Cold Fire

  Vai flung open a door and plunged in, undoing the top five buttons of the jacket as if he meant to strip off the fine garment before it could be ruined by smoke and ash. The tang of burning made my eyes water. A line of flames hissed down the center of the open space. Smoke billowed from a tabletop. A troll was bent over the table poking at something and apparently oblivious to the fire burning an arm’s length from the hem of its sober gray-and-black dash jacket and the tip of its thick tail. A second troll emerged from a cloud of ashy soot with a glass tube pinned in its talons. Seeing me and Vai, it whistled what sounded like mellifluous birdsong.

  Then, with a jolting flash of teeth, it spoke. “No, not toward us. Away.”

  Vai jerked a chain from beneath his jacket and ran to the table. I spotted a line of buckets at the wall, some filled with dust and others with water. I grabbed one with water and placed myself at the far end of the line of fire, swinging the bucket back to get the best spray.

  Vai had turned at the opposite end of the line of flames, holding a ring within the circle of his thumb and forefinger. The two trolls were bent over the table. Gaius Sanogo and the professora appeared at the door.

  Vai shouted, “Cat, no!”

  The professora cried, “Not water!”

  The water splashed down, and the flames flashed huge. Heat slapped into me. I stumbled back; the hammer of Vai’s cold magic slammed me to the floor as my sword pulsed. The fireball vanished as if pulled into an unseen pocket. A dusting of snow swirled and faded.

  Gaius Sanogo reached me first. “Is yee all right?”

  My lips were dry and my eyes wept a few stinging tears, but nothing seemed broken. “I think so.”

  Vai pushed past him and knelt to rest a hand on my cheek. “Catherine! Speak to me!”

  I fluttered my eyelids, and pressed a hand to my forehead in the hope I appeared wan and fragile. “I…I think I…don’t feel well. Are you worried about me?”

  He recoiled. “I would be, if you seemed at all hurt, which you do not.” He rose, running a hand over his head. “You ruined their experiment,” he added, then strode to the door, where he stopped dead.

  Bee blocked it. “Blessed Tanit! Cat, are you hurt?” Her gaze axed him. She spoke in a caustic tone that would surely have burned out anyone else’s tongue had they attempted it. “Magister, did you do this to her?”

  “Me? I am the one she refuses to trust! The one she keeps crucial information from! The one she doesn’t respect—!”

  “Stop that,” said one of the trolls.

  Looking startled, he broke off.

  “Yee have killed the combustion.”

  In the silence following this unexpected declaration, I let the warden help me to my feet.

  “Proud young men is prone to nursing wounded feelings,” Sanogo observed softly, “as I know from me own experience as one of that very type.”

  My pagne needed brushing off and straightening, because I dared not meet the warden’s gaze. The professora ventured to the table as the first troll rose out of the smoking cloud, crest raised, its feathers smeared with soot and ash. Its old-fashioned knee-length dash jacket was not, I realized, of a gray-and-black splotchy pattern; it was layered with the detritus of countless experiments.

  “The ice lens focused the first undulation away,” said the troll in a tone I had to perceive as excitement. “That is not what killed this combustion, then. Emotion must also focus and amplify the effect. Or is it only anger? What think yee, Bibi?” It cocked its head, addressing the professora. The tip of its tail lashed twice and stilled.

  “He seem unusually high-strung, though,” murmured Sanogo. “He would make an ineffective conspirator, but he surely is a cursed impressive fire bane.”

  “Why haven’t you arrested him?” I asked.

  He took my hand in an avuncular way. “Maestressa, yee already know everything about me that I can tell yee at this time.”

  “You can’t even tell me who you support?”

  With a wink, he released my hand as the professora came up. “The Anolis.”

  I pounced. “If the Anolis lose Jonas Bonsu, they shall never win the Territory Cup.”

