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She poured me a second shot of the very dark rum. “Your very entertaining pamphlet and its colorful tales is a rat story, not one of ours. We have our own enemies, and maybe you have met them. But no Wild Hunt like the one you describe rides through troll country.”
“I don’t see how it could track anything in that maze.” I raised the glass to my lips, then set it down without drinking. Could Bee hide in troll town on Hallows’ Eve? “Keer, do you think the Wild Hunt only hunts humans? Or have you found a way to protect yourselves against them?”
“They are not the ones who hunt us. Once, long past and beyond telling, my ancestors were almost wiped out. A few pockets survived in valleys amid the great ice shelves. Now we grow again. But the eye of our older brethren lies upon us, and the unwary are taken.”
“Who are your older brethren?”
“I think you rats call them dragons. It is not our word for them.”
Now I did drain the second shot glass, and followed it with a chaser of tea to purge the sting from my throat. The printing press wheezed in the workshop out back, and pens scritched in the clerks’ office. “Fiery Shemesh! Not even my father knew that!”
“Not even the ancients know every secret that exists in the world,” mused Keer. “At the heart of all lie the vast energies which are the animating spirit, if you will, of the worlds. The worlds incline toward disorder. Cold 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.”
