Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

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.