Cold Fire

by Kate Elliott

  “What makes you think I could?” I whispered.

  “Because I won’t allow it! I read Uncle Daniel’s journals. If you have to answer questions with questions, then when you were in the spirit world without me, you must have been forced to become a servant of the night court. You must promise me you won’t sacrifice yourself. Promise me!”

  I wanted to say, “Alas, he will not let me,” but my lips seemed to freeze together, knit by ice.

  “Sit down, Cat.”

  I sat.

  “That was an interesting reaction,” she said, chafing my hands.

  After a bit, I could speak. “When do you go to Taino country?”

  “It’s complicated, because the wedding is a series of ceremonies that takes place over many days. It all culminates with a five-day areito that begins on October thirtieth.”

  “I have to be with you when you go to the Taino. Promise me you won’t leave me behind.”

  “I won’t, dearest. I was hoping you would offer. I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You won’t be because I won’t leave you. Now, I feel the need to stab something. Does this city have a fencing academy?”

  “I was attending one before we went to Sharagua. It’s run by a branch of the Barahal clan.”

  “Excellent! We have the entire afternoon before supper. We shall go enroll. I’ll let you pay my tuition since I have no money.”

  We came home sore and laughing with just enough time to wash and change for dinner. I had to hope the illustrious of Expedition knew something about powerful fire mages and behiques and were willing to talk. By gaslight, servants bustled behind the windows of the dining room where a table laden for twelve was set out. The chamber’s walls were painted with scenes of flowering vines in whose branches nestled half-hidden birds like so many avian eavesdroppers.

  The general had assembled a collection of philosophically inclined minds whose ability to lapse into the most abstruse tangents defied my ability to sift through the thickets of natural history, practical science, and political theory to figure out who was a supporter of Camjiata and who was just there to enjoy the conversation and feast on a splendid meal. For the meal was indeed splendid, with platters of whitefish stewed with chilies hot enough to make my nose run, chicken marinated in rum and garlic and ginger, and mounds of sweet potatoes sliced and grilled with yet more rum.

  An older maku professora in residence at the university engaged in a lively debate with a toweringly young and prosperous merchant who had been born into one of the city’s most prestigious founding families. He betrayed his noble origins with the ostentatiousness of his clothes and the presumptuous way he addressed everyone. Both young merchant and older general claimed Keita lineage, so they could be in some way cousins.

  “Yee are a maku, Professora Alhamrai,” young Maester Keita was saying in a tone so bombastic that it reminded me of an overstuffed chair in whose pillows you drown. “So it is no mystery that yee shall not fully understand the principles of government here in Expedition.”

  I liked the bland smile the professora offered in response. “It is true I investigate the nature of the physical world rather than the body politic. Scientific principles teach us that friction creates heat. If a majority of the populace of Expedition has become fractious due to their perception they are being governed poorly, then is it not likely they shall catch fire?”

  “Most people have no ability to moderate their emotions. ’Tis why they are unable to govern themselves and need their betters to govern on their behalf. What do you think, Maestressa Barahal?” The young Keita turned his attention on Bee with a smile so condescending it set my blood to boiling.

  Bee simpered winningly up at him. “I think you shall be the first one shot when the radicals assault the old city.”

  Forks and spoons stilled. Glasses thumped, set on the table. Conversations withered. All eyes turned to Bee as she blinked as into the noonday sun with the look that fooled everyone but me.

  “For that jacket is certainly very fine. Any young man would be eager to wear it. I suppose most must be too poor and lazy to gain such resplendent garb by any means but foul ones.”

  The general coughed into a hand as the rest of the table shared a polite and mildly bewildered laugh. The servants brought platters of fruit, but I was too full to do more than stare longingly at a plate of papaya whose slices had been meticulously arranged in the shape of a fish.

  Professora Habibah ibnah Alhamrai was seated to my right. She addressed me in the Latin spoken in southern Europa. Judging by her coloring and curly black hair as well as her name, she was a native of the Levant. “You are come but lately to the general’s household, Maestressa.”

  “I do not belong to the general’s household. I am here only as companion to my cousin.”

  “Ah. You are not one of the general’s partisans or servants.”

  “One may have other reasons for sitting at this table or sleeping in this house,” I said. “I do not serve the general nor have I ever.”

  Yet her frank assessment embarrassed me. “You retain some skepticism about the general’s motives?”

  “Can there be any skepticism where the general is concerned? Is he not exactly what he claims to be?”

  “A worthwhile question. If I may change the subject, I am told you are the daughter of Daniel Hassi Barahal. I met him once.”

  I leaned in too swiftly, drawing notice for my lurch. “Please, tell me about him! For you know, he and my mother died when I was six.”

  Before she could answer, the general asked her opinion about the efficacy of cold magic in the Antilles. “For I am surprised,” he said, “to find there is a general belief here in Expedition that fire banes are weak creatures of little utility.”

  “So they are,” proclaimed the young merchant. “Good for parlor tricks, lighting a path at night in the countryside, and acting as auxiliaries to the municipal firefighting force. These stories of how they call down storms and shatter iron are the credulous fantasies of the gullible natives of Europa, who have been treated for so long to such tales that they have come to believe them.”

