Cold Fire

“Tea, or rum?” asked Keer, talons poised above the tray and teeth flashing wickedly.



“Might I have rum? Why did you call me a spiritwalker?”



She handed me a shot glass and poured tea for herself. The rum burned down my throat. She poured tea again, this time for us both.



“The world is a maze. It is twisted and layered. Like a knot, perhaps you rats would say. No, that is not a good analogy. Anyway. Some of you rats can navigate to places in the knot where none of my kind can go, just as we have our secret pathways.”



I sipped at the tea. The flavor breathed with the scent of late summer flowers, dusty and tart. “Your own secret pathways? Does the Wild Hunt hunt your people?”



“Such a question demands we enter the circle.”



“I can’t play the game, Keer. My head feels like it’s being squeezed in a vise. My feet feel like they’ve been chopped out from under me. If that makes you want to eat me, or if I lose all the height I’ve gained on Triumph Spire, so be it. Just give me another shot of rum first.”



Keer eyed me in the peculiar way trolls had, looking with one eye and then the other. “You have given me the gift of your weaknesses. Now we are like clutch mates. I can either consume you to strengthen myself or…”



She had the most interesting eyes, in one way so human with round black pupil and silver iris and in another way so gleaming and deadly, rimmed by the tiny feathers of a metallic golden-brown color. I almost felt I could see in that lens the secret pathways known only to trolls.



“Whatever the second is sounds more appealing than the first,” I interposed, for one of the things I liked about trolls was that the ones I knew appreciated a sardonic sense of humor.



She poured me a second shot of the very dark rum. “Your very entertaining pamphlet and its colorful tales is a rat story, not one of ours. We have our own enemies, and maybe you have met them. But no Wild Hunt like the one you describe rides through troll country.”



“I don’t see how it could track anything in that maze.” I raised the glass to my lips, then set it down without drinking. Could Bee hide in troll town on Hallows’ Eve? “Keer, do you think the Wild Hunt only hunts humans? Or have you found a way to protect yourselves against them?”



“They are not the ones who hunt us. Once, long past and beyond telling, my ancestors were almost wiped out. A few pockets survived in valleys amid the great ice shelves. Now we grow again. But the eye of our older brethren lies upon us, and the unwary are taken.”



“Who are your older brethren?”



“I think you rats call them dragons. It is not our word for them.”



Now I did drain the second shot glass, and followed it with a chaser of tea to purge the sting from my throat. The printing press wheezed in the workshop out back, and pens scritched in the clerks’ office. “Fiery Shemesh! Not even my father knew that!”



“Not even the ancients know every secret that exists in the world,” mused Keer. “At the heart of all lie the vast energies which are the animating spirit, if you will, of the worlds. The worlds incline toward disorder. Cold battles with heat. When ice grows, order increases. Where fire triumphs, energies disperse.”



“Is the ice alive?”



“An interesting question. The worlds are a maze with many paths. That is all I know.”



I considered her odd statement that we were now clutch mates. “Keer, troll town seemed to me like a maze with many paths. I want to call on you as my kinswoman. If I send my cousin to you on Hallows’ Night, will you hide her in troll town?”



“I will. And not let her be eaten. Today you did not reach Chartji’s aunt.”



“I’ll have to try another path to reach my husband. Why can you see my sword?”



She cocked her head. “How can any not see it? It is so very shiny.”



I clasped her hand in the radical manner, and she showed me her teeth and raised her crest, and I did not know what it meant to her, but it heartened me. The headache had passed. Outside, the sun beat down. Clouds glided like airships on an aloof journey, and who was to say they were not? Perhaps creatures of air lived in the clouds whose existence we had no inkling of.



So many mysteries. And yet I had my own burdens.



I left the law offices and, drawing the shadows around me, walked down the long boulevard along the sleepy waters of the bay to the neighborhood I had too briefly called home. I sought out the compound where Kofi’s people hired out carts and wagons. I crept in where I had never been invited, feeling like the worst intruder. There I saw Kayleigh boiling and mangling clothes with young women, laughing and easy with them as she had never been easy with me.