Cold Fire (Spiritwalker #2)

Cold Fire (Spiritwalker #2) Page 101

The following Jovesday afternoon Vai returned from work carrying a pair of sandals. I delivered a tray of ginger beer to a table of men arguing over the results of a batey game and brought a cup of juice to Lucretia and her next youngest sister. Under the shade of the big tree, they were straining pimento-soaked rum through cheesecloth for liqueur. Luce accepted the cup with a smile, then glanced toward Vai, who was waiting by the stairs. I went over.

He held out the sandals. “Catherine, these are for you.”

“I can’t afford them. And I won’t accept gifts from you.”

He glanced up at the tapering, oblong leaves of the ceiba tree as if to find patience hiding in the lofty branches. “Don’t take them for your own sake. Do it for Aunty. You’re walking around here all day and night, and to the market and up and down Tailors’ Row—”

“How do you know what I’m doing during the day when you’re at work?”

His glance toward Lucretia betrayed him. “If you cut your feet, you can’t wait tables…” He paused.

I turned to see two trolls standing in the gate, looking around with predatory gazes. One was tall, drab, and likely female, and the other was short, brightly crested, and likely male. They wore the long cotton jackets commonly worn by men of business in Expedition, the cloth a plain dark green, smeared with soot and oil stains. The customers looked toward them with the same mild disinterest they showed when a street vendor appeared with a tray of cigarillos or taffy, and then at Vai.

He said in a low voice, “Catherine, don’t be an idiot. You’ve been walking around barefoot for over a week.”

“I can’t wear my winter boots.”

“I didn’t say you should. These are cheap sandals. Just take them. I have to go out.”

I took the sandals. He joined the trolls at the gate and left. Why would a cold mage be fraternizing with trolls?

“Oooh me stars!” Lucretia sidled up beside me, smelling of pimento, cinnamon, lime, and rum. After prying the sandals out of my hands, she found the maker’s mark on the sole. “These cost him a pretty bit of coin!”

“He said they were cheap sandals.”

She rolled her eyes as she handed them back to me. “Yee believe that if yee wish, Cat.”

I measured them against my dust-smeared feet. “How did he know my size? Luce? Did you sneak him my boots and then put them back? Are you telling him tales on me?”

She grabbed one of the sandals and whacked me on the hip with it. “Yee’s so stubborn. Just wear the sandals and be glad yee have such, since there is many who have no shoes.”

It was, I realized, a point of pride in Aunty’s household that all the children had shoes and could afford the fee for the district school. For however busy the courtyard was every night and however full the boardinghouse stayed, signs of economical living crept out everywhere, things I recognized from my own upbringing. Chastened, I washed my feet, put on the sandals, and went back to work.

“Sweet Cat, a round of beer! I see yee have new sandals.”

Sweet Cat was what the elderly regulars had decided to call me. “Nice of him to bring them round before he had to go off again.”

“Yes, he go every Jovesday with those two. Yee know them, I suppose.”

“The only trolls I ever knew were lawyers.” I cast my lure. “Are there many troll lawyers here?”

“Many troll lawyers! Yee’s such a maku, Sweet Cat! Now, yee listen.”

They liked to explain things to me, because I listened so well. Trolls loved the law the way batey players loved the game. They were known as specialists in scratching over the finer points of the law and pecking through every least step in the contractual procedures on which legal arrangements were created and implemented. Troll-owned law offices tended to congregate in areas by specialty; law houses that worked maritime law or that anchored branches gone overseas could be found in the harbor district just outside the old city.

By the end of the second week, I had begun to make friends with several of the tailors. Useful and pleasant of themselves, these acquaintances allowed me to have an excuse one morning to depart with apparent innocence on a stroll down Tailors’ Row, where I might chat the morning away over the intricacies of patterns, stitches, and the weight and tensile strength of threads.

As I walked away from the boardinghouse, I turned over in my mind the things I had learned. The old city was ringed by an old fortress wall, and these days only families eligible to serve on the Council were allowed to own property there. East and north of the city, along the river, lay the burgeoning factory district. West lay the sprawl of residential districts like Passaporte, where Aunty Djeneba had her boardinghouse. Beyond the city lay farming country, and beyond that the border with the Taino kingdom.