Cold Fire

by Kate Elliott

  Vai smiled in the most annoying manner possible, as if he understood my struggle.

  “No!” Aunty appeared, wiping her hands on a cloth. Lucretia whimpered and retreated up several steps. “A kerchief, or a braid, gal. Yee’s not leaving me house with yee hair unbound.”

  “Oh,” I said, petrified into immobility. I had never seen her angry before.

  She turned on Vai. “Yee should know better, maku.” When she said “maku,” her tone bit.

  The fire in the kitchen hearth flickered out. Over by the bar, Uncle Joe cursed. “Did yee not set that wick properly?” he said to one of the lads.

  Vai lowered his gaze and let his hand fall to his side. “I beg your pardon. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Not with yee mind, that is for sure.” She yanked the kerchief out of her granddaughter’s hand as Lucretia gave an audible gulp. “I shall tend to Cat me own self. Go sit by the kitchen, Cat. As for yee,” she added, nodding to Kofi, “yee take the maku and go on. The gals shall come after.”

  Kofi stammered an almost inaudible leave-taking, grabbed Vai’s arm, and dragged him off.

  I followed Aunty over to the kitchen, where I sat on a stool. She fetched a comb, gave a look to the children that made them flee to the safety of Uncle Joe, and began a single thick braid.

  “Yee do fidget, gal. Never again.”

  “Never again what?”

  “Unbound hair is how sly women advertise they wares, and witches entwine they victims.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yee don’ know, but Luce ought to have done. I reckon she thought yee was just being daring, for she think the world of yee.”

  “She tried to give me a kerchief !”

  “While Vai was too dazzled to think.”

  “He was?”

  “Gal, don’ play that game with me. Nor should yee play it with him, like yee’s punishing him for what he done before. Like yee want he to be in love with yee, so yee can throw it in he face.”

  “That isn’t what I want!”

  “That is how it look. Either let him be, or let him win yee back. This other is just small and mean, and I don’ like to think of yee as a mean-hearted gal.”

  “But I can’t, Aunty,” I whispered. “I have to leave. There’s a great deal I can’t tell anyone.” My voice wavered, and almost broke.

  “He have secrets also. Yet say ’tis true. If yee cannot, then cut it clean. There is just no cause for this way of going on. Life is too short. There. Yee’s fit to go out. Don’ be trying that again.”

  “No, Aunty,” I said in my most chastened voice, ducking my head like a cowed dog. And really, what can be worse for a cat than being compared to a dog?

  At the gate, Luce took my hand with a compassionate smile, and we went out into the blowsy late-afternoon heat. Rain had slicked the streets, already drying off; the blustering wind had torn the clouds until they looked like crumpled iron sheets. Her arm on mine, we strolled along Tailors’ Row, where men greeted us politely from tables beside the gates of their family compounds.

  “Yee sew that skirt yee own self, Sweet Cat? Will yee give me the pattern?”

  “That’s my trade secret, isn’t it? How shall yee make it worth my while?”

  They laughed. “Going to the areito, gals? Yee two look fine!”

  Luce giggled, and it was all worth it, to hear her laugh like that.

  The brush of drums spiked the air and made my skin tingle. Shadows kissed and mingled with light as afternoon sank with the sun into the drowsy west. We strode through the quiet streets of the Passaporte District, home to working households of the respectable kind, people who made the things necessary to the daily round of life.

  Lucairi District had once been a village where Lucayan immigrants from the Bahamas had settled back in the early days of Expedition Territory. As the city spread, the village had been folded into the outer city and newer immigrants had moved in. The streets had not the neat grid of Passaporte nor its gaslit streets. The plaza was very old, and not large, having once been only a village center, but the batey court had been recently expanded and rebuilt with gaslight, with what the locals called cobo hoods for the glass shell, with its decorative ironwork meant to resemble the queen conch. The drums were already conversing, and rings of dancers moved on the ball court as gaslight flamed into life with the sun’s setting. There were a lot of people milling and laughing and eating, but I did not spot Vai or Kofi.

