Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

“I should think they are rare everywhere, given their likelihood of an untimely demise. If that’s the only reason you are marrying, you might as well have been handed off to Four Moons House to be their prisoner. What obligations will the Taino place on you?”

She let out a gusty sigh. “Would you please listen for once? They have traditions here about the lore of walking the path of dreams. Once I am married, I will be allowed to learn.”

“While you’re imprisoned in some hot, dusty palace. Couldn’t you have stayed with Brennan and Kehinde?”

“I would have loved to do so, with their fine revolutionary notions and legendary fistfights and buckets of whiskey and beautifully written pamphlets filled with radical sentiments. But that doesn’t solve my other problem, does it? Perhaps you have a brilliant plan to stop the Wild Hunt from ripping off my head!”

I jumped up, the chair tipping over to clatter to the floor behind me. “Yes! I do!”

Drake stepped in off the balcony. The door opened and the Amazon captain appeared, sword drawn. The general gestured, and she retreated, closing the door.

“I would be glad to hear your plan,” he said, walking over to place the plate in front of Bee.

I dug my nails into my palms, but pain wasn’t enough to loosen my tongue. And it was a lie. I couldn’t protect her. Only my sire could, and then only for as long as it suited him to do so.

Bee looked at me and blinked twice as a signal. “She’s just exaggerating in her usual way.”

“Ah, I understand now.” He walked back to the sideboard, where he heaped bacon, potatoes, and eggs on a plate. “Helene told me never to ask questions of Tara Bell’s child because she dreamed the child was chained by some manner of magical binding.”

The chains that bound me to my husband? Or the ones that bound me to my sire? He didn’t know everything! I righted the chair and sat with hands clasped in my lap as the general returned to the table with a plate for himself. Drake ventured to the end of the table farthest from me.

“Anyway, Cat,” said Bee, barreling on like a fully laden rail car rolling downhill with no brakes, “you’re the one who will never be free of Four Moons House because you are married to one of its cold mages.”

ny person could say these words and not sound condescending I am sure I did not know, but he did say them, and they were not condescending.

Beatrice brought over the new pot and sat next to the general instead of me. Drake eyed the teapot with longing. Meeting his gaze, I licked egg yolk and bacon grease off my knife. He grimaced before turning back to his view of the garden.

The general set down his cup, and Bee filled it.

“All has been resolved. Once the necessary ships and troops are fitted, the Council will release the arrested radicals into my custody. I’ll take them with me to Europa. Otherwise they would be hanged. Everyone benefits.”

“If that’s what you call benefit. Aren’t people afraid the Taino will invade Expedition?”

“That hasn’t been announced yet,” he said. “We’re keeping it secret for now.”

“What hasn’t been announced yet? An invasion?”

Bee’s face flooded with color. She downed a cup of tea in one gulp as if she wished it were rum.

“Our agreement with the Taino,” he said, as if such an alliance was foreordained and natural.

“The Taino rule the Antilles! You’re nothing but a dispossessed general hoping for troops and money to fight a war in a land an ocean away! What can you have that they want?”

“Besides the spoils of victory to fill a treasury emptied by decades of expansionist wars? An opening of significant trade and export without too much risk to the cacica’s authority?” He walked to the sideboard to make another plate of food.

“Is that enough to interest them?” I demanded.

Bee set down the cup and stared at the polished tabletop. Never in my life had I seen her shy from anything. Never. She managed a tremulous smile. “I am to get married.”

I sat back, hard, in the chair. “Married!”

She glanced toward the general. He nodded exactly in the manner of a professor encouraging a favored student as she gropes her way toward the correct answer.

She reached across the table to lay a hand atop one of mine. “If the price of hope is marriage, then so be it. To a man of high rank and good manners, so I am assured.”

“You agreed to marry him sight unseen?”

“Don’t be so naïve, Cat! That’s how such things work. You should know! They want me because I am a dream walker. Here in the Antilles, dream walkers are honored because they are so rare.”