Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

“I thought you worked at the carpentry yard.”

“I work there when they have a big order and I can spare the time. Vai, I can row yee across if yee wish.”

The professora fetched a squat ceramic jar packed with straw and ice, from which she drew a pair of ice lenses strung on chains. “These are the last two I have. They are working on more over in the troll town refrigerium.”

“Do Chartji’s aunt and uncle live in troll town, or here?”

“Their workshop is in troll town. They came here because Vai couldn’t move about the city.”

Vai slipped the chains over his neck and slid the lenses under his jacket. We gave our thanks to the professora and walked to the pier. Kofi shifted a barrel and crate to the bow so Vai and I could share the stern bench. Vai had brought along one of the faded old pagnes, which he folded over the bench so his jacket would not have to touch the weathered and stained wood. I made a great show of getting into the boat in an effort to not touch anything that might sully my humble but pretty pagne. He leaned enough to rock the boat so I almost lost my balance and he had an excuse to pull me close on the bench with his arm around me.

“This shall be painful, I fear,” said Kofi as he unshipped the oars and pushed off. “For I have to sit facing yee two in order to row.”

“I was just thinking of leaning here against Vai with my eyes shut and my mouth closed quite tamely for the whole of the voyage.”

They seemed happy to ignore me. It struck me how much they genuinely liked each other, how their talk flowed with the ease of people who have spent a lot of time conversing together. That ease, the motion of the boat, Vai’s arm around me and his shoulder against my cheek, and the sun’s warmth on my head so relaxed me that I dozed off.

The boat’s bumping against a pier roused me.

“Good luck to yee,” Kofi was saying softly, “for I can see how much she matter to yee.”

I felt him kiss my hair. “She’s awake. Aren’t you, Catherine?”

I opened my eyes to bask in Vai’s smile. He gathered up the coiled rope with the arm that wasn’t fixed around me. A thin man with sun-lightened hair and the splotched and freckled sun-weathered skin of a man born in northern climes loped over to help us tie up.

“Ja, Kofi-lad,” said the fellow, with a polite nod at me and Vai. “I’s looking for work today. Yee got anything?”

Kofi and Vai exchanged a glance, and Vai lowered his chin enough to signal agreement.

“Ja, maku,” said Kofi. “But here, hold the boat while I get out.”

Kofi leaped up to the pier with the ease of a man accustomed to the harbor and made a show of helping me out, which I understood as an attempt to make up for his suspicion of me. Vai shook out the pagne and followed. Folk on the jetty did notice him, and his clothes, and his good looks, and I supposed that, like Bee, he desired and perhaps even enjoyed the attention. But he did not seem to notice it as he walked a short way with Kofi.

Kofi spoke in a low voice. “As for the other, yee must promise me yee shall do nothing rash. Don’ let yee pride get in the way of yee thinking.”

Vai grabbed my hand to pull me up alongside him. “I can keep a level head.”

“’Twould be the first time,” said Kofi, “but listen, maku. Yee can be the net we throw across the ocean to the radicals in Europa.”

“I think it is our best choice, for I’m sure there’s no other way to force the mage Houses and princes to change.”

“If any man know what power these mage Houses have, it shall be yee, Vai.”

“Yes, it shall be. They will not go down without an ugly fight.”

Shaking hands, they looked each other in the eye with such grim smiles, like two men about to ride into battle, that a swell of fear surged up from the pit of my stomach.

I knew then I would do anything to protect him, as my mother had once done to protect the man she loved. When I rested a hand on the top of my cane, the sense that my mother stood beside me, in understanding and support, bloomed so strongly in my spirit that for an instant I was sure I felt her touch on my shoulder. She had been a soldier, and now I must be one.

Kofi offered me a hand in the radical manner. He seemed about to say something but instead he slapped Vai on the shoulder and went back to his boat.

Vai took my hand and we walked along the jetty toward the main gate. Sailors reeled drunkenly toward a ship. A man tacked up a broadsheet with the bold headline BOYCOTT on a public board as people clustered around to read the radicals’ call to boycott the wedding areito.

“Why did he look at you and you nod? When that man asked for a day’s hire?”

“Kofi’s household is poor, Catherine.”

“It is?”