I burst into tears. Rory patted my back and fended off the impertinent queries of passersby by telling them his sister had had a row with her husband, nothing that wouldn’t be fixed once he had had a manly talk with the rogue of a popinjay his sister had foolishly married all for being dazzled by the man’s peacock feathers and melting eyes.
I could not help but laugh.
“That’s better,” he said.
“Where is everyone else?” I asked. “Chartji’s letter said you were at the tavern.”
“That’s where we sleep. Today they’re addressing a secret convocation of radicals. We’ll go there.”
He led me on a road that ran parallel to the old city walls. As we entered the interior courtyard of a large compound, I drew the shadows around me. People were hammering in workshops on the ground floor. Men sawed in the courtyard beside wagons piled with rope for haulage. The carpenters touched the brims of their red caps in a signal, and made no move to stop Rory. We descended a flight of stone steps into a basement lit by oil lamps and heavy with tobacco smoke, the scent of the Antilles. The fragrance made me lose hold of my threads, but no one took any notice of two more in the crowded cellar.
The smell of strong coffee wafted from a bar where men, and a few women, talked in the local cant at a speed I could not understand. The women wore loose, simply cut gowns, while the men wore neckerchiefs tied in exciting knots over jackets cut short in front and long in back.
At the back of this cavernous space, Kehinde Nayo Kuti was giving a demonstration of her jobber press. She wore a knee-length tunic over belled trousers in the Turanian style common in the south. It was practical garb for a traveler, and the brown fabric almost hid the many ink stains where she had unthinkingly wiped her fingers. Standing on a box, Bee acted as the professora’s voice.
“The press can be taken apart and moved if the authorities raid. Besides that, when your prince demands another tax be levied on printers and pamphlets, think how hard it is to track it down. What you cannot chain, you cannot hold!”
“I’d like to hold you, sweetheart!” shouted some sad wit.
Bee pointed him out to laughter and applause. “If that is the best you can do in the way of courtship, Maester, then like this press I shall have to seek my words elsewhere. I have come to Lutetia to speak of justice and revolution, not to waste my time with men who are not serious about the great struggle we have undertaken.”
“Cat Barahal!” Brennan Du slid in beside us to shake my hand. “Chartji thought you might show up. Where is the cold mage?”
I sighed, for of all the things I had thought of, how to answer this question to anyone except Bee or Rory was not one of them.
Rory said, “He’s a prisoner of his vanity.”
“I beg your pardon? A prisoner of the banditry?” Brennan rubbed his ear. The roar in the chamber was astoundingly clamorous. Chartji and Caith flanked Bee, who was now wrangling with hecklers sure that women had no cause or right to speak in a public venue. “Come this way.”
We moved into a low passage and emerged into an old storage room lit by two basement windows. Lines of afternoon light cast gold over a table strewn with pamphlets, blank sheets of foolscap, and pens and ink.
He slid a pamphlet out of a heap. “Your account of the revolutionary philosophy of the Expedition radicals has traveled across Europa while you have laid low. Many have read it. Have you been a prisoner or a spy?”
“Cat!” Bee appeared, trembling as she rushed to embrace me.
“Oh, Bee! I’m so glad you’re here!” To my horror, I again burst into tears.
“Dearest! Has some terrible calamity befallen Andevai?”
Pleased with his cleverness, Rory repeated himself. “He’s become a prisoner of his vanity.”
Brennan chuckled. “Was he not that already? As the djeliw say, vanity is a mark of weakness, humility that of strength.”
“The mansa made him his heir!” I cried.
Brennan whistled with real admiration. “When I suggested you spy in the mage House, I had no idea you would do so with such success!”
“Heir to Four Moons House?” demanded Bee. “So he will become the next mansa?”
I nodded, too choked to speak.
She patted my hand. “Blessed Tanit! No wonder you’re crying! If there is one enticement Andevai could not resist, that would be it.”
“It gets worse,” I sniveled. “The mansa brought Vai’s mother along to be prisoner with his sisters. Now with his elevation his mother is elevated, too! She was born a peddler’s daughter and now she’s the honored mother of the heir to Four Moons House!”
Brennan whistled again. “Bold Teutates! Remind me never to play chess with the mansa. That will have secured the young man’s loyalty. You can’t ask a man to take a course of action that will seem to him to be dishonoring his mother.”
“Did you ask him to give up the heirship, Cat?” Bee asked. “Or did he cast you out so he could secure a more valuable bride?”
“Of course he didn’t cast me out!” I crumpled a pamphlet in my hands. I hated the way my anger and distress surged like storm tides, ripping me this way and that until I could not even think straight for wanting to cry one moment and rage the next.
“Of course he didn’t cast her out,” said Rory with a disdainful sniff. “For one thing, his scent is still all over her, and pretty fresh. For another, he would think it would make him look bad, as if he’s ashamed of Cat. If there’s one thing he truly hates, it’s the thought of looking bad or feeling demeaned in front of other people. No, there’s one thing he hates worse. He hates people thinking he is ashamed of where he comes from, because a part of him is ashamed of it.”
We all stared at him.
He explained with the patience of an elder to slow-witted children. “People often lie with their words, even if they don’t mean to purposefully. But almost no people can lie with their bodies. Do you need me to go and scold him?”
I wiped tears off my cheeks. “No. It would just make him worse. They praise and fawn over him to his face and talk about his low origins behind his back. But they’re scared of him, too, and so very impressed by how powerful he is.”
Bee nodded, stroking my arm. “What now, Cat?”
I flipped through the pamphlets to give my hands something to do. The writings ranged from broadsheets in simple verse to Professora Nayo Kuti’s lengthy tracts. “It was insupportable living in the mage House as the heir’s wife with nothing to do or look forward to except—”
“You need not describe the whole,” said Bee quickly.
“But I won’t let the mage House have him. I love him too much to let them ruin him!”
“Only you could. Honestly, Cat, sometimes I don’t know how you put up with him.”
“No doubt I learned how to love annoying people by growing up with you!”
Rory snorted.
Without the least furrow of irritation, she smiled at Brennan in a gentle way that made her look as radiant as a kind goddess standing in a heavenly beam of light. “I suppose you did.”
She glanced toward the archway as the two trolls and Kehinde came into the room. Chartji held aloft a candle lantern. Her taloned feet clacked as she walked in the oddly rhythmic glide trolls had. She bobbed to acknowledge me.
Kehinde came forward with hands extended to grasp mine. “Cat Barahal! I am so pleased to see you. May your heart be at peace.” She looked at our expressions, and raised an eyebrow in inquiry. “What news do you bring?”
I drew myself up. “I’ve glimpsed the mage Houses and their princely and Roman allies from the inside. I’m now convinced the general is the only one who can overthrow their grip on power. But Vai will never support Camjiata as long as the general is allowing James Drake to use fire magic to fight his battles. Nor should he. So I am going to infiltrate Camjiata’s army and kill James Drake.”
Before anyone could respond to my bold and dramatic declaration, a shrill troll whistle sounded outside,
