Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

tepped back into the gloom as Rory tugged on my wrist. Abandoning the weapons, we passed through a carpentry shop smelling of sawdust and hurried by diverse passages into a hidden staircase and thus out onto another street. Brennan strode up with Bee. He had a scuffed chin and an abrasion on his right cheek. His trousers were ripped at the left knee.

“I’m getting slow,” he said. “Invincible Andraste! How did you do that, Cat?”

Bee shook her head to indicate that whatever else she had told Brennan, my secrets had never passed her lips. “It’s a Hassi Barahal secret,” she said.

“Where are the others?” I asked as we set out.

“Taking down and moving the press,” he said. “That was a spectacular diversion, Cat.”

“My thanks.” My heart was still pounding, and I had barely caught my breath, yet I felt alive as I had not for weeks now. Indeed, I was scarcely thinking of Vai constantly at all.

“Diversions are her specialty,” said Bee with a laugh. “Dearest, I can’t imagine how Andevai could ever imagine you would tolerate being closed within stultifying walls, whatever attentions he might think to assuage you with.”

“Even I would get bored, no matter how good the petting was,” said Rory.

By the time we reached the tavern I had worked up an impressive hunger. The Tavern with Two Doors was made up of two squares of buildings, one for human people and one for feathered people. Each had a central courtyard, linked by a shared wing. This central wing housed the kitchens, one for each courtyard, and other service rooms. Part of the ground floor, beneath the upper floor, lay open as a wide portico. Because it was summer, tables were set here, where rats from one side and trolls from the other could congregate as they wished. We took a table here. Men strolled up, a few to flirt with Bee but most to argue the serious business of radical philosophy. People spoke of rising up against the prince in order to open the city gates to Camjiata’s army.

I ate my way through three platters of meats flavored with sauces, but more than that I relished the talk, the laughter, the freedom to say what I wished or to get up and take a turn around the trolls’ courtyard had I the desire to do so, which I did more than once before the trolls went to bed at nightfall. Kehinde appeared late, having conveyed the components of the jobber press to its next hiding place. Rory slipped off to talk to the young man I had seen him with earlier.

I ate an entire tray of mouthwatering pastries while everyone else was debating the question of whether women could bear the burden of having the same rights as men, because if I had not kept my hands busy I would have punched every man who argued that women simply could not have any independent legal capacity separate from their fathers, husbands, or sons. I could have sat there all night, listening to Bee and Kehinde eviscerate them, with Brennan tossing in the occasional joking remark to assuage male vanity. We almost did sit there all night, talking under the gleam of lanterns because the Parisi prince, in concert with Two Gourds House, had forbidden the installation of gas lighting anywhere in the city or its outer districts.

The first birds chirruped a dawn song as we staggered to our rest. Brennan and Kehinde had taken a narrow room above the kitchens whose window looked over the trolls’ courtyard. Here rooms were cheapest, since the trolls made many people uncomfortable. Chartji and Caith slept elsewhere.

A screen divided the room to create privacy. On the side where Kehinde and Bee slept was a bed just wide enough for two, supplemented by a narrow pallet, which Bee set on the floor as Kehinde took off her shoes by the light of a candle.

“Let you and Cat share the bed, Bee. I shall take the pallet for as long as Cat is with us.”

“Are you sure, for we surely do not mind taking the pallet,” Bee said with such solemnity that I gaped at her downcast gaze and folded hands. Tension bled between the two women, yet their polite respect toward each other seemed sincere.

“There are two of you. It is unreasonable of me to take the larger space.” She glanced at the door as Brennan came in, looked our way, then vanished behind the screen. He whistled as he fussed around getting ready to sleep. A chair clacked as he shifted it. Ropes squeaked as he lay down. The tilt of Kehinde’s head made me think she was blushing.

Bee slanted a portentous glance my way. “Cat and I will be glad to share the bed.”

“Where is Rory?” I whispered as I settled onto the bed in my shift.

Kehinde chuckled. “He takes care of himself.”

As Bee snuggled down between me and the wall, the professora pulled off her tunic and lay down in trousers and under-blouse.

I whispered. “Kehinde, if I may ask, I heard you were arrested by the prince here and had to return to Massilia. Isn’t it risky for you to come back now?”

After a silence in which I thought I had perhaps offended her, she said, “The work must be done despite the risk. It is more important than one life.” She blew out the candle.

Brennan coughed.

Bee and I lay side by side in the old familiar way, holding hands.

“After the war, we’ll set up a little household together, you and me and Rory,” she whispered. “Men can come and go if we approve it or wish it, dearest. We don’t need them to live.”

“Yes.” My shattering despair subsided to a weary throb. “I can manage anything as long as we are together.”

It was almost midday when Bee and I woke. Kehinde still slept, a hand gripping the end of one of her locks as if she had never let go of a child’s habit. Brennan was gone.

We dressed and went out to wash our faces in a trough. The sun burnished the ebony of Bee’s curls as she rubbed shadowed eyes. “Blessed Tanit! Cat, why did you let me drink so much?”

In late morning most of the tables were empty. We settled where we could look over the trolls’ courtyard but also see into the courtyard of the other half of the inn. There we saw Rory laughing next to his friend. Bee tended her hangover with a mug of beer and a bowl of broth. I devoured a splendid spelt porridge garnished with butter and a creamy pear sauce.

“Whatever happened with Kemal?” I asked.