“Kofi trusts me, just as I trust him. I’m an unregistered fire bane. That makes me a good risk because anyone could have me arrested. Also, as a true cold mage, I have something they didn’t know they wanted. I’ve been instructing local fire banes in the most basic teachings any child at a mage House is taught in the schoolroom. Obviously that is also against the law.”
“How did you find the radicals in the first place?”
“Chartji’s aunt introduced me to Kofi. Trolls have a complex net of affiliations.”
“Chartji’s aunt? Is she related to those two trolls who come every Jovesday?”
“Why, Catherine, have you been watching me?”
His dash jackets were tailored so exactly to him that they didn’t bind, and he knew perfectly well how good he looked. The red and gold of the magnificent fabric set off the deep brown of his complexion most flatteringly. “Why do you ask when you know the answer?”
“Just to hear you say it.”
I laughed again. “You are such an irritating man. Where are we going?”
“We’re going to Nance’s. The boardinghouse down by the gates of the old city.”
He drew me over next to the rock wall against which waves slurped so noisily that it would be difficult for passersby to hear. “The radical leadership has finally agreed to talk with me. It’s taken months for me to get this invitation. You’re right, they’re cautious. They can’t afford to trust anyone new. They’re very close to calling a general strike and bringing the city to a halt until their demands are met.”
“What are their demands?”
“The establishment of a committee to compose a charter for the establishment of a new government for Expedition Territory. And a time span to accomplish it in: three months. The Council would arrest them in a heartbeat if the wardens knew who the leaders actually were. In fact, the radicals were ready to call the strike last Martius. But the arrival of General Camjiata threw the whole city into an uproar. Meanwhile here I am, an unknown agent. That’s why I have to meet with them now, at such short notice. If I refuse, they’ll think I’m plotting something and won’t give me another chance.” He looked searchingly at me. “Catherine, I need to know if there is anything you want to tell me about all this. Anything it would be better for me to know now, before the meeting with the radicals. I see you brought your cane-your sword, I mean-as if you are expecting trouble.”
The Hassi Barahal house had spied for Camjiata. My mother had fought for him, and then escaped imprisonment at his hands. In the entryway of the law offices of Godwik and Clutch, he had told me he was looking for Tara Bell’s child. Me. I touched the ghost hilt, for twilight had brought the sword to life even though to the eye it still appeared as a black cane. Was it truly a cemi, of a kind? Was it my mother’s spirit that touched me when I felt the shiver of its cold steel? She who had left me with a memory of only five words? Tell no one, not ever.
“I always bring my cane because I’m always expecting trouble,” I said.
He pressed his cheek to my hair. “There is surely a great deal about you I do not understand.”
Water slapped across the rocks. In the distance, thunder rumbled like a warning. I turned my face into the curve of his neck, remembering the voice of the hurricane’s herald and his taunting words. The spirit had told me to run, but I was not going to run this time from those chains.
“Vai, I want you to understand-”
Ice weight choke dread throat closing mask blinded. I couldn’t breathe. I was slipping below the surface of the water without a sound as my sire dragged me down.
“Catherine! I have you! Don’t faint.”
I sucked in air, holding on to him as if to my life. “I have to get away from the water.”
He eased me away from the rocks and, once we reached the edge of the boulevard, looked me over carefully. “Catherine, I’ll never let you drown, if that’s what you fear. After I lost you in the well, I swore I would not let go again. Not if you wanted me.”
I had my breath back. And I thought: The time to decide about a man is before you sleep with him, not afterward.
“And if I didn’t want you?”
He smiled in the most aggravating way. “How could you not want me, Catherine?”
I laughed, because only Vai could have spoken those words in a way that made it seem he completely believed them while at the same time he was making light of his own vanity in needing to believe them. “How much time do I have to answer the question?”
“My sweet Catherine, I suggest we go to this untimely meeting so we can get it over with, the sooner to go home to our bed. And then…then you have as long as you need.”
Quite the most reckless surge of feeling swept through me. Before I could kiss him, he slipped out of my grasp.
“We can’t start that or I won’t get through the evening and neither will you. Let’s keep walking.”
Walking warmed the cold right out of me and loosened the chains that had been strangling my tongue and my heart. His long stride matched well with mine. I felt comfortable with his silence even if my thoughts wandered all over his body, wondering just exactly how long it would be before we could return to the room and what on Earth we were meant to do with Kayleigh. Being Vai, he had surely already arranged something. Honestly, I could not imagine otherwise.
“Vai, there’s one thing, though.” I had to say it. “I don’t want to get pregnant right now.”
“Of course. We’ll take precautions. We want no children until we’re free of clientage.”
“Blessed Tanit! You’ve already thought about this, haven’t you?”
His fingers squeezed mine as he smiled without looking at me. “I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, if you must know. But besides that, I also suspected…it was something you were worried about before.”
Before, meaning Drake. I did not want to discuss Drake with Vai.
“If he hurt you, I wish you would tell me.”
I really did not want to discuss Drake with Vai, but I owed him an explanation. “He got me drunk. And he lied to me. He implied he could only heal me if I had sex with him. I suppose that is a form of harm.”
“I’d call it harm,” Vai muttered.
“Did he force me? No, I was willing. I won’t lie to you. It was nice.”
“ Nice??” He laughed in a way that made me flush straight through the center of my body. “I would pity the man you said that of, if I didn’t know he’d gotten you drunk and lied to take advantage of you. Because I promise you, Catherine, that afterward you won’t say it was nice.”
The air changed not as with anger but with a force so primal I felt I’d been turned inside out and every part of me tuned to him. I had no words, but I did have an overpowering foreboding that the next hour or two was going to advance like molasses down the shallow slope of a platter.
At length and with the grace of a man shifting directions in a dance, he said, “You did a remarkable job piecing that skirt together.”
“I am a seamstress of rare and unexpected potency. Vai, when are you going to tell me what you are doing with the trolls?”
“I’ll bring you along next Jovesday. And teach you a better thing to call them than trolls, which is a human word. Here’s a simplified version of what they call themselves.” He whistled something short but grand.
“That’s not a word.”
“It’s not a word as we think of words. But it makes you wonder if they dislike being called trolls as much as Kena’ani dislike being called Phoenicians.” He tugged me to the left. “Here we are.”
Gas lamps burned on the old city walls. We turned aside before we reached the wide plaza, the main batey courts, and the harbor. The boardinghouse was the one I had noticed before, a sprawling edifice raised on squat stilts, its main floor a huge open-air wooden deck flanked by two-story wings. I smelled pepperpot, rum, and urine.