a torch for La Professora. But she is married to another, alas.”
“That doesn’t stop people,” I muttered, looking up at the whitewashed ceiling. How must Vai have felt, waiting for me all those months only to discover me with another man?
“It seems La Professora is quite the traditionalist in some ways despite her radical philosophies. Anyway, how would you know about…Cat! You can’t hide from me!” Bee grabbed one of my fingers and bent it back. “You said you hadn’t done it with him.”
“Ouch! I haven’t. Although I cursed well wish I had. Ah! Let go!”
“Tell the truth!”
Through teeth gritted against the pain, I said, “James Drake. But I can explain.”
She released my finger, and whistled. Wincing, I rubbed my abused hand.
“ James Drake,” she said in an altered tone that made me cringe. She stretched out with elbows planted next to my head. “Gracious Melqart! But then why were you mauling your husband? And why is a cold mage of such rare and exceptional power here in Expedition anyway, where it is against the law to be a cold mage? Most importantly, did you find your sire?”
Like a thwarted child, I rolled over, and pounded my fists and kicked my feet, savoring the smack of my hands and legs on the mattress. I had never hated my sire as much as I hated him at that moment.
“Cat, you’re having a temper tantrum.” Bee’s laughter so sang in my heart that I began to choke and gurgle. I stopped hitting and rolled onto my back to laugh with her.
“Oh, Bee, how I missed you!”
She embraced me, and we laughed until tears ran. Finally, she went to wash her face in the basin. My cane had gotten wrapped up in the blanket, so I stuck it under the mattress.
“What happened to you, Cat?”
I clapped a hand over my mouth and, as she stared at me with an exaggerated expression of surprise on her face, I pointed with my other hand to my mouth. Waggled the fingers covering my mouth. Bit on them, feeling a question rising. Any question. It didn’t matter, as long as it threw people off the scent. Curse him!
“You are hungry? No, you are crazed? You’ve lost the power of speech? You have to pee? You have developed a strange but debilitating desire to inflict pain on yourself?? You are trying to tell me something with these bizarre gesticulations that you can’t put in words? Ah!”
She dashed to a tall wardrobe. The door was carved with a gourd upended and spilling fish, the sides and top elaborated to resemble a leafy tree. She returned to me with her sketchbook and a lead pencil. The pages fell open to a sketch depicting a man and a woman forcefully intertwined in a kiss. The angle concealed most of the man’s face, but the jacket gave him away. I slammed the book shut, embarrassed by the intimacy of the pose.
Bee sighed. “Now you see why I did not want to have had that dream. It was positively lurid. The only identifying mark is the cobo hood gas lamp above your head. It’s of a type you will find in every establishment in Expedition, so it was hard to identify the place. Try writing.”
I grabbed the pencil out of her hand and opened the book to a blank page. At once, I began shaking, awash in sweat. I bit my lip. The pain allowed me to scrawl: I cannot speak of what happened after you left. It is worse than we feared.
“Blessed Tanit, you’ve drawn blood,” said Bee, wiping my lower lip with her thumb. She snatched the pencil and drew in a length of chain like shackles, then handed the pencil back.
I wrote, Yes.
She sketched the jetty and harbor of Expedition, as seen from offshore.
Ocean, I wrote, licking a drop of blood off my lip. Shark. Salt Island. Bitten. Healed. Drunk. Lies. Drake. Rescued. Buccaneers. Cow Killer Beach. Jetty. Vai. Vai. Vai. You.
She blanched and took in several deep breaths. After, she turned to me with the same look I imagined a surgeon would give a patient who has survived an amputation. “This is quickly going to become tedious.”
I wrote, Don’t ask questions.
“That’s an odd sort of binding,” she remarked, taking pen and sketchbook from me.
“I do have to pee,” I said, rolling off the bed. I trotted to the wardrobe and reassured myself that my father’s journals had indeed survived our separation. “And I’m hungry.”
