Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

“Yet she is no opia,” he cried, with an orator’s gesture that invited his audience to note how he had agreed. “She is a witch and a salter. She has used her witchcraft to escape from Salt Island and means to infest us all with the salt plague.”

A man who knew how to infest an orderly crowd with terror and strife could make the mob do his bidding. As startled and scared as the Expeditioners had been at the appearance of a coach riding down the wings of night, the salt plague frightened them far more. People pushed and shoved and began trying to climb up into the risers where the Taino, so collected and calm before, were now looking alarmed. Everyone seemed desperate to get away before I lurched over to bite them.

At Prince Caonabo’s order, Taino soldiers made a fence around the ball court’s exits, while others hurried onto the risers to restore order. But I wasn’t worried about them. Captain Tira was pushing through the surging crowd; she had a hand on her sword and her gaze on me, and I didn’t have to be my sire’s daughter or a Hassi Barahal spy to figure she had just been ordered to kill me.

Rory slipped down out of the coach with the grace of a prowling cat and handed me the machete I’d stolen from Salt Island. I stepped back, weighing the machete in my hand as I looked around for Camjiata. But it was Vai I saw. He shoved through the crowd with a naked blade of cold steel in his hand. He looked stunned and angry and oh so welcome as he placed himself beside me.

Captain Tira halted, too far away to lunge at me with her falcata.

“Catherine, they told me you were sequestered with Beatrice!”

“They lied. I was kidnapped and sent to Salt Island.”

As if to reassure himself that I was real and not illusion, he reached for my hand.

A searingly cold wind swept across the ball court. An icy sleet began to drizzle. My sire stepped down out of the coach as into a fine summer’s balm.

His gaze met mine just as Vai’s fingers brushed my hand.

The Master of the Wild Hunt smiled. It was nothing more than a slight upward quirk of the lips and an infinitesimal narrowing of the eyes, but it was the most horrifying expression I had ever seen. I snatched my betraying touch back from Vai’s, but it was too late.

My sire licked his lips, as if tasting the most delicious food.

“Strong and sweet!” His smile mocked me, for he understood perfectly my look of horror. “You are truly my daughter, to have sought and bound such rich blood as this.”

“No!” At last I spotted Camjiata making his way toward the end of the ball court, hoping to escape Vai’s cold steel and my anger. “That’s your prey!”

“The fire weaver?” His gaze lifted to the cacica. “So rare it is to find one such as her. I knew there was tremendous power hiding behind their spirit fence. But I couldn’t get through it to find out. Yet after all, the smell of the cold mage’s blood delights me far more.”

“No! No!” Camjiata was almost out of sight. “Him! Over there!”

My sire stared right where I pointed. “I see only darkness. There is no one there. Do not try to deceive me.”

The Master of the Wild Hunt was blind in the mortal world except to the flare of those who channeled the energies that bind the worlds, that weave life to death and death to life, order and disorder. He could not see Camjiata to take him, even if he could be bothered to want to.

“Stand away!” The cacica’s voice cracked over the night like thunder. Fire flared in every lamp. Light blazed to reveal the Taino soldiers restoring order. The coach, with the coachman and footman, appeared as a perfectly ordinary coach at rest except for the fact its wheels did not touch the ground. What looked like low-hanging dark clouds churned above, chased by flashes of light like fireflies. The pack of hunters had not yet been released.

“Stand away, fire bane,” she called, addressing Vai before she commanded the assembled crowd. “Opia travel at their will. We have no quarrel with them, even if they invite in the spirit lords who are not welcome here. But the salt dead may never walk in Taino land lest we all be poisoned. Those who will not stay on the other shore must be destroyed by fire.”

Her gaze touched Juba’s. In that exchange I saw her sorrow and his defiance: She had favored him over his brother, and I could not tell whether he had never forgiven her for her weakness in loving him more than Caonabo, or if she would never forgive herself.

“That is the law,” she proclaimed.

Sparks shimmered to life on a hot gust of wind as she struck.

“Not my Cat.” Vai pulled me hard against him while yanking the last ice lens out from under his jacket.

Fire kindled in my heart. Abby, and the other prisoners, screamed. Prince Caonabo shouted in protest, but there was nothing he could do. The cacica was a fire mage of unimaginable power with a net of fire banes to absorb the conflagration.

Vai’s ice lens bloomed as he channeled his magic and his anger and his fear for me into it; the curve of the lens amplified its power. The cacica’s fire was vast and complex; its tendrils spanned the ball court and the plaza and farther yet, for the net of her fire magic spanned the island itself. Its threads reached as far as a sick man’s bed in distant Sharagua halfway across Kiskeya, where the constant pulse of her magic kept her dying brother alive.

All that fire, the fire bane and his ice lens killed.

Every lamp snapped out.

In far Sharagua, the heart of the cacique stopped beating. Lips parted to release his spirit into the night.

Snow spun down in a beautiful shower of sparkling white, dusting the ground.