“I am puzzled that you speak of unscrupulous spies as if you are innocent in this regard, since we have already established that you sent the cold mage to spy in Expedition,” retorted Bee. I could tell by her flushed cheeks and brilliant gaze that she was just getting warmed up. “Or do you mean to advance the argument that what is wrong for us to do is right for you to do? If we even
His eyes narrowed. “A fine and affecting speech, but I must suppose that legally you are still bound to them because you are an unmarried woman and such maidens can never be guardians of themselves.”
Bee laughed so sarcastically that everyone in the kitchen jumped as at a gunshot. “By which you mean to say, men like you do not wish such women to be guardians of themselves.”
He ignored her in favor of measuring my body. “I must assume you seduced Andevai in the usual way. You have that look about you that may make a young man feel hunger.”
At the boardinghouse I had learned to scold any man who ogled me in such an insulting way, and I usually succeeded in getting the other customers to laugh at him.
Bee murmured, “Cat! Don’t!”
But I did.
“Rather, I would say that radical principles seduced him. Really, Your Excellency, you have only yourself to blame. Why should he serve an unjust system as if he were a horse placed in harness who has no choice but to pull lest he be whipped if he balks? Even so, Vai made you a vastly generous offer. If you would release the village of Haranwy from the clientage it has labored under for generations, he promised to serve you loyally. He would have sacrificed his own freedom and happiness to assure their liberty. You laughed at him.”
“I did nothing so crude as laugh. I gave him his sister’s freedom, when in truth she ought to have been bred to see if more cold mages could be produced out of that family. It was far more than I needed to do!”
“Kayleigh is not a brood mare!”
His lack of recognition betrayed that he had no idea that Vai’s sister was named Kayleigh. “That I released her shows my appreciation for his value to Four Moons House. We may hope he will sire children on you who have some measure of the strength he has—”
“I’m not a brood mare either!”
“—but the genealogies sung by the djeliw tell us that cold mages with such deep roots rarely breed children who possess as much potency. To think how many advantageous matches the House lost now he is wasted on you! We might have sent him on a successful Grand Tour and afterward prosperously negotiated for three or even four wives for one such as him. Even if he does not sire powerful children, many Houses are willing to make the try for grandchildren out of such a mage. Each marriage creates a rope that binds us and makes us stronger for the coming war.”
“Vai is not a stallion to be put out to stud!”
“He is what I choose to make him.”
Bee tapped me sharply on the forearm to shush me.
“Are you saying your own children are not as potent cold mages as you so obviously are, Magister?” she asked with a sweet smile that startled the mansa and made the old djeli make a sign to avert disaster. “Have you no lofty sons to inherit your princely seat as mansa of Four Moons House? Are you forced to conceive the awful thought that the young cold mage best suited to become mansa after you is a humble young man born to people who have been enslaved by clientage for so many generations that you cannot think of them as anything except lowborn inferiors whom you may breed like livestock? Yet think! The son of a prince may rule whether he do so wisely or well, and he shall have advisors and kinsmen to steady him. But the son of a magister who has no magic cannot be given magic, can he?”
The temperature in the room dropped precipitously, making my eyes sting and my lips go dry. The mansa strode to the stove. With a look, he drove the soldiers from the kitchen. Accompanied by a horrible groaning strain, the door of the stove buckled.
I kicked over the table and dragged Bee down behind it just as the thick iron door shattered like the hull of a boat shot to splinters. Bee screamed. Shards of metal thunked into the table so hard that a few almost pierced through, their jagged blades the visible threat of his astonishing power. My ears rang. My breathing was all torn to pieces.
“Blessed Tanit shelter us,” whispered Bee, her complexion gone a sickly gray-white.
I was shaking. “You couldn’t have known. Stay down!”
As I rose, I drew my sword on the shimmering backwash of his magic. The cold steel glittered as if coated with burning oil, making the gloomy kitchen blaze with light.
“I cannot kill you, Your Excellency. Nor do I wish to. You lost Andevai not because I seduced him but because you refused to respect him as a man.”
The djeli had survived the mansa’s display of power unscathed, for he had his own secrets. He turned on me now. “Maestra, keep silence.”
“I won’t keep silence! You speak of fruitful alliances and breeding rights, but Andevai and Kayleigh are people the same as you.”
The mansa frowned. “Of course they are not the same as me! Their ancestors disgraced themselves and thus put their honor in chains.”
“Easy to speak of honor when you get to choose whose honor to champion. Is it the gods who foreordain our birth and position in life, or only chance? What if things had been different, if the history of the world had fallen out in another way? What if your people had been forced into chains? Would it not be wrong that a man of your power be whipped as a common laborer all his life just because of a chance of birth? Would it not be wrong that a man of your dignity be bound to a master who does not respect him and can use or discard or kill him without penalty? What then of your power and majesty? Why do you deny to Andevai what you assume for your own self?”
“You are a fatherless bastard. For you to believe you can lecture one such as me is not just absurd but unnatural. Andevai belongs to Four Moons House. As do you. Understand that I can kill you, and take no legal penalty for doing so.”
“Yet you have not done so!”
A spark of cold fire winked into existence, then expanded into a globe of light. “I admit to curiosity about a girl who can vanish and reappear at will. A girl who can walk into the spirit world and return to this one. A girl who can tell me where Andevai is.”
Footsteps rapped along the passage. A magister wearing a fine indigo dash jacket under an unbuttoned winter coat stepped into the kitchen. I had seen him before; he was the mage who had unsuccessfully pursued me at Cold Fort, the one whose horse I had stolen.
He made a clipped courtesy to the mansa. “Uncle, we found this man—”
The mansa smiled triumphantly at me. “Ah. My nephew has found him despite your efforts to shield him.”
Rory sauntered in, toying with the end of his long braid. “Cat? Do you want me to—?”
“No!” I exclaimed, just as Bee said, “No!”
The mansa stared, startled by Rory’s appearance. The djeli tried to catch Rory’s image in the mirror’s slippery surface, but all he saw was a saber-toothed cat. I studied the young magister, tracing the family resemblance between him and the mansa.
The young man caught me looking. “Caught you this time, haven’t we? You’ll not escape my uncle now he has taken an interest in you himself.”
I offered him a courtesy, to mock him. “My apologies about the horse.”
Despite my sword, the fool took a step toward me, a hand raised as if he believed he could slap me.
“Enough, Jata,” said the mansa. “Do not touch her.”
The young mage turned away from me at once. “The village boy is close by, Uncle, I’m sure of it. He doesn’t have the wit to hide, thinking himself so much better than he is.”
“Your envy serves you ill, Jata,” said the mansa. “Go out and look again. Find him.”
