Cold Fire

She spoke in a slightly hoarse alto. The prince translated. “Your blood does not harbor the teeth of the ghouls.”



“I know,” I said as evenly as I could. “James Drake healed me.”



She laughed in a curt way that made me want to sink into the dirt floor. Instead, I stared at the printed fabric of my pagne, sure that the secret architecture of the universe could be discerned in its patterns of shells. When the silence dragged out, I looked up.



The prince rubbed his forehead with a frown. “The maku did not heal you.”



“I’m not healed?” The room went hot, and my pulse thundered in my ears as I swayed.



“If a bitten person is brought quickly, then we can burn out the teeth before they infest the blood. But always the touch leaves a remnant. Like the ashes from wood that is burned. You have no ashes, Catherine Bell Barahal. There were never ghoul teeth in you.”



“But how…?” Words evaporated like mist under the sun.



“This mystery the behica also wonders at. You were bitten by one of the afflicted ones, that is certain. But there are no ashes and there are no teeth. No one healed you. You had nothing to heal because you are clean.”



“But Drake told me I would die if I didn’t—!” Now and again, I had the unfortunate and unpleasant experience of blurting out words I immediately regretted.



The prince’s brow creased in puzzlement, then lifted in enlightenment. “Did James Drake say that in order to heal you, he and you must mate?”



The behica examined me with an expression blended of pity and disgust, just as offended as my once-beloved Aunt Tilly would have looked had I brazenly informed her I had married and abandoned one man and taken another as a lover. Which some people might say I had.



I hope I am not a rude person. Bee and I learned good manners and proper deportment, and I am sure I value courtesy. But this was too much. I looked at the blameless catch-fires, then met the old woman’s gaze with a blazing fire of my own.



“People who throw others to the wolves ought not to judge where they end up running.” I turned my back on her, pushed past the prince and the catch-fires, and walked out of the house.



Blindly, furiously, I strode across the open space until, like a brain-rotted salter, I bumped into the tall iron fence and found myself staring through the narrow gaps between bars into the crystalline white eyes of a man.



I yelped, leaping back.



He said nothing. He simply stood with face against the bars shifting ever so slightly as if some hours or days or months ago he had been walking this way and, having fetched up against the bars, did not know how to turn around. For all I knew, he would stand there until a strong rain dissolved him. His gaze had neither soul nor intelligence. He was an empty vessel.



I caught my heel on the ground, and sat down so hard on my backside that I began to cry. What a fool I was!



But tears get boring very quickly. I wiped my face on a sleeve and rose. Better to face the truth than run away.



The high fence ringed an open area of shelters with thatched roofs but no walls. In some, clothed figures dozed in hammocks. Other figures lay on the ground or stood with slack faces and lax limbs staring at nothing. Closer stood actual cages whose prisoners paced and muttered and then, catching sight of me, began to gabble and claw at the bars that confined them. I recognized the man who had bitten me more by the rip in his singlet than by his features, which were smeared with dirt. Red rimmed his mouth; was that my blood? He rocked from one foot to the other, eyes shut, keening and moaning: “Kill me. Kill me before I rot.”



How long did it take them to die? For how long did their minds hang on, screaming, as they slid inexorably into the claws of the plague?



I saw Abby. Her hair was bound in a head wrap of brown-and-gold cloth. She was running a hand along the bars of an empty cage as if counting in time to the tune she was singing. “On a fine batey, do yee hear, me sissy-o? We want one of they, do yee hear, me sissy-o? Which one do yee want? Do yee hear, me sissy-o?”



“Abby! It’s Cat’reen!”



She looked at me without recognition and walked on.



I fled back to the house and barred the door. I washed my face and hands once, then twice, and then a third time, but what I had seen and heard would not rinse away. I sank down on the mat and let the exhaustion of despair drag me down into sleep.



“Cat?” James Drake’s voice woke me. “Here’s food and juice. I haven’t seen you all day.”



I opened the door. Drake stood with a half smile on his face and his hair darkened by being sopping wet; his clothes stuck to him; he looked as if he had been swimming. He was not alone.