Cold Fire

She dashed to a tall wardrobe. The door was carved with a gourd upended and spilling fish, the sides and top elaborated to resemble a leafy tree. She returned to me with her sketchbook and a lead pencil. The pages fell open to a sketch depicting a man and a woman forcefully intertwined in a kiss. The angle concealed most of the man’s face, but the jacket gave him away. I slammed the book shut, embarrassed by the intimacy of the pose.

Bee sighed. “Now you see why I did not want to have had that dream. It was positively lurid. The only identifying mark is the cobo hood gas lamp above your head. It’s of a type you will find in every establishment in Expedition, so it was hard to identify the place. Try writing.”

I grabbed the pencil out of her hand and opened the book to a blank page. At once, I began shaking, awash in sweat. I bit my lip. The pain allowed me to scrawl: I cannot speak of what happened after you left. It is worse than we feared.

“Blessed Tanit, you’ve drawn blood,” said Bee, wiping my lower lip with her thumb. She snatched the pencil and drew in a length of chain like shackles, then handed the pencil back.

I wrote, Yes.

She sketched the jetty and harbor of Expedition, as seen from offshore.

Ocean, I wrote, licking a drop of blood off my lip. Shark. Salt Island. Bitten. Healed. Drunk. Lies. Drake. Rescued. Buccaneers. Cow Killer Beach. Jetty. Vai. Vai. Vai. You.

She blanched and took in several deep breaths. After, she turned to me with the same look I imagined a surgeon would give a patient who has survived an amputation. “This is quickly going to become tedious.”

I wrote, Don’t ask questions.

“That’s an odd sort of binding,” she remarked, taking pen and sketchbook from me.

“I do have to pee,” I said, rolling off the bed. I trotted to the wardrobe and reassured myself that my father’s journals had indeed survived our separation. “And I’m hungry.”

With a grandiose sigh, she stowed her sketchbook back in the wardrobe and tossed clothing at me: a featherlight shift and my very own skirt, bodice, and jacket, washed and the wool ironed to a glossy sheen. Over her own shift she buttoned a skirt sewn from strips of gold, gray, and blue cloth. The bodice she wore had sleeves to the elbow and was embroidered with an entanglement of flowering vines and axes.

“Where did you get that?” I asked. “I might murder you in your sleep to steal it.”

“I like the axes in particular,” she said with a smile that could have killed a man at twenty paces. “They remind me of the head of the poet Bran Cof. I had it done here, at a very nice shop on Avenue Kolonkan. That’s where all the best clothes and finery may be purchased.”

“It’s very pretty.” But I was swamped by a swell of nostalgic regret for humble Tailors’ Row.

“You’re not usually this slow to get ready. There will be food.”

Our chamber was one of four on the second story of a town house whose clean tile floors slipped blessedly cool beneath my bare feet. Bee handed me the sandals Vai had given me, now cleaned and oiled. After I slipped my cane through its loop, we hurried down a stairway at the back of the house to the ground floor. She showed me into a tiny room with a water closet and then into a washroom where one had only to turn a spigot to allow water to flow into a basin while one washed one’s hands.

“How many times do you have to turn that on and off??” she demanded, clamping her fingers over the faucet to turn it emphatically off.

“How does it do that?” I bent over, trying to look up into the pipe.

“Gravity. The water tank is on the roof. We can go look at it later. Come on.”

She led me back up to the first floor and into a chamber that ran the length of the back of the house. Glass doors opened onto a narrow balcony overlooking a garden so green one could almost breathe the color. Guards paced beneath the walls, swimming in and out of view beneath flowering trees and vines.

The general sat at a table. He set down the broadsheet he was reading, rose with a grave smile, and took my hand between his as he examined me with deep-set, almost black eyes whose gaze penetrated astonishingly. “You are better. Please, join me. I expect you are hungry.”

He nodded toward a sideboard laden with covered dishes, a basket of bread, a platter of fruit, a bottle of liquor, and a white ceramic teapot flanked by six white cups on white saucers.

He released my hand and, to my shock, gave Bee a kiss on each cheek in quite an intimate manner. She did not even have the grace to blush. Indeed, she seemed to expect this familiarity.

“I’ll pour,” she said, going over to the sideboard. “Sit down, Cat.”