However, there was another bench. On it sat a male figure wearing a dash jacket perfectly tailored to his well-proportioned frame. Eyes shut, he had his head tilted back to rest on the wall, one hand curled lightly on his lap and the other tapping a rhythm on a thigh. A folded paper with a broken wax seal rested on the bench beside him.
I sat at the opposite end of the bench, my heart as fragile as a trembling songbird cupped in sheltering hands.
“Ah,” he said, without opening his eyes. “My tormenter.”
No, after all, my heart was not a trembling songbird but a hissing, outraged goose in full rampage.
“What puzzles me is how a man willing to spend weeks courting a woman to convince her that she was really in love with him, or could be in love with him if she would just set aside her perfectly reasonable and pragmatical concerns about being in all essentials owned by a mage House…” I had to pause to take a breath and sort out my line of argument. “What puzzles me, is how he could spend weeks- weeks! -entrenching his plans and carrying out his campaign, and then in one instant be willing to think the worst of her without making any effort to let her explain.”
His drumming fingers stilled. “Was I to doubt the evidence of my eyes?”
“Am I meant to conduct my entire explanation in questions?”
“Can you do so?”
“Do you actually think I’m lying about the questions?”
“Can I know what to believe?”
“Did you read my pamphlet? Get my message?”
“Would you be sitting here if I hadn’t?”
“You arranged this?”
“Who do you suppose sent Professora Alhamrai to the general’s household in the first place over three weeks ago to see how a certain…person was doing?”
“Wouldn’t the esteemed professora be capable of sending herself??”
“Do you think she would have thought of you at all? Do you think you are the first person on everyone’s mind?”
I opened my mouth, and shut it. The hammering of my heart eased from an erratic cacophony to a mere pounding but no-less-?irritated clamor. “Might some vain young man’s pride have been hurt?”
“Why would a person trust a person who had lied to him?”
“Why do you think I lied?”
His eyes opened as his head raised. “Was the appearance of the general, his fire mage, and your cousin not reason enough? Not to mention the wardens?”
“What if a lost young woman had had no inkling of any machinations behind her abandonment on the jetty and was as surprised as anyone at the appearance of the general, his fire mage, and her cousin? Not to mention the wardens?”
He cut me a dagger-like glance from his lovely eyes. “Am I meant to believe anyone could be that naive?”
“Do you suppose I guessed this dinner was arranged by you?”
His brow furrowed in a way that suggested he was calculating my likely ability to be that naive.
I had had enough. “Is this meant to impress me with your cleverness, Andevai? Wasn’t it bad enough when you insinuated in that unpleasant way that I might have had other lovers besides Drake? Do you really think I’m pretending about the questions? Do you think I like having to answer questions with questions all the time? Do you? ?”
He exhaled as he pressed a hand to his forehead. “No, you’re right. My apologies.”
The sudden way he shifted ground took me entirely by surprise. I looked down at the fists I had made of my hands, let out a breath, and opened them.
“Please let me say what I have been thinking about for days, hoping to have a chance to say to you. I want to tell you the things I should have told you when you asked on the night of the areito. I did know Drake was associated with the general. I did know the general was in the law offices of Godwik and Clutch in Adurnam that morning you came to meet with Chartji. But Bee and I were not there to meet him. We would never have gone to the law offices had we known the most notorious man in Europa would arrive there right after we did. We went to the law offices to see if we could get work with the radicals.”
“That would be the enchanting Brennan Du,” he muttered, hands back to tapping on his thighs.
“It’s sweet when you’re jealous.”
His lips pinched together.
I fought down an urge to jab a little deeper into that soft spot. “We left the law offices because the general was there. You know what happened after that. Bee and I slipped through the well and…and then I washed up on Salt Island. A salter bit me. Drake found me.”
“You left out the shark.”
“The shark attacked before the salter bit me.”
“You traveled straight from the spirit world into the Sea of Antilles.”
“Yes! But it was the Barr Cousins who rescued us, right off the beach, which I have to admit was very adventurous and ever so exciting… Was that a smile?”
“No.” He looked away so I couldn’t see his face.
But it had been a tiny bit of a smile.
“I knew nothing about the plot until after the raid. I didn’t know the general was in the Antilles until Drake told me. I didn’t know Bee was with the general until I saw her at Nance’s that night. Camjiata used her dreams to find me on Salt Island. He worked out the whole scheme of rescuing me and dropping me on the jetty as a way to flush you out of hiding. But I didn’t know that’s why I had been dumped there. I didn’t even know you were in Expedition. Yet there you were, at the carpentry yard. And you wore me down. And they sprang their trap.”
He whipped around to face me. “I wore you down? Weeks of patient courtship of a woman I can after all already call my wife, and that is how you think of it? That I wore you down?”
He pushed to his feet to storm off but I grabbed his wrist and tugged. He was not quite up and not quite stable, so he sat back down hard.
“Am I not flattering you enough?” I was, as the poets said, incandescent with fury, or would have been, if I had not been sitting next to an angry cold mage. “Are you even listening to me?”
An explosion like a fusillade of gunfire shook every building in the compound. Vai leaped to his feet. I ran after him as he cut through an archway in the back of the courtyard and into a cobblestoned side yard that ran alongside a warehouse with shattered windows. At first I thought the explosion had blown them out, but I had heard no breaking glass. Although what glass remained in the windows had jagged edges, none littered the ground; it was cleanly swept. Then my mouth went dry, for I saw flames inside the building and heard whistling in tones of the greatest agitation.
Vai flung open a door and plunged in, undoing the top five buttons of the jacket as if he meant to strip off the fine garment before it could be ruined by smoke and ash. The tang of burning made my eyes water. A line of flames hissed down the center of the open space. Smoke billowed from a tabletop. A troll was bent over the table poking at something and apparently oblivious to the fire burning an arm’s length from the hem of its sober gray-and-black dash jacket and the tip of its thick tail. A second troll emerged from a cloud of ashy soot with a glass tube pinned in its talons. Seeing me and Vai, it whistled what sounded like mellifluous birdsong.
Then, with a jolting flash of teeth, it spoke. “No, not toward us. Away.”
Vai jerked a chain from beneath his jacket and ran to the table. I spotted a line of buckets at the wall, some filled with dust and others with water. I grabbed one with water and placed myself at the far end of the line of fire, swinging the bucket back to get the best spray.
Vai had turned at the opposite end of the line of flames, holding a ring within the circle of his thumb and forefinger. The two trolls were bent over the table. Gaius Sanogo and the professora appeared at the door.