You truly veil yourself from the sight of others.”
“From everyone but you.”
“I will always know where you are. Maybe you will tell me how you manage this magic.”
“You think I will tell you because I am drunk.”
“The drink does loosen your…control.”
I staggered away from him as the abyss that was my future yawned before me to coax me into its chasm. “No, what am I thinking? It’s impossible. I have to hold on.”
“Why should it be impossible, Catherine? Hold on to what?”
“How can it not be impossible? Haven’t we already had this conversation? Aren’t I already bound-?” The wind was tearing at the clouds, and in a rent appeared the masked white face of the moon, its light a talon dug into my throat. I halted as if I had slammed into a glacial cliff.
He took two steps, then turned back to take my hand. “Catherine?”
I was a statue, with a statue’s grindingly hoarse whisper like a chisel chipping away at my very soul. “ What makes you think he will ever let me speak??”
The calluses on his fingers made his touch a little rough, and yet thereby their very ordinariness settled his presence over me like balm. “Tell me who ‘he’ is, Catherine. We will find a way to unchain the binding.”
In a rumble of thunder I heard the warning boom of his voice. I broke away from Vai. I hurried, for I was sorely afraid, and I was not truly sure what scared me most: that I would never be able to speak or that I would. I came to the closed gate first and scratched at it.
When Aunty Djeneba answered, I lunged forward to kiss her. “Aunty! I missed you!”
She stepped back to let us in with a look at Vai that would have scorched wood.
He was not intimidated. “She’s drunk. Did you let her go out this way?”
She smelled my breath and recoiled. “I did not know she had imbibed quite so much rum.”
He sighed. “I found her precipitating a riot at the Speckled Iguana.”
“I never! I was with Bala and Gaius. They were guarding me.”
Aunty set hands on hips and looked at Vai. “I can see yee would have believed yee had to remove her from that situation.”
“I went there to look for you,” I said to Vai, to reassure him. No need to mention Drake!
Aunty Djeneba made a noise suspiciously like a choked laugh. By the light of a single candle over the bar, other forms moved. It took me a moment to realize it was not a burning candle but a glow of cold fire that had been illuminated, no doubt, all the while he had been gone.
Uncle Joe called softly, “Is that Vai and Cat, safely back?”
“Yes, and not going out again this ill-omened night,” said Aunty Djeneba in a voice none dared argue with. “Kayleigh and Luce, yee go up to bed. The gate is barred.”
Vai shaped a second floating bauble to light the family members to their beds, but he and I remained by the closed gate, him unmoving and me swaying to the surge of the waves and the voice of the wind. They were living creatures, calling me. My sire had raked his fingers through my heart and heard its singing. Now he was sending his minions to cut off my tongue so I could never betray who I was and how he had made me. Maybe this was his way to stop me from saving Bee!
Vai said, in the arrogant voice which meant he was strangling a powerful emotion, “After what you’ve drunk, I daresay you need to go pee, Catherine.”
“How clever you are, Vai. I do!”
He accompanied me to the washhouse, waiting outside. I did what I needed to do and afterward admired the fixtures in a glow of cold fire and yanked on the pulley three times because it worked so cunningly well with water running out and in.
From outside, he said, “If you do not come out now, Catherine, I will assume you are in trouble and come in.”
I hurried out and wrapped my arms around him. “After a year and a day has passed,” I said, finding in this thought a glimpse of sun. “Then I can do what I want without being chained by it.”
He squirmed out of my embrace. “What can you possibly mean by that?”
“Who would have thought it, the Thrice-Praised poet spitting words as crude and unpleasant as an adder’s? Can adders talk? Do they spit venom? Or just bite?”
“I’d like to know which Thrice-Praised poet. It’s a common epithet.”
I opened my mouth to tell him, for I ought to have told him beforehand about what I had learned from the head of the poet Bran Cof. I had meant to, hadn’t I? I opened my mouth, and there were no words there. Bran Cof??’s master was my master. I could not speak of him.
“You are tired.” He steered me upstairs and into the room. “Kayleigh, put your cot across the door so she can’t wander out. She’s that kind of drunk.”
“What kind of drunk?” Kayleigh obediently dragged her cot to the open door, where he stood poised to escape me.
“Vai,” I said urgently. “Why are you leaving?”
“A lecherous drunk,” he said.
“Why are you leaving, then, Brother?” asked Kayleigh in a tone whose sneer I could not like.
“Don’t you mock me,” he said to her, “or shall I have to remind you-”
“I can’t be a lecherous drunk,” I protested, having finally worked through his comment. “Lechers are male.”
She snickered. “This must be very difficult for you, Vai.”
He shut the door.
“I recommend a bucket of cold water or a touch of cold magic if you dare,” she called, but he was gone.
“You have a mean streak,” I remarked, very wisely I am sure.
“No worse than you teasing him the way you do! Come here. Go away. Kofi says you’re two-faced like a star-apple tree.”
I sat down on my cot. “How can a tree have two faces, when it doesn’t even have one?”
“I don’t understand, Cat. If you don’t want him, then why don’t you stay away from him?”
“How can I bear to stay away from him?” I whispered. Lying back, I found that the room, the building, or perhaps the entire island pitched and rolled like a ship at sea.
“I hope you’re not going to throw up,” muttered Kayleigh from her cot at the door. “Because you have to clean it up if you do.”
“I feel fine.”
I fell into sleep. Or so I supposed, because a crow flew in through the shuttered window, stirring the air with black wings. Salt poured onto the roof as though ground from a bottomless mill. A rhythmic shaking danced through the room like a procession of invisible drummers at an areito. People were talking, but I couldn’t understand their words. They were suckling fruit, the scent of guava in the air. A bat hung from the rafters, its eyes obsidian as it spoke to me in a voice like a rasp. “ Yee should not have defied him. He is angry because yee tried to talk. Now yee shall feel the lash of the master’s power. ”
24
I woke up.
A shutter was banging rhythmically in a pounding, relentless wind. Rain sheeted on the roof like a downpour of pebbles. Dawn’s light suggested the outline of the shuttered windows. Because I had slept in my clothes, everything was rumpled and creased. My braid had begun to unravel, and I had to wipe strands of hair off my sweaty cheek. Kayleigh slept so soundly it was the work of a moment to shift her cot, crack the door, and squeeze through. I paused at the top of the stairs.
The battering gusts of wind forced me to grip the railing. Rain pelted sideways. Uncle Joe, Uncle Baba the fisherman, and Aunty’s unmarried son emerged from rooms downstairs, followed by several of the men who rented hammock space. I helped them lash down everything that was not already tied down. The canvas roof over the
