Cold Fire - Page 188/210

I slept, and I dreamed I was waking Vai with passionate kisses, and he said we can’t it will hurt you and I said we have to because what if I’m dead tomorrow and he gave way cautiously and tenderly, and then I woke up. To discover Vai asleep beside me and yet somehow his clothes had come off, which forced me to revisit my memories of what had been dream and what had been real. A sound of clicking and rustling had woken me. The key in the lock was being jiggled from the other side of the door. I slipped out from under the thin cotton blanket and dashed for the wardrobe to grab Vai’s sword. Then I picked up my rumpled pagne and tied it hastily over torso and hips as the key worked loose and dropped with a clunk to the floor. Vai stirred. The latch turned, and the general came in.

He closed the door, taking in the scene. “The vigor of youth never fails to amaze.”

Vai blinked several times as in confusion, and then recollection settled his expression. Sitting, he caught sight of Camjiata, realized he was uncovered from the hips up, and, after a moment, smiled with the comfortable bravado of the man who knows he looks well in any outfit.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” he said, making no effort to cover his bare torso or the two chains and rings, one ice lens clear and one cloudy.

The general smiled. “Which you may suppose is deliberate. I must use what advantage I can make for myself, for I am not a cold mage of rare and unexpected potency.” I flushed, not that one could tell, as I was already pinked. “As for you, Cat, I trust you are not too badly injured.”

“Do you? Drake tried to kill Vai, too.” I placed the sword on the bed next to a startled Vai before I stalked to the wardrobe to get a blouse, pagne, and clean bodice and drawers.

“He will not do that again.”

“How can you possibly be sure?” I demanded as I took the clothes, and the ceramic jar of ointment, behind the screen for privacy. Vai kept his gaze fixed on the general.

“I hold the power of life and death over James Drake in ways I am not about to share.”

“You’ll excuse us,” said Vai, “if that seems a slender reed on which to cross this river.”

“‘Us,’” murmured the general as I poured water into a pitcher. “How interesting to phrase it that way. I should like to know how you managed to kill Drake’s fire and save Cat. You should not have been able to do that.” A chair scraped along the floor and I heard him settle onto it.

“I should like to get dressed,” said Vai, “but in all honesty, General, I’m not going to do it in front of you.”

“I don’t like to have a sword held to my throat, Magister, so I admit to enjoying placing you in a position of discomfort. We’ll have the talk here. You may dress, or not.”

“Bastard,” said Vai, perhaps appreciatively.

“I was very close to my mother,” replied the general in a tone so genial it made me pause.

“Then we have a thing in common. My apologies. No offense was meant to your mother.”

I began dabbing again; the ointment worked quickly; my skin was already better.

“Understood. So, thanks to the mothers who raised us, here we are, Magister. Why did you not kill me when you had the chance?”

“I am not that man.”

“Yet you could have been that man. Any reasoned assessment of the situation suggests I will bring war to Europa and many will die in blood and fire. You could have stopped that.”

“People already die. There will be a conflagration sooner or later.”

“You are the rich and privileged son of one of the most powerful mage Houses. Are you willing to give that up?”

“I am one of their weapons, rather as James Drake seems to be one of yours. I haven’t finished discussing the man who tried to murder my wife.”

“What do you want, Magister?”

“I want to kill him.”

“But not me?”

“You have something I want. The means to abolish clientage.”

“A legal code is not the means to abolish clientage. One must have the means to enforce such a code. I can say or write anything I want, and that does not make it happen, or make it true. Why should princes and mage Houses abolish clientage? Whatever your origins, Magister, you have benefited by your association with Four Moons House. You, and your people as well.”

“I may have. But they have gained material benefit, nothing else.”

“I would not call material benefit ‘nothing.’ I have seen a man holding his dying child, the one he could not feed because his crops failed and the share for his lord must be met regardless. I have seen a wife hold the broken ruin of her husband crushed in a fall of rock in a mine whose bounty enriches the mine’s owner but not those who work in it. Sometimes the gods are cruel, but more often it is the cruelty and greed of men that kills us. You stand in a high place with the waters rising. I would not be so quick to give it up merely for principles.”