Free Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel by Kate Elliott Page A

in comparison. But I must say, Kofi, I really think their greatest strength is
     their fire mages. If I’m found guilty, will the provisional Assembly allow the prince
     to take me away into Taino country? Will they hand me over to James Drake? Will they
     support me or sacrifice me?”
    The scars on his cheeks made him seem forbidding until he smiled. “They shall have
     to find yee guilty first. I tell yee, gal, I have heardyee scold men before, but to watch yee tear into that fire mage Drake made me skin
     turn cold.”
    “I know I shouldn’t have spoken like that. I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on.”
    He laughed.
    I leaned my head against Kofi’s shoulder, so broad and solid, but I wished it were
     Vai I was leaning against. The shock of Caonabo repudiating Bee and her departure
     with him on a journey sure to be miserable and unpleasant had torn away my shield
     of determination. All my ugliest fears surfaced like Leviathan breaching the waves.
    “Vai’s so accustomed to being the most powerful magister, to winning. What if my sire
     breaks him? What kind of man will he be? And will I still love him?”
    “Peradventure Vai shall not survive this. But I reckon I have never met a man with
     such a high opinion of he own consequence. In such a dark place, a man’s vanity and
     arrogance can be what save him.”
    I sniveled out something meant to be a chuckle. “If any man’s conceit can survive
     captivity by the Master of the Wild Hunt, it would be his.”
    “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 forhim 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,