Her laughter boomed, the sound cracking so hard I was driven to my knees. Her fingers like the grasp of death closed over my face.
“Yee talk too much. The secret is not yee own to share.”
A mask of water hardened over my face. The foul liquid coursed into my eyes and nose and mouth. But the flood had not ripped me away. Vai had saved me from the drowning waters.
Water splashed in my face. I was being carried through the rain-washed streets.
“Let me down. Let me down!” I struggled free and landed on my knees, first coughing, then heaving uncontrollably until I thought I would retch the entire sea out of my lungs.
Vai knelt beside me. His skin was hot, or mine was cold. “Catherine, we have to keep moving. The sea is flooding inland.”
“I have to save Bee!” But when I tried to rise the darkness beneath the overturned boat engulfed me until I saw nothing. Perhaps I flew. Perhaps it was all a nightmare.
For then I was sitting in the chair under the shelter by the kitchen with my muddy wet blouse stuck to me and a dry pagne draped modestly over my soaked drawers. A poultice soothed my scraped knee. One of the toddlers cuddled in my lap, a comforting presence.
“’Twas bravely done,” said Kofi, behind me, “but I still reckon that gal be hiding the truth from yee.”
“This is the not the time to speak of it,” said Vai. “She saved your uncle’s life when we all would have left him there not knowing he was trapped.”
“’Tis true. She saved him. I shall go over to he daughter’s place to see how he fares.”
Their voices faded. The wind mocked me in its singsong chant: We want one of they, do yee hear, me sissy-o?
The old man was dead. The spirits had taken him. The thread that linked him and me unraveled and its last tendril snapped like a hand slipping out of the hand that seeks to hold it in this world. His spirit sighed, and crossed over. A crow perched on the open sill and watched me as the sun behind it made a cowl of golden light for its form. Weary beyond measure, I went to bed.
I woke the next morning on the cot, wearing fresh drawers and a clean blouse I had no memory of putting on. The sound of hammering and sawing beat at my aching head. My mouth tasted of a vile brew that I could only imagine had been fermented from a stew of rotted worm guts and moldy rat droppings. Gagging, I fastened my spare pagne around my hips and, aching in every battered muscle, creaked down to the washhouse to do my business. After, I hobbled to the kitchen, where Aunty Djeneba greeted me with a cup of fresh juice and a kiss on each cheek.
I drained the cup.
She grated cassava in her calm way. “That was a fierce night and day. Uncommon thing, though. The storm sheared off right after all that happened on the jetty. There was wind, but nothing like what there should have been. Unexpected good fortune for us. How is yee, gal?”
A basket of fruit sat on the kitchen table. “Been shopping already?” I asked.
“That was brought at dawn by the daughter of the man yee found in the boathouse. ’Twas a brave act, Cat.”
“But he died anyway.”
She paused. “He passed in the arms of he family, not trapped in the flood.”
A mask of ice stiffened my face, and my sire’s claws sank into my beating heart. Now she was wondering how I’d known, because no one could possibly have told me.
“Is there some mending I could do?” I said hastily.
She studied me. “Yee need mend nothing, gal. Yee rest.”
“I just need to do something.”
She nodded. “Yee know where the basket lie.”
I darned as my heart raged. How I hated them! My sire who had bound me to serve him and sent his servants to mock and torment me. The mansa who had been willing to kill me and didn’t even care that he owned me. He only cared that Vai was forced to obey his commands because the mage House owned Vai and his entire village. Princes and Romans who played a game of plots and scheming to which only the powerful were invited. Hidden masters who directed Bee’s fate. The Council who sent out its wardens to track down fire banes and arrest people who wanted a voice.
No wonder folk lashed out, rebelling against their chains.
I did not ask where Vai was. I did not have to. I could hear the sounds of repair work all around as the people of Expedition mended the damage done by the storm. He would be working.
For even if he was out hammering and sawing, he was working in the service of the mansa. He was a cold mage first and always. He was bound, as I was bound because I was bound to him.
Today was the eighth of September. What day had we married? It had been late in October, the evening of the twenty-seventh, to be exact. Yet what did that date matter? On the last day of October, the Wild Hunt would ride. I didn’t have much time left. I had to stop thinking about anything except Bee.