The blood was redolent with the fragrant bloom of powerful cold magic as mouthwatering as spice. But it was not mine to drink. I owed it to my masters. The chain that bound me to them dragged me back toward their presence.
A voice was murmuring, honey words luring me away from the kill. Vai’s kisses sweetened my lips and warmed my flesh. His hands measured the map of my body, fingers tracing each curve as he rolled me over on the bed he had built for us.
I stirred, eyes opening as my hands reached for him.
The basket gaped open and empty across my lap. I blinked, trying to focus, for I was back in the belly of the beast. Its comblike teeth shone with a phosphorescent gleam.
By this light I saw Bee talking to Queen Anacaona. The dead flat shine of the cacica’s eyes had deepened to a warm brown.
“I’m not sure I understand, Your Highness. Is the Great Smoke the ocean of dreams through which I walk in my dreams?”
“Yes. The Great Smoke is the ocean of all existence. The currents which we call past, present, and future mingle together in the sea of mist.”
I was so hungry and hot. I was not meant to journey through the ocean of dreams. My senses rebelled at the stink and the threat.
The dragon’s smoky breath trawled me under, back into sleep. I plunged into the slippery dance of the old ones, the most ancient Taninim. Their intertwining movements created currents that streamed through the smoke like rivers. A ripple caught me, pulling me into a dream so vivid it did not seem like a vision but rather like my body and sight cast into another time and place.
General Camjiata stood with his hand on a door latch. Behind him, the view out an attic window overlooked a town square and a stone castle tower rising above green trees. His hair was tied back with an incongruously bright-green ribbon that matched the old-fashioned bottle-green dash jacket he wore, its cuffs trimmed with lace. He addressed me with a serious look that quite disarmed me. Who would offer such a direct and confiding gaze to an enemy?
“I need you to kill him. You’re the only one who can.”
Golden spears of late-afternoon sunlight lanced into my eyes, blinding me as he opened the door into a lamplit chamber beyond. Darkness smoked up on all sides.
I did not want to be a killer. If only the Master of the Wild Hunt had not been my sire, I would not have had such dreams. Yet if he had not sired me, I would not be what I was. If I had not been what I was, I would not have escaped the mansa. I would have been dead long before I had been forced to make the choice that had killed the cacica. We are bound to our ancestors and to those who made us, whether we want to be or not. What matters is what we make of what we are.
I opened my eyes, back in the belly of the beast. Bee and the cacica were still conversing.
“Do you wish Caonabo had thrown away his honor merely to please you?” Queen Anacaona spoke not with anger, not with pity, but as if pressing Bee to find the answer to a riddle.
“I didn’t say that! But he ought not to have gone after Cat in that way. He shouldn’t have cooperated with James Drake and the general.”
“Open your eyes, selfish girl. It isn’t about you. There are greater battles awakening in the world. Those who have developed a thirst for blood cannot easily be turned aside from their insatiable appetites, no matter whom they harm. The old ones move slowly, but they fight to protect their young.”
“You speak in riddles,” Bee said. “What does that all mean?”
I slid into the fog of dreams as if in the belly of Leviathan I, too, became a dragon dreamer. Streaming rivers of mist welled up from the deep, currents flowing in vast circles that penetrated close to the gleaming surface before pouring away into darker, smokier depths. Swimming shapes brushed me, hot and cold by turns, rough to the touch and then slickly smooth like eels slithering in coils around and around me.
I startled awake, shuddering, to find myself lying in Vai’s arms on the bed he had built for us. His embrace was so strong and comforting that I could have reclined in its orbit forever and not missed the world.
“Catherine,” he murmured in a drowsy, contented voice. “You were dreaming and mumbling. It sounded like ‘There are greater battles awakening in the world.’ What is it, love?”
The feel of his body stretched the length of mine, his skin to my skin, made me want to purr with simple pleasure. “I dreamed I was swallowed by a dragon. And now I have to pee. Do you think those two things are related?”
Chuckling, he kissed me on the lips. After stroking a hand along the length of my torso, he kissed me again, and then longer and with more concentration, until I really did have to get up even though he clearly had other activities on his mind. He rose with me.
“We’ll go the washroom,” he said, swinging me up into his arms. My hip pressed against his belly. “We both need a wash.”
I giggled, for the night was warm and the room stuffy despite an open window, and we were both sweaty. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“All the better. No one to disturb us.” A pinch of light sparked into existence. Cold fire swelled to a fist-size bubble whose light dappled the clothes strewn over the floor beside the bed.
I brushed my cheek against his short-shorn beard, the hair just long enough to tickle instead of scratch. “You must spend hours getting your beard to look just this decorative way.”
When he looked at me with a smile of tenderness and mischief mixed so sweetly, I could scarcely breathe, much less think. “Why, Catherine, you were watching me all that time, weren’t you?”
The currents ripped me away from him just as I realized I was dreaming the night we had consummated our marriage. I flailed and kicked, for I was determined to get back to him, but a whirlpool dragged me down into the crushing abyssal deeps.
Like a gull hovering in the wind, I floated over a rocky path strewn with boulders and pocked with ice. A towering cliff of ice studded with rocks filled the horizon: It was the wall of a vast ice shelf. A gray sea lapped a narrow strand of stony beach. In the shelter of a shallow cave, two longboats had been overturned out of reach of the waves and covered with canvas staked to the earth. Three men with ragged gloves fumbled with stakes and canvas, uncovering one of the beached boats and its treasure of oars and oilcloth. The wind was coarse and unforgivingly cold. They worked frantically as the howls of approaching wolves grew in volume.
On the path that led up a steep incline to the crumbling foot of the glacial shelf stood a hatless woman. She wore a rumpled, dirty uniform and grasped a bloody falcata in her gloved left hand. Her dark red hair was pulled back into a braid and pinned in a coil at the back of her head. Fresh red welts marked a sun-weathered face brushed with freckles. Blood oozed down her cheek and neck. Someone else’s blood was splashed across the front of her uniform coat, and drying blood soaked her knees, as if she’d knelt in blood. Her right sleeve was torn to ribbons, exposing a bleeding shoulder and arm. Her ragged breath came in gouts of mist in the freezing air.
Behind her a man with curly black hair as lush and thick as Bee’s knelt to crank back the ratchet of a crossbow. He had two bolts remaining in his quiver but no other visible weapon. Four dead dire wolves littered the path, marking the trail of a pursuit. About fifty steps above lay a dead man in a soldier’s kit. His corpse was mottled crimson, his belly slashed open and spilling guts. A dying wolf twitched beside him, pink spume riming its muzzle. A falcata had been thrust up to the hilt into its right eye, the tip sticking out through the back of its neck.