  Luce dragged me along toward one of the women’s circles where she had seen her friends. I paced along with Tanny and Diantha, the steps easy to follow, the gals chatting like runaway horses. They wanted to know about Luce’s hair; my jacket and skirt; they wanted to know about Luce’s father’s ship; they wanted Diantha to tell them about the latest tryouts for the women’s team of the Rays; they wanted to know if kerchiefed Gaius had come courting Tanny with a basket of mamey.

  How they talked! I might have said something, but I could not get in one word, and anyway, I kept losing track of the conversation and the steps. I had to scan the restless shifting of the crowd.

  But of course he would not come out onto the ball court, not with all those gas lamps.

  I tugged at Luce. “I shall be right back. You stay here?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yee’s not gone looking for him already?”

  Affronted, I meant to make a brilliant counterthrust, but I caught sight of Kofi strolling along the stone risers with one of the gals I had seen at the gate the night before. I hurried after him, only to lose him in the crowd as I pushed out of the ball court and into the plaza where food carts had been set up together with folk peddling such a fine array of amulets, beaded necklaces, and brass or shell earrings that I would have paused to browse had I not been impelled to look for…

  Arms crossed on his chest, he was leaning against the closed tailgate of a wagon in whose bed stood four soldiers. One soldier was exhorting the gathered audience, mostly young men, to sign up for the general’s army, where fortune and adventure awaited in distant Europa. With his closed expression and detached gaze, Vai looked so like the haughty cold mage I had first met that I could barely stand to look at his handsome face, inviting body, and beautiful clothes. What had I been thinking, to come here? Could a man eavesdrop more clumsily, in his excessively decorative jacket that marked him a mile off ? Could he look more contemptuous, with eyes staring onto nothing and lips pressed together as if he was holding back angry words? I tried to remember all the cutting things he had ever said to me, but there were so many it was hard to recall even one.

  My hands clasped and unclasped restlessly over the skirt. Had I dressed up so he would admire me? Or to make him chafe at what he couldn’t have? Was Aunty right? Was I just trying to punish him? I felt like a monster, the grotesque spawn of a courageous, bold woman who had protected the man she loved and of a heartless creature who with brutal efficiency and no scruples or compassion hunted down anyone who disturbed his peace of mind.

  He saw me, away across the crowd. His entire expression changed. The mask of contempt washed away as in a cleansing downpour. He pushed away from the wagon and arrowed for me.

  Blessed Tanit. I could not move. My mouth was parched and my heart was galloping.

  Even when a surge of people passing in front cut off my view, freeing me from the chain that linked our gazes, I could not move.

  He elbowed his way out of the crowd. And there he was, standing right in front me. Him. Just him. There was no one else in the world except him.

  “Catherine?” He extended his right hand, and somehow my left hand leaped into his grasp. “Are you well?”

  I leafed through my extensive mental dictionary and managed to snare a word. “What?”

  His eyebrows rose. “You look…stunned. Like a cow that’s been bludgeoned by a sledgehammer.”

  “I look like a cow?”

  Several people passing paused at my outraged words, and their gazes dropped to my sandaled feet as if they thought to see
hooves. Then the crowd’s roiling current ripped them away.

  He released my hand and pressed his to my forehead. “No fever. Maybe you just need something to drink. Guava juice with lime and pineapple. That’s your favorite.”

  I was riveted by the smile that curved his lips. “Why do you always call me Catherine and never Cat?”

  He leaned intimately closer. “A name should be like a caress. Why make it short?”

  I am sure I would have spoken a sophisticatedly witty question in reply if my mind had not, just then, lurched to a halt as his lips brushed my cheek with a feathery-light kiss, and then a second and a third, moving toward my ear.

  He murmured words like a fourth kiss. “Tell me what you want from me, Catherine. For whatever it is, you know you can have it.”

