“Questions I might also ask you.”
I was so tired of questions! “You tell first!”
“There’s the temper! Frustrated, Cat?”
I flung myself onto the bed, which was so spacious and inviting…
“Cat, dearest, you’re flushed.”
“What can I do, Bee? He asked me straight out if there was anything I needed to tell him.”
“And you kept silent, exactly as you should have done.”
“Yes. No! Yes, I kept silence, but no I shouldn’t have. I should have told him everything.”
“Of course you shouldn’t have!”
“You don’t marry someone with the intent of concealing things from him! To withhold trust until there is no doubt is not trust. He trusted me, but I didn’t trust him. Don’t you agree he must hate me now?”
“That didn’t look like hate to me. And if he really trusted you, he wouldn’t have run off like that. So if you ask my opinion-”
“Did I ask for your opinion?”
“Yes, you just did. Blessed Tanit, Cat! Marry him? Don’t tell me you had actual sexual congress with him!”
“I didn’t! But I was going to!”
“I don’t understand. The head of the poet Bran Cof said if you don’t consummate the marriage, then after a year and a day you’ll be free. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be released from the marriage?”
Without realizing, I had ruched up parts of the thin blanket in my fists. “Do you think I would walk free if he could not? That I’d take my pleasure, and leave him in chains?”
“Dearest Cat, I always knew you were secretly romantical.” She smiled in a way that reminded me of Aunt Tilly at her most tender, and stroked my hair to calm me. “My story is more easily told, which, I note, is commonly true when it comes to your stories and my stories. You witnessed my compulsion to unearth those slimy grubs. I knew I was leaving you behind when I waded into the river but I simply couldn’t stop. I floundered to shore in the Temes River of all places, on the wharf in that town Londun. No sign of the grubs. I must suppose they dispersed in the water. As for me, I almost froze to death while choking on rubbish and sewage. But I talked my way into a ride-”
“I’m sorry I missed that!” I found I could open my fists and let go.
She smirked. “I discovered a fatherly carter on his way to Adurnam and weepingly informed him my callous lying sweetheart had abandoned me on the wharf. I went straight to the Buffalo and Lion Inn. You’ll be relieved to know I found Rory there.”
“Thank Tanit.” My heart eased. No matter what else, we had not lost him. “And my father’s journals?”
“Rory had everything. He’s cannier than he looks and acts, you know. Anyway, six days had passed while we were in the spirit world. Riots still wracked Adurnam. The prince and mages had discovered the general was in the city. There were also broadsheets out with a substantial reward for our capture accompanied by very unflattering sketches, I must say! And of course I couldn’t trust the headmaster. Rory kept insisting the headmaster is a dragon, but surely he’s a mage.”
“I’m no longer ruling out any possibilities. You met the general again?”
“Eventually, yes. He told me his wife had seen in the path of dreams that I would lead him to you. La Professora and Brennan Du had to leave Adurnam also, and they invited Rory and me to go with them to Massilia. But naturally I sailed with the general to Expedition to look for you.”
“Where is Rory?”
“He could not bring himself to get on the ship. He’s afraid of the ocean. I kept the journals, which are here, and sent him with Brennan.”
I closed my eyes. Blessed Tanit! How Vai had kissed me! He couldn’t really believe I cared about Brennan Du the way I cared about him!
“Cat, are you blushing again? I hope you’re not carrying a torch for black-haired Brennan. I suspect he carries a torch for La Professora. But she is married to another, alas.”
“That doesn’t stop people,” I muttered, looking up at the whitewashed ceiling. How must Vai have felt, waiting for me all those months only to discover me with another man?
“It seems La Professora is quite the traditionalist in some ways despite her radical philosophies. Anyway, how would you know about…Cat! You can’t hide from me!” Bee grabbed one of my fingers and bent it back. “You said you hadn’t done it with him.”
“Ouch! I haven’t. Although I cursed well wish I had. Ah! Let go!”
“Tell the truth!”
Through teeth gritted against the pain, I said, “James Drake. But I can explain.”
She released my finger, and whistled. Wincing, I rubbed my abused hand.
“ James Drake,” she said in an altered tone that made me cringe. She stretched out with elbows planted next to my head. “Gracious Melqart! But then why were you mauling your husband? And why is a cold mage of such rare and exceptional power here in Expedition anyway, where it is against the law to be a cold mage? Most importantly, did you find your sire?”
Like a thwarted child, I rolled over, and pounded my fists and kicked my feet, savoring the smack of my hands and legs on the mattress. I had never hated my sire as much as I hated him at that moment.
“Cat, you’re having a temper tantrum.” Bee’s laughter so sang in my heart that I began to choke and gurgle. I stopped hitting and rolled onto my back to laugh with her.
“Oh, Bee, how I missed you!”
She embraced me, and we laughed until tears ran. Finally, she went to wash her face in the basin. My cane had gotten wrapped up in the blanket, so I stuck it under the mattress.
“What happened to you, Cat?”
I clapped a hand over my mouth and, as she stared at me with an exaggerated expression of surprise on her face, I pointed with my other hand to my mouth. Waggled the fingers covering my mouth. Bit on them, feeling a question rising. Any question. It didn’t matter, as long as it threw people off the scent. Curse him!
“You are hungry? No, you are crazed? You’ve lost the power of speech? You have to pee? You have developed a strange but debilitating desire to inflict pain on yourself?? You are trying to tell me something with these bizarre gesticulations that you can’t put in words? Ah!”
She dashed to a tall wardrobe. The door was carved with a gourd upended and spilling fish, the sides and top elaborated to resemble a leafy tree. She returned to me with her sketchbook and a lead pencil. The pages fell open to a sketch depicting a man and a woman forcefully intertwined in a kiss. The angle concealed most of the man’s face, but the jacket gave him away. I slammed the book shut, embarrassed by the intimacy of the pose.
Bee sighed. “Now you see why I did not want to have had that dream. It was positively lurid. The only identifying mark is the cobo hood gas lamp above your head. It’s of a type you will find in every establishment in Expedition, so it was hard to identify the place. Try writing.”
I grabbed the pencil out of her hand and opened the book to a blank page. At once, I began shaking, awash in sweat. I bit my lip. The pain allowed me to scrawclass="underline" I cannot speak of what happened after you left. It is worse than we feared.
“Blessed Tanit, you’ve drawn blood,” said Bee, wiping my lower lip with her thumb. She snatched the pencil and drew in a length of chain like shackles, then handed the pencil back.
I wrote, Yes.
She sketched the jetty and harbor of Expedition, as seen from offshore.
Ocean, I wrote, licking a drop of blood off my lip. Shark. Salt Island. Bitten. Healed. Drunk. Lies. Drake. Rescued. Buccaneers. Cow Killer Beach. Jetty. Vai. Vai. Vai. You.
She blanched and took in several deep breaths. After, she turned to me with the same look I imagined a surgeon would give a patient who has survived an amputation. “This is quickly going to become tedious.”
I wrote, Don’t ask questions.
“That’s an odd sort of binding,” she remarked, taking pen and sketchbook from me.
“I do have to pee,” I said, rolling off the bed. I trotted to the wardrobe and reassured myself that my father’s journals had indeed survived our separation. “And I’m hungry.”