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“There. Yee have brought yee fear out into the light. I reckon yee have been fretting.”
I sniffled, wiping my eyes. “Now Bee’s thrown away her future trying to save me.”
A windblown branch tapped on one of the glass doors that led out to the courtyard.
“Cat, she done no different a thing than yee did for her. Chance it shall even be for the best. The Taino nobles is a high and mighty people who look down on folk like us. Maybe she would fancy a life in their court, or maybe she would find she own self in a cage that squeeze like a trap. Vai told me one time that the day he was brought up from the village to Four Moons House and taken before the mansa, he reckoned he was the most fortunate lad alive to have such a chance. He came to find they did not want him but dared not turn him away. They treated him like the worst kind of mangy cur. So he decided to become better at being one of them than any of them was at it. Yee said to me one time that the worst thing for Vai shall be if he go back to the mage House and become a cold mage like to what he was when yee two first met. I see now what yee meant. ’Twas no good home for him at the mage House. So why is yee so sure the Taino court would be a good home for yee cousin?”
“Do you think they could crush her?”
He chuckled. “That gal? I reckon not. But that don’ mean she shall for a surety live a happy life there. Had she married a Taino man of the common run I reckon she should have as good a chance as any to have a good life, for the Taino live as well and justly as any folk do. But I’s not a man to choose a palace of gold and precious shells over a humble room if the first come with a knife in the back and a foot on me heart and the second come with a smile and a kiss. I don’ know what yee cousin wish for above all else. She may be glad later to have another choice.”
When I thought about it, wondering what Bee would really want, I realized I wasn’t sure. If anyone had asked me a year ago if I hoped and dreamed a handsome, wealthy, and well-connected young man would fall in love with me at first sight, I would have laughed and said yes because it was the sort of thing a young woman was supposed to say yes to. But it wouldn’t have been true. Bee was the one who dreamed of a romantic story in which she figured as the principal heroine. I had wanted nothing more than to have a chance to follow in my father Daniel’s footsteps, to travel the length and breadth of Europa seeing new places and, if I was fortunate, have adventures as he had had. I would have wanted a romantic interlude… at some unspecified later date.
Bee had made her choice. She had chosen to be loyal to me.
I released Kofi’s hand and smiled crookedly at him. “Thank you, Kofi.”
Rory had fallen back asleep, so Luce took the first watch in a chair and I settled on a bed of blankets on the floor. I shut my eyes, but my mind kept pressing me back into the bitterly sweet memory of lying in Vai’s arms the one night we had shared. How he had kissed me! How was a gal meant to sleep if she could not stop thinking of his passionate caresses?
The scratching at the window just would not stop. I sat up. Luce slept, one arm curled against her chest and the other flung out to one side. Kofi was leaning against the interior door, eyes closed, napping on his feet. I crawled over to the drapes that concealed the glass doors. I twitched aside the lower corner to peer out into the night-swamped courtyard.
Shadows marked the glass in blotches and lines. Winged shapes flittered across the sky.
A slender green finger was tapping on the glass. I recoiled. A branch had elongated until it reached the doors, as if trying to find a path inside. A bat perched on the swaying end, staring at me with obsidian eyes. I blinked, and it vanished.
A man pressed against the door. He had Vai’s face and he wore a magnificent dash jacket printed with fishes spilling out of gourds.
“We shall find a way in,” he said in a low, sweet voice. The scent of guava penetrated the glass separating us. I wanted to kiss him to taste the fruit, but I knew better. “Yee cannot escape us. We know yee killed her.”
The latch turned but caught because it was locked. The key shuddered in a gust of wind.
“You can’t come in,” I whispered.
It was impossible to stare into those brown eyes and not be drawn closer; his lips tempted me; his hands reminded me of the kind of work they could do. But he was not Vai. He was an opia, the spirit of a dead man.
“Open the door,” he whispered, “and yee shall have what yee so badly desire.”
The hot look in his eyes drowned me. Next thing I knew, my hand was touching the key. I jerked away my hand and fixed it around the hilt of my sword.
“Cat?” The drape rustled away from me.
I jolted back as Kofi joined me. He looked into the courtyard with its dense shadows and a night wind trawling through the branches of the ceiba tree. The nearest branches of the tree waved twenty strides or more from the glass-paned doors. Of branch, bat, or male figure I saw no sign, although a small frog hopped along the paving stones along the side of the building.
“I reckon yee shall step back from there,” Kofi said. “That tree have a powerful spirit.”
Shapes were climbing in the tree, some grappling up and some slipping down. The movement made me dizzy.
“Do you see them?” I whispered.
Instead of answering, Kofi pulled me back, let the drapes cover the view, and settled me on the blankets beside Luce. I dozed off.
A mosquito buzzed by my ear, and I kept swatting it away and it kept coming back, until I opened my eyes. Both Luce and Kofi slept soundly. But Rory was gone.
One of the glass doors was open, its key fallen to the floor.
With my ghost-sword in hand, I ran out into the courtyard. It was so late I heard not a breath of sound from anyone living.
The soporific aroma of overripe guava drenched the air. As on a gust of wind, a cloud of bats poured down over the roofs that surrounded the courtyard. Their tiny bodies battered me. I drew my sword out of the spirit world where the blade resided and slashed at them, but they darted past into the shadow of the ceiba tree. A hundred ratlike rodents were hauling Rory up the trunk of the ceiba tree, calling to each other with whistling chirps and chortling barks.
