“Stand away!” The cacica’s voice cracked over the night like thunder. Fire flared in every lamp. Light blazed to reveal the Taino soldiers restoring order. The coach, with the coachman and footman, appeared as a perfectly ordinary coach at rest except for the fact its wheels did not touch the ground. What looked like low-hanging dark clouds churned above, chased by flashes of light like fireflies. The pack of hunters had not yet been released.
“Stand away, fire bane,” she called, addressing Vai before she commanded the assembled crowd. “Opia travel at their will. We have no quarrel with them, even if they invite in the spirit lords who are not welcome here. But the salt dead may never walk in Taino land lest we all be poisoned. Those who will not stay on the other shore must be destroyed by fire.”
Her gaze touched Juba’s. In that exchange I saw her sorrow and his defiance: She had favored him over his brother, and I could not tell whether he had never forgiven her for her weakness in loving him more than Caonabo, or if she would never forgive herself.
“That is the law,” she proclaimed.
Sparks shimmered to life on a hot gust of wind as she struck.
“Not my Cat.” Vai pulled me hard against him while yanking the last ice lens out from under his jacket.
Fire kindled in my heart. Abby, and the other prisoners, screamed. Prince Caonabo shouted in protest, but there was nothing he could do. The cacica was a fire mage of unimaginable power with a net of fire banes to absorb the conflagration.
Vai’s ice lens bloomed as he channeled his magic and his anger and his fear for me into it; the curve of the lens amplified its power. The cacica’s fire was vast and complex; its tendrils spanned the ball court and the plaza and farther yet, for the net of her fire magic spanned the island itself. Its threads reached as far as a sick man’s bed in distant Sharagua halfway across Kiskeya, where the constant pulse of her magic kept her dying brother alive.
All that fire, the fire bane and his ice lens killed.
Every lamp snapped out.
In far Sharagua, the heart of the cacique stopped beating. Lips parted to release his spirit into the night.
Snow spun down in a beautiful shower of sparkling white, dusting the ground.
“Catherine!” Vai pressed his mouth to mine, just a touch, to mark that I still breathed.