Cold Steel

“You were magnificent, love. They couldn’t stop talking about you the rest of the day!” His smile glittered. “Some of them said they envied me—”

“I had far more freedom at Aunty’s boardinghouse than I do here! It seems to me the women of Two Gourds House are too elegant and rarified to ever leave these walls, or perhaps it would just be considered shameful to do so. Certainly they scorn me too much to ask me to come along on their shopping trips and their tours of the famous landmarks of the famous city, of which need I remind you I have not seen a single paving stone nor a single vendor’s umbrella.”

“If they are treating you with disrespect, I will have a word with—”

“Yes! You will have a word. Everything I am here is due to my marriage to you. I might as well have allowed Prince Caonabo to arrest me! Whatever you may think, I am still being held like a prisoner as surety for you.” I repeated the conversation I had overheard between the two mansas.

“Yes, yes, that is how they talk, that is how they see things. But they can be brought to change. What matters is that they know they need me, that I am the best. Do not forget that Camjiata is letting James Drake do as he wills. You cannot want that to continue, Catherine!”

“Of course I understand that James Drake has to be stopped! That is not my point. The locked room in the servants’ wing was better than this because I had your mother and sisters to keep me company. I should have gone with them!”

“My sweet Catherine,” he murmured, nuzzling me in just the way I liked best, “you know it makes all the difference to me to have you here. You have been so patient. I see how it chafes you.”

“I dislike this coaxing manner, Andevai, with your wiles and caresses.”

“We’ll make a child.”

Trembling, I shoved him to arm’s length. “Is this the same man who swore we would bring no child into the world until we’re free of clientage?”

“Yes, but—”

“Not to mention my sire.”

“Yes, love, but—”

“I would be very careful what you say next.”

He sighed.

“They won’t even let me sew, except under their eye. As if they think I can effect an escape with a needle.”

“My love,” he murmured. This time I let him embrace me, because I was so tired of being alone all day that to feel the press of his hand on my back and the warmth of his chest against mine was the nectar I wished to feed on. “I promise you, we will go out tomorrow and promenade along the Sicauna River. We’ll take coffee at one of the little cafés, as people do here.”

Yet this night, finally, the kisses of a handsome man were not enough.

“If this is what it means to be wife of the mansa, I cannot live it. You would do better to marry the daughter of Two Gourds House and let her pour your wine!”

“Love, love, love, this is not what it will be once the war is over.”

But it would. I knew it, and he did not want to know it.

Yet he was right that a war was being fought. The old order did not want to die, and why should it? The radicals wanted change, and why wouldn’t they? Meanwhile Camjiata had a foot in each camp: His father and mother had both been born into the highest ranks, while his legal code would tear down the bed his noble forebears had long luxuriated in.

The bells of conflict rang down through the interwoven worlds. The dragons lost their hatchlings and began to die out, so they walked their dreams through the minds of mortal girls and by this means hatchlings survived, even if the girls did not. The courts drank mortal blood to strengthen themselves, and the salt turned them into ghouls, and thus, unable to change, as ghouls they fell into the mortal world and spread the salt plague that had killed so many.

So on and on, always the long struggle: The worlds are a maze with many paths.

“What about my sire?” I asked. “What are we to do when Hallows’ Night comes, as it will?”

“I have been discussing Hallows’ Night and troll mazes with the mansa—”

I shoved him to arm’s length. “With the mansa!”

“Beatrice is the one who revealed to him that we know how to escape the Hunt. You can’t wish people to die, Catherine! That’s all I told him, love. None of your secrets, I promise you.”

I could not scold him. I did not want people to die any more than he did. “Yet troll mazes won’t help me,” I muttered, letting him gather me against him.

He held me so close and so so sweetly. “My sweet Catherine, if we walk this road together, we will find a way through. I promise you, love. We will find a way.”