Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

The young woman clapped her hands together. “Tell me more about him! I mean, begging yee pardon, Grandfa’, for the interruption.”

“Yee said nothing about a cousin,” said the old man, exchanging glances with the old troll.

“I have one,” I said hastily. “My cousin and I made our way to the radicals because we had heard the words of La Professora. My cousin and I have been chained by obligations fixed on us by others. Surely we may wish to contest a vexatious legal code that allows others to bind us without our consent. Surely we may wish to have our dignity respected. To secure the freedom of our families and lineages and clans. And if we wish these rights for our communities, should we not therefore strive to see that other communities and clans also have what we ask for?”

“Bravo!” said the young woman.

But they were a hard, canny lot. I might have amused them, but I was not sure I had convinced them. I sat, quite out of breath. Frown banished by my passionate speech, Vai took my hand in his.

“Very stirring,” said the middle-aged man. “So tell me, fire bane, tell me true, is yee sure she is on we side? She who washed up on the jetty in a canoe that came from Cow Killer Beach?”

“She was lost,” said Vai.

“Was she, indeed? Yee’s sure? Absolutely sure?”

Letting go of my hand, Vai stood. With him rose the candle lantern, drifting off the shelf and twisting like a creature transformed by the tide of a dragon’s dream. From candle lantern it bulged into a sphere of glowing lacework, spinning slowly upward to the eaves, and melted into a perfect illusion of a cobo hood glass lamp. If astonished expressions were anything to go by, they had never before seen such a display of cold magic, as modest as it was. As the light floated beneath the eaves, casting oddly distorted shadows across us, I saw that the rafters needed to have a broom taken to them to wipe out the cobwebs. Strange what the eye catches on.

“You have my apologies if it seems my action in bringing Catherine here was reckless or ill considered,” he said with a hauteur appropriate to his spectacular jacket and casual exercise of magic. “Or if I seem to have been keeping secrets from you. If you feel you cannot trust my judgment, which I admit must seem to be compromised, then I will understand.”

“But yee need us,” said the middle-aged man. “Is that not what yee said? That yee would prefer to accomplish yee goals with no killing?”

“That is what I want. No killing.”

“But what do yee think will happen, fire bane? People shall die regardless. All that will happen is that blood will not stain yee hands.”

“Blood has already stained my hands. I’d rather not repeat the experience. Killing the general does not change your circumstances in Expedition. That’s why the best solution is to leave him alive but without support. If he cannot return to Europa, that serves me just as well.”

“Alive but without support? No change in circumstances?” The middle-aged man laughed without humor. “Don’ yee understand? When he first came and placed he request before them, all the Council could see was trade and profit. The Council would have voted to support him. Expedition is a small place. We’s like a basket, all woven together. We radicals is the ones who got that vote to turn against him. And then what did he do? He went running to the Taino. And now he is back, with some manner of agreement with them. That make things worse for us. For the Council can now say ’tis the fault of the radicals that the general made a pact with the Taino. As for the Taino, who know what they mean to do?”

“What are you trying to say?” Vai asked, looking at each one.

The old man gave Vai a bitter look. “Yee have boasted yee have a certain means to kill him.”

“It is no boast. It is the truth.”

This was not only too much, it was terrifying, for they meant to throw away Vai’s life!

I jumped to my feet. “Vai is worth far more to everyone alive. If you demand he try to assassinate the general, you’ll only be making him throw away his life on a task he can’t accomplish.”

“Catherine!”

“One man with adequate fighting skills, pitted against trained soldiers who will have crossbows? The mansa can’t have known cold magic is so weak here or I can’t believe he’d have sent you. In Europa, there’s no one you could not destroy. Here, without truly powerful cold magic to protect yourself, the general’s people will cut you down before you can get close enough to draw blood.”

I desperately needed some way to persuade Vai away from this foredoomed course of action. I recalled Brennan’s words when we had been digging through the wreckage of the airship. “Why do you radicals see the general as your enemy? Why do you want him dead?”

The old man waved a hand like wiping away a stain. “We ancestors escaped an empire. Shall we help raise another? A man who is on his father’s side a Keita, a descendant of the Malian royal lineage? Even from over the ocean, such an emperor can come back and say he have the right to trample us because we ancestors once served his.”

“Brennan Du told me that if you examine Camjiata’s legal code, you’ll see he understands he can only succeed by offering rights and privileges to the common people that their masters have denied them. Why kill him? Have you considered making an alliance with him against the Council?”

“A question,” said the old man, “made more interesting by the fact that yee is the one who have posed it.”

“Yee do know, fire bane,” remarked the middle-aged man, “that this gal is known to have arrived on the jetty in the company of James Drake, a notorious fire mage?”

Vai’s mouth turned down, and his shoulders stiffened. “I know that. Have you a point?”

“Beside the point ’tis rumored he have used unwilling people—dying people—as catch-fires to absorb his magic?”

I choked, but no one was watching me. They were all watching Vai.