Cold Fire

“No.” He released me.

As he took a step back to join Kofi, I swayed. Bee put an arm around my waist, tucking me neatly against her.

“You may wonder that I concern myself in the affairs of the common laboring folk of Expedition,” began the general in the hall behind us in a wonderfully carrying voice whose musical lilt had a stirring, martial rhythm that caught at the heart and loins. “You may wonder, and even be suspicious, knowing I am born into the Keita lineage. But is it not the concerns of the common laboring folk that propel the ship of revolution out of the night of the old ways? If we say a rising light marks the dawn of a new world, which new world do we mean to measure and describe?”

The gleam of my cold steel dimmed as feet scraped along the darkening corridor.

“Vai,” I said.

He was already gone.

27

For a night and a day and a night, I lay immobilized in a bed of unspeakable luxury, unable to think or talk or move. He thought I had betrayed him.

I did drink, because he would have insisted, and eventually I got bored of sleeping and staring. So on the second day I rose in the momentary cool of dawn and washed my face in a ceramic basin while Bee sat on the big bed we had shared, watching me with a gaze I might have described as wary.

“I could not have taken one more day of that,” she said. “I didn’t know you could stay silent for that long. Even that one time when we were thirteen and you were ill with that terrible fever, you babbled nonsense nonstop sleeping and waking.”

I examined her. “You look thinner.”

“I was beastly sick on the Atlantic crossing. I only survived because the general sat with me every day and coaxed water and gruel down my throat. He told me about his wife. He told me what he knows about walking the path of dreams.”

“You like him!”

She tucked her legs up to sit cross-legged. “I do. I admire him.”

“You admire the Iberian Monster?” I looked around the room. “I hope this chamber isn’t in the nature of a bribe.”

The whitewashed walls had been ornamented with a mural depicting a trellis of flowers swarmed by butterflies in vibrant blues, greens, and golds. The sideboard on which the basin stood had carved legs, the kind of work that took an artisan weeks to finish. The ceramic basin was painted inside and out with an intricate Celtic knotwork with neither beginning nor end. The windows were open, and there was of course no fireplace or brazier, only a gas lamp in each corner.

“It is a fine chamber, is it not?” said Bee. “But I am squelching a horrible temptation to paint nasty pointy-toothed sprites flitting through the trellis. They could be skewering the butterflies with little javelins and darts.”

“Javelins and darts? You should give them rifles!”

“Of course! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!”

“Neither can I! How did you end up here? What happened to Rory?”

“Questions I might also ask you.”

I was so tired of questions! “You tell first!”

“There’s the temper! Frustrated, Cat?”

I flung myself onto the bed, which was so spacious and inviting…

“Cat, dearest, you’re flushed.”

“What can I do, Bee? He asked me straight out if there was anything I needed to tell him.”

“And you kept silent, exactly as you should have done.”

“Yes. No! Yes, I kept silence, but no I shouldn’t have. I should have told him everything.”

“Of course you shouldn’t have!”

“You don’t marry someone with the intent of concealing things from him! To withhold trust until there is no doubt is not trust. He trusted me, but I didn’t trust him. Don’t you agree he must hate me now?”

“That didn’t look like hate to me. And if he really trusted you, he wouldn’t have run off like that. So if you ask my opinion—”

“Did I ask for your opinion?”

“Yes, you just did. Blessed Tanit, Cat! Marry him? Don’t tell me you had actual sexual congress with him!”

“I didn’t! But I was going to!”

“I don’t understand. The head of the poet Bran Cof said if you don’t consummate the marriage, then after a year and a day you’ll be free. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be released from the marriage?”

Without realizing, I had ruched up parts of the thin blanket in my fists. “Do you think I would walk free if he could not? That I’d take my pleasure, and leave him in chains?”