  The professora appeared beside us to take my arm. “How long have you lived here, gal? They that support the Anolis are radicals. That is why no matter how much the Greens offer Jonas Bonsu, he shall never leave the Anolis. Shall we go to our supper? We need two more settings, for my associates have had their experiment terminated for the night and will be dining with us after all.”

  “What happened with the water?”

  “Certain chemicals react explosively with water. Rather like young men who feel they have lost face in public in front of people whose respect they wish to have.”

  “Oh.”

  At the door, only Bee and her gloating remained. She said, “He stormed off. Gracious Melqart, Cat, but that man has a high opinion of his own consequence. Still, it’s clear he’s madly in love with you. So if you want him—”

  “I really do not wish to discuss this right now, Bee.” Embarrassment had singed me more than flames could.

  “You’re not hurt, are you?” she asked more solicitously.

  “Weren’t we talking about batey?” I said to the universe at large.

  We had no sooner reached the archway than Vai appeared with the letter in hand. “If I might…your pardon, Professora…we shall be right there…”

  With a look like that, fixed on me, I knew we had to have it out now. I did not look at the others as the professora released me. Sure that this would end badly, I strode over to the bench and sat down at one end. He sat at the other end. The talking of the others faded as they walked past the hedge and the fruit trees toward the dining patio.

  He extended the folded paper, which was clearly a letter. “I read your pamphlet.”

  I said nothing, for it was obvious Bee, the professora, and the warden were right. Vai was as in love with me as ever. And he looked pretty angry about it.

  Whistling and clicking, the trolls strode out of the archway and off along the path, so quaintly oblivious that I realized they were not politely ignoring us.

  Still holding the letter, Vai went on in a carefully level voice. “You wrote the pamphlet in the hope I would read it and draw conclusions from the way you strung together the village tales and anecdotes. You have no other way to communicate with me about matters pertaining to the spirit world because of the binding on your tongue.”

  A weight cold and grim seized my limbs, but I managed one word. “Yes.”

  “You’re not a mage, yet you conceal yourself as if by magic. My uncle said you have the same human flesh and blood as I do but that the spirit world is knit into your blood and bone. The djeli you and I met in the spirit world said you have a spirit mantle close against your flesh.”

  Ice prickled along my skin, but I did not think Vai was the cause of it. “Yes.”

  “As impossible as it sounds, it seems likely your sire is a creature of the spirit world who had sexual congress with your mother while he was in the form of a human man. Considering your ability to cross into the spirit world at any time and be blooded by cold steel without dying, it seems the only explanation.”

  A strange thick clotting swelled to seal my throat. I could not speak, but I held his gaze.

  He scooted partway down the bench and tapped my arm with the letter. “The problem, Cat, is that you do not trust me. If you had bothered to write out something when you first arrived in Expedition, I could have worked it out then. If you had told me everything about James Drake, the general, and the Adurnam radicals, this whole situation would have been averted. The radicals could have escaped the raid, and people would not be in prison. You would not have put Aunty Djeneba and her household in danger. Kofi wouldn’t have felt obliged to marry Kayleigh—”

  “They were courting already!”

  “They were flirts. He liked her. She admired him. They married for my sake.”

  “Everything is no
t about you! Maybe they were looking for an excuse and this was it. I saw them together. They looked happy to me.”

  “I looked happy once. For about one hour.”

  “Spare me your self-pity. That is the one thing I cannot endure from you.” I snatched the letter out of his hand and unfolded it, squinting to pull the neatly formed letters out of the darkness. A glow winked to life at my shoulder to aid my reading.

  “It’s from Chartji,” I said, more in breath than in word. In dense legal detail that quoted obscure ancient bardic sources, the letter explained how to dissolve a chained marriage. The head of the poet Bran Cof had declared it more succinctly: “Has the young man had sex with you yet? ”

  Vai had descended to pure incendiary disdain. “‘A year and a day.’ You said those words to me the night of the batey riot, although of course I couldn’t know what you meant at the time. You knew all this time, but you didn’t tell me. And yet I am the other person bound into this marriage. You didn’t respect me enough to trust me, not even about that.”

