” I said hastily.

  She studied me. “Yee need mend nothing, gal. Yee rest.”

  “I just need to do something.”

  She nodded. “Yee know where the basket lie.”

  I darned as my heart raged. How I hated them! My sire who had bound me to serve him and sent his servants to mock and torment me. The mansa who had been willing to kill me and didn’t even care that he owned me. He only cared that Vai was forced to obey his commands because the mage House owned Vai and his entire village. Princes and Romans who played a game of plots and scheming to which only the powerful were invited. Hidden masters who directed Bee’s fate. The Council who sent out its wardens to track down fire banes and arrest people who wanted a voice.

  No wonder folk lashed out, rebelling against their chains.

  I did not ask where Vai was. I did not have to. I could hear the sounds of repair work all around as the people of Expedition mended the damage done by the storm. He would be working.

  For even if he was out hammering and sawing, he was working in the service of the mansa. He was a cold mage first and always. He was bound, as I was bound because I was bound to him.

  Today was the eighth of September. What day had we married? It had been late in October, the evening of the twenty-seventh, to be exact. Yet what did that date matter? On the last day of October, the Wild Hunt would ride. I didn’t have much time left. I had to stop thinking about anything except Bee.


  Aunty Djeneba let me mend in silence as she chatted companionably about the prospects for an areito’s being held the next day as usual in honor of the annual Landing Day, the day the first Malian ships had made landfall on Kiskeya. I ate rice and peas although without cassava bread, for the last few days’ flour so painstakingly grated and squeezed had been spoiled by the storm.

  In the late morning, Luce came running in. Uncle Joe looked up from polishing his best cups. Aunty and Brenna came out of the back, where they had been straining cassava.

  It was to me Luce ran. “Cat, wardens is making a sweep. I sneaked out of school. They’s looking for a maku gal. They don’ say why, except to arrest her.”

  Uncle Joe set down cloth and cup as Aunty and Brenna looked at me.

  “I promise you,” I said, seized by reckless fury, “the wardens shall not find me.”

  I put away the mending and went up to my room to bundle up the clothing I had sewn from my old skirts and jacket, for the wool challis in weave and color was markedly different from any material sold here. Not that wardens would necessarily notice cloth, but I could not take the chance. A trample of wardens announced themselves at the gate before I left the room, but it was no trouble for me to draw shadows around me and walk into plain view, nothing more than the railing on the stairs. I descended to the courtyard as they searched, and I stood right out in the open against a stretch of wall, one that providentially captured the afternoon shade.

  They searched through every room and shed as Aunty and Brenna and Uncle Joe demanded by what authority wardens came trampling into their boardinghouse where they had never had a hint of trouble and paid their excise tax just as all folk did.

  The wardens left. I waited, leaning against the wall with my mind a fuming blank, until another brace of wardens showed up. Had I been a warden, I would have used the same trick, hoping to take my fugitive by surprise after she was sure she had escaped capture. The children clamored home from school. The afternoon drifted heatedly past, and folk whom I had never before seen came in for a drink. They did not stay long, having not seen a maku gal.

  Yet all the local people knew a maku gal waited tables at Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse.

  Did folk just not talk? Did the secret truly belong to those who remained silent?

  In the late afternoon Vai returned, shoulders slumped wearily. After washing and speaking with the others, he dragged over a bench as if to take advantage of the shade and placed his tools in a tidy row along its length. He gently shooed off the little lads who followed him around and set to work sharpening. The scraping covered his low voice. “I suppose you’ve been hiding right here all day. People are furious the wardens made a sweep of the district. I knew they wouldn’t find you.”

  I whispered. “You look tired.”

  He looked right at me, surprised by my concern, and as quickly away.

  Luce had been surreptitiously searching for me all afternoon after returning in the normal manner from school. She strolled over and sat on the bench where Vai had laid out his tools: chisels, planes, three axes, two saws, an auger, an adze, a drawknife, a mallet, and a gauge.

  “I shall help yee,” she said to Vai, picking up a file.

  He smiled. “When a gal offers to sharpen a man’s saw, it means she is courting him.”

  She giggled, a shy smile flashing. I thought: She thinks of him as I think of Brennan Du, a man wholly out of her reach and not meant for her anyway.

  He plied a rasp on the edge of his chisel, his hands sure and strong, the muscles of his bare arms tensing and contracting, his lips slightly parted as if he was just about to tell me something. I could not bear to look at him. The sound of the rasp scored a runnel across my heart.

  I slunk away and crept up to my room, where I unwound the shadows, stowed my things, hardened my heart, and went back out.

  Luce saw me descending the stairs and ran over. “Where’d yee hide?”

  “Don’t you think I have to keep that a secret?” The others had seen me come down. I walked over to the bar. “Will anyone come tonight, Uncle Joe?”

  “Sure.” He looked me over with a frown. “Most shall come to drink in thanks we was not harder hit by the hurricane. The rest shall come to talk revolution, for the Council have overreached it own self with this raid.”

