Cold Fire

  “I’m sorry about Drake,” I said. “I really am. I was drunk.”

  He did not answer, but I felt his thoughts as if they were knives. Very cold edgy knives.

  “I mean, he got me drunk.”

  “I can now see how well that would have worked out for him.”

  “Ouch! That was unkind!” I waited, but he fumingly said nothing, so I went on. “Anyway, I had just washed up on that place we’re not supposed to talk about. I was so scared and confused.”

  His anger veered off me and slammed elsewhere. “As I suspected, he took advantage of you. Or worse.”

  “He saved my life. Or maybe he didn’t. I’m still not sure who to believe about that. Do you know what? He uses dying people as catch-fires to heal people who have a chance to live. That seems wrong to me but what if it is right? If they’re already dying, I mean?”

  “Lord of All, that is a grim tale,” Vai murmured. “Fire mages seem rank upon the ground here in the Antilles.”

  His words caused my thoughts to gallop down a more interesting path, one whose peculiar contours I ought to have surveyed before now. “Vai, what’s wrong with you?”

  “What makes you think anything is wrong with me?”

  “When you’re angry, shouldn’t there be hammering waves of cold? Shattered iron? For one moment there at the ball court, weren’t rifles killed and flames extinguished? Yet then didn’t a pistol go off ? Given you are a rare and potent cold mage, how can you sit in the courtyard and not extinguish Aunty’s cook fire? What is going on with your magic? Is it you? Or is it this place?”

  He said nothing. We walked a ways in a calm resembling truce.

  At length, he spoke. “I’m wondering how you are able to walk unseen. I weave cold fire to form false images. You truly veil yourself from the sight of others.”

  “From everyone but you.”

  “I will always know where you are. Maybe you will tell me how you manage this magic.”

  “You think I will tell you because I am drunk.”

  “The drink does loosen your…control.”

  I staggered away from him as the abyss that was my future yawned before me to coax me into its chasm. “No, what am I thinking? It’s impossible. I have to hold on.”

  “Why should it be impossible, Catherine? Hold on to what?”

  “How can it not be impossible? Haven’t we already had this conversation? Aren’t I already bound—?” The wind was tearing at the clouds, and in a rent appeared the masked white face of the moon, its light a talon dug into my throat. I halted as if I had slammed into a glacial cliff.

  He took two steps, then turned back to take my hand. “Catherine?”

  I was a statue, with a statue’s grindingly hoarse whisper like a chisel chipping away at my very soul. “What makes you think he will ever let me speak? ”

  The calluses on his fingers made his touch a little rough, and yet thereby their very ordinariness settled his presence over me like balm. “Tell me who ‘he’ is, Catherine. We will find a way to unchain the binding.”

  In a rumble of thunder I heard the warning boom of his voice. I broke away from Vai. I hurried, for I was sorely afraid, and I was not truly sure what scared me most: that I would never be able to speak or that I would. I came to the closed gate first and scratched at it.

  When Aunty Djeneba answered, I lunged forward to kiss her. “Aunty! I missed you!”

  She stepped back to let us in with a look at Vai that would have scorched wood.

  He was not intimidated. “She’s drunk. Did you let her go out this way?”

  She smelled my breath and recoiled. “I did not know she had imbibed quite so much rum.”

  He sighed. “I found her precipitating a riot at the Speckled Iguana.”

  “I never! I was with Bala and Gaius. They were guarding me.”

  Aunty set hands on hips and looked at Vai. “I can see yee would have believed yee had to remove her from that situation.”

  “I went there to look for you,” I said to Vai, to reassure him. No need to mention Drake!

  Aunty Djeneba made a noise suspiciously like a choked laugh. By the light of a single candle over the bar, other forms moved. It took me a moment to realize it was not a burning candle but a glow of cold fire that had been illuminated, no doubt, all the while he had been gone.

  Uncle Joe called softly, “Is that Vai and Cat, safely back?”

  “Yes, and not going out again this ill-omened night,” said Aunty Djeneba in a voice none dared argue with. “Kayleigh and Luce, yee go up to bed. The gate is barred.”