  How I hated my sire.

  Crossing his arms, he looked away, toward the hedge. “A marriage chained by magic. Your tongue bound by the night court. It even makes sense that perhaps you couldn’t speak of the chained marriage. The two bindings are related if only because they both are chained by magic drawn out of the spirit world. But it wasn’t only the marriage and the spirit world you didn’t tell me. It was everything. How can we walk a path together if you do not respect me enough to tell me the things we both need to know? The things that mean we are partners?”

  A mist mizzled through, not even enough to wet the brick pavement.

  He had not buttoned up his jacket, and the flat collar parted to reveal the curve of his throat. I wanted to press my lips just there, where I could inhale his pulse.

  “I don’t know what your plan was, Catherine, or if you even had a plan. Maybe you meant to wait until the year and a day was up. Maybe you changed your mind that night at the areito. I can’t know what the truth is when you never offered me truth or trust.”

  “Please stop, Vai,” I whispered, for Bee was wrong. I wasn’t heartless.

  Softly, he said, “But I have lasted this long. I can last another nineteen days. Then the year and a day is up, and our chained marriage will dissolve.”

  My cheeks felt the sting of the flames that had not quite touched me in the workshop.

  It was so hard to speak that my voice came out as a husky whisper. “Growing up in the Hassi Barahal household, I was taught to keep silence. About anything and everything, really. It’s the only thing I remember my mother telling me.”

  He uncrossed his arms and shifted back to gaze at me, waiting. Cautious. Reserved. But he had not closed me off yet, for I would know it when he did.

  “‘Tell no one, not ever.’ The words I grew up by.”

  The widening of his eyes was so brief I would have missed it if I was not staring at him as if his expression held every truth that mattered.

  My voice gained strength with surety. “You’re right, Vai. I didn’t trust you, not the way I should have. So I said nothing except what I thought I had to, to pay my way and tell my story. But I should have told you. And I’m sorry for it. I’m especially sorry for it if it made you think I don’t respect you. Because it was wrong.”

  The sounds of conversation and laughter drifted from the patio. Night eased the heat just a little, and the breeze lifted the intoxicating scent of night-blooming jasmine.

  “That’s the first time I’ve understood why you say things the way you say them,” he said in so low a voice it might have been the wind muttering over the roofs. He looked toward the clipped hedge of bellyache bush as might a man surprised to see secrets woven into the branches. “Being cruel while being clever was how I learned to endure Four Moons House. Before I could crush them all, that is. But it was wrong to do it to you tonight. I just…” He shook his head impatiently, still not looking at me. “The truth is, I suppose I wanted to know I could hurt you as badly as I felt hurt. And yet I’m the one who thought for one awful day that I had to kill you. I’m sorry, Catherine.”

  My tongue was lead, but I got it to work. “Thank you for saying it. As for the mansa commanding you to kill me, when I said before I forgave you for that, I meant it.”

  We sat in awkward silence.

  I had to ask. “Vai, what would happen to you if our marriage dissolved? Would the mansa know? Or could you keep it a secret?”

  “The mansa would know because the djeli who chained our marriage would know, and would send him word.”

  “What would the mansa do? Would he be very angry?”

  “Angry?” He glanced at me and quickly away. “No. More likely he’d be relieved. Before I was sent to marry you, he’d had at least ten advantageous offers to marry me. They might look down on me, but no one can ignore what I am. So I’m accounted a valuable catch for mage House women both inside and outside Four Moons House.”

  “Is such an advantageous marriage…what you would want?”

  That other face, the face of the arrogant magister, settled on his features: proud, aloof, and cold. But his voice remained absolutely level. “The mansa won’t consult me. He’ll seal whatever alliance he wishes in my name and then inform me afterward to whom I am now married. You should know that, Catherine.”

