Cold Steel

“Blessed Tanit,” I murmured, “please bring me home.”

My blood seeped onto the floor of the coach, moistening and melting into the coach’s substance. Blood makes the gate.

I fell through.

The goddess caught me in her arms. She cradled me like a newborn, her brown face smiling down at me. Tears wet her cheeks. A crescent moon shone above her head to light the path for those who must walk into darkness.

“Choose, little cat. For you may have peace now if you wish it.”

“I just want to go home.”

Home is the people you care for, the ones who care for you in return.

Her kiss woke me back into the world. When I opened my eyes I found myself kneeling in a garden lush with pomegranates and ripe grapes and cascades of purple flowers. Before me rose a stone statue of the goddess wearing her lioness head, she who protects women but also gives them the strength to protect themselves.

The horns of a crescent moon sank into dawn. Pain pooled at my chest. Sticky blood oozed down my body to be swallowed by the damp soil. I blinked. A winter wind rattled through bare branches, for I now found myself huddled not in a summer garden but all alone and abandoned in an empty sanctuary. The air had a bitter, angry bite. Someone had stabbed me in the heart and then eaten out my head. I pitched forward onto my face.

A familiar and beloved voice spoke my name. “Catherine. My sweet Catherine, wake up.”

A familiar and beloved hand took hold of mine. “Cat, wake up! What on earth got into her to wander off to Tanit’s sanctuary when she ought to have been hiding inside like every other sensible person? I thought I was going to die of anguish when we got back and she was gone!”

“I should like to know what miscreant stabbed her in the chest. She’s fortunate it is such a shallow wound.”

“Look how her skirts are torn. I can’t leave her for a single day without her getting into trouble!”

Warm lips brushed my forehead. “She’s feverish. Let’s get her home.”

I dreamed I was turning into a pillar of salt, grain by grain. I was thirsty all the time, and hot, and uncomfortable, but there was always someone to wipe me down with a damp cool cloth or lift me up to spoon broth down my parched throat. I could not get enough salty gruel to eat.

Sometimes Rory licked my face with his rough cat’s tongue, rumbling softly as he guarded me in his cat shape. Sometimes Bee held my hand and sang to me, off-key, or combed out and rebraided my tangled hair. Sometimes Vai slept beside me in the bed he had built for us—although I had only slept in it once, I recalled its contours with intimate precision.

Obviously I was hallucinating, because I also saw Kayleigh sitting with her mother in attendance on my sickbed, and it was intriguing to watch how animated Vai’s mother was with her eldest daughter compared to the stiff formality she offered her only son. For what seemed like hours Vai would sit on the bed gently stroking my hands or hair while talking softly to Kofi about the latest radical pamphlet by Professora Nayo Kuti or the setbacks the radical efforts had met with in the Veneti dukedoms under the hand of their overlord, the Armorican prince, and his pregnant daughter who would act as regent if she bore an infant son.

Kofi’s laugh heartened me. “I reckon it is as well we happened to come when we did, for I thought sure I should have to tie yee to a chair lest yee burn down the entire building for the way yee lost yee head. Not that yee can burn things, fire bane! Peradventure yee shall have an easier life of it, Vai, if yee stop and think before yee panic.”

“I did not panic!”

“You did,” said Bee, for I just then realized she was sitting on the bed at my feet, her pencil scratching across a page.

“No more than you did, Beatrice!”

“Is this how it shall be, yee two always bickering?” demanded Kofi. “Because if it shall be this way, I can go back to a more restful domicile in Expedition and likewise not have to suffer this frightful cold.”

“You only think this is cold because you’ve not yet experienced winter,” muttered Vai so peevishly that Kofi laughed again, obviously teasing him, and I realized it was Kofi’s willingness to joke with him that had likely won Vai’s trust when the two men first met.

Bee broke in. “I think the worst was when we were searching and those men at the coffee shop said they had seen a young woman answering to Cat’s description drinking coffee with the horned hunter god Carnonos on the street!”

“People will see anything in shadows when they’re frightened,” said Vai, “but I admit it gave me a turn. For you know it’s exactly the sort of thing she’d have thought she had to do, sacrifice herself to save us.”

“It surely is, and it makes me so angry to imagine her even thinking of doing such a thing to us! Never telling us, sneaking off… well, she didn’t, so all’s well.”

All’s well, until you become a salter with sightless eyes, trapped inside a deathless crystal body with your own dying thoughts and a craving that will not go away.

I tossed and I turned, for the ground was rumbling and thumping beneath me. As in a restless dream a woman with feathers and shells in her hair entered the room. Her gentle hand traced my navel; her lips touched my forehead with a kiss that snaked through my body to kindle my blood. She spoke: “She is clean.”

Clean was all very well, but I needed to be able to talk!

Rory touched a finger to each of my eyes. “Cat, I swear, you talk constantly even in your sleep. It’s safe to wake up. I never gave them the letters, so they don’t know anything.”

I opened my eyes. Rory sat in a chair next to me. I lay on the bed Vai had built for us, and strange it was to do so, for we had not had it with us before. A fabric-covered standing screen blocked my view of the rest of the room, its golden suns and silver moons smiling at me. By the quality of the light I guessed it to be mid-afternoon on a cloudy day. I heard the clatter and ring of utensils and cups as people ate at a nearby table.

“Why am I dreaming that Kofi and Kayleigh are here?” I demanded, although my voice came out as a hoarse whisper. “Have I been delirious?”

He rolled his eyes in an expression copied from Bee at her most aggravating. “That is one word for it. Kofi and Kayleigh and their baby and people arrived on Hallows’ Day on a ship from Expedition. The Assembly in Expedition has sent Kofi to be ambassador to Europa, only no one really knew where he ought to go, so they sent him to Godwik and Clutch to get his bearings. Then Bee and Vai returned with the others at sunset on Hallows’ Day. You can imagine what happened when they found you missing! It’s fortunate we tracked you down as quickly as we did. I admit it was rather dramatic to find you just at sunrise in the goddess’s temple. Are you better now?”

Venturesomely I swung my feet out from under the beaver-pelt blanket and set them on the plank floor, which radiated heat, for evidently the hypocaust had been repaired. I wore the nightgown I’d been given at White Bow House, and my chest had a poultice on it, wrapped into place by linen strips. “How long have I been sick?”

“Eight days.”

According to report, if a human is bitten by a ghoul, the onset of the disease is so swift and implacable that the victim will become morbid in less than seven days. So the headmaster had read aloud to us the day Bee had argued with Bran Cof in his study.

Eight days! Well! This was encouraging! I stood, and my feet stayed under me. Holding on to Rory’s arm, I shuffled to where I could see past the screen and into the room.

The scene of a family dinner just come to its end could not have been more charming even had Bee sketched it. Vai’s mother was seated in the chair of honor, looking frail but aglow with happiness as she held the hand of her pregnant daughter, Kayleigh. Bintou and Wasa were fomenting mischief with a lad I was pretty sure was one of Kofi’s young cousins, brought with him from Expedition. Old Bakary was seated next to Bee, and to my surprise Beatrice was paging through her sketchbook while the djeli made comments. Over at a lovely new desk Chartji, Caith, Godwik, and the Taino woman I had seen in my delirium bent over a schematic Kofi had unrolled. The behica was explaining about good plumbing, drinking water, and cholera.

Vai stood looking at it, too. He held a fat baby with chubby brown cheeks and a chortling laugh. I had just decided that I had to be dreaming when he turned his head and smiled at me, as if he’d known I was standing