  I ran my fingers along a tray’s well-worn rim, smooth from years of use by serving gals before me. “I shall eat something now, and serve if folk do come. If you think it’s safe.”

  Vai had followed me. “Catherine, you took a beating in the storm. Shouldn’t you rest?”

  Words flooded like the storm’s surge in a wild burst of anger that took me utterly by surprise. “Rest? Do you think there is rest for the likes of us? Aren’t we the ones at the mercy of the flood and the hammer of the wind? How can it be right that a cold mage who can turn a wave into ice and shatter iron is nothing but the mansa’s property? And why would you think you truly own me, Vai, just because your mage House does own me due to a contract I never signed or agreed to? Why would I wrap myself in more chains?”

  Leaving everyone gape-mouthed, I ran to the washhouse and blew my nose. A rime of emotion I could not describe or acknowledge coated me, so I stripped out of my clothes and washed myself and my hair and, braiding it wet, fixed it under a kerchief after I dressed. Luce looked in once but left me alone. Everyone else pretended not to see me.

  At length I ventured out to a courtyard ringed by soft lamps, an illusion testifying to the power of Vai’s cold magic, he who had yesterday said he had nothing more to draw from. Unless that wasn’t what he had meant with the words “I can’t use that a second time.”

  Folk came, as Uncle Joe had predicted. The crowd conversed in agitated murmurs. With a laden tray I walked among them as always, and I was grateful to do this ordinary work, just another gal making her way in the world.

  Vai had put away his tools and gone over to talk to Kofi, their heads together like conspirators’. Who was this man who looked exactly like my husband? Once or twice or ten times he glanced toward me when he thought I wasn’t looking at him—not that I was looking at him all the time—and each time he would look away with an imperious lift of his chin as if to remind me of the way I had raged at him an hour ago in front of everyone. There was the Andevai I had married! I could dislike the arrogant cold mage. I had to.

  How old men did ramble! Yet their words had a toothsome bite as they discussed why the Council hadn’t supported General Camjiata’s original bid for troops, money, and weapons.

  “I reckon,” said the oldest uncle, “the Council feared the general would-a just turned troops and weapons around against the Council to overthrow them and sit he own self in they place.”

  “So he is now run to the Taino? The cacica shall be glad to use the excuse to invade.”

  Several shook their heads. “The Taino shall not invade. They hold their virtue very high. They shall never be the ones to break the First Treaty.”

  So why would the Taino help the general? Everyone agreed: trade to Europa with no tariffs or wharfage fees and no restrictions as there were now. They could flood the Europan market with sugar, tobacco, and Expedition’s cheap cloth, and with the profits fund a war against their perpetual rivals, the Purépecha kingdom.

  Oldest uncle considered. “The Council shall get those same benefits if they support the general. Except for the war with the Purépecha. The Council could likewise send over the ocean in the general’s service the very lads who trouble the city most with discontent. Yet they refuse to help him. Sweet Cat, yee is from Europa. What yee reckon?”

  I paused beside the table, tray balanced on one hand, aware that Vai had looked around to see how I would deal with a question. “Does anyone think the general can defeat the Roman Alliance with a single small fleet from Expedition? Didn’t he lose the first war with a significantly larger army? But have you all forgotten there are radicals in Europa, too? Wasn’t it twenty years ago that General Camjiata
wrote a legal code codifying the natural rights due to men? Wouldn’t the existence of such a legal code scare the Council?”

  “Gal have a point,” said the oldest uncle. “The Council don’ like kings, but they like talk of equality less.”

  “Maybe the Council refuses to help Camjiata because they fear the radicals support him.”

  Brenna came over to pour more beer. “I hear Camjiata’s legal code don’ give rights to women. Like the Romans in that, yee know, for on he mother’s side he is of patrician descent.”

  The oldest uncle answered her with a kindly nod at me to show he meant no offense. “Yee know how they is in Europa, very backward. Yee should, with that Roman mariner yee keep.”

  “Which is why he and me never signed a marriage contract. He is a good man, yee all know it, but he got no rights over me share of this house and me money. Which will all go to me girls.”

  “With yee permission, Uncle,” said Kofi, looming up beside the table. When the old man nodded, he went on. “I don’ know what they radicals in Europa reckon, but if the general wish for the support of we Assemblymen, he shall have to change he code. No troll clan will put a single ship or sailor at he disposal if females got no rights. And neither shall we.”

  “Not to mention no man in this city who speak against such shall ever again enjoy the favors of he wife or gal,” Brenna added before she glided off like a ship under sail.

  A judicious silence calmed the courtyard’s chatter. Then the men chuckled nervously and got going again. I moved on, and Vai caught the eye of a new customer who had been about to pat my backside but decided to pat his kerchief instead. Vai looked away before I could skewer him with a chiseled glance meant to inform him that I had to take care of myself, not be beholden to him.

  “Say, is it true? After all that big talk about he search for she, the lost woman.” The speaker was a young man I did not know, talking in a low voice to his lads. He did not see me passing behind him although his companions had begun gesticulating wildly. “Now the maku found she, he is not getting any—?” He yelped as I upended my tray over his back.