Cold Fire - Page 88/210

“I was dreaming about having a bowl of yam pudding!”

“You’re very amusing, Cat, when you make your little jokes.” He flagged down a man who was pulling along a cart with a canvas awning draped over a seat wide enough for two people. “We’ve loitered too long. I must get out of sight immediately. Wardens patrol thickly through these districts where most of the trouble comes from.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Go to the Speckled Iguana.” He kissed me again on the lips and clambered onto the seat. “Ask for the innkeeper and tell him the usual phrase: A rising light marks the dawn of a new world. You can trust him.”

He spoke a meaningless phrase to the cart-man, who was wiping sweat from his forehead with a cloth. The man stowed his cloth, gripped the shafts, and off they jolted, leaving me all alone in the midst of an unfamiliar city.

19

I stood stunned and bewildered, surrounded by tramping feet, axes chopping, wheels turning and a man whistling a cheerful tune. People, carts, wheelbarrows, wagons, laden donkeys, and pack dogs with their human handlers walking behind pushed along the main thoroughfare.

A prickling sensation crawled along my neck as the locket warmed my skin. I looked toward the carpentry yard. The young man with the adze had stopped work in order to turn half around. Was the cursed man staring at me? What had I ever done to him to attract his rude notice?

He wore loose trousers belted at his hips with rope and above that, as I had already had cause to remark, nothing but gorgeous muscled skin the color of the raw umber worked in painters’ studios, a deep, rich, warm, luxuriously dark brown. He set down the adze and, bracing a hand on the fence, leaped over it. Then he strode toward me as if certain I was about to bolt and he must catch me before I did so.

Several carpenters halted their work. One whistled, provoking laughter.

Another yelled, “Don’ let this one run away, Vai. Not like that one yee lost…”

I blinked, for the man approaching me so determinedly looked exactly as Andevai Diarisso Haranwy would look if he were half dressed and his chest and back sheeny with sweat from hard physical labor.

Blessed Tanit, but it was hot in this country!

He stopped at arm’s length.

“Catherine,” he said, the word fading as if he hadn’t the strength to get it all out.

I couldn’t tell if he wanted to embrace me or berate me. Heat burning up my cheeks, I knew what he was going to say: “Who was that man and why was he kissing you when you are my wife??”

He said, “Did Duvai find you?”

After several years of effort that passed in perhaps five sluggish breaths, I sewed together the rudiments of speech out of the remnants of my confounded mind.

“Duvai?”

“After I lost you in that well, I meant to follow you into the spirit world myself at Imbolc. But I was unavoidably detained, and then—well—then it wasn’t possible. So I asked my brother Duvai to hunt for you. I must imagine you recall him well enough, since he was the person who guided you out of my village in order to keep you away from me.”

Only Andevai could have managed that hint of peevishness, as if he, rather than I, had been the one inconvenienced by the mansa’s command to kill me!

“I recall him with a great deal of gratitude, if you must know.”

“I do not doubt it,” he said quellingly.

“He did not find me.” I fished out the locket. “But your grandmother did.”

He recoiled, taking a step back. A trio of passing trolls skirted him without breaking stride, as if accustomed to crowded streets where stray men lurched blindly into their path. A man not quite in control of a dozen leashed, unpleasantly large, and clearly short-tempered snapping lizards yelled at us to get out of the way.

Vai grabbed my wrist. “This isn’t the place to have this conversation.”

He strode back toward the carpentry yard, me trotting alongside, my mind whirling and my stride kicking awkwardly against the damp pagne. We went in by an unlatched gate. Wood shavings warmed by the sun padded my footsteps. Every man in the yard had ceased working in order to enjoy the spectacle. If one man among the twenty or so was not grinning or chuckling, I did not see him.

“Ja, maku! That a fine catch yee hauled in!”

“That the gal yee lost?”

“Yes,” said Vai in a clipped tone which likely meant he was strangling an intense emotion.

An ominous silence dropped over the men.

He tugged me to a thatched-roofed shelter with no walls where a woman, seated in its shade, was measuring a shaved plank with calipers. She had silver-streaked straight black hair and the broad features I was beginning to recognize as Taino.