  I had made a dreadful mistake. I had left Sensible Cat and Heartless Cat at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch. There was only one way to protect myself.

  “I want the truth of why you came to Expedition,” I said hoarsely.

  He took my hand. “Very well. Let’s get something to eat.”

  He had a small gourd bowl and a spoon slung over his back on a cord. He fished coin out of his cuffs and bought the things I liked best. First, we drank two bowlfuls of lovely juice. Next, we shared a bowl of rice, red beans, and beef with fried plantain, and wiped it clean with a wedge of maize bread. Finally, he filled the bowl with coconut rice pudding topped with slices of papaya.

  He sweet-talked a length of burlap from a vendor and spread it on the ground in a quiet corner of the plaza where courting couples had settled down for the serious business of staring at each other like formerly intelligent people who had lost the capacity for meaningful thought. Yet, thinking of Abby, I was horribly ashamed to have made such a comparison. She might have had a sweetheart before she was bitten. Would he love her still, or would he look into her confused gaze and wonder only if the teeth of the ghouls lurked there? Who could ever truly know if one was healed or the infestation only slumbering?

  I shuddered.

  “Catherine,” said Vai, pausing with a laden spoon halfway raised to my mouth, “I hope you are not afraid of me.”

  I looked at him blankly. “Of you? Of course I’m not afraid of you!”

  “There’s something. I can see it in your face.”

  I touched my sleeve where it covered my scar.

  His fingers brushed my hand. “It’s healed so well no one will guess.”

  When I did not look up, he sighed. “Obviously I can never let you go adventuring without me. Of course, if I’d been in the water with you, no doubt the shark would have eaten me before you got the chance to punch it.”

  “I was terrified when the shark hit me,” I said, glancing up at him, for I found I could speak of the shark but not of Vai grappling me out of the overturned boat where I was drowning.

  “I should think so. For all the words you say, you’re oddly silent. It makes it hard to know precisely how to…make sense of your stories. Maybe there is some other thing on your mind you wish to confide in me.”

  The icy mask that concealed my sire’s face shimmered in my thoughts. A bat skimmed past overhead. I was sure my lips had become sewn together. My days of speaking were over.

  He leaned closer. “Let me see if I can get that mouth to open.”

  His tone made me blush in places whose heat made me blush yet more.

  His lips parted as he brought the spoon with its scoop of pudding to my lips. As if in mimicry my own lips opened, and he fed me. The pudding was so sweet and rich that I shut my eyes to savor it and lick my lips all the way around in case I had missed one single drop.

  “Ah! Mmm. Vai! That’s better than yam pudding.”

  He laughed unsteadily. “You have no idea how much I love the pleasure you take in eating.”

  A rush like heat and wind poured through me. I swayed toward him.

  He pulled back. “Don’t distract me. I want you to know why I came to the Antilles.”

  “You’re about to tell me it had nothing to do with me.”

  “It had nothing to do with you. I told people about you so they wouldn’t question me.”

  “Only you would call that courting talk.”

  He teased a slice of moist papaya along my lips until I could no longer bear it, so I ate it up and licked its sweet juice off his fingers.

  He inhaled sharply. “Is that what you think I’m doing? Courting you?”

  “What else would you call it?”

  “I could call it a hundred different things, but those are just words. I could use a hundred words to describe cold magic, but none would be this.” He pinched a spark of cold fire out of the air and stretched it and wove it to become a golden flower dappled with light as with dew, and then a chain of such flowers like a necklace hammered out of light.

  I stared open-mouthed, for it was the most astonishingly lovely vision. “Ought you to be doing that in public?”

  “Who will know,” he said, bending closer to pretend to loop the chain from my shoulders low along the swell of my breasts, “if you do not tell them?”

  Even through the challis of my jacket, the illusion’s touch felt like the tickle of bees exploring along my skin. He was still toying with the illusion, darkening the shadows and muting the lights until it no longer glowed like sorcery but only like polished gold catching glints from the lamps that burned around the plaza. None, I realized, were hissing gas lamps or blustering torches.

