battles with heat. When ice grows, order increases. Where fire triumphs, energies disperse.”
“Is the ice alive?”
“An interesting question. The worlds are a maze with many paths. That is all I know.”
I considered her odd statement that we were now clutch mates. “Keer, troll town seemed to me like a maze with many paths. I want to call on you as my kinswoman. If I send my cousin to you on Hallows’ Night, will you hide her in troll town?”
“I will. And not let her be eaten. Today you did not reach Chartji’s aunt.”
“I’ll have to try another path to reach my husband. Why can you see my sword?”
She cocked her head. “How can any not see it? It is so very shiny.”
I clasped her hand in the radical manner, and she showed me her teeth and raised her crest, and I did not know what it meant to her, but it heartened me. The headache had passed. Outside, the sun beat down. Clouds glided like airships on an aloof journey, and who was to say they were not? Perhaps creatures of air lived in the clouds whose existence we had no inkling of.
So many mysteries. And yet I had my own burdens.
I left the law offices and, drawing the shadows around me, walked down the long boulevard along the sleepy waters of the bay to the neighborhood I had too briefly called home. I sought out the compound where Kofi’s people hired out carts and wagons. I crept in where I had never been invited, feeling like the worst intruder. There I saw Kayleigh boiling and mangling clothes with young women, laughing and easy with them as she had never been easy with me.
I waited. Midway through the afternoon, Kofi came in with an older man who looked enough like him to be a brother. Kofi greeted Kayleigh with an affectionate wink that made me absolutely wild with envy for the simple pleasure they could take in being together among family that cherished them. But I stalked him as he went into a secondary courtyard where three new rooms were going up beside a shed storing broken wheels. We were alone. I let the shadows fall.
He stepped into the shed and picked up a splintered spoke. “A witch, then. Leave Kayleigh alone. She never harmed yee.”
“Whatever you think of me, whatever you believe of me, I ask you to remember I risked my life to find that old man in the boathouse.”
“That is surely true,” he agreed grudgingly. “For he sake, I shall listen.” He waited.
We had gone too far too fast to exchange polite pleasantries. “I wasn’t the one who betrayed the radicals at Nance’s. I knew nothing about it. The general and his people were using me. I was ignorant of the plan. It’s a complicated story.”
“The stories yee tell always is. Yee shall understand if I’s skeptical.”
“Jasmeen is the general’s mistress. With my own eyes I saw Jasmeen kiss the general and call him darling. She comes at night for assignations. She’s the one who betrayed you.”
He whistled softly. “Yee’s a meaner bitch than even I thought, weaving a tale like that.”
A foot scuffed behind us. Kofi whipped his spar forward as if to charge. Just as I shifted to defend myself, Kayleigh stepped in under the shed’s roof. Kofi settled back on his heels.
“Maybe Cat is, but if I were you, Kofi, I would look into it.”
“Would yee now, love? After she humiliated yee brother as plain as she could?”
My face burned, but I bit down the words I wanted to shout into his doubting face.
Kayleigh sighed. “Even if Cat betrayed Vai, which seems likely, I think she cares for him. People have more than one face, many parts, contradictory feelings. I don’t think she wants him dead. I have a very good idea of where she wants him.” Her mouth curled into a smirk.
Kofi lowered the spoke. “The same argument Vai made. He said ’twould take a hells good actress to behave toward a man the way she was behaving the night of the areito. But he wanted it to be true. That don’ make it true.”
“He wanted it to be true?” I asked, so choked with hope I could barely speak.
“Don’ think I shall let yee get yee claws in him, gal. Vai is like me own brother. Get out.”
“Wait.” Kayleigh took a step closer, hand raised. “We hear yee’s living with the general, Cat.”
“I live with my cousin, not with the general. She needs me. You may have heard she is soon to be married to Prince Caonabo.”
“So we have read,” said Kofi. “The radicals shall call for a boycott of the wedding areito. We don’ like it that the general had a hand in the raid at Nance’s.”
I plied my hook, hoping for a catch. “Are we trading information now? I have some for you. The marriage is the deal the general made with the cacica, in return for her support for his Europan war. He promised her that the spoils of victory in Europa would refill her empty treasury.”
Kofi took a step back and caught himself with a muttered curse. “Ma Jupiter! I don’ reckon that can be true. An empty treasury!”
“I’m just telling you what I heard. I can bring you more information.”
“In exchange for Vai?” he asked, his gaze like a machete’s cut.
I reached into the pocket sewn inside my skirt and drew out a copy of the pamphlet. “In exchange for this. Can you get this to him?”
“I think not! Likely yee have mixed yee moon’s blood into the ink to further witch Vai.”
I winced. “Do people really do that?”
Kayleigh giggled. “You should see your face, Cat.”
“I don’t think it’s funny,” I said.
“Kayleigh me gal, don’ touch that!” said Kofi.
She took the pamphlet from me and glanced through it. “I saw this for sale today. It’s just stories from Europa. If she mixed her moon’s blood into the ink then the printers shall have it all in their press, too.” She looked at me. “What do you want?”
“I want to meet him, under a flag of truce.”
“Sure yee do,” muttered Kofi. “The better to witch him. Or claim the reward for he arrest.”
“If I was what you think I am, I could have had you arrested already, Kofi, and Aunty Djeneba and all them. And your associates.”
“We’s small fry compared to the fire bane and the leadership. That gal Livvy was at the meeting. She is in prison in Warden Hall with she grandfather.” He shook his head, mouth a sarcastic line. “And yet yee wonder why I cannot trust yee.”
There was no answer to that. Voices and footfalls neared from the main compound.
“I’ll return on Jovesday. That gives you two days.”
“Jovesday next,” he countered. “Nine days is soonest I can manage. If he agree.”
“Agreed.” Nine days was too long, but it was an offer. I drew the shadows around me.
Kofi sucked in a sharp breath. “Is that common where yee come from, Kayleigh? That ordinary women shall vanish that way? She is a witch.”
“Not the kind of witch you mean,” said Kayleigh. “My grandmother helped Cat twice. She never would have done had she found Cat to have a wicked soul.” With her stare she dared Kofi to contradict her, but he wisely kept his mouth shut. “Get the message to Vai.”
“I shall, because yee ask it. But yee’s wrong about that gal.”
“My grandmother was not wrong!”
I crept out past a file of men coming to build on the half-finished rooms.
That night I went early to bed and slept hard. Bee came in late, and she dreamed, because at dawn before I even completed my yawn, she grabbed her sketchbook and drew with such focus and speed that I watched in awe. She filled two facing pages with a landscape of such splendor and detail that we might have been looking through a window: a calm lake surrounded by slender birch and sleepy pine, the flat landscape rimed with a thin carpet of snow; a rowboat tied to a rickety little pier; mist wreathing a wooded island. An indistinct figure stood on the pier.
She threw pencil and sketchbook onto the bed with a sigh of relief and scrambled up. “All right, now I can pee.”
I examined the sketch as she hurried behind the screen to the chamber pot and then back out to pour water