With a grandiose sigh, she stowed her sketchbook back in the wardrobe and tossed clothing at me: a featherlight shift and my very own skirt, bodice, and jacket, washed and the wool ironed to a glossy sheen. Over her own shift she buttoned a skirt sewn from strips of gold, gray, and blue cloth. The bodice she wore had sleeves to the elbow and was embroidered with an entanglement of flowering vines and axes.
“Where did you get that?” I asked. “I might murder you in your sleep to steal it.”
“I like the axes in particular,” she said with a smile that could have killed a man at twenty paces. “They remind me of the head of the poet Bran Cof. I had it done here, at a very nice shop on Avenue Kolonkan. That’s where all the best clothes and finery may be purchased.”
“It’s very pretty.” But I was swamped by a swell of nostalgic regret for humble Tailors’ Row.
“You’re not usually this slow to get ready. There will be food.”
Our chamber was one of four on the second story of a town house whose clean tile floors slipped blessedly cool beneath my bare feet. Bee handed me the sandals Vai had given me, now cleaned and oiled. After I slipped my cane through its loop, we hurried down a stairway at the back of the house to the ground floor. She showed me into a tiny room with a water closet and then into a washroom where one had only to turn a spigot to allow water to flow into a basin while one washed one’s hands.
“How many times do you have to turn that on and off??” she demanded, clamping her fingers over the faucet to turn it emphatically off.
“How does it do that?” I bent over, trying to look up into the pipe.
“Gravity. The water tank is on the roof. We can go look at it later. Come on.”
She led me back up to the first floor and into a chamber that ran the length of the back of the house. Glass doors opened onto a narrow balcony overlooking a garden so green one could almost breathe the color. Guards paced beneath the walls, swimming in and out of view beneath flowering trees and vines.
The general sat at a table. He set down the broadsheet he was reading, rose with a grave smile, and took my hand between his as he examined me with deep-set, almost black eyes whose gaze penetrated astonishingly. “You are better. Please, join me. I expect you are hungry.”
He nodded toward a sideboard laden with covered dishes, a basket of bread, a platter of fruit, a bottle of liquor, and a white ceramic teapot flanked by six white cups on white saucers.
He released my hand and, to my shock, gave Bee a kiss on each cheek in quite an intimate manner. She did not even have the grace to blush. Indeed, she seemed to expect this familiarity.
“I’ll pour,” she said, going over to the sideboard. “Sit down, Cat.”
Steps sounded in the hall. A woman swept into the chamber. She wore a fabulous deep orange boubou of starched, waxed cloth, although instead of a head wrap she wore her black hair uncovered the better to display tiny braids woven with beads and medallions. I gaped at her.
“Darling,” she said, kissing Camjiata on the lips.
“Jasmeen!” Never let it be said I could not tally up the numbers. “You’re the one who betrayed the radical leadership! Called in the wardens! Why?”
She was not easily discomposed. “The fire bane was sent here to assassinate Leon. Obviously I don’ intend to let that happen. Also, as yee own self must admit, he is an unusually powerful fire bane. Such a dangerous sort of man cannot be allowed to run around like a wild stallion with no bridle.”
I fixed a glare on Bee, who had paused in the act of pouring tea. “Bee? What do you know about this?”
The general steered me toward one of the chairs. “Sit down, Cat.”
I wrenched myself away. “I don’t want to sit! I want to know what happened!”
An aroma of wood ash tickled my nose. I sneezed. James Drake walked into the chamber, looking crisp and attractive in a white jacket and gold trousers, his red-gold air agleam in the morning sun. After all, I sat, for my legs had just gone boneless.
“Cat!” Drake strode over and pressed his lips to mine. I jerked away, ramming up against the back of the chair. He smiled. “No need to be so formal with me, darling. Why did you take so long to come to the Speckled Iguana? And then run away?”
I glared. “Can it be possible you think you have a grievance?”