  “Are they all cold fire?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, glancing around at the gleaming lights. “That’s the only training they allow their lowly fire banes. Not a one can manage more than the most rudimentary illusion. And they can put out a weak fire. The fire banes who work for Warden Hall are obligated to call light for festivals and hire themselves out to folk who have to run errands at night. Imagine a man of the mansa’s stature and pride forced to be a linkboy all his life!”

  “I can’t imagine it,” I murmured, remembering how the mansa had shattered rifles.

  “Or the wardens sell them into Taino country. It’s against the law for mages of any sort, even fire mages, to form associations to aid and educate each other. They keep them weak by denying them knowledge. I can’t wait to go home.”

  “To Four Moons House?” I asked as my heart hardened.

  “More pudding?” He brought the spoon to my lips. As he fed me, he spoke in a voice whose intensity pierced me to the bone. “When you fell into the well and crossed into the spirit world, I thought I would rather die than have to live knowing I had lost you. I left Adurnam and went to Haranwy. There I found my grandmother making ready to cross over. I gave her the locket, hoping it might lead her to you with my message.”

  I touched the locket. “How did you get it back from those two girls I gave it to?”

  He chuckled. “I promised those girls I would never tell. Anyway, I got Duvai and Uncle Mamadi to agree to hunt with me at Imbolc, even though we knew the chance we could track you down was small. Then the mansa summoned me. They’d had news. General Camjiata had taken ship right out from under their noses in Adurnam. No one had even known he was in the city. And he was sailing to Expedition with plans to raise a new army. You can imagine the mansa’s consternation.”

  I said nothing. He fed me another spoonful.

  “The mansa commanded me to go to Expedition. My task was to discover Camjiata’s intentions. And, if the general intends to launch a new war, to stop him.”

  A chill knife of foreboding pricked my breath. I did not want him to be that man: the man who would kill in cold blood, with cold steel. “But the general does mean to start a new war.”

  “I know.” He looked away. My glowing necklace of lit flowers faded, as if it were a lamp running out of fuel. “The mansa argued that one death is a small price to pay to avert the deaths of tens of thousands. I said killing is not the only solution. But I also said I would stop the general, if the mansa would release the village of
Haranwy from its clientage to Four Moons House.”

  “You didn’t ask for yourself ?”

  He bridled. “Do you think I would walk free if my village could not? Since the mansa has all the advantage over me, naturally he refused. But he said I could bring Kayleigh and establish her here, with a legal writ to release her from clientage. Otherwise they would breed her to see if they could produce more cold mages from my family’s bloodline.”

  “So you were never given a choice, only a sort of a bribe.”

  “That is how the mansa thinks, because it is the only way he knows how to think. But you must understand, Catherine, that while it is certainly true I am an exceedingly rare and unexpectedly potent cold mage—”

  I rested a hand against his cheek, the touch silencing him instantly. The bristle of his beard on my palm made me want to purr. “Such rare potency matched by the inverse of your modesty.”

  He drew my hand away, his breathing ragged as he went on even more pedantically. “It is also true that in Four Moons House I paid closer attention to our lessons and practiced more diligently and asked more questions and experimented more freely than the others did. Their expectations hurt them, I suppose. They knew what seat of power and wealth was theirs to sit in. It was nothing to them. A few enjoyed the challenge of weaving cold magic. Some felt the weight of duty. But no one worked harder than I did. No one. Maybe my reach is that much greater than the others of my age group. Or maybe I simply am more disciplined and responsible. That being so, how can the children born into the House believe they are somehow in blood better, if my own experience shows they are not? So after the things you said to me, after the mansa commanded me to kill you, I began to question. Why should my village remain under a system of clientage that’s little better than slavery just because it has always been that way?”

  “You truly listened to me?”

  “I did.”

  “That’s why you went to Godwik and Clutch?”