“Very stirring,” said the middle-aged man. “So tell me, fire bane, tell me true, is yee sure she is on we side? She who washed up on the jetty in a canoe that came from Cow Killer Beach?”
“She was lost,” said Vai.
“Was she, indeed? Yee’s sure? Absolutely sure?”
Letting go of my hand, Vai stood. With him rose the candle lantern, drifting off the shelf and twisting like a creature transformed by the tide of a dragon’s dream. From candle lantern it bulged into a sphere of glowing lacework, spinning slowly upward to the eaves, and melted into a perfect illusion of a cobo hood glass lamp. If astonished expressions were anything to go by, they had never before seen such a display of cold magic, as modest as it was. As the light floated beneath the eaves, casting oddly distorted shadows across us, I saw that the rafters needed to have a broom taken to them to wipe out the cobwebs. Strange what the eye catches on.
“You have my apologies if it seems my action in bringing Catherine here was reckless or ill considered,” he said with a hauteur appropriate to his spectacular jacket and casual exercise of magic. “Or if I seem to have been keeping secrets from you. If you feel you cannot trust my judgment, which I admit must seem to be compromised, then I will understand.”
“But yee need us,” said the middle-aged man. “Is that not what yee said? That yee would prefer to accomplish yee goals with no killing?”
“That is what I want. No killing.”
“But what do yee think will happen, fire bane? People shall die regardless. All that will happen is that blood will not stain yee hands.”
“Blood has already stained my hands. I’d rather not repeat the experience. Killing the general does not change your circumstances in Expedition. That’s why the best solution is to leave him alive but without support. If he cannot return to Europa, that serves me just as well.”
“Alive but without support? No change in circumstances?” The middle-aged man laughed without humor. “Don’ yee understand? When he first came and placed he request before them, all the Council could see was trade and profit. The Council would have voted to support him. Expedition is a small place. We’s like a basket, all woven together. We radicals is the ones who got that vote to turn against him. And then what did he do? He went running to the Taino. And now he is back, with some manner of agreement with them. That make things worse for us. For the Council can now say ’tis the fault of the radicals that the general made a pact with the Taino. As for the Taino, who know what they mean to do?”
“What are you trying to say?” Vai asked, looking at each one.
The old man gave Vai a bitter look. “Yee have boasted yee have a certain means to kill him.”
“It is no boast. It is the truth.”
This was not only too much, it was terrifying, for they meant to throw away Vai’s life!
I jumped to my feet. “Vai is worth far more to everyone alive. If you demand he try to assassinate the general, you’ll only be making him throw away his life on a task he can’t accomplish.”
“Catherine!”
“One man with adequate fighting skills, pitted against trained soldiers who will have crossbows? The mansa can’t have known cold magic is so weak here or I can’t believe he’d have sent you. In Europa, there’s no one you could not destroy. Here, without truly powerful cold magic to protect yourself, the general’s people will cut you down before you can get close enough to draw blood.”
I desperately needed some way to persuade Vai away from this foredoomed course of action. I recalled Brennan’s words when we had been digging through the wreckage of the airship. “Why do you radicals see the general as your enemy? Why do you want him dead?”
The old man waved a hand like wiping away a stain. “We ancestors escaped an empire. Shall we help raise another? A man who is on his father’s side a Keita, a descendant of the Malian royal lineage? Even from over the ocean, such an emperor can come back and say he have the right to trample us because we ancestors once served his.”
“Brennan Du told me that if you examine Camjiata’s legal code, you’ll see he understands he can only succeed by offering rights and privileges to the common people that their masters have denied them. Why kill him? Have you considered making an alliance with him against the Council?”
“A question,” said the old man, “made more interesting by the fact that yee is the one who have posed it.”
“Yee do know, fire bane,” remarked the middle-aged man, “that this gal is known to have arrived on the jetty in the company of James Drake, a notorious fire mage?”
Vai’s mouth turned down, and his shoulders stiffened. “I know that. Have you a point?”
“Beside the point ’tis rumored he have used unwilling people-dying people-as catch-fires to absorb his magic?”
I choked, but no one was watching me. They were all watching Vai.
“I have heard such a rumor.”
“Don’ yee know that the reason he is not in prison for these crimes is because he have a powerful protector? One he is careful to hide? He serve General Camjiata. He was one of the people sent to Adurnam to fetch the general out of Europa and over to here.”
Vai looked at me.
I swallowed.
“Drake, in the entryway of the law offices,” he breathed, as one after another of the connections hit home. “Was the general there that morning, too? Catherine, did you know he was there? Do you know him?”
I shut my eyes rather than answer.
His tone cooled. “I had no idea.”
“Seem to me,” remarked the middle-aged man, “yee’s in bed with yee own enemy.”
The temperature in the room dropped so precipitously that everyone, except for the trolls, cried out in alarm. Several leaped to their feet. The hilt of my sword flowered under the breath of cold magic. I had almost forgotten the way the air bit into the skin, the tingle of power rising from the sword’s hilt to sting my tongue. I opened my eyes to see them all chafing their hands.
“What is this?” whispered Livvy, shivering.
I grabbed Vai’s wrist. “ This is an extremely angry cold mage. Come, Vai.”
I tugged. He did not budge. Nor did he speak. Had we been in the north, I did not doubt the building would have crashed down around us, but we were not in the north. We were here.
I surveyed the radicals with what I hoped was a look portentous enough to make them let us go without forcing me to fight a way out.
“I’m not part of the general’s army. I didn’t ask to be brought to the Antilles, or to this meeting for that matter. I won’t betray what I’ve heard here because I know what it means to be betrayed, and I will never do that to another. But let me tell you this. You don’t know what you’re dealing with, not with Vai and not with the general. And you certainly have no earthly idea of what you’re dealing with, with me.”
As Bee would say, know when to stop talking and leave.
The cold had intimidated them. I released Vai and headed for the door. He followed me, as I had hoped he would. I got out the door and started down the corridor.
Verus said, “Ja, maku!” but someone called urgently to him from down the main staircase and he stepped out of view.
With his longer stride, Vai caught me just as I pushed past the beads and set foot on the back staircase. He grabbed my shoulders and pressed me back, trapping me between him and the wall, beneath the dead gas lamp.
“It isn’t like it might seem,” I said. “I can explain.”
His cold fire blazed through the gas lamp above us. “I gave you a chance to explain. So why start now when you let me walk blind into that meeting and look like a complete fool?”
I managed words. “What do you wish you knew?”
“What do I wish I knew? Where do I even start? You had no trouble telling them everything you knew about Camjiata, so if you didn’t tell me before, it was certainly on purpose. For that matter, why should I believe your story about the binding from the spirit world? You could have made up the whole thing to stop me from prying!”