trouble?”
“Yes. It’s not the first time a public meeting has been attacked in that aggressive way. I can’t get used to it.”
“You’re not meant to get used to it! What happened after you and Rory left me in the spirit world?”
She wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. “Rory and I swam ashore in the city of Camlun at the festival of Beltane. We traveled to Havery, where we were courteously received at the law offices. We’ve been with the radicals ever since. It’s been more dangerous than I imagined. Professora Nayo Kuti was arrested in Lutetia for the crime of spreading sedition!”
“What happened?” I demanded.
“We believe the mage House in Lutetia pushed the Parisi prince to take the step,” said Brennan with a crooked smile meant to remind me of why he had to be careful with mages. “However, her husband is a man of considerable status in Massilia. Through his efforts she was released and sent back to Massilia.”
“Professora Nayo Kuti is married?” I said. “I thought Kehinde was an independent woman.”
Bee’s gloved hand slipped from mine and she leaned over to rest a hand on Brennan’s knee in a gesture so intimate and familiar that I looked sharply away lest I blurt out an inappropriate question that would embarrass us all. My thoughts whirled dizzily.
“I am sorry regardless to hear she was arrested,” I lumbered on, “but I am glad to hear she was released in a timely manner to a safe place. I hope she is still writing.”
“She is still writing and her pamphlets travel across Europa.” Brennan nodded at Bee.
She withdrew her hand and tucked it into the bend of my elbow. “I pray your escape was not too much of an ordeal, dearest. Is Andevai unharmed? I hope we will have time to prepare him before he sees Rory wearing his ruined dash jacket.”
Brennan chuckled.
I sighed. “He is much the same as ever, as you will see. Bee, where is your sketchbook?”
She had it with her, for her sketchbook was like my cane: We never went anywhere without them. I paged through to the sketch of the tailor’s shop.
“When Maester Godwik recognized the eggs atop the towers as the architecture of Sala’s palace, I knew I had to come to Sala,” she said. “I hoped you would remember. And you did!”
I flipped to the sketch of the false dream.
“Cat!” she whispered, with a glance toward Brennan, who had closed his eyes in a kindly attempt to give us a little privacy. “Why do I need to look at this? I try to forget I ever drew it.”
For the longest time I examined the fabric of the dash jacket worn by a man seen only from the back. Shading and hatching became petaled flowers, while dots and lines evoked the spray of fireworks exploding joyfully out of the flowers’ blooming splendor.
I said in a low voice, “Quite by chance and not by my doing, he is getting a dash jacket made in this fabric. Can you bring about the future by drawing it?”
She snatched the sketchbook out of my hands and snapped it shut as if to close off the drift of my thoughts. Brennan opened his eyes, looking startled.
“I have no power to bring about the future. I only have the curse of sometimes glimpsing the future in visions that usually make no sense.”
She looked at Brennan in a way that made me realize she and he had discussed the subject at length. I caught my breath, waiting for some confession, but she only turned back to me with hands pressed together, palm to palm, as she spoke.
“I have done a lot of thinking about what you and I have seen, and what Queen Anacaona told me. The women who walk the dreams of dragons walk unscathed through the Great Smoke, which we might also call the ocean of dreams. People have long gone to augurs and priestesses to have their dreams interpreted, because they believe dreams are windows into the gods’ intentions. Yet surely most dreams are merely a jumble of thoughts and images and fears and hopes. Or nothing more than indigestion.”
“Or brought on by too much whiskey,” murmured Brennan with a smile that brought a rose’s bloom to Bee’s cheeks.
She went on as if he had not spoken. “I think the Great Smoke is very like the ocean. It has shallows, and depths, and a shoreline. I believe it also has currents just as mariners tell us our own oceans do. I now believe all strands of past, present, and future commingle in the Great Smoke. Dragon dreamers walk the currents of the future, even if we do not know what we are seeing.” She paused to brush her cheeks. “Why are you staring, Cat? Is there something on my face?”
“No.” I struggled for a jest but could not find one. She looked so grave and scholarly, quite unlike my bombastic and passionate Bee but exactly like a woman I could love and admire just as much. “Was the leviathan that conveyed us across the Great Smoke truly a dragon?”
“
“Are you sure that’s where he is?”
Brennan nodded. “We have learned through our network of intelligencers that a man answering to the description of the headmaster and bearing the name Napata is headmaster of the New Academy in Noviomagus. The New Academy was founded two years ago.”
“Which would be the right time if he left Adurnam after we fell into the well,” added Bee. “Furthermore, Cat, I think we will find him in Noviomagus on the Feast of Mars. In nine days. That’s what I dreamed. Remember?”
I clasped her hands excitedly. “The secrets of the Great Smoke aren’t the only thing he can tell us. He saved his assistant from the Wild Hunt. We need to find out how he did it. He might be my only chance to save myself from my sire.”
Bee squeezed my hands in reply, for I could tell by her expression that she had not told Brennan any of my secrets.
Brennan was tapping his thigh rather as Vai did when he was wound up, counting a drum rhythm as if it helped him focus. “We will have to leave Sala tonight regardless, before the ghana can close the roads.” He opened the window.
Dusk bled darkness over a street of tightly packed row houses. The carriage slowed, and Brennan cracked open the door. As we passed the awning of a hat shop, he jumped out and caught Bee as she sprang after him; I leaped likewise, and dashed through the open door. The elderly shop attendant nodded as I followed Brennan and Bee through the front room and out the back into an alley.
Several streets over, we entered a humble, whitewashed inn whose front room was swept clean of customers. A young woman wearing a head wrap, wool gown, and calf-length leather vest was bent over the stove, lighting a fire. She carried a baby in a sling against her back.
As the door creaked open she said words in the local dialect that I understood as “We’re closed.” When she glanced up she switched to the bastard Latin common among laborers who had to speak to people from different regions of Europa. “In the back upstairs. Ye was never telling us ye mean to be bringing a cold mage who would be killing all the fires in the house, did ye?”
“My apologies, Maestra.” Brennan gestured for us to go ahead. “We intended no inconvenience. I must warn you, there’s been fighting at the livestock market.”
“Angry Carnonos!” She stood with a gasp of outrage. “My brother is gone there! If the ghana’s men come searching, ye cannot be staying…!”
Bee drew me down a passage and past a kitchen where a woman was cursing most alarmingly about plague-ridden cold mages, and thence into a back wing of the building.
In a chilly passageway she took my face in her hands, forehead wrinkling as she peered at me in the dim light. “Is all well? You escaped the spirit world unscathed and unbound?”
“Not unbound, but unscathed except for the ruin of one of his favorite dash jackets.”
With a hiccupping laugh she crushed me against her in an affectionate embrace. “Oh, Cat! I’ve had all sorts of adventures but I felt so lonely without you.”
I pulled her hands down and squeezed them. “Not as lonely as all that, it seems. Answer me truly! Is there
