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“Catherine Bell Barahal, you have been accused in the council hall of Expedition of being responsible for the death of the honorable and most wise cacica, what you call a queen, she with the name Anacaona. As Queen Anacaona’s only surviving son, and as heir to her brother, the cacique, I am required to pursue justice in this matter.”
I met his gaze. “I would like to know who made that accusation.”
“I made the accusation.”
He knew what I had done.
I took a step back, but I could not move faster than magic. Warmth tingled across my skin as the backlash of his fire magic brushed across my skin and stirred heat within my lungs and heart.
Yet as the light of the growing flame shimmered across his face, his features melted quite startlingly, like candle wax. He was as poured into a new mold and began to transform into a different person. I had not known that fire mages were skilled in the art of illusion, able to make themselves appear as someone else! Even the bar and courtyard were cunningly wrought illusions that, like his face and body, dissolved into mist. A gritty smoke filled my lungs, choking me.
Leaping back, I grabbed for my sword, but before I could grasp the hilt, my hand burst into flame. A blast of hot wind dispersed the stinging veil of smoke. As my vision cleared, I found myself standing on grand stone steps that led up to the imposing entry of a palatial building. Its walls and roof blazed. Sheets of fire crackled into the air like the vast wings of a molten dragon. Flames clawed searing daggers into my flesh as I groped for my sword. I had no cold magic with which to kill the inferno. Only if I could wield cold steel had I a chance to save myself.
My fingers closed over the smooth hilt. I tugged, but the blade stuck in its sheath. An icy wind poured down in gouts of freezing air that battered against the raging flames, as if fire and ice were at war and I was at the center of the battle. The flames shimmered from gold to white, and in the blink of an eye the fire transmuted to become falling snow. Brushing away the snowflakes icing my eyes and lips, I tried to make sense of what had happened.
Where was I? Why was everything changing so fast? Was I dreaming?
Instead of a burning building, the sheer cliff face of an ice sheet loomed over me. The pressure of its glacial mass slowly advanced, grinding and groaning. I pulled on my sword, but the blade was crushed in the ice and my hand had frozen to it. I simply could not move.
Beyond my frozen body lay a hollow cavern that bloomed with the harsh glamour of cold fire. In that lofty cave, the melted form that had first appeared to me as Prince Caonabo glittered as it changed. Frost and crystals shaped themselves into the figure and face of a man I recognized: the Master of the Wild Hunt.
My sire.
His expression was as cold and empty as his heart. “So are you trapped, little cat. You will never be free.”
“I will be free! All of us will be free!” I tugged at the sword with all the heart and might I had in me.
Instead, the sword yanked me back the other way so hard that it hauled me right off my feet.
“Cat! Fiery Shemesh! You are talking nonsense in your sleep and besides that trying to drag me off the bed.”
My cousin Beatrice loomed over me, her thick black curls framing her familiar and beloved face. Her fingers clutched mine, and I realized I had been holding her hand for quite some time. For fifteen years, since I was orphaned at the age of six, Bee had been my best friend, as close as a loving sister. Just to see her helped me relax enough that I could take stock of where I was and what I was doing. We had fallen asleep together in the drowsy afternoon heat in an upstairs room of Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse.
After washing up on the jetty of the city of Expedition, on the island of Kiskeya in the Antilles, I had come to live at the boardinghouse. Here Andevai Diarisso Haranwy, the cold mage I had been forced to marry back in Europa, had courted me and won my heart. Bee and I were napping on the bed Andevai had built for his and my wedding night. I shut my eyes, remembering his kisses. For a few breaths I pretended I could hear his voice downstairs in the courtyard, as if he had just come home from the carpentry yard where he worked. But he was gone.
You will never be free.
I sat up, trying to shake off the memory. “What a frightful nightmare I just had. Pinch me, Bee.”
She pinched my arm with the force of iron tongs wielded by a brawny blacksmith.
“Ah! You monster!” I cried.
“You said to do it!”
I shook my arm until the pain subsided, while she laughed. “No, it’s all right. I just wanted to make sure I’m finally awake.”
Bee tapped my cheek affectionately. “You were talking in your sleep. You’ve become quite the revolutionary, Cat. You kept mumbling, ‘All of us will be free.’ ”
With a sigh, I leaned against her shoulder. Bee was significantly shorter than I was, but she was sturdy and determined, easily strong enough to hold me up when I needed support. “It’s no wonder I mumble such words in my sleep. When I wake up, I remember that my sire threw Vai into his magical coach and drove off with him into the spirit world.”
Bee pressed her fingers to my knee, staring at me with brows drawn down as if she could bend the world to her will through her glower, and sometimes I was sure she could. “I know you’re worried because your sire is the Master of the Wild Hunt, because he is a powerful magical denizen of the spirit world, and because not even the most powerful cold mage can stand against him. But even though all that is true, it doesn’t mean you and I can’t defeat him and rescue Andevai.”
“I always feel so heartened when you explain things in exactly that cheering way, Bee.”
“Do you doubt that we can?” she demanded in the belligerent manner I loved.
“I don’t doubt that we must, for certainly no one else can! Anyhow, I’m not going to lie here and cry about it. We will figure out what to do because we have to.”