  “Oh.” I did not know what else to say, and maybe neither did he.

  He rose. “I was taught never to insult a woman by refusing to eat the meal she had cooked. We should join them at the table.”

  I folded the letter and handed it to him. He tossed it carelessly on the bench, as if he cared not if a rainstorm pounded it into so much pulp. We walked to the dining patio where the others were already digging into bowls whose contents smelled so delectable my mouth watered. Never let it be said I could not eat. The professora had left a place for me beside Gaius Sanogo and one for Vai opposite, between the two trolls. They were brother and sister, Chartji’s aunt and uncle by some arcane measure of kinship I did not understand. Mostly they remembered to speak human language but then they would forget and ascend into flights of trollish that were intriguing to listen to but quite meaningless, lacking words as I knew them. When they remembered to speak human words, they and the professora debated the properties of heat, whether heat was dynamical or undulating, and Bee asked them questions. I ascertained that the caloric theory of heat had been discredited. Vai picked at his food, scarcely touched his wine, and replied with scrupulous courtesy when spoken to.

  I, on the other hand, launched into a jocular evisceration of the prospects of the Anolis in the upcoming cup that got the warden laughing even as he vociferously defended his team.

  Bee said, “I’d be curious to know where you learned all this about batey, Cat.”

  Vai glanced at me as if to warn me that to speak of waiting tables might condemn Aunty Djeneba. After all, Sanogo had told me the wardens had never known where I was.

  “Batey and politics is all anyone talks about in this city. Might I have another helping, Professora? It’s absolutely delicious.”

  No cook can resist an enthusiastic eater. The way to a cook’s heart seemed simple.

  She smiled. “I was going to tell you about meeting Daniel Hassi Barahal. It was in Qart Hadast, of all places. I was very young, in my first year at the university.”

  “You’re not Kena’ani.”

  “I am from the Naqab Desert. But I chose to study in Qart Hadast because of my interest in chemistry. And because they admitted women. And because I had family there, so my parents allowed me to travel so far since I could live with cousins. Your father had beautiful eyes, and hair just like Beatrice, those thick black curls. In fact, Beatrice looks something like him. I suppose you must resemble your mother.”

  Vai looked at me, then away.

  “So people who knew them both say,” I said. “I never knew my father went to Qart Hadast. Not all his journals survived. What was he doing there?”


  “He had come to see a well-known scholar who at that time was involved in an early attempt to construct a navigable balloon that could cross open water.”

  “He must already have been planning for the First Baltic Ice Expedition,” I said as I leaned forward, trembling. “Go on, please.”

  Vai’s gaze drifted to me, its pressure both bitter and so very sweet.

  “I was able to attach myself to a group of students and researchers who went to the caupona for the evening’s drinking and meal. At the end of the evening one of the women students made it clear he could share her bed that night. He said he was flattered and honored but he could not. I shall never forget what he said, for I admit in my experience”—here she glanced at the warden with an amused smile, which he answered with an ironic twist to his lips—“it is not a common refrain from the lips of men. He said he had contracted a secret engagement with an Amazon in the army of General Camjiata, and that as long as she must remain celibate so he had pledged likewise. I thought it admirable, which is why I recall him so well.”

  “Thank you,” I muttered, blinking back tears. My gaze strayed to Vai, who was still watching me. “I do believe he loved my mother very much. And she him.”

  After a moment, we both looked away.

  The warden rose. “Alas, my friends, it is late and I have to report to work at dawn. If the maestressas will accompany me, I will escort them home.”

  I made polite farewells to the trolls and an exceedingly formal goodbye to Vai and walked to the gate with Bee and Sanogo and the professora.

  There I stopped. “I’m not coming with you.”

  Bee examined me as if to make sure I was really her Cat. At length, she kissed me. “Good fortune to you, dearest.” She led the warden away, chatting merrily about her sea voyage in a way that made her life-threatening seasickness seem like the running joke in a comedic spectacle.