Cold Fire

Which meant his breakout had been planned long in advance.



“He came looking for yee, Cat,” said Luce with a frown.



“The general?” I asked with real alarm. I did not need that complication on top of all else!



She rolled her eyes again. “Yee’s an escaped Amazon from he army?”



“Can’t I have made a joke?” I said with a false smile as I realized what she had meant.



“No joke to he who traveled so far to seek yee.”



“Is that what Vai told you?” It was a foolish question, answered by the very fact of my asking it. Vai had told everyone he had come to the Antilles to look for the perdita, his lost woman.



Which meant Kayleigh and I were the only ones who knew it for a lie.



Why had he really come to Expedition? More importantly, why had the mansa allowed it? Commanded it?



What did the mansa want that was also in the Antilles?



There was only one thing I could think of: Camjiata.



Vai had brought with him a sword forged of cold steel. Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage severs the soul from the body with a cut: They need only draw blood to kill you.



The mansa had sent Vai out to do his dirty work before. Vai had destroyed a magnificent airship and then gloated over his triumph. “They were sure I was too inexperienced to manage it!?”



Yet he was not a heartless killer. He had refused to kill me. Surely I was the one bred and raised to be a heartless killer, not him.



“Cat, can yee help me with this table?”



My thoughts slammed back to earth. “Where do you want it?”



Because Venerday was Kayleigh’s usual half day off each week, she accompanied us to the batey match. Vendors had set up on the open ground outside Passaporte’s ball court, selling baked yams, roasted corn, and cassava bread, things that could be eaten with the fingers. A few sold kerchiefs in the colors and patterns by which a person advertised allegiance to one of Expedition’s teams. Some kerchiefs bore unusual sigils that marked teams from within the Taino kingdom.



“Do Taino teams play here as well?” I asked.



“Assuredly. And if there is a celebration in the Taino kingdom, like a noble marriage or birth, there shall be games at the border plaza.”



Not for us the vendors’ expensive food; we’d eaten before we left the boardinghouse. In a jostling delight of girls of whom Luce at almost sixteen was the youngest and I at twenty was one of the eldest, we paid our entry fee for the cheap seats and climbed to the top row. I enjoyed the feeling of being half hidden among them, because the young women of Expedition were, on the whole, tall and big and healthy, quite unlike the frailer, sallower, shorter women of cold Adurnam. I was so accustomed to men and women seated separately in public venues that intermingling forcibly recalled to me how foreign a place Expedition was. Yet my companions felt no compunction about pushing their way through the ranks of young men, seeking a spot where we could all sit together. They were the boldest girls I had ever met, and I loved them for it, and for the way they took me in as if I were Luce’s cousin and treated me as if I were no different from one of their own.



We crammed in shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, and I found myself between two tall girls of about my age named Tanny and Diantha.



“Yee husband is uncanny handsome,” said Tanny, taking my hand and using it to point toward a group of young men below and to our left, standing in dusty trousers and singlets as if they had just come from the carpentry yard. Vai was fake-boxing with Kofi, laughing, quite at his ease. “Good fortune for yee.”



“And you wonder how it is he comes to think so well of himself?!” said Kayleigh from the row behind me in a tone accompanied by a long-suffering sigh.



Tanny was a heavyset, handsome young woman who had, I’d been told, cast off two husbands already although she was no older than I was. “Carpenters have the best tools.”



I stared at my hands, which had evidently lost hold of my entire store of witty rejoinders.



“Stop! Please!” exclaimed Kayleigh as the girls around her laughed.



“Don’ tease Cat,” said Luce, popping forward from the row behind us.



“If yee decide to rid yee own self of he, Cat,” said Tanny with a shrug, “I shall take a try.”



“Good fortune to yee with that,” retorted Luce loyally. “He shall not bite. He is devoted to Cat.” She cast at me a baleful glare that made the other girls snicker all over again.



“We were married by our families,” I said, choking out the words in the hope that some kind Fate would sever the conversation. “I barely know him. Indeed, I scarcely think of him at all.”