Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

Bee’s gaze hardened, reminding me of an axe. “Did you listen to nothing that Kehinde and Brennan said? With the right weapons and allies, we can bring them down. A legal code matters.”

“You’re a radical, too! You and Vai both!”

Her gaze softened. “So it is more than just his looks!”

I fastened my fingers around the wrought-iron railing. The vivid memory of his passionate, angry kisses mocked me. “I wonder how far I’ll go to convince him I did not betray him.”

“There is something Andevai wants you think the general can give him. Offer him that.”

“Oh, Bee, I thought I was offering Vai so much, to share both the burdens and the risks of trying to break the chains of Four Moons House, when I could have been free of them. But he doesn’t even know it. Why should he listen to me now?”

“If he is not willing to listen to you, then he isn’t worth suffering over. Really, dearest, this isn’t like you. You know you have to try.”

Who was I, to feel fear? I, who was the weapon of the Master of the Wild Hunt? In the heart of me, like a shard of obsidian, lay a cruel gleaming kernel that would allow me to do what I must to save those I loved. I need only grasp it, cut my skin on it, and let it drink fully of my blood.

“I’m going to save you, Bee,” I said. “I’m the only one who can.”

Her lips twisted up. “Really, Cat. The man’s vainglorious arrogance has been rubbing off on you. Now, follow my lead.”

She opened a door and swept into the chamber, leaving me to follow in her wake like so much wind-chopped flotsam. She threw a smile at Drake that made him wince, and addressed the general. “We are going shopping.”

“Of course, my dear.” Camjiata began reading a pamphlet whose title was On the Dynamical Theory of Heat: Some Experiments and Conclusions as Delivered by Professora Habibah ibnah Alhamrai at the Expedition Society of Natural Historians.

We cut a swath through the shockingly expensive shops of Avenue Kolonkan. After a strenuous morning of examining fabric, smallclothes, footwear, kerchiefs and head wraps and hats, as well as ribbons and beads, necklaces, earrings, and painted gourds suitable for storing such treasures, we rested our feet in the shade of an arbor in a private courtyard. Well-dressed and well-groomed women—no men—drank carafes of sweetened lime juice garnished with mint leaves.

After we had quenched our thirst with an obscenely pleasurable and hotly spiced drink called chocolatl and worked through a platter of pastries, Bee nodded. “We have suitably bored the two men who are following us. Take yourself to the toilet and vanish. The gates into the old city close at sunset. I believe there are secret corridors in the house, so anything we say can be overheard. I should have told you before.” She pressed a coin into my hand. “For the washroom attendant.”

“The washroom attendant?”

“She has to earn her living, too. That way.” She pointed toward an archway set under whitewashed walls, then returned to nibbling on a custard tart layered with slices of star-apple.

The washroom lay tucked in the back beside a lattice that screened off the kitchen. Women worked, chopping, grinding, and conversing about the highest-scoring member of the Anolis women’s team, who had begun to hook her elbow shots in a manner that suggested a hidden injury would soon put an end to her glory days. An elderly woman in a faded but scrupulously clean pagne dozed in the shade beside the tiled entrance to a little toilet.

A piercing shriek from the courtyard brought a crashing halt to the kitchen conversation.

“It stung me!” screamed Bee. “The pain! I feel…so sick…I’m going to throw up!”

I dropped the coin into the gourd, drew the threads of shadow around me, and slipped out through the kitchen into a side street. I had left my cane in Bee’s room, shoved beneath the mattress, so even the trolls ignored me as I strode along the busy streets of Expedition. Only the occasional dwarf mammoth showed a tendency to probe in my direction with its exquisitely sensitive trunk. Folk worked on roofs and walls, repairing the damage from the hurricane. Mostly people were muttering about the warden’s arrest of an elderly man known to broadsheet readers as the Virtuous Rock, who had spearheaded the radicals’ drive for an Assembly. The Council had made it known that in the event of a general strike, the man and his granddaughter would be hanged.

Nerves made me sweat more than the sun. I was chewing on my lower lip as I halted before the gate to Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse. It was propped open just enough for a child to slip through, a sign that the establishment was not yet open for business although I could hear the comforting flow of voices as the family made ready. I waited until the street lay momentarily empty, then dropped my glamour and squeezed past the gate into the courtyard.

Luce, sweeping, saw me first. The scrape of her broom ceased as her lips parted. Uncle Joe, at the bar, looked up. In the kitchen peeling sweet potatoes, Brenna paused.

Silence in surprise has a quality as loud as a scream. Like a ripple from a thrown stone, it soon laps over the entire pond. The children, busy braiding streamers as for an upcoming festival, fixed their hands in their laps as if they thought crows were about to swoop down and rip them clean off. In her shaded sling chair, old Aunty Brigid cackled with a frightful rasp in her sleep, “nr nr not the owl. Leave me be. I’s not ready to go yet.”

Aunty Djeneba turned. For an eternity her gaze measured me as her expression congealed into disgust. Every voice faded. All movement in the courtyard ceased except for the drip of water from the rain-soaked leaves of the ceiba tree.

At last she spoke. “Sly women like to yee is not welcome in this respectable establishment, maku.”

My lips had gone numb and my feet turned to dead weights, impossible to shift. My cheeks flamed. I opened my mouth but no word came out for there was nothing left on my tongue except shame and hurt as they all stared at me until I wished only to sink into the dirt and be obliterated.

All but Aunty Djeneba pointedly looked away, and that was worse.

“Yee reduced him to tears, if that is what yee came to hear and gloat over, witch. He is gone and not coming back so there is no one here for yee to torment. Lucretia shall fetch yee things, for yee shall not bring the wardens down on us on a charge of theft.”

Beneath the throttling shock quivered words, barely deliverable in a hoarse mangled voice. “It isn’t what it seemed. I can explain. They used me to get at him. I didn’t know…I had no idea…” How pointless and stupid the words sounded. How pathetic and cheap. “I need to find him. I have to warn him he’s still in danger.”

“Did yee not get yee full payment because yee did not deliver up the fire bane?” Like storm clouds, she swelled in indignation as I cowered under the tumult of her anger. “How did we not see it, yee washed up with yee hair unbound on the jetty in the company of another man? With yee magics and yee hair like a net to catch him in? How yee blinded him, poor lad. I must wonder if any of it were true, or if yee even went so far as to bite yee own arm to make him worry for yee. Just get out, maku. We have no more wish to ever see yee again nor hear that lying voice.”