Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

“Go and do what is proper. I’ll see if Aunty needs help.”

He took a step away but turned back to brush my hand with his own as if checking to make sure I was a solid creature and not an illusion woven out of light like the one he had once woven of my face. He walked to the two-story wing, hurried up the stairs, and vanished into a room.

If I had a thought, I am sure it was too faint to register. At length, I stopped staring after him. I finished the food and carried the tray back to the kitchen sideboard.

“A good appetite is a precious thing,” Aunty Djeneba remarked. She was back at the griddle.

“The food was splendid. My thanks. Can I help in some way? I’m a good worker. I know how to sew, cook, read, and write. I must tell you, I have nothing, no coin, no possessions, nothing but my labor to offer you.”

“Yee’s married to Vai, is yee not?”

I blinked. At least four times. I had no idea what my expression looked like, but Aunty Djeneba glanced away, and the girls giggled.

“Is that what he told you?” I demanded.

She considered me thoughtfully. “Everyone around here know the story. He and he sister come here six months ago. He is handsome and charming. He work hard. Know how to make friends. He manners is so very good, I should like to meet he mother. Such a young man is like a flower. The gals will come round to see if they can pluck it. But yee know, Cat, never a hint of that with him. Always he is talking about the gal he lost, that one he married. How can he look at another when he don’ know what had become of she he had lost? Yee know all this, don’ yee?” She grasped my arm. “Yee need to sit down?”

“Why would I need to sit down?” But I could not get out the other questions foaming up in my thoughts: How had the world come unmoored? Who was this baffling personage pretending to be my husband the arrogant cold mage? Was I actually going to be safe here? How could I save Bee?

“Yee’s looking unsteady, gal.” She guided me to a sling-backed chair next to a toothless old woman who smiled at me but spoke no word. “Sit.”

I sank into the sway-backed canvas and shut my eyes, overcome by a sense of extreme disorientation and by the unrelenting heat.

I dozed off. When I woke, the shadows had drawn long across the courtyard and a dozen children of varying ages were standing in a semicircle watching me with great round stares. As soon as my open eyes registered, one of the little lads raced across the courtyard over to the long counter where men gathered, drinking and talking. Vai was deep in conversation with men his own age who looked vaguely familiar, likely carpenters from the yard, the ones I’d thought had been teasing him. Except they hadn’t been teasing him at all.

Someone laughed; a couple of the men made sparring gestures, play fighting. The little lad tugged on Vai’s arm, and he turned. His gaze met mine, and he made excuses and threaded through the crowd and over to the shelter. The children crowded around as he crouched beside me.

“Catherine, I hope you are feeling well, not ill.”

“I’m just so hot and thirsty.”

He tapped one of the little girls. “Juice.” With a bright grin, she hurried off and returned in triumph with a full cup. “Best if you rest until you get your feet under you.”

I drank. My head hurt and I felt queasy, but I did not want to complain. “Let me just sit.”

“Send one of the little lads if you need anything. The girls can fetch you juice. No giggling or talking.” As he rose, I belatedly realized the last was a command meant for the children.

He went back to his friends. I shut my eyes, because the shifting angle of the sun’s rays beyond my patch of shade was making me dizzy. The lilt and cadence of voices comforted me. Rain pounded on the shelter’s roof, kissing me with a cooling draft. Then it was hot again, and I tried to wake up, but I kept fading.

I heard them talking, but it was too hard to open my eyes.

“Are you sure she’s not a shade come to haunt you? Like what they call opia here?”

“Of course I’m sure, Kayleigh! She and I are bound by threads of magic chained by a djeli through a mirror. I knew the locket would bring her to me.”

“She doesn’t even like you.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” His tone had a smile in it.

“Could you be more vain? You can’t think she came here to find you! Kofi told me she came in on a canoe up from Cow Killer Beach. It’s all criminals, witches, and whores down there.”

“Don’t you talk like that, Kayleigh!”

“I’m just saying it’s got a bad reputation. That’s a nasty gash at her eye. How did she get it?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is she’s here, and she’s safe.”

“I heard she was with another man.”

A breath of cool breeze soothed my fevered brow.

“Don’t get mad at me, Vai. It’s the truth. Kofi saw you see him. He said it looked like you wanted to plant your adze in the other man’s…face.”

It got a little colder. Then, alas, the breath of ice eased. “I see now. You’re jealous.”

Her voice did have a touch of discontented whine. “You promised you would come with me to the areito. But now you’re going to sit here all night and stare at her.”

His anger faded entirely. “I can’t leave her to wake up to unfamiliar faces. Here’s Kofi. Doesn’t he look all cleaned up for you! Because I assure you it’s not for my benefit. But before you leave for the areito, he and I need to have a talk about what we tell little sisters.”

I opened my eyes into a blur of confusing images: The young carpenter with the scars wavered into view wearing a colorful jacket and with his locks ornamented with beads; he was smiling at Vai’s younger sister Kayleigh, who had on a blouse and wrapped pagne in the local way, her blouse ornamented by white necklaces whose polished gleam bore me under into a white-capped sea turgid with ice; a masked face, bright and unkindly, turned to look at me; a latch winked with glittering eyes; a crow swept down in a shroud of black wings. I moaned, trying to get away, but it pecked at my weeping eyes, and I turned to salt and dissolved into the foaming ocean water.

“Catherine?”

I gasped, bolting upright, heart pounding and breath ragged.

Night had fallen. A finely etched and exceedingly delicate bauble of cold fire illuminated Vai’s face. Beyond, by lamplight, people were clearing the tables and setting the benches in order.

“I don’t feel well,” I whispered.

“No,” he agreed. He got his arms under me and lifted me bodily out of the chair. “If you can use the privy yourself, I’ll take you there. Otherwise I’ll ask Aunty to come help you.”

“I can do it myself.”

I could, and I did, although I got confused by the pipes and the bowl and the water-flushing mechanism that the girls had showed me how to use earlier, very elaborate and hygienic and unlike anything I had ever seen in Adurnam. I was reeling with dizziness when I came out, so he carried me up the stairs and into a room and onto a narrow cot.

He peeled me out of my jacket, and there was a sudden silence even though it was already quiet. Afterward he let go of my arm and wiped down my face and neck and arms with a cool cloth. He made me drink in sips and then he moved away and I heard him talking in a low, urgent voice but I couldn’t understand the words.

I tossed and turned. As in a restless dream, an old man with feathers and shells in his hair entered the room. His calloused hand traced my navel; his lips pressed against my forehead with a kiss that snaked through my body to kindle my blood.

His unfamiliar voice spoke. “ She is clean. ”