Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

“Perhaps you have a different name. Here, we say you are accompanied by one of your ancestors. This person travels with you in the form of a three-pointed blade.”

Even Andevai hadn’t been able to see the sword unless I unsheathed it, but it appeared fire mages could see it at any time. “You see it as a blade?”

“A puzzling question. I see what it is.”

“What do you mean by three-pointed? It has only two, the hilt and the tip.”

“This person has two points in this world, as you say, but a third point in the other world.”

Which was true enough, if you considered the hidden blade the third point. Could a person’s spirit live in cold steel? As some memory of the spirit of Vai’s grandmother might reside in the stone I had picked up, could some part of my mother’s strength reside in the sword? I stroked the hilt, wondering if her spirit walked with me, and it seemed I felt an icy radiance and a trembling sense as of a thin wall that kept me apart from the vast and echoing landscape of the spirit world.

“I wonder why a maku carries a cemi,” he went on. “Also, never have I met and spoken to a woman from across the sea. You are disrespectful, but I think that is just your way. My mother the cacica tells me I will marry a woman from across the sea. Maybe it will be you.” He did not speak the words lasciviously. He said it as he might remark that rain clouds presaged rain.

“I think it unlikely it will be me.” Two could play this game. “You call your mother the cacica. Is she queen? I thought your uncle was king.”

“My uncle is very ill. Because of his illness, my mother, who is his sister, rules as cacica.”

“Ah. I understand now. Then I expect a princely clan from Europa will send a princely daughter to seal a princely pact between your two noble houses. That daughter would not be me.”

Yet I eyed him, feeling quite like a vulture as I did so. Was his fire magic enough to attract the Wild Hunt? Could I sacrifice him to save Bee?

From the foot of the ladder, the stocky adolescent spoke in Taino.

A glimmer like the breath of a firefly resolved into James Drake and his lamp. Upon finding the door of the house unlocked and unguarded, he came around to the back.

“Here you are,” he said with a frown as he held up the lamp to examine us.

The prince regarded Drake with a splendid display of indifference.

Drake’s lamp flared. “What is Prince Caonabo doing here?”

“Why do you think I am obliged to answer for my actions to you?” I asked.

We spoke in the mixed speech common to northwest Europa, not in the formal Latin of the schoolroom, and my face was surely so red that its heat alone might have lit the night. Prince Caonabo glanced at me, then climbed down. He and his companion walked away into the night.

“Well,” Drake said grudgingly, “it isn’t as if he could be trying to seduce you.”

I thought of Abby’s words. “You would know, I suppose.”

“Dear me, Cat. Have I done anything to provoke such a mean-spirited reply? I only meant that a nephew of the supreme ruler is not in the business of marrying the daughter of an impoverished Phoenician mercenary house. But we have to speak of this later. Where is Abby?”

She would not get into trouble on my account! “Why do you think I know where she is?”

He sighed. “Your insistence on being contrary in every answer is really quite annoying, Cat. A woman who is always contrary is unlikely to please a husband.”

I experienced a sudden and painful revelation that it was important to converse with a man before you became intimate with him, or else never to converse with him afterward. “I am sorry to inform you that not every woman wants a husband.”

“You’re very young. And very naive.”

I felt my ears turn to steam. “All the better to be taken advantage of??”

The wick flared again, flame licking upward in a flash. Yes, he was definitely angry, and not in a way I found amusing. “Is that what you think? That I took advantage of you?”

I pinched my lips together. I had to accept that Abby was right: I had been bitten, and he had healed me. Anyone would have said yes. He had also promised to get me off this cursed island, on which I was, evidently, meant to be trapped for the rest of my life. I could be caged at the vast estate of Four Moons House in more gilded comfort than this! Best to keep silence.

He went on. “I saved your life, Cat. At considerable risk to my own! Do you know why Prince Caonabo walks everywhere with his young cousin?”

“How could I know that?”

“A rhetorical question, I assume. Really, Cat. This affectation of showing opposition to everything becomes ridiculous and does not do you any credit for you seem otherwise a sensible girl. Naturally, fire mages are rare. They are so revered among the Taino that even mages born among the naborias — we would call them the plebeians-are married into the noble clans. Each fire mage is given a catch-fire. The great risk of being a fire mage is that you overextend your power-”

“And burn up,” I finished. Yet I had felt his magic not as fire but as tendrils snaking through me, drawing my desire out of its innocent sleep.

“And burn up. I wish you would not interrupt me.”

“You have no catch-fire?”

“Who would volunteer to be my catch-fire? Would you?”

My fingers tightened on the railing. “Wouldn’t it be an awful way to die?”

“To burn to death? I don’t intend to find out. Anyway, in Expedition Territory, it is forbidden by law for any fire mage to employ or enslave a person as a catch-fire.”

“Is the prince’s catch-fire a slave?”

“No, he is a cousin. That is his family duty. Among the Taino, catch-fires are honored. If they die, as they often do, they become a god-as we might say-and their skull-if a skull is left-is woven into a figure of power which the Taino call a cemi.”

I lowered my gaze to the gleam of my sword. “Prince Caonabo said my sword was a cemi.”

“That’s probably why he came to talk to you. If he considers it a cemi, then you carrying it would make you seem a person of consequence, with powerful ancestors.”

“How do you know this is a sword?”

He glanced away as if thinking someone else must have spoken. “Because it is one. Now. Where is Abby?”

The question popped out unbidden. “Why do you think I know?”

Raising the lamp, he frowned as if genuinely puzzled. “Are you angry at me?”

I fisted my hands, suddenly furious at myself. Wouldn’t it be better to be honest about my anger instead of making all these petty retorts and always answering questions with questions?

The thought stunned me into muteness. Answering questions with questions?

He sighed, as if my silence was my answer. “I’ll get a hammock for you. It will be cooler to sleep up there, but I warn you, the mosquitoes will feast on you at dawn.” He went into the house and emerged with a bundle of netting, which he tossed to me. “There are loops at each end. String it from the hooks in the posts. Draw up the ladder. Salters can’t climb, and Taino princes are too proud to ask for a ladder to be lowered. Although I’m not.” He blew me a kiss as he left.

I strung up the netting. I had a difficult time finding a comfortable position because my sword kept getting caught against my body at awkward angles. Once settled, I stared at the sea as the breeze stirred my shift against my sticky body. My eyelids were sweating.

Footsteps paced nearby, wearing a circuit. A man sobbed, “Kill me, kill me before I rot,” but no one was listening. No one but me.

I wrapped my arms around myself, wishing I were not alone. Yet how could I wish Bee or Rory here on this terrible island? I thought of Drake and of Prince Caonabo. I did not think the prince was interested in seduction. I was pretty sure he had simply been curious about my cold steel and my foreign origins. Drake’s motives seemed simpler: He was a man who might die at any moment. He had risked his life to heal me, and evidently he was the kind of man who thought it fair to get something in exchange. I had my life.