From outside I heard men shouting angrily. Lord Marius turned to look at the tent’s entrance, where two soldiers in the colors of the Tarrant militia stood guard.
“No! They’re saying one of them was shot! I will see my sisters!” The voice was Vai’s.
A second male voice replied in the loud and mocking tone of a highborn man who means to be heard by as many people as possible. “Your sisters, or your daughters? I know how your kind are. Everyone sleeps in the same bed.”
“I’ll kill you,” said Vai in a raw, ugly tone I had heard only in his nightmares. The smack of a fist hitting flesh was followed by the thud of a body hitting dirt.
The other man shrieked, “Get the stinking goat off me!”
A commanding voice I recognized as the mansa’s spoke. “Enough! Tie his arms back if he can’t control his fists.” The grunts and curses of a scuffle faded to silence.
Vai burst into the tent. His arms were trussed up behind his back with rope bound around a stout stick that could be twisted to control him. The brawny soldier who had hold of the stick brought him up short as he saw the girls.
“Bintou! Wasa!”
The bigger girl bolted to him and pressed her face against his shoulder. He kissed her hair, then looked with a frown toward the other girl who, with her too-short crutch, hadn’t tried to move. His glance skipped from the invalid girl to the woman. His lips parted. A jolt of stunned shock rolled through his body. But he recovered quickly. In a cunning move worthy of a sly Barahal, he slammed back into the soldier, jostling the stick. With a wrench, he freed himself and staggered forward to drop to his knees before the woman.
“Mother.” He rested his forehead on her knees. “Forgive me for bringing this trouble on you and the girls.”
“Son.” She laid a hand on his head in a blessing. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but her tone was implacable, even a little aloof. “You will be strong, as I taught you. I am told this woman is your wife and thus my daughter.”
His head and shoulders came up as if yanked. With an intake of breath, he stared into her face to read the truth of the words. Then he turned and saw me.
“Catherine!” He leaped to his feet. “What can you have been
“Andevai, this is not the behavior I expect from you.” His mother