“Catherine!” called Vai from the boat.
I shoved the cacica’s skull into the basket and ran onto the pier. The dragon flashed away into the chasm, out of the mortal world and into the Great Smoke. As the waves of its departure slapped the shore, Vai raked six fat spheres of cold fire into the air. Light coalesced into gleaming columns so bright I could discern the green of the grass.
I kissed and then released him. “If soldiers are coming, they’ll know right where we are.”
“That is my intention. I want to draw them off from the academy.”
From the road, a horn blatted and was answered thrice.
Kemal set Bee back from him. “When I have made all safe here, I will find you,” he promised her. He turned to us. “I’ll tell them you stole our horses and fled by road. Go!”
I dragged a speechless Bee into the boat. Vai pushed off and set to the oars as Rory coiled the line. The current caught the bow, spinning us halfway around until Vai pulled us back. Bee stared toward the bank. A lamp caught flame. Kemal stared after us until Maestra Lian took his arm to help him back up to the academy of which he was now headmaster.
32
For the longest time no one spoke. Rory sat cross-legged among the gear, his head buried in his hands. Bee stared back the way we had come. A candle of light floated by Vai’s knee, casting a gleam onto his beautiful face and intent expression. I watched the way his fingers tightened and relaxed on the oars, the way he glanced up between strokes at me, as if he was never quite sure he would still see me there, as if I might vanish between one breath and the next.
All my breath spilled out of me as I forced the awful vision of James Drake out of my head. I could kill Drake. If he tried to touch Vai, I would.
“Well!” said Bee. “Not every young woman has a dragon fall in love with her!”
I laughed, for her gloating tone scoured fear from me. I counted off on my fingers. “Goodness, Bee! A legate. A prince. An infamous radical. Even the mansa seemed inclined to fall for your prodigious charms. It seems unthinkable a dragon in the shape of a man would not do so likewise.”
“How can you speak to me of any of those others!” she cried. “They are but… trifles compared to…” Words failed her.
Vai’s gaze flashed up to meet mine. He smiled the intimate smile meant for me only, the one that made my cheeks grow warm. “I would have demanded more than a kiss.”
“I must say that in your case, Andevai, I do believe that horse has already left the stable,” retorted Bee in the most dignified manner imaginable, after which she spoiled the effect with a toss of her curls and an audible sniff.
Rory lifted his head. “Wouldn’t it be more precise to say in that case that the horse has already entered the—”
“Rory.” Vai’s tone was genial, but he cut him off.
I cut in. “Maestra Lian is a dragon dreamer. Both of you have a ghostly third eye.”
Bee touched her forehead, then giggled giddily. “Don’t joke, you beast! Think of how unsightly that would look! I wonder why the headmaster never revealed the truth to me while we attended the academy.”
“If he had told you what he was and what you were, back before all this happened, would you have believed him?”
“I suppose not,” she said with a grudging sigh. “Anyway, my dream was wrong, about meeting the headmaster in his study.”
“We found the headmaster in Noviomagus on the Feast of Mars Triumphant. He ate fire challengers. I spoke to the cacica as in a mirror. If you didn’t truly understand the dream you were having, you might have interpreted it in a more familiar way.”
“Why, Cat,” she said in surprise, “I do believe you are right for once.”
A horn’s call rose and faded. Rain spattered over us. I clutched Bee’s hand more tightly.
“Catherine, are you cold?” Vai pulled the left oar to steady us in the current. A bauble of cold fire chased out in front of us to light our way.
“I’m scared of being out on the water, to be honest.”
Bee put an arm around me, but her attention was fixed on the globe of cold fire. “Andevai, how far can you push the cold fire away from you before you lose control of it? For that matter, how close must you be to a fire to kill it?”
“In Expedition we did a number of experiments to study exactly these issues.”
“Did you?” said Bee, shifting excitedly beside me on the facing bench. “What did you do?”
“Everything will be different here because of the proximity and mass of the ice, but…” He described how the troll scientists he had worked with had set different combinations of things on fire and adjusted him for distance, angle, and substances placed between him and the fire. They had tested his ability to manipulate cold fire at distance, and how long the brightness would last after he had let go of it. “And both the feathered people and the dragons have an effect on my cold magic.”
As they talked, I shut my eyes and pretended we were in a carriage.
After another hour we put in at an isolated sandbank. The boat became our roof as we huddled beneath like kittens under the beaver-pelt blanket and our winter coats, with Vai and Rory on the outside and Bee and me snug between them. Rory fell asleep at once.
“No kissing,” said Bee.
Vai kissed me anyway. The touch of his lips was as soft as the caress of flowers.
“The cacica warned we must beware cold mages pretending to be our friends,” I said. “But we already know the mansa of Five Mirrors House sent word to Four Moons House.”
He sighed. “Yes. I should have known better than to believe I could return to the Houses.”
“To think dragons walk among us and we never knew!” whispered Bee. By the lilt in her voice I could tell she was wide awake. “It seems to me the spirit world and the Great Smoke are locked in a struggle that neither can win. One grows powerful while the other grows weak, and then they reverse, back and forth endlessly.”
“Perhaps the interlocked worlds are like steam engines, ever heating and cooling,” said Vai.
“Gas expands as its temperature goes up, and a balloon deflates as its temperature goes down,” she murmured. “What if cold mages are moving the vital energy from one place to another?”
“I’m trying to sleep,” said Rory, and they lapsed into silence.
Tucked against Vai, I listened to him think by listening to the way he breathed steadily, sucked in a breath as a thought struck him, then slowed again as his mind waded through the possibilities. The river flowed with a soothing voice that pulled me into its drowning waters. Held in his arms and with Bee’s back pressed against mine and Rory’s soft snuffling just beyond her, I did not fear. My mother’s hand and my father’s voice had guided me home. I slept.
I woke alone in the frosty chill. A pallor of gray brushed the edges of the night, promising dawn to come. Wisp-lights trailed along the far bank.
Vai knelt beside me, a gloved hand shaking my shoulder. “Catherine, wake up.”
“I’m awake. What are those lights?”
“Troops searching the shore. We’ve got to get back out on the water.”
The Rhenus River flowed north before its final curving southwest plunge toward the vast marshy delta we in Adurnam called the Sieve, which poured through a hundred channels into the Atlantic Ocean. On this stretch of the river the current was steady but not treacherous. Vai gave us each turns at the oars. The banks were overgrown with bushes and woodland. All morning we saw no villages or fields, and only once a rider on horseback.
Just past midday and by now exceedingly thirsty and hungry, we spotted a village on the western bank marked by the round houses typical of northwestern Celts. It appeared to be a peaceful place, folk about the spring business of sharpening plowshares and milking ewes. We pulled into a backwater and tied up.