Just as different fabrics have different textures, silence can display various qualities. In this case, I was sure that if astonishment were like rain, it would have been pouring sheets.
Yet he replied in the tone he had used before. “Your conditions prove acceptable, Perdita.”
Abby’s dry lips brushed my cheek, and she clambered down the ladder and tottered off.
My interlocutor climbed up and crouched beside me. Straight coal-black hair fell loose down his back. His dark eyes smoldered with the suggestion of buried heat. “You have a name.”
“I do have a name. You have a name as well.”
He blinked, as at an unexpected drop of rain in his eye. “I have learned to speak the Europan tongue. Perhaps I speak wrongly and you do not comprehend. Your name I wish to know.”
“In my country, it is usual for people to introduce their names each to the other. So if I say that my name is Catherine Bell Barahal, then you would say, ‘Greetings’ and afterward you would tell me by what name I can call you.”
“Perdita, it is not possible for you to speak to me as one of my kin. You must address me in the proper way.”
“Because you are a king’s nephew? He is not my king. We have no kings in Europa.”
“But many princes and generals, the histories tell. Perhaps for this reason you fight so much.”
“There is no answer to that! I feel obliged to remind you that you are the one who wanted to talk to me. I mean no offense.”
It seemed he had taken none, for all this time his manner had not changed. He was beginning to seem less like an arrogant and proud man and more like a reserved and formal one. “You speak with bold words. And you carry a cemi with you. Are you of noble birth?”
“What is a cemi?”
“It is that person you hold, who shows her power at night.” He indicated the sword.
“Why do you call it a person?”
“Perhaps you have a different name. Here, we say you are accompanied by one of your ancestors. This person travels with you in the form of a three-pointed blade.”
Even Andevai hadn’t been able to see the sword unless I unsheathed it, but it appeared fire mages could see it at any time. “You see it as a blade?”
“A puzzling question. I see what it is.”
“What do you mean by three-pointed? It has only two, the hilt and the tip.”
“This person has two points in this world, as you say, but a third point in the other world.”
Which was true enough, if you considered the hidden blade the third point. Could a person’s spirit live in cold steel? As some memory of the spirit of Vai’s grandmother might reside in the stone I had picked up, could some part of my mother’s strength reside in the sword? I stroked the hilt, wondering if her spirit walked with me, and it seemed I felt an icy radiance and a trembling sense as of a thin wall that kept me apart from the vast and echoing landscape of the spirit world.
“I wonder why a maku carries a cemi,” he went on. “Also, never have I met and spoken to a woman from across the sea. You are disrespectful, but I think that is just your way. My mother the cacica tells me I will marry a woman from across the sea. Maybe it will be you.” He did not speak the words lasciviously. He said it as he might remark that rain clouds presaged rain.
“I think it unlikely it will be me.” Two could play this game. “You call your mother the cacica. Is she queen? I thought your uncle was king.”
“My uncle is very ill. Because of his illness, my mother, who is his sister, rules as cacica.”
“Ah. I understand now. Then I expect a princely clan from Europa will send a princely daughter to seal a princely pact between your two noble houses. That daughter would not be me.”
Yet I eyed him, feeling quite like a vulture as I did so. Was his fire magic enough to attract the Wild Hunt? Could I sacrifice him to save Bee?
From the foot of the ladder, the stocky adolescent spoke in Taino.
A glimmer like the breath of a firefly resolved into James Drake and his lamp. Upon finding the door of the house unlocked and unguarded, he came around to the back.
“Here you are,” he said with a frown as he held up the lamp to examine us.
The prince regarded Drake with a splendid display of indifference.
Drake’s lamp flared. “What is Prince Caonabo doing here?”
“Why do you think I am obliged to answer for my actions to you?” I asked.
We spoke in the mixed speech common to northwest Europa, not in the formal Latin of the schoolroom, and my face was surely so red that its heat alone might have lit the night. Prince Caonabo glanced at me, then climbed down. He and his companion walked away into the night.