He had a small gourd bowl and a spoon slung over his back on a cord. He fished coin out of his cuffs and bought the things I liked best. First, we drank two bowlfuls of lovely juice. Next, we shared a bowl of rice, red beans, and beef with fried plantain, and wiped it clean with a wedge of maize bread. Finally, he filled the bowl with coconut rice pudding topped with slices of papaya.
He sweet-talked a length of burlap from a vendor and spread it on the ground in a quiet corner of the plaza where courting couples had settled down for the serious business of staring at each other like formerly intelligent people who had lost the capacity for meaningful thought. Yet, thinking of Abby, I was horribly ashamed to have made such a comparison. She might have had a sweetheart before she was bitten. Would he love her still, or would he look into her confused gaze and wonder only if the teeth of the ghouls lurked there? Who could ever truly know if one was healed or the infestation only slumbering?
I shuddered.
“Catherine,” said Vai, pausing with a laden spoon halfway raised to my mouth, “I hope you are not afraid of me.”
I looked at him blankly. “Of you? Of course I’m not afraid of you!”
“There’s something. I can see it in your face.”
I touched my sleeve where it covered my scar.
His fingers brushed my hand. “It’s healed so well no one will guess.”
When I did not look up, he sighed. “Obviously I can never let you go adventuring without me. Of course, if I’d been in the water with you, no doubt the shark would have eaten me before you got the chance to punch it.”
“I was terrified when the shark hit me,” I said, glancing up at him, for I found I could speak of the shark but not of Vai grappling me out of the overturned boat where I was drowning.
“I should think so. For all the words you say, you’re oddly silent. It makes it hard to know precisely how to…make sense of your stories. Maybe there is some other thing on your mind you wish to confide in me.”
The icy mask that concealed my sire’s face shimmered in my thoughts. A bat skimmed past overhead. I was sure my lips had become sewn together. My days of speaking were over.
He leaned closer. “Let me see if I can get that mouth to open.”
His tone made me blush in places whose heat made me blush yet more.
His lips parted as he brought the spoon with its scoop of pudding to my lips. As if in mimicry my own lips opened, and he fed me. The pudding was so sweet and rich that I shut my eyes to savor it and lick my lips all the way around in case I had missed one single drop.
“Ah! Mmm. Vai! That’s better than yam pudding.”
He laughed unsteadily. “You have no idea how much I love the pleasure you take in eating.”
A rush like heat and wind poured through me. I swayed toward him.
He pulled back. “Don’t distract me. I want you to know why I came to the Antilles.”
“You’re about to tell me it had nothing to do with me.”
“It had nothing to do with you. I told people about you so they wouldn’t question me.”
“Only you would call that courting talk.”
He teased a slice of moist papaya along my lips until I could no longer bear it, so I ate it up and licked its sweet juice off his fingers.
He inhaled sharply. “Is that what you think I’m doing? Courting you?”
“What else would you call it?”
“I could call it a hundred different things, but those are just words. I could use a hundred words to describe cold magic, but none would be this.” He pinched a spark of cold fire out of the air and stretched it and wove it to become a golden flower dappled with light as with dew, and then a chain of such flowers like a necklace hammered out of light.
I stared open-mouthed, for it was the most astonishingly lovely vision. “Ought you to be doing that in public?”
“Who will know,” he said, bending closer to pretend to loop the chain from my shoulders low along the swell of my breasts, “if you do not tell them?”
Even through the challis of my jacket, the illusion’s touch felt like the tickle of bees exploring along my skin. He was still toying with the illusion, darkening the shadows and muting the lights until it no longer glowed like sorcery but only like polished gold catching glints from the lamps that burned around the plaza. None, I realized, were hissing gas lamps or blustering torches.
“Are they all cold fire?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, glancing around at the gleaming lights. “That’s the only training they allow their lowly fire banes. Not a one can manage more than the most rudimentary illusion. And they can put out a weak fire. The fire banes who work for Warden Hall are obligated to call light for festivals and hire themselves out to folk who have to run errands at night. Imagine a man of the mansa’s stature and pride forced to be a linkboy all his life!”