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 not 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.”
