Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

I bit back a smile and, instead, drew down my brows to indicate vexed consideration. “Is there a point to this pedantic speech? As you know, I’m very hard-working.”

He slid his hands caressingly up my hips, and by the tensing of his arms and back, my Barahal training and cat’s instincts warned me he was about to attempt an abrupt reversal.

“I don’t think you should try that, Vai,” I murmured, bracing myself.

“But are you truly hard-working, Catherine? I suppose we’re about to find out.”

32

I woke at dawn with birds singing and the scent of flowers wafting in through the open shutters, which seemed a little much even considering my euphoric mood. Lying tucked in against him, my head resting on his shoulder, felt the most natural thing in the world. In case he was still asleep, I whispered.

“Vai?”

“Mmm.”

“I had no idea.”

Eyes shut, he smiled in a drowsy, contented way. “Of course you couldn’t have had. You weren’t with me.”

Silence allowed me to contemplate this astonishing statement for a while, during which I stroked my fingers up and down his admirable chest.

“Vai?”

“Mmm?”

“Are you really that conceited? Or are you having a bit of a joke with yourself at times?”

“Catherine, I promise you, no one will ever make you feel as good as I will.”

“As the djeli said, ‘Men act humble until they get what they want.’ Although obviously the djeli who said that hadn’t met you. Anyway, wouldn’t a person of scientific inclination say that to verify such a statement I would need to make a significant number of comparative tests with other subjects?”

His eyes opened as at a shot. “No!”

“Then I could never actually know.”

He pushed up onto one elbow, dislodging my head from its pleasant resting place, and brushed hair from my cheek. “You can’t possibly have any complaints.”

“But I do.”

His hand stilled. “Name one.”

“You’re talking.”

He smiled and bent to kiss me.

Things were proceeding in just the way I had planned when a series of hollow pops rattled the roof. He released me and rolled off the bed.

“Do you need me?” I asked as he quickly dressed in a pair of faded and clumsily mended workman’s trousers and a singlet he pulled off a shelf.

“Of course I need you, Catherine, but not in that workshop. You were fortunate yesterday. They’re obsessed with my ability to kill combustion. They keep lighting different combinations of things on fire and adjusting me for distance, angle, and substances placed between me and the fire. Eventually they’re going to burn the whole place down.”

He went out the door so fast he forgot to close it behind him. I used a foot to hook my pagne off the floor and tied it just above my breasts the way we women had at Aunty Djeneba’s when we went down to shower, the cloth covering me from armpits to knees. I stuck my head out the door, but the little courtyard was deserted since the professora slept on the other side of the compound and all the other rooms in this wing were empty.

I hurried to the outhouse set out from the compound’s outer wall, which Vai had shown me in the middle of the night. Built into the wall was a washroom furnished with a brass tub, and a sideboard on which sat a copper basin, three pitchers, and threadbare pagnes to use as towels. The water we had splashed all over in the middle of the night had dried up. I filled the pitchers from the pump outside. I combed out my hair with my fingers and braided it, then twisted the braid around a stick from the garden and pinned it up on my head so I could wash. Afterward, I refilled the pitchers and hung up the towels to dry.

Back in the room, I tidied up the bed and the precautionary sheaths Vai had been so prudent, and confident, as to obtain the night of the areito. Smiling like a besotted fool, I shook out and folded the clothes we’d strewn all over. In my haste to get off his dash jacket, I had accidentally torn two buttons off a cuff, so I draped the jacket over the back of the chair for mending later. A cedar traveling chest tucked in a corner caught my eye. Kneeling, I opened it. Gracious Melqart! How many fashionable dash jackets and waistcoats could a man own?

How could a woman who loved cloth resist stroking each neatly folded garment? He favored vivid colors: deep browns as dark as his skin, burnished golds, kingly reds, and warm bright oranges, one midnight purple as dark as ecstasy, and indigos so saturated they would drive a peacock to envy. The stronger the patterns the better: plaitwork and interlace, dyed damask beaten and pounded until the fabric was stiff, bold geometric designs, and some strange, crazy block prints. At the bottom, folded between sheets of paper as if to hide it, lay the spectacular red-and-gold-chained dash jacket he had worn the night of the areito.