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“I’ll buy you whatever you want, dearest. Never mind what he says!”
I had a sudden and horrific image of being caught between Vai and Bee arguing, a precise cold steel blade pitted against the blunt trauma of an axe. I temporized, because while I agreed with Vai, there had been such lovely trinkets and ribbons. “I thought the Taino treasury was empty.”
“I think the situation is more complicated than that phrase makes it sound. We traveled halfway across Kiskeya, to Sharagua and back. I have never seen a more prosperous, orderly, and healthy people. No one stopped me from going anywhere I wished. I saw not a single starving child, and I assure you, I was looking for the wretched and the poor because I wanted to gauge exactly how powerful and rich the Taino kingdom was if I was to ally myself with them.”
Despite Captain Tira’s presence, I decided to say what really weighed on my mind. “An alliance brought about by the general. He is half Roman. We can’t trust him.”
“Roman on his mother’s side. Iberian and Mande on his father’s. That makes him of mixed lineage. Just like you. Should I therefore not trust you?” Her curls swayed around her face as she smiled impishly at me. Her hands clutching mine were the only hint of her anxiety at what lay ahead and the huge gamble she had taken. “Of course he is using me to get what he wants, which is the cacica’s airships and access to Expedition’s wealth and factories because the Council daren’t say no to him once the Taino support his cause. I don’t care. Because it gets me security. If the cold mage truly loves you, and you love him, then you are both fortunate and cursed, because you two will never be secure. People who want to use one of you can threaten the other one. And they will. But when I am a powerful noblewoman and respected seer among the Taino, I can protect you both. Always, Cat. Always.” She embraced me. “And buy you whatever you want on Avenue Kolonkan.”
The captain had folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes, as if the maudlin outpourings of gals like us commonly bored her to sleep.
I muttered, “You would think Captain Tira often delivers innocent young brides to strangers meant to become their husbands.” A flicker of movement twitched in her cheek, and her right foot shifted, heel raising and lowering. “Captain, did the general really figure out where Vai was all that time from Bee’s sketchbook? Or did someone inform on him? No harm in telling me now.”
She opened her eyes. Her silence was her answer.
A growing clamor of sound greeted us: drums, rattles, horns, and singing swelled and ebbed like the sea’s surge. We had reached the border, and it sounded like an areito had already started.
The carriage halted.
Bee took in a shuddering breath. We locked gazes.
“Always, Bee,” I said. “Always.”
The door was opened from outside. The captain went out first.
Bee took advantage of her departure to draw me close and whisper. “Remember, say nothing and do nothing except what I tell you to do. Don’t speak unless I tell you to. And especially, don’t take orders from others, only from me.”
“That shouldn’t be difficult, accustomed as I am to you bossing me around.”
As Captain Tira looked back in, Bee released me to wave an imperious hand. “You first, dearest, for the last and most dramatic entrance shall be mine.”
“You always hog the dramatic entrance, Bee,” I said as I clambered out. “Maybe next time I’ll steal it from you.”
I had not once ventured out of Expedition’s sprawl in the weeks after Drake had dumped me on the jetty. Its streets and courtyard gates, untidy alleys and well-groomed ball courts, cheerful markets and the shimmering presence of the sea and the masts of ships, and even the whistling parties of trolls hurrying about their business, had become my landscape.
We had fallen into another world.
The huge plaza reminded me of paintings I had seen depicting the great public spaces of Rome and Qart Hadast when those empires were in their heyday. The paved open space stretched so far that tendrils of dusk hid its boundaries. Ahead lay entrances to four monumental ball courts, two on either side of a long stone building painted red and blue and pierced with nine narrow archways. The central arch was surmounted by an elaborately painted scene depicting fish spilling from an overturned gourd.
Music, drumming, and singing came from the ball courts. Oddly, the only Expeditioners I saw were a single troop of wardens standing off to my left, and a few local vendors who had set up along the plaza with fried plantains, cassava bread straight off the griddle, seafood being cooked over charcoal, and mounds of fruit. Their customers were Taino streaming out from the ball courts, men from the courts to my left and women from the courts to my right. They wore loosely draped cloth in an antique Roman-like way, although both young women and men wore only a pagne-like cloth wrapped around their hips and no shirts at all, casually bare-chested.
But none of these things robbed me of words. What rendered me speechless were the thirty or more airships tethered at the border between the Taino kingdom and Expedition Territory. Some were scout ships no larger than the one navigated by the Barr Cousins. Many were the size of the ocean-crossing airship Bee and I had seen in Adurnam, the one Vai had destroyed. Among them floated three leviathans monstrous in their glamour. It was a stunning show of wealth and force.
Bee slipped an arm around me. “I have a fancy to be like the didos of old, the queens of Qart Hadast who sailed at the head of a mighty fleet. I shall draw my fleet as a school of bloated silvery fish released from a vast heavenly gourd.”
“I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to sail the seas of a noble court, when any courtier is ready to stab you in the back or flatter shamelessly for a step up the ladder. I would far rather wait tables at Aunty Djeneba’s.”
“Where the customers try to put their hands on your ass? How is that different? Do not worry for me. I shall crush my rivals with smiles and the axe blow of my indomitable will.”
“I can’t bear it if they take you away from me, Bee.”
“Dearest, we shall all return to Europa together like conquering heroes.”
The other carriage rolled in, and the general emerged, followed by Vai wearing the dash jacket he had worn the night of the areito. He marked me with the smile that belonged to me alone.
As the sun shimmered against the horizon, the central gate opened. A procession of women appeared. They were dressed in skirts that lapped their ankles and in bodices like wide belts woven with beads. Feathers adorned their long black hair, which they wore unbound. Two at the front walked with hands outstretched and fire—actual flame—rising from their palms as if they contained the oil that lit the lamps. The two fire mages were flanked by four women equally richly garbed, one of whom was not Taino but red-headed, pale, and freckled like a refugee from the Europan north. Were they catch-fires? Hard to tell. By the elaboration and richness of their clothing, they seemed equally honored. Behind walked three more women heavily draped with thick stone pendants and gold bracelets on their bare arms, their skin patterned with lines and dots. When they reached a raised circular platform in the middle of the plaza, they halted.
My sword bloomed against my hand as day crossed twilight’s border.
