He took two steps, then turned back to take my hand. “Catherine?”
I was a statue, with a statue’s grindingly hoarse whisper like a chisel chipping away at my very soul. “What makes you think he will ever let me speak??”
The calluses on his fingers made his touch a little rough, and yet thereby their very ordinariness settled his presence over me like balm. “Tell me who ‘he’ is, Catherine. We will find a way to unchain the binding.”
In a rumble of thunder I heard the warning boom of his voice. I broke away from Vai. I hurried, for I was sorely afraid, and I was not truly sure what scared me most: that I would never be able to speak or that I would. I came to the closed gate first and scratched at it.
When Aunty Djeneba answered, I lunged forward to kiss her. “Aunty! I missed you!”
She stepped back to let us in with a look at Vai that would have scorched wood.
He was not intimidated. “She’s drunk. Did you let her go out this way?”
She smelled my breath and recoiled. “I did not know she had imbibed quite so much rum.”
He sighed. “I found her precipitating a riot at the Speckled Iguana.”
“I never! I was with Bala and Gaius. They were guarding me.”
Aunty set hands on hips and looked at Vai. “I can see yee would have believed yee had to remove her from that situation.”
“I went there to look for you,” I said to Vai, to reassure him. No need to mention Drake!
Aunty Djeneba made a noise suspiciously like a choked laugh. By the light of a single candle over the bar, other forms moved. It took me a moment to realize it was not a burning candle but a glow of cold fire that had been illuminated, no doubt, all the while he had been gone.
Uncle Joe called softly, “Is that Vai and Cat, safely back?”
“Yes, and not going out again this ill-omened night,” said Aunty Djeneba in a voice none dared argue with. “Kayleigh and Luce, yee go up to bed. The gate is barred.”
Vai shaped a second floating bauble to light the family members to their beds, but he and I remained by the closed gate, him unmoving and me swaying to the surge of the waves and the voice of the wind. They were living creatures, calling me. My sire had raked his fingers through my heart and heard its singing. Now he was sending his minions to cut off my tongue so I could never betray who I was and how he had made me. Maybe this was his way to stop me from saving Bee!
Vai said, in the arrogant voice which meant he was strangling a powerful emotion, “After what you’ve drunk, I daresay you need to go pee, Catherine.”
“How clever you are, Vai. I do!”
He accompanied me to the washhouse, waiting outside. I did what I needed to do and afterward admired the fixtures in a glow of cold fire and yanked on the pulley three times because it worked so cunningly well with water running out and in.
From outside, he said, “If you do not come out now, Catherine, I will assume you are in trouble and come in.”
I hurried out and wrapped my arms around him. “After a year and a day has passed,” I said, finding in this thought a glimpse of sun. “Then I can do what I want without being chained by it.”
He squirmed out of my embrace. “What can you possibly mean by that?”
“Who would have thought it, the Thrice-Praised poet spitting words as crude and unpleasant as an adder’s? Can adders talk? Do they spit venom? Or just bite?”
“I’d like to know which Thrice-Praised poet. It’s a common epithet.”
I opened my mouth to tell him, for I ought to have told him beforehand about what I had learned from the head of the poet Bran Cof. I had meant to, hadn’t I? I opened my mouth, and there were no words there. Bran Cof??’s master was my master. I could not speak of him.
“You are tired.” He steered me upstairs and into the room. “Kayleigh, put your cot across the door so she can’t wander out. She’s that kind of drunk.”
“What kind of drunk?” Kayleigh obediently dragged her cot to the open door, where he stood poised to escape me.
“Vai,” I said urgently. “Why are you leaving?”
“A lecherous drunk,” he said.
“Why are you leaving, then, Brother?” asked Kayleigh in a tone whose sneer I could not like.
“Don’t you mock me,” he said to her, “or shall I have to remind you—”
“I can’t be a lecherous drunk,” I protested, having finally worked through his comment. “Lechers are male.”
She snickered. “This must be very difficult for you, Vai.”