She grinned as she galloped the toy stallion across the floor. “You had hacked off half her hair before her mother bothered to come look. It’s a good thing we can run so fast.”
“It’s not speed. It’s knowing how to distract the enemy.”
“Do you remember seeing her again years later when we arrived at the academy?” Bee laughed so hard she had to wipe tears away. “All grown up, and with her hair done in those knots and bows that were fashionable four years ago.”
“Thank Tanit that went out of fashion as quickly as it did. Your hair was too curly and mine too heavy and straight.”
“How she looked daggers at us! She started a whispering campaign, do you remember? To try to make us feel ashamed of being impoverished Phoenician girls.”
We shared a smile, for of course the girl hadn’t known we were shameless. We simply didn’t care what she and her circle thought of us. Our indifference had demolished her campaign. Not to mention the syrup we had secretly smeared on her knots and bows, which soon attracted ants.
“Let’s go down before Rory does something he oughtn’t,” said Bee, taking my hand.
We gathered our treasures. As we started down the steps I heard splashing.
“Oh, dear,” I said. “We’d better hurry.”
When we reached the scullery we found Rory happily washing himself as he sang a spectacularly obscene song. Fortunately he was sitting in the tub, and had filled it with hot water. The water was already grimy with his dirt.
“Am I supposed to eat this?” he asked brightly, holding up a sliver he had cut off the cake of soap. Then he laughed as he set back to scrubbing himself. “You should see your expressions!”
“Be careful I don’t make you eat it!” muttered Bee. “Where on earth did you learn those crude verses?”
He brushed his lips as if he were grooming up the corners of his grin. “That’s a story! Do you remember when you sailed with the general and I was left behind with Brennan Du and Professora Kehinde Nayo Kuti? I discovered they have houses here in Europa where all they do is pet all day and all night!”
“You can tell us another time, Rory,” I said quickly.
Bee and I retreated to the kitchen. I prepared a nourishing porridge from oats and pulse while she cleaned the fish and baked it plain, with only salt. Shockingly, we discovered a cache of actual sugar in a glass jar that had been shoved behind a small butter churn in the pantry. When Rory had finished bathing and clothed himself in a towel wrapped around his waist, I set him to watch the porridge while Bee and I bathed. We washed each other’s hair in a bucket, as we always used to do, then traded washing in the tub and rinsing with buckets of warm water from the stove. Afterward, we washed our underthings.
“I miss the shower and plumbing at Aunty’s boardinghouse,” I said. “This seems so awkward now. Think of the faucets in the town house where the general lived!”
“I do think of them,” said Bee with a melancholy sigh. “Even that was as nothing compared to the magnificent plumbing in the palace in Sharagua.”
With towels wrapped around us, we returned to find the porridge ready to eat and Rory picking slivers off the cooked fish. We dug in.
Bee paused to watch me. “The way you’re eating, are you sure you’re not pregnant?”
“I am quite sure!”
“She’s not pregnant.” Rory brushed his face alongside my head. “I have a very sensitive nose. She’s not pregnant. Nor is she at the moment fertile.”
“How can you know that?” demanded Bee.
His affronted expression made her laugh. “Didn’t I just say I have a sensitive nose? I know when females are fertile, or not fertile. You human women aren’t like the females of my own kind. You are fertile more often, and yet never seem to know it, so it’s fortunate I can tell.”
Bee and I stared at him for so long, mouths dropped open, that his brow wrinkled.
“How can you not tell? I would think it would be something you would want to know.”
“Goodness,” I murmured as heat crawled up my cheeks.
“You look so sweet when you blush, Cat.” Bee’s smirk made me laugh, although I was still flushed. She crossed to the high basement window with its four expensive panes of glass, cracked the latch, and pushed open the window to let out some of the heat. “What else haven’t you told us, Rory? We’ve asked you more than once to tell us about the spirit world and the Wild Hunt and the spirit courts, but you always say you don’t know anything.”
A flicker of wildness stirred in his amber eyes. He leaned closer, growing more threatening, like a great cat guarding the succulent deer it has just dragged in. Bee glanced toward the knives hanging by the stove, but I held my spoon and did not retreat.
“You two persist in talking to me as if I am a man. I am not a man. It amuses me to walk in these clothes. I am a cat. I live in the wild, and I hunt. The dragons are my people’s enemy. As for the other, I cannot walk in the spirit courts. I know nothing of their kind, except that they rule us.”
“How do they rule you?” Bee asked.
He considered the bones of the fish. “How do princes rule here? All creatures in the spirit lands where I grew up bide under the rule of the courts because the courts are stronger.”
“But why are the dragons your enemies?” Bee asked.
“If we are caught in the tides of their dreaming, we are changed, and lose both our bodily form and the mind that makes us a self. How can they not be our enemies?”
Bee’s smile had the brilliant assurance of the sun flashing out as wind drove off its shield of clouds. “You see! The headmaster must know about dragons, dreaming, and the Great Smoke. Why else would he have tricked us into crossing into the spirit world? Cat, get my sketchbook.”
After wiping my hands, I unfastened the lid of Vai’s chest. Bee had placed her sketchbook at the top, wrapped in an oilskin pouch. As she flipped through its pages, I went through the contents of the chest.
The top was spanned by the length of canvas, sewn with pockets, in which I kept my sewing things and my other necessaries. Beneath the unrolled canvas lay a pretty pagne I had never before seen, a festive gold-and-orange print with smiling suns and laughing moons. I blinked watering eyes, for it was obviously a special gift from Aunty, one the family had chosen for me with affection. Below this I found trousers and underthings and, beneath them, some of Vai’s beautiful dash jackets tucked within clean pagnes for extra protection.
“He can probably describe exactly where and when he got each one,” I said, running my hands along the folds.
Bee snapped shut the sketchbook. “What is it like to love someone that much?”
I glanced up at her. “Did you love Caonabo?”
“In that ridiculously infatuated way you love Andevai? No, thank Tanit, I did not love him!”
“How can you say so? At the academy, you were always droning on and on about Amadou Barry’s beautiful eyes or whichever young man took your fancy that week. You filled your sketchbook with pictures of handsome young men. And you were always talking—”
“Yes, I was always talking. I enjoyed the attention. Who wouldn’t?”
“I wouldn’t!”
“Yes, dearest. That’s my point. You wouldn’t and never did, because you’re a different person than I am.” She lifted a hand to scrub at her face as if she were tired. “Because I’m beautiful, people expect me to have a romantical disposition. Even you expected it, Cat! But I must say, there is nothing romantical about using cheap ribbons to make an old dress appear newer whenever the family is obliged to appear at a social gathering. Melqart forbid there be any chance we look as poor as we really were, lest people inclined to hire us reject our services due to our wrecked finances! There is nothing romantical about eating tough winter radish or mushy turnips for every meal in chilly Martius and damp April because the root cellar is almost empty, the early-ripening crops aren’t yet at market, and there’s not enough money for meat.”