  Vai shaped a second floating bauble to light the family members to their beds, but he and I remained by the closed gate, him unmoving and me swaying to the surge of the waves and the voice of the wind. They were living creatures, calling me. My sire had raked his fingers through my heart and heard its singing. Now he was sending his minions to cut off my tongue so I could never betray who I was and how he had made me. Maybe this was his way to stop me from saving Bee!

  Vai said, in the arrogant voice which meant he was strangling a powerful emotion, “After what you’ve drunk, I daresay you need to go pee, Catherine.”

  “How clever you are, Vai. I do!”

  He accompanied me to the washhouse, waiting outside. I did what I needed to do and afterward admired the fixtures in a glow of cold fire and yanked on the pulley three times because it worked so cunningly well with water running out and in.

  From outside, he said, “If you do not come out now, Catherine, I will assume you are in trouble and come in.”

  I hurried out and wrapped my arms around him. “After a year and a day has passed,” I said, finding in this thought a glimpse of sun. “Then I can do what I want without being chained by it.”

  He squirmed out of my embrace. “What can you possibly mean by that?”

  “Who would have thought it, the Thrice-Praised poet spitting words as crude and unpleasant as an adder’s? Can adders talk? Do they spit venom? Or just bite?”

  “I’d like to know which Thrice-Praised poet. It’s a common epithet.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him, for I ought to have told him beforehand about what I had learned from the head of the poet Bran Cof. I had meant to, hadn’t I? I opened my mouth, and there were no words there. Bran Cof  ’s master was my master. I could not speak of him.

  “You are tired.” He steered me upstairs and into the room. “Kayleigh, put your cot across the door so she can’t wander out. She’s that kind of drunk.”

  “What kind of drunk?” Kayleigh obediently dragged her cot to the open door, where he stood poised to escape me.

  “Vai,” I said urgently. “Why are you leaving?”

  “A lecherous drunk,” he said.

  “Why are you leaving, then, Brother?” asked Kayleigh in a tone whose sneer I could not like.

  “Don’t you mock me,” he said to her, “or shall I have to remind you—”

  “I can’t be a lecherous drunk,” I protested, having finally worked through his comment. “Lechers are male.”

  She snickered. “This must be very difficult for you, Vai.”

  He shut the door.

  “I recommend a bucket of cold water or a touch of cold magic if you dare,” she called, but he was gone.

  “You have a mean streak,” I remarked, very wisely I am sure.

  “No worse than you teasing him the way you do! Come here. Go away. Kofi says you’re two-faced like a star-apple tree.”

  I sat down on my cot. “How can a tree have two faces, when it doesn’t even have one?”

  “I don’t understand, Cat. If you don’t want him, then why don’t you stay away from him?”

  “How can I bear to stay away from him?” I whispered. Lying back, I found that the room, the building, or perhaps the entire island pitched and rolled like a ship at sea.

  “I hope you’re not going to throw up,” muttered Kayleigh from her cot at the door. “Because you have to clean it up if you do.”


  “I feel fine.”

  I fell into sleep. Or so I supposed, because a crow flew in through the shuttered window, stirring the air with black wings. Salt poured onto the roof as though ground from a bottomless mill. A rhythmic shaking danced through the room like a procession of invisible drummers at an areito. People were talking, but I couldn’t understand their words. They were suckling fruit, the scent of guava in the air. A bat hung from the rafters, its eyes obsidian as it spoke to me in a voice like a rasp. “Yee should not have defied him. He is angry because yee tried to talk. Now yee shall feel the lash of the master’s power.”

  24

  I woke up.

  A shutter was banging rhythmically in a pounding, relentless wind. Rain sheeted on the roof like a downpour of pebbles. Dawn’s light suggested the outline of the shuttered windows. Because I had slept in my clothes, everything was rumpled and creased. My braid had begun to unravel, and I had to wipe strands of hair off my sweaty cheek. Kayleigh slept so soundly it was the work of a moment to shift her cot, crack the door, and squeeze through. I paused at the top of the stairs.

  The battering gusts of wind forced me to grip the railing. Rain pelted sideways. Uncle Joe, Uncle Baba the fisherman, and Aunty’s unmarried son emerged from rooms downstairs, followed by several of the men who rented hammock space. I helped them lash down everything that was not already tied down. The canvas roof over the restaurant was rolled down, leaving a stripped rectangle of ground soon churned to mud. Even the ceiba tree in the courtyard had netting thrown over it and staked to the ground.

  “Where is Vai?” I shouted.

  “He is gone down to the jetty!” shouted Uncle Joe. “We shall go as soon as we is done here. Got to move people inland. The Angry Queen come. Someone have offended her. Listen.” A deep dull boom rolled in the southeast. “Her herald speak. Then the flood-bringer shall come.”

  I did not ask permission to go to the jetty with them. I simply went. After they had asked me twice to go back, they gave up and let me walk with them if you could call walking what was really leaning into the howl and shuffling forward as against a hand that kept trying to sweep you back. We passed groups of people trudging inland hauling belongings, trundling carts, or carrying cages with bedraggled birds. The city hunkered down like an animal hoping to survive.

  When we came to the wide avenue that fronted the jetty, the wind-lashed waters greeted us. Waves clashed and roiled out on the churning brown waters of the bay. Clouds towered along the horizon, as dark as an angry heart.

  The wind screamed, blowing my braid parallel to the ground. I could scarcely stand upright as I struggled in the wake of the men toward a damaged building shoreside—one of many boathouses—where folk were trying to hoist a fallen beam. Carpenters had brought tools to cut and split, working beside the wardens they had fought last night. By the evidence of their frantic activity, they were aiming to free people trapped inside as waves pounded at the shattered plank flooring.

  A man was laughing.

  A lofty shape strode across the bay, flinging shafts. These insubstantial spears ghosted past, curling to become the wind that tore through the streets. The man stood not taller than me, and yet his shadow spanned the sky. His long beautiful black hair writhed, its tendrils growing to engulf every building, every tree, every frail struggling person.

  “Run, little sister,” he called mockingly. “I’s the storm’s herald. The Angry Queen follow close behind me. Run if yee can.”

  Waves rushed up over the revetment and the wharves and onto the avenue, sizzling around my ankles. He stepped out of the air beside me. His face was scored and scarred by zigzag lines so scintillant I had to look away lest I be blinded. A shaft drove into my flesh, and I found myself on my knees in the rising water. The wave that washed around me sucked out, pulling me toward the sea. By the time I struggled gasping to my feet the shadow had walked at least half a Roman mile west along the shore.

  A shout rose from the boathouse as three men were carried out of the building, injured but alive. I ran over. Straddling the fallen beam, men were arguing over whether anyone was left inside. The floorboards had cracked to create a splintering hole in the floor beneath which soughed seawater. An arm appeared, tossing a saw and an axe up into the light. A head appeared, and Vai levered himself up to sit on the edge.

  An older man shouted to someone still below. “Kofi-lad! Come up! The flood is coming.”

  I pushed through men stowing their gear.

  Vai looked up. “I should have known you’d walk straight into danger,” he shouted at me. Then he looked into the hole. “Kofi! You’re the last one. Come up!”

  In a wreckage of shattered boards and boats below, Kofi slipped and cursed. “I’s coming. ’Tis just that he is like my uncle.”

  “Is someone missing?” I yelled.

  Vai said, “The owner is missing. We only found his nephews and the hired boatman.”

  Before anyone could stop me, I swung my legs over and dropped. Vai swore, and I had no sooner gotten my balance atop a sliding mass of planks than he hit beside me, the heap shifting. I slid. He caught himself on a hand. A bulb of cold fire cast a glow across the carnage. A wave bubbled up from beneath broken boards. Kofi turned.

  “Get out of here, gal!” His contemptuous grimace brought me up short. “Yee’s not impressing any man except Vai.”

  With the water coming up, I had no time. “Quiet!”

  I balanced across the back of a smashed boat and in a crouch crept up into the nether shadows where the back part of the boathouse had collapsed. I set my hands against one of the ground stilts and leaned there as another wave hissed in, swirling my pagne up to my knees. As the wave subsided, I drew the threads that bind the world into my heart and my ears. And I listened. Nails creaked and groaned as the wind slowly pried at them. Soon the whole edifice would tear loose. Waves slurped beneath the debris. Kofi muttered a complaint, but Vai shushed him.

  Human breathing had a distinctive flavor that might flow fast or slowly but that could not be mistaken for a cat’s prim proud air or a dog’s slovenly panting. Another body dwelled here. Blood tainted the air like a sliver of salt. A heart’s erratic pulse cast a fragile line into my hands.

  “He is here. Still alive.”

  I crawled over the wreckage until I found the spot. I began to pull out boards. The bauble of cold fire drifted down to light my way, for Vai had taken no effort to make it appear like a lamp. Kofi and Vai appeared with an axe and a pry bar. We cleared boards to find another overturned boat beneath, with which we grappled until it became clear it was stuck.

  “His head is up under the bow,” I said.

  With four powerful swings, Kofi smashed a hole in the half-buried stern, then used the pry bar to clear out the splintered boards. Vai clambered back over the debris to shout up at the remaining men, asking for rope and a net.

  “I’ll go,” I said to Kofi. “You’re too big.”

  After a hesitation, Kofi stepped back. I squeezed through and crawled up into the marrow of the boat, up beneath the ribs to where a man lay unconscious. I felt along a skinny body to a sunken chest which barely rose and fell. A sticky mat of blood covered his hair, but his skull seemed intact. The ribs of the boat shuddered as Kofi axed a bigger hole in the stern.

  “Cat!” he shouted. “Water is rising! Can yee hear me?”

  “I’ve got him!” I tugged him through a slime of mud down to the opening. They got hold of his feet, so I shimmied back to cradle his head as they started to pull him out.

  A wave poured in, dragging at Kofi and Vai as they braced to hold on to the old man. I lost hold as water surged into the cavity and slammed me into the ribs of the boat.

  Then it sucked out. My foot caught and twisted on the rower’s bench above, trapping me under the boat. Spewing and choking, I freed my foot and pushed up to hands and knees. A skin of grime coated my lips. When I breathed in through my nose, a spike of salty water lanced up behind my eyes in a hot knife of
pain.

  “Cat? Cat!” A shadow blocked the hole. “Throw me some cursed rope, Kofi!”

  I heaved, lungs spasming.

  Barely heard over the rough tearing rumble of the wind, men cried out in warning.

  The whole building rocked as the flood slammed into it and boiled up underneath, filling the entire overturned boat, which was my prison. I had time to suck in one gasp of air before the slippery grasp of the water embraced me. Its moist mouth fastened over my lips to inhale the breath out of my lungs. A liquid voice murmured in my heart: “Let go, little sister. Walk with me and me brother who is the thunder. Walk with us into the storm.”

  I open my mouth to call for my mother, for it is her hand clutching mine, but the furious water wrenches her away and I am drowning in the churn of the flood.

  My head hit a corner and my knee scraped up splinters like a nest of prickling burning bites. I fought, but fear tore out my courage as water streamed through my parted lips.

  Then Vai’s arms held me, and he dragged me out. Foam popped at my nostrils. My head breached. I gasped in air. Vai hauled me up. I hung on him as a dead weight, for I was a quivering frightened drowning child who had lost her papa and mama to the flood.

  He carried me over the wreckage of the under-space, slipping and sliding. Kofi had already gone up with the old man. Distant shouts barked a warning.

  Another huge wave slammed into the building, shuddering the structure half off its stilts as the entire building groaned. Water gushed into the under-space, rushing up to engulf everything including us.

  My ears popped as the temperature dropped. The wave crackled into a ragged, rippled curtain of ice, stopping just short of washing over us. Above, water poured down through the hole on top of us and slapped into the ice wall, hissing and grinding.

  Vai was shaking all over, his skin as cold as winter. He had his free arm outstretched. In the curve of his forefinger and thumb, he was holding a necklace chain with a round metal ring like the eye of a spyglass. Within the ring was a circle of what looked like cloudy glass. He released the ring, and the chain dropped limply against his wet singlet.