  “In fact, that is wrong,” said the professora. “I have studied this question at some length. Many of the properties of cold magic can be explicated using the principles of the sciences. In fact, I suspect testimony from the mages would serve only to confuse precisely because they deliberately conceal what they know. For example, the first question we must ask is, What is the source of the vast energies available to cold mages? Does it lie in that plane of existence often called ‘the spirit world’? Or does it lie in the ice itself ?”

  “Is the spirit world a physical place, Professora,” asked the young merchant with a laugh, “or a metaphorical one?”

  “Let me complete my thought,” she said with the sort of graciousness that cut him off at the throat. “I believe both may be necessary.”

  “You know this for certain, Professora Alhamrai?” asked the general.

  She inclined her head. “I am an inquirer, General. In the Chibcha kingdom of southern Amerike, in the mountains, rests an ice shelf. I have traveled there to ascertain this for myself. Likewise, my colleagues among the”—here she whistled four notes, denoting trolls—“have a map of the great ice wall whose southern cliff stretches across most of North Amerike. This wall I have seen for myself, although not its entire extent. I think it likely that the cold mages of the Antilles exist too far from these sources to use them with as much efficacy as cold mages can do in Europa, where the ice lies closer to human habitation.”

  I said, “So a cold mage would have power here, but it would be weaker because the ice is farther away? I mean, is the ice actually farther away?”

  Bee looked at me, lifting one eyebrow in an unspoken question.

  The professora nodded. “The extent and mass of the nearest ice may also matter. In addition, it is likely that, over the generations, the mage Houses in Europa have developed a particularly skilled and nu
anced method of drawing from the source of these energies. Without such specific knowledge, and living in a place where it is illegal for them to form associations to better themselves, the fire banes here in the Antilles would be at an additional disadvantage. In a geography with a number of active volcanoes, it is no wonder fire mages are treasured and ennobled. While, in a tropical climate, the seemingly weaker cold magic is ignored and belittled.”

  “Are there quite a lot of powerful fire mages here?” I asked. “Where are they all?”

  Talk at the table died as quickly as if I had stripped naked.

  The general rose. “I believe it is time to move to the salon.”

  As was typical in Expedition, the company moved with no separation of women from men into a parlor made comfortable with sofas and chairs. Along one wall stood a pianoforte beside two djembes placed atop a wooden chest.

  Because I wanted to hear about my father, I tried to slide into the circle that had gathered around the professora by the glass doors that opened onto the patio, but the young merchant had taken her earlier words on friction as an inducement to monopolize her. He began droning on about his theories of the unfitness of most people for governance and the need for the Council to remain a select group chosen by and from those with the virtue, birth, and education to properly shepherd society through difficult times. Bee had been cornered by a pair of young officers in the Expedition militia, specialists, so they were telling her at length, in the new science of artillery. The general sat at the pianoforte to play a complicated fugue, one melodic voice following the next, as two women wearing the rich clothing to be found along Avenue Kolonkan engaged him in simultaneous conversations, one about transatlantic sailing routes and the other about the manufacture of rifles. I faded back to the sideboard. Unlike the general, I could not separate so many voices.

  “If yee shall forgive me, Maestressa Barahal. We have met before but was not formally introduced. I’s called Gaius Sanogo.”

  I looked into the face of a man old enough to be my father but not elderly, tall and a little stout but clearly fit and healthy, with more silver in his beard than in his closely shorn black hair. I recognized his face with a shock.

  “You were at the meeting at Nance’s.” My tone sounded too hot to my ears. “One of the radicals. Are you the one who betrayed your own people? I thought it was Jasmeen.”

  “Did yee?” He had a pleasant face and a pleasant smile and the pleasant gaze of a man confident in his status. “The revelation come too late for they who now sit in prison waiting for the fleet to sail.”

  My cheeks flamed. Might the worst have been averted if I’d told Vai everything I could? “I didn’t see you at the supper table,” I said.

  “I was not at the supper table. Still, I could not help but overhear yee when yee told the professora that yee is not under the employ nor in the service of the general.”

  “Are there really secret passages in the walls? Do you serve the general?”

  He looked amused. “Not at all, Maestressa. The folk at Warden Hall call me ‘Commissioner.’ The general tolerate me presence here because he must.”

  “The commissioner! Were you infiltrating the radicals?”

  “As such,” he continued, “I’s thinking any gal who can for some weeks evade we search for she, might be a valuable asset for we organization. If she is not engaged elsewhere.”

  My fingers brushed the spot where my sleeve concealed the scar. “I am not for hire.”

  “I know about Salt Island,” he said in the same tone he might use to comment about the rain shower pattering through the foliage outside.

  “Is that meant as a threat?”

  “Only if I choose to disclose that information to the Taino authorities, or to arrest yee. Which for me own reasons I don’ choose to do. I’s trying to figure yee out. I reckon a Barahal ought to know something of how cold mages fought against the general in the Europan wars.”

  I bargained. “I might know something, if you tell me where my husband is.”

  “I must ask me own self, just why it is yee want to know where he is gone. For it surely did look like yee plotted to hand him over to the general. And it surely do look as if the general is protecting yee, even as yee claim not to be under he command.”

  “He protects me for the sake of my cousin, Beatrice.”

  He glanced at the floor with a smile caught on his lips that said as clearly as words that he did not believe me. His gaze, rising, met mine. He had eyes as brown as his skin. “I don’ think so.”

  I needed him to believe I wasn’t working for the general so he would help me find Vai. “She’s far more valuable to him than I am, now that she’s to marry Prince Caonabo.”

  I truly surprised him.

  He studied me with the gaze of a man accustomed to assessing criminals. “Yee’s either quite naïve or very clever, Maestressa. I suppose time will tell. With yee permission.”

  As Sanogo withdrew, I glanced toward the general, obliviously playing a sprightly melody as he contributed to the other conversations he was having. When Camjiata rose to allow one of the women to play, Sanogo intercepted him. I escaped through the open doors onto the patio. The wind flecked drops on my head from rain-laden leaves as I stepped into the garden. The debate between the professora and the young merchant seemed likely to go on all night. I sat on a damp bench and folded my hands in my lap, waiting.

  The general found me soon enough. “Cat, you and I need to have a talk about the nature of confidential information.”

  “Had I known you meant to keep your alliance with the Taino secret from your own allies in Expedition, I would have leveraged the information more to my advantage.”

  “You have no advantage. You eat off my table and sleep in my house. Nevertheless, you intend to sneak off and find your husband. I wonder what you possibly expect to do then.”

  “Save Europa from your war,” I said with an angry smile.

  “Thus leaving countless communities laboring in the harness of an unjust social order.”

  “Which you hope to replace with an empire.”

  “I am the descendant of emperors both Roman and Malian. I do what I was born for.”

  “Surely there are other people in the world who are descendants of emperors, but that does not mean they are fit for or eager to rule. Or that they have a right to do so!”

  “You are the last person to claim that blood means nothing, Cat. Your mother meant to sacrifice herself in order to make sure you were raised by your own blood instead of by a stranger.”

  The breeze wove a net that made my lips heavy and my throat thick. I stared at him.

  “So you didn’t know? Your parents never told you what she risked for you?”

  “Don’t you know my parents died when I was six? Was that why they were so afraid of Tara being recaptured by your army? Not because she was a deserter, but because of your wife’s dream about me? Were they just trying to keep me safe? Because they feared what you might do to me?”

  “As the djeli said, destiny is a straight path. We are meant for what we are meant for.”

  “I can’t argue with that mulish truism!”

  “Indeed, you can’t. Here’s something you don’t know. Your mother betrayed me.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “She chose Daniel over my cause, her heart over my army, the duty she felt for him and for the baby over the duty she owed to me. She might have waited until her term of service was up, only another five years. But at some point on the lost expedition to the Baltic Ice Shelf, she had sexual congress with Daniel Barahal, and by doing so, broke her oath to me.”

  The old city’s night revelry danced in the excitable rhythm of drums and lutes and laughter, heard from beyond the garden walls. I stared. He didn’t know Daniel wasn’t my father. Yet why should Tara or Daniel have told him? “You can’t know what circumstances were like on that expedition,” I said. “Many people died.”

  He set a foot on the bench
beside me, braced as if to remind me that he was bigger than I was in every way possible. “Certainly we may do in extreme conditions what we might not do elsewise. But you see, she never claimed so. You can of course understand that when the women in my Amazon Corps swear an oath to remain celibate, it is understood that women may be vulnerable to rape. They less than other women, because of their training and comrades, but it happens.”

  “Would that have made a difference to her sentence?”

  “Of course it would. A soldier made pregnant by rape can serve out her enlistment if she gives up the child to anonymous fosterage. Tara could have claimed rape, given you up, served out her enlistment, married Daniel after, and had other children with him.”

  “Why couldn’t a raped woman give the baby to her family?”

  “It would be too easy to circumvent the law. An army must have discipline. No one forced Tara to sign the enlistment papers. She knew the terms. Instead, she hid her pregnancy until she was wounded in battle and her condition revealed. Then we had no choice but to arrest her for insubordination. Yet with my own ears I heard her swear in court that Daniel was the father and she his willing partner, and so he had therefore the right to claim and raise the child after her execution. Yet no pregnant woman can know if a baby will be healthy or even survive birth. So I had to wonder, why she was willing to sacrifice her life for the chance of keeping you with Daniel?”

  I knew the answer: because she had hoped Daniel could somehow keep me away from the Master of the Wild Hunt. It hadn’t been about Camjiata at all, even though he thought it was.

  “Do not defy me as your mother did, Cat. I cannot be merciful. Bring me the cold mage.”

  I bowed my head to give myself space to calm my thundering heart. Rising, I smoothed down my pagne. “Are we finished, General?”

  “No. We are not finished. But this night I am going to have a drink and thence to my bed.”

  I made him a pretty courtesy in the Adurnam manner, but the heat of my anger had forged my heart into cold steel.