Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

“Will you come with me, Catherine? Or would you rather not?”

“What choice do I have?” I demanded.

His lips thinned as he pressed them tight as if to hold back words he didn’t want to say. Then he spoke. “Why, the choice I just gave you. Which I meant. Is there something I need to know?”

I flushed, utterly embarrassed. “What do you think you might need to know?”

He looked skyward, released a breath, and addressed me without looking at me. “I must wonder if your…affections are engaged.”

“My affections are not engaged. I do not love any man, if that is what you mean.”

“Of course it’s what I mean! What am I to think, having seen what I saw?”

“Did it not occur to you that he’s the one who abandoned me? In a strange city? Oh, la, darling! I have secret business of my own and I’ll return to fetch you when I get around to it?”

He looked at the ground, his expression flashing through a series of emotions too complex to unravel. Hard to imagine the man who had worn perfectly polished boots and expensive, tailored dash jackets standing in worn trousers and dusty bare feet in a carpentry yard! “I’m sorry to hear you were abandoned.”

“You don’t sound sorry. You sound pleased.”

“Very well, Catherine.” His gaze flashed up to sear me. “I’m not sorry. And I am pleased.” He brushed the scabbed-over wound above my right eye, his touch cautious but his tone trembling as on the brink of a cliff. “Unless he’s hurt you. In that case, I’ll kill him for you, if you like.”

“I don’t find that amusing.”

Thank Tanit, he looked down again, for I could not have borne the intensity of those eyes for one more heart-stopping breath.

I went on. “It would be better just to let it go.”

“How like a woman to say so!” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said too quickly. When he looked up, he had veiled that boiling glare behind a screen of prickly disdain. “My offer still stands. Come with me, if you wish. I ask nothing of you, except that you allow me to offer you shelter. Or go your own way, if that is what you prefer.”

“I’ll come with you.” I didn’t want to let go of a hand that was like a lifeline in a storm-tossed sea.

He closed his eyes briefly, making no reply. Nor did he let go of my hand.

We walked inland. Once away from the carpentry yard we were just another young couple, although I am sure I looked as if I had just been fished out of the sea, so bedraggled was I. The neighborhood was laid out in a grid plan, two-story buildings behind gates and walls, mostly workshops and residential compounds. In the streets, children played a game by hitting a ball with their knees and elbows and calves, and it was quite astonishing how they kept it from touching the ground without ever catching it in their hands. Women dyed cloth in vats and hung the cloth from lines to dry. One pretty woman looked up, began to smile as if to call out a greeting to Vai, then saw me. As her eyes widened, she nudged a companion, and they whispered as they watched us go.

We walked up a quiet boulevard where men were sewing companionably under cloth awnings. The streets were paved with smooth-fitting stone swept clean of debris, and posted with gas lamps for the coming of evening. Past every gate opened a courtyard where more people, of all ages, lounged under shaded shelters or busied themselves at some manner of work. Women carried baskets of vegetables and fruit on their heads. More than one smiled at Vai with a friendly—or over-friendly—greeting, only to notice me with surprise or disbelief. He was polite to everyone, but he plowed forward without stopping.

We turned a corner onto a dusty lane shaded by trees. He led me in through an open gate to a sprawling courtyard with a cistern, a tree, and a two-story wing abutting the back. About a third of the space was taken up by tables and benches set out beneath a vine-swept latticed roof. Behind the tables stretched a counter like a bar in a tavern. To the left lay an open-air kitchen. In its shade, two girls were grating tubers into moist pulp.

A healthily stout woman of middle age stood at a stone hearth, cooking on a griddle. Seeing Vai, she smiled as might an aunt who spots her favorite nephew come to visit. Seeing me, she abandoned the griddle to a girl and, wiping her hands on a cloth tied over her pagne and blouse, walked over to us.

“Never tell me!” she said with a laugh.

“Yes, this is Catherine.” He turned to me. “Catherine, this is Aunty Djeneba. She owns this lodging house.”

“Peace to you, Aunty,” I said, in the village way, because she reminded me of the women of the Tarrant countryside and Adurnam’s markets for whom a long exchange of greetings was the measure of politeness. “Do you have peace?”

“Good morning, Cat’reen,” she answered. “’Tis pleasing to make yee acquaintance.”

“Cat is fine.”

“Cat it shall be, then.”

I wasn’t sure how to go on, so I glanced at Vai for help.