Cold Steel
Bee twisted a slender bracelet off one dainty wrist. “Please take this as thanks for your help.”
“You don’t need to pay me. I’m happy to do a good turn…” The wagoner paused as Bee held up the bracelet. “Is that gold?”
“Gold from the court of the Taino king,” she said prettily. “He was so overwhelmed by my beauty that he married me.”
“If you want to call that marriage.” His gaze hardened. By the way his gaze flicked between us, I guessed he was reconsidering his estimate of what manner of young females we might be and whether Rory was truly my brother or rather our partner in crime.
Bee’s diminutive stature led people to think her both mild and harmless, until she shifted her feet to a fighting stance. “We expect to be treated with the respect we have shown you,” she said in a voice thick with queenly grandeur. “Do not make me regret I thought you a decent man.”
He relaxed. “I see you two girls is having me on. My thanks, then, and I’ll take the bauble gladly, as a keepsake of your mischievous ways. Now you get on to your sire, lass. Lest he get tired of waiting for you and come hunting you down. Listen, you can hear him coming now!”
In the distance horns tootled and drums and cymbals clashed.
“What festival parade is that?” I asked as we heaved the chest out of the carriage.
“Tomorrow Mars Camulos has his feast. The mask associations have been practicing for weeks for the festival procession. You Phoenician girls won’t be dancing to that Roman horn!”
With a wave and another cackle he drove into the narrow lanes of the market.
“Mars Camulos!” said Bee with a dark frown. “That means tomorrow is the twenty-third day of the month of Martius. The areito to celebrate Caonabo becoming cacique took place on the first of Februarius. Which means we left Sharagua six weeks ago.”
“Six weeks! And yet three months before that!” I cried, thinking of Vai, taken from me on Hallows’ Night.
Looking toward the stalls of fish, Rory eyed the nearest vendor as if gauging whether he could snatch a fish and run. “No wonder I’m so hungry!”
“Rory, don’t do it.” Bee grabbed his arm, and he winced. She turned to me. “You’ve always said that time passes differently in the spirit world. It’s still strange to have it happen to us.”
Rain started up again in a blowsy mist. My teeth began to chatter. “We need to find shelter and decide what to do.”
“I have to speak to the headmaster, Cat. I think we should go there first.”
Rory hunched his shoulders. “He’s a dragon. You can’t trust him. He will eat you.”
“He won’t eat me, Rory.” Bee poked him in the arm. “He might eat you, though, and there are moments when you are so annoying that I must say I expect I would encourage him to do so.”
Rory drew himself straight, lips pulled back. “I shall have you know, Beatrice, that I am never annoying. That you find me so is a reflection on your character, not mine.”
“We need to scout out our ground first,” I temporized, for I sensed Rory trembling at the edge of rebellion. Also, I desperately wanted to dry out and get warm. “Let’s go first to the law offices of Godwik and Clutch. It’s a long walk across the city, I know. But if there’s anyone I trust, it’s the trolls… the feathered people, I mean. The Taino always use the more polite phrase.”
“We need not imitate the Taino in everything just because they believe themselves to be superior to us!” remarked Bee in a frosty tone. “But I suppose it is wisest to go to the law offices first. Wait here.”
She left Rory and me huddled with the chest under the eaves of a decrepit warehouse. Wagons lined up to offload their glistening catch into the baskets and crates of middlemen, merchants, cooks, and men guarding wheelbarrows. No one paid us any mind, for we looked exactly like an impoverished brother and sister who had no home and no means of buying our next meal, but I felt exposed and vulnerable.
“Rory, what did you tell the wagoner about our sire? You ought to have been silent.”
“It was while you were howling. I said our sire was the Master of the Wild Hunt. The benefit of telling the truth is that so few people believe you.”
I laughed. “When did you get to be so wise?”
“There was this woman I petted in the palace of the prince of Tarrant that time I got trapped there after eating the pug dog and the peahen…”
He regaled me with a story that made me laugh more than once, even if there were particulars I had to command him to skip over because I did not want to hear them. Having no shame, he had no idea there were private things a person did not tell other people. Just as he finished, Bee reappeared carrying three leather peddlers’ sacks and a wrapped paper bundle.