I fetched my ruined skirts and borrowed scissors from one of the neighbor men. At a table in front of an interested audience of children and the regular customers who always came early, I began dismantling the ripped and torn remains while I spun a carefully worded tale that left out Salt Island, James Drake, and Prince Caonabo, and jumped straight from the watery attack to my beach rescue by buccaneers. The rains came through, as they did every afternoon, and more people gathered as folk left off work for the day and came to drink and relax.
“Yee say yee was attacked by a shark? Describe what yee saw, gal.”
“It was very large, and a nasty shiny gray, and it had dead flat eyes. I must say, I’ve never been so terrified in my life.” Except standing before the creature who sired me. “I punched it, and it swam off.”
They laughed and whistled. Several began debating whether it was a carite or a cajaya, two different kinds of sharks known to attack people. I looked up to see Vai standing in the back with arms crossed, glowering as if I had personally offended him. By the evidence of sawdust dusting his skin, he had only recently come in and not yet washed; he’d tied a kerchief over his head today, making him look very buccaneer-ish, a man about to sail off in an airship except of course for the minor issue of his deflating the balloon and thereby causing a spectacular crash.
“That shark is not the predator yee shall have been feared of, gal,” said Uncle Joe. “’Tis they buccaneers yee shall have feared more. Seem yee was rescued off the beach by the Barr Cousins. They is called Nick Blade for he knives and the Hyena Queen for the way she laugh.”
“The Barr Cousins? Likely so. We were never formally introduced.”
“Yee’s killing me, gal!” said some wit in the crowd. “‘Never formally introduced!’”
“She said her grandmother was a Kena’ani woman. That makes us cousins of a sort. Maybe more, since I’m a Barahal. We might be truly cousins, if their ancestors shortened the Barahal name to Barr. That must be why we got along so well.”
My bravado sent my audience into gales of laughter as I measured cloth against the waistband. As Vai’s gaze swept across my audience, they stepped back just as if he had pushed each one. Maybe he had, for the air had a sudden bite. All hastily moved away to other tables.
He sat down opposite me, arms still crossed. “You’ll get sick again if you overdo it.”
I kept my voice low as I pinned cloth to the waistband, for although the customers had gone to sit elsewhere that did not mean they weren’t watching. “I need to earn my keep, Vai, not as your kept woman. It does amaze me how you felt able to tell everyone the gripping tale of how you lost your darling wife and have searched for her ever since. How heartbreaking. How noble.”
“It keeps away the women.”
Irritation marred the features of most men, making them look small-minded or ill-tempered. Not Vai. Irritation sharpened his features, made a woman want to kiss him until he relented. I imagined hungry young women buzzing like bees to a succulently annoyed flower.
He raised an eyebrow, in supercilious query.
“How nice for you,” I said, since he was clearly expecting a response to a statement meant to provoke me. “Or not.”
“Don’t change the subject, Catherine. I don’t see how the tale I told is much different than the one you just embroidered.”
“It’s all true!”
“I’m sure it is. If anyone could punch a shark in the eye and survive to tell of it, it would be you.”
“I would thank you for the fine praise, except you looked so annoyed when I was telling that part of the story.”
“Yes, annoyance was certainly my first reaction on hearing you had been attacked by a shark. I couldn’t possibly have been shocked or terrified on your behalf. Although you left out the part about exactly how you found yourself floating in the middle of the sea in the first place.”
“Would you have turned me over to the wardens if I hadn’t been clean?”
His chin raised as sharply as if I had slapped him. A breath of ice kissed my lips.
Because I was suddenly, inexplicably furious, I pressed my attack, leaning closer with an aggressive whisper. “You would have been right to do so. I was on Salt Island.”
He stood so quickly that all around the courtyard people jumped, and looked forcibly away. He grabbed my arm and dragged me closer, across the table. The table’s edge dug into my thighs.
His voice emerged in a hoarse murmur. “You just dreamed that. You were never there. ”
“Let go,” I said, rigid beneath his hand. All I could see was Abby’s face.
He released me. Sat down. Shut his eyes, breathing hard, as the cold eddy of air around us faded. I fought to recover my composure. As I straightened out the disturbed fabric, I wondered what people were making of all this. It would be an easy plate to garnish: The long-parted lovers quarrel over the circumstance that precipitated their separation.
When his breathing had settled, he opened his eyes and considered me with the haughty arrogance I knew best. “Which explains the presence of the fire mage. Although I can’t quite figure how a fire mage might have come to be working with the notorious Barr Cousins.”
I parried. “I don’t think the Barr Cousins liked the fire mage much.”
“Good for them. I don’t like him much either.”
“I didn’t ask you to like him. You don’t even know him.”
He set his elbows on the table, heedless of the fabric I was neatly piecing back together. “There is where you are wrong. I met him in Adurnam. In the entryway of the law offices of Godwik and Clutch. Where I also found you. I remembered that when I saw him again today-”
Jerking up, I stabbed myself with a pin. “Ah!”
“-Wandering around the harbor with a ridiculous cap pulled down to cover his red hair and asking about a girl he had lost track of after he had rescued her from a shipwreck on a deserted islet. I’m surprised you forgot to mention the shipwreck in your otherwise flamboyant tale.”
I licked a spot of blood from my finger.
“I must wonder why he was in Adurnam then, and why he came here now,” he finished.
Vai didn’t know General Camjiata had been in the law offices in Adurnam. And I wasn’t about to tell him since it was none of his cursed business and nothing to do with me anyway no matter what the Iberian Monster claimed.
“I never met Drake before that day in Adurnam,” I said quite truthfully, “and then not again until that which we won’t speak of.” But I sat down, resting my head in my hands because otherwise I was going to touch my belly. “Blessed Tanit! Did anyone tell him where I’d gone?”
“No one did in the carpentry yard. I did find out you can leave a message for him at the Speckled Iguana. Shall we go over there now?”
I found the courage to look at him. “Can’t I just stay here?”
He exhaled sharply. Then the self-satisfied lift of his mouth betrayed him. “You can, if that’s what you want.”
I began to tremble. “You couldn’t just come straight out and ask me what you really want to know, which I must suppose is whether I want to go back to James Drake. At least the infamous murderer Nick Blade was honest with me!”
That made him sit up straight. “Do enlighten me!”
“He scolded me. He said, ‘Don’t you go getting drunk around men. What do you think will happen?’”
“Did he, now?” said the arrogant cold mage thoughtfully, drawing forefinger and thumb down the line of his jaw in a way that dragged my gaze toward his lips.
“Do you think I’m lying about that?” I snapped.
“Did I say I thought you were lying?”
“Are you going to ask me questions to annoy me?” I considered stabbing him with a pin.
“Who do you think can keep this up longer?” he said with an aggravating smirk. He rose, snagged a cup from a tray being carried past by Brenna-who smiled on him as if wishing him good fortune! — and handed it to me. “Have a drink?”
“Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“Why would I want to get you drunk, Catherine?”
