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“What of the headmaster?”
“A high and mighty nobleman, they say, though I never saw him. He lingers on his deathbed!”
“How frightful!” I exclaimed, and seeing that she was not likely to leave the room without provocation, I surreptitiously pinched the toddler so hard the poor child woke up wailing.
After she apologetically carried off the screaming baby, Rory turned on me. “Cat! How could you? He peed on my arm!”
“Bee won’t be able to stop herself from poking her nose in a little farther. I’m going after her. You must lie low until we return.” I explained the situation.
“How can they wish to shoot me? They don’t even know me!”
“Go wash your jacket. Stay alert and stay inside.”
I walked out of town on the old Roman road that led south along the river to the city of Colonia. For once it was pleasant to have only my own thoughts for company. As much as I loved Vai and trusted his strength and loyalty, Bee had been right: He was not always a restful person to be with. Bee was not a restful person either, but my heart could never truly be at peace unless I knew she was safe, and I wasn’t ever wholly happy except when she was near. I hurried, eager to reach her.
At the third mile marker I reached a large estate. A towering hedge blocked my view of the land. I passed a massive iron gate closed across a pretty lane lined by evergreen cypress trees. The drive cut through landscaped grounds to a distant compound house set back by the river. On the opposite side of the gate, the impenetrable hedge gave way to a row of larger cypress grown close enough to block the view toward the river.
“Cat! Here!” Bee peeked through cypress branches.
I hopped over the roadside ditch and shoved through the branches. Before I could inform her of what an idiot she was to go tramping off without me, she dragged me out of sight behind the cypress. Inside the estate grounds, we hid in a copse of trees of white-barked alder, ringed by yet more cypress. The trees concealed a set of marble benches whose bases were carved with what I first took for serpents and then realized depicted swimming dragons with tapered wings, elongated muzzles, and smoky breath.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” I demanded. “Any terrible calamity could have befallen you! Anyway, I’m so aggravated, Bee, because nothing is going as planned!”
She listened as I explained what had happened. “I trust you did not suffer any mistreatment while staying overnight there!”
Sadly, I blushed, thinking of how we had started on the bed and ended on the table.
“Not that I need hear any details!” she said, laughing. “I have come to agree with the Romans in this. An excess of passion is clearly the sign of a undisciplined mind.”
“Vai is not undisciplined!”
She smiled in the manner of a general contemplating sweet victory. “I wasn’t talking about him.”
In the distance dogs began barking, a clamor that built to a frantic yipping. We leaped to our feet.
“Fiery Shemesh!” Bee exclaimed. “I thought we would be safely hidden here!”
A huge dog with teeth bared charged through the trees, followed by a slavering pack of equally gigantic hounds. They erupted into a deafening frenzy of yips and barks as they surrounded us. I brandished my cane, wishing desperately that it were a sword.
“Behave!” she proclaimed in her orator’s voice. They ceased barking and flattened themselves, ears back. Waggling forward, they acted like courtiers who have fallen out of favor and wish to regain the approval of a mercurial queen. She deigned to allow them to lick her hand and grovel at her feet.
“Gracious Melqart, Bee! You have always had a way with dogs, although I cannot imagine why except that dogs have no discrimination whatsoever, for they will adore anyone who feeds them!”
At the sound of my voice, several growled.
“Down!” she cried. Their growls ceased. She glanced at me with a triumphant smile. “Didn’t Andevai win your heart by feeding you? Care to try your fortune with these? I swear on Melqart’s Axe I will only let them bite off one of your hands.”
“Bee, someone is coming.”
My warning came too late. The cypress branches parted to reveal a ghost-pale figure wearing a midnight-blue dash jacket under a plain wool coat. The headmaster’s assistant stared, mouth agape. Kemal Napata was an albino of Avarian ancestry, which meant he had extremely pale skin and straw-colored hair but also broad cheekbones and eyes with an epicanthic fold to mark him as a man whose ancestry resides in the distant East. His surprise was certainly greater than our own. After all I had done and said in the last year, I could easily recognize the look of frustrated longing and struggling restraint that tightened his expression.
“Beatrice Hassi Barahal!”
“Maester Kemal Napata,” she echoed with a graceful courtesy. “Please, if you will, call off your hounds. I do not fear them, for they are quite loving, but I confess to some anxiety that they have taken a dislike to my dear cousin Cat, mistaking her name for her character.”
At the academy we had jokingly called him the headmaster’s dog for his doglike loyalty, but I examined him with a fresh perspective now. He had a stocky frame and an appealing face once you became accustomed to his unusual coloring. More importantly, as the headmaster’s assistant, he must know things most people did not.
I said, “Begging your pardon, Maester Napata, but is the headmaster a dragon?”
