The old man gave Vai a bitter look. “Yee have boasted yee have a certain means to kill him.”

“It is no boast. It is the truth.”

This was not only too much, it was terrifying, for they meant to throw away Vai’s life!

I jumped to my feet. “Vai is worth far more to everyone alive. If you demand he try to assassinate the general, you’ll only be making him throw away his life on a task he can’t accomplish.”

“Catherine!”

“One man with adequate fighting skills, pitted against trained soldiers who will have crossbows? The mansa can’t have known cold magic is so weak here or I can’t believe he’d have sent you. In Europa, there’s no one you could not destroy. Here, without truly powerful cold magic to protect yourself, the general’s people will cut you down before you can get close enough to draw blood.”

I desperately needed some way to persuade Vai away from this foredoomed course of action. I recalled Brennan’s words when we had been digging through the wreckage of the airship. “Why do you radicals see the general as your enemy? Why do you want him dead?”

The old man waved a hand like wiping away a stain. “We ancestors escaped an empire. Shall we help raise another? A man who is on his father’s side a Keita, a descendant of the Malian royal lineage? Even from over the ocean, such an emperor can come back and say he have the right to trample us because we ancestors once served his.”

“Brennan Du told me that if you examine Camjiata’s legal code, you’ll see he understands he can only succeed by offering rights and privileges to the common people that their masters have denied them. Why kill him? Have you considered making an alliance with him against the Council?”

“A question,” said the old man, “made more interesting by the fact that yee is the one who have posed it.”

“Yee do know, fire bane,” remarked the middle-aged man, “that this gal is known to have arrived on the jetty in the company of James Drake, a notorious fire mage?”

Vai’s mouth turned down, and his shoulders stiffened. “I know that. Have you a point?”

“Beside the point ’tis rumored he have used unwilling people—dying people—as catch-fires to absorb his magic?”

I choked, but no one was watching me. They were all watching Vai.

“I have heard such a rumor.”

“Don’ yee know that the reason he is not in prison for these crimes is because he have a powerful protector? One he is careful to hide? He serve General Camjiata. He was one of the people sent to Adurnam to fetch the general out of Europa and over to here.”

Vai looked at me.

I swallowed.

“Drake, in the entryway of the law offices,” he breathed, as one after another of the connections hit home. “Was the general there that morning, too? Catherine, did you know he was there? Do you know him?”

I shut my eyes rather than answer.

His tone cooled. “I had no idea.”

“Seem to me,” remarked the middle-aged man, “yee’s in bed with yee own enemy.”

The temperature in the room dropped so precipitously that everyone, except for the trolls, cried out in alarm. Several leaped to their feet. The hilt of my sword flowered under the breath of cold magic. I had almost forgotten the way the air bit into the skin, the tingle of power rising from the sword’s hilt to sting my tongue. I opened my eyes to see them all chafing their hands.

“What is this?” whispered Livvy, shivering.

I grabbed Vai’s wrist. “This is an extremely angry cold mage. Come, Vai.”

I tugged. He did not budge. Nor did he speak. Had we been in the north, I did not doubt the building would have crashed down around us, but we were not in the north. We were here.

I surveyed the radicals with what I hoped was a look portentous enough to make them let us go without forcing me to fight a way out.

“I’m not part of the general’s army. I didn’t ask to be brought to the Antilles, or to this meeting for that matter. I won’t betray what I’ve heard here because I know what it means to be betrayed, and I will never do that to another. But let me tell you this. You don’t know what you’re dealing with, not with Vai and not with the general. And you certainly have no earthly idea of what you’re dealing with, with me.”

As Bee would say, know when to stop talking and leave.

The cold had intimidated them. I released Vai and headed for the door. He followed me, as I had hoped he would. I got out the door and started down the corridor.