Cold Fire

“They are asking if you are my cemi,” she said.



“If I am your cemi?”



“They want to see your hair unbound, and if you have a navel. Why would they think you didn’t have a navel?”



“They think I’m a spirit of the dead.”



“I won’t let them bully you. You need show them nothing. Otherwise Juba says they will think I can forever be pushed around.” Her reply to them, in Taino, was precise and slow.



They merely shrugged, taking off their sandals and washing their feet before they escorted Bee up onto a carpet of reed mats. Under the heat and light shimmering out of the lamps, they stripped her naked, wiped her down with damp cloths, perfumed her with sweet-smelling oils, and painted her bare arms with lines that crawled up the curve of her flesh like serpents. Then they dressed her in a long wrap skirt of pure white cotton; red and gold feathers for her hair; a bodice woven of cotton and beads; a stone collar carved with turtles and frogs; and wreaths of bells for her ankles and wrists. When they had finished, I could believe she had become someone else, crossing into a new world.



I followed, as ignored as a cane that hides a sword. Her attendants did not speak to me, and she indicated by occasional glances and nods that I was doing exactly as I should. We proceeded down a corridor on soft matting. Bee and the Taino women walked barefoot; I was the only one shod, in the sandals Vai had given me. We came to a porch that overlooked a courtyard crowded with men standing on one side and women seated on the other. Our escort moved aside to reveal Bee. I stayed at the back.



The many elders and proud nobles examined Bee in her finery. The men had stern, striking features; most wore feathers and stone collars. Opposite, women looked us up and down with solemn gazes. They were beautifully adorned in feathers and beads and pure white beaded bodices and skirts. No overt hostility marred their expressions. Neither did they seem overawed by the presence of a woman who walked the dream of dragons. It was hard to judge.



One face caught my eye among the women. I saw the very behica who had grasped my arm on Salt Island and informed me through Caonabo’s translation that Drake had not healed me because I had never been infested. Instinct jolted me. Hide. I caught a few threads of magic to obscure myself.



Yet the behica saw me at once. She saw me, and she knew me. But she said nothing.



The assembled people sang in call and response. The melody seemed familiar, a tune I heard whistled on Expedition’s streets, but the pulse and winding rhythm of the song made it seem like a proclamation. Only I did not know what for.



When they finished, we proceeded along another walkway to a large wooden building raised on stilts and surrounded by a veranda lit by gas lamps. Bee strode toward the building as toward her destiny, head high. She was so beautiful.



We climbed three stairs onto the porch and its carpet of matting. Past open doors lay a large room draped with fine netting over the furnishings, a lovingly lathed and polished table set with gold-plated dishes and shining silver utensils that was flanked by two Europan-style chairs, and a matched pair of plush Turanian couches suitable for conversation. On the far side of the chamber, hands clasped behind his back, Prince Caonabo stood looking out a window onto the night beyond. He turned, hearing us. He was so like to Juba in feature that it was only by the length of his hair that you could tell them apart. Incongruously, he wore trousers, and a dash jacket that had certainly been tailored in Europa—or on Tailors’ Row in the Passaporte District from a pattern off one of Vai’s jackets—out of sober sea-green cotton. One might think he was endeavoring to make his foreign bride comfortable with familiar things, although he was also, even more incongruously, barefoot.



As we paused on the porch for Bee to catch her breath and steady her nerves, a woman came hurrying around from another side of the building. With a gesture at me, she explained something to the most senior of our escorts.



Bee’s serene expression creased into confusion and then darkened to dismay. “They are saying you cannot enter with me. That you cannot stay at all, Cat. There’s a misunderstanding… They’ve changed their minds.” She took my hand, but her gaze was on the prince. “But it’s too late for me to retreat now. You have to go. I’ll be all right.”



I shook my hand out of hers. “Wait just a moment.”



I charged into the chamber and right up to him as he blinked in astonishment. “Prince Caonabo, I have brought your bride but I have two things to say to you first. If you harm her or let her come to harm, I will gouge out your eyes and then eat them. That is one. As for the other, she must go to troll town in Expedition before the sun sets on Hallows’ Night. Promise me you will see that she is taken safely there until a full day has passed.”