Vai shouted, “Cat, no!”
The professora cried, “Not water!”
The water splashed down, and the flames flashed huge. Heat slapped into me. I stumbled back; the hammer of Vai’s cold magic slammed me to the floor as my sword pulsed. The fireball vanished as if pulled into an unseen pocket. A dusting of snow swirled and faded.
Gaius Sanogo reached me first. “Is yee all right?”
My lips were dry and my eyes wept a few stinging tears, but nothing seemed broken. “I think so.”
Vai pushed past him and knelt to rest a hand on my cheek. “Catherine! Speak to me!”
I fluttered my eyelids, and pressed a hand to my forehead in the hope I appeared wan and fragile. “I…I think I…don’t feel well. Are you worried about me?”
He recoiled. “I would be, if you seemed at all hurt, which you do not.” He rose, running a hand over his head. “You ruined their experiment,” he added, then strode to the door, where he stopped dead.
Bee blocked it. “Blessed Tanit! Cat, are you hurt?” Her gaze axed him. She spoke in a caustic tone that would surely have burned out anyone else’s tongue had they attempted it. “Magister, did you do this to her?”
“ Me? I am the one she refuses to trust! The one she keeps crucial information from! The one she doesn’t respect-!”
“Stop that,” said one of the trolls.
Looking startled, he broke off.
“Yee have killed the combustion.”
In the silence following this unexpected declaration, I let the warden help me to my feet.
“Proud young men is prone to nursing wounded feelings,” Sanogo observed softly, “as I know from me own experience as one of that very type.”
My pagne needed brushing off and straightening, because I dared not meet the warden’s gaze. The professora ventured to the table as the first troll rose out of the smoking cloud, crest raised, its feathers smeared with soot and ash. Its old-fashioned knee-length dash jacket was not, I realized, of a gray-and-black splotchy pattern; it was layered with the detritus of countless experiments.
“The ice lens focused the first undulation away,” said the troll in a tone I had to perceive as excitement. “That is not what killed this combustion, then. Emotion must also focus and amplify the effect. Or is it only anger? What think yee, Bibi?” It cocked its head, addressing the professora. The tip of its tail lashed twice and stilled.
“He seem unusually high-strung, though,” murmured Sanogo. “He would make an ineffective conspirator, but he surely is a cursed impressive fire bane.”
“Why haven’t you arrested him?” I asked.
He took my hand in an avuncular way. “Maestressa, yee already know everything about me that I can tell yee at this time.”
“You can’t even tell me who you support?”
With a wink, he released my hand as the professora came up. “The Anolis.”
I pounced. “If the Anolis lose Jonas Bonsu, they shall never win the Territory Cup.”
The professora appeared beside us to take my arm. “How long have you lived here, gal? They that support the Anolis are radicals. That is why no matter how much the Greens offer Jonas Bonsu, he shall never leave the Anolis. Shall we go to our supper? We need two more settings, for my associates have had their experiment terminated for the night and will be dining with us after all.”
“What happened with the water?”
“Certain chemicals react explosively with water. Rather like young men who feel they have lost face in public in front of people whose respect they wish to have.”
“Oh.”
At the door, only Bee and her gloating remained. She said, “He stormed off. Gracious Melqart, Cat, but that man has a high opinion of his own consequence. Still, it’s clear he’s madly in love with you. So if you want him-”
“I really do not wish to discuss this right now, Bee.” Embarrassment had singed me more than flames could.
“You’re not hurt, are you?” she asked more solicitously.
“Weren’t we talking about batey?” I said to the universe at large.
We had no sooner reached the archway than Vai appeared with the letter in hand. “If I might…your pardon, Professora…we shall be right there…”
With a look like that, fixed on me, I knew we had to have it out now. I did not look at the others as the professora released me. Sure that this would end badly, I strode over to the bench and sat down at one end. He sat at the other end. The talking of the others faded as they walked past the hedge and the fruit trees toward the dining patio.
He extended the folded paper, which was clearly a letter. “I read your pamphlet.”
I said nothing, for it was obvious Bee, the professora, and the warden were right. Vai was as in love with me as ever. And he looked pretty angry about it.
Whistling and clicking, the trolls strode out of the archway and off along the path, so quaintly oblivious that I realized they were not politely ignoring us.
Still holding the letter, Vai went on in a carefully level voice. “You wrote the pamphlet in the hope I would read it and draw conclusions from the way you strung together the village tales and anecdotes. You have no other way to communicate with me about matters pertaining to the spirit world because of the binding on your tongue.”
A weight cold and grim seized my limbs, but I managed one word. “Yes.”
“You’re not a mage, yet you conceal yourself as if by magic. My uncle said you have the same human flesh and blood as I do but that the spirit world is knit into your blood and bone. The djeli you and I met in the spirit world said you have a spirit mantle close against your flesh.”
Ice prickled along my skin, but I did not think Vai was the cause of it. “Yes.”
“As impossible as it sounds, it seems likely your sire is a creature of the spirit world who had sexual congress with your mother while he was in the form of a human man. Considering your ability to cross into the spirit world at any time and be blooded by cold steel without dying, it seems the only explanation.”
A strange thick clotting swelled to seal my throat. I could not speak, but I held his gaze.
He scooted partway down the bench and tapped my arm with the letter. “The problem, Cat, is that you do not trust me. If you had bothered to write out something when you first arrived in Expedition, I could have worked it out then. If you had told me everything about James Drake, the general, and the Adurnam radicals, this whole situation would have been averted. The radicals could have escaped the raid, and people would not be in prison. You would not have put Aunty Djeneba and her household in danger. Kofi wouldn’t have felt obliged to marry Kayleigh-”
“They were courting already!”
“They were flirts. He liked her. She admired him. They married for my sake.”
“Everything is not about you! Maybe they were looking for an excuse and this was it. I saw them together. They looked happy to me.”
“I looked happy once. For about one hour.”
“Spare me your self-pity. That is the one thing I cannot endure from you.” I snatched the letter out of his hand and unfolded it, squinting to pull the neatly formed letters out of the darkness. A glow winked to life at my shoulder to aid my reading.
“It’s from Chartji,” I said, more in breath than in word. In dense legal detail that quoted obscure ancient bardic sources, the letter explained how to dissolve a chained marriage. The head of the poet Bran Cof had declared it more succinctly: “ Has the young man had sex with you yet??”
Vai had descended to pure incendiary disdain. “‘A year and a day.’ You said those words to me the night of the batey riot, although of course I couldn’t know what you meant at the time. You knew all this time, but you didn’t tell me. And yet I am the other person bound into this marriage. You didn’t respect me enough to trust me, not even about that.”
How I hated my sire.
Crossing his arms, he looked away, toward the hedge. “A marriage chained by magic. Your tongue bound by the night court. It even makes sense that perhaps you couldn’t speak of the chained marriage. The two bindings are related if only because they both are chained by magic drawn out of the spirit world. But it wasn’t only the marriage and the spirit world you didn’t tell me. It was everything. How can we walk a path together if you do not respect me enough to tell me the things we both need to know? The things that mean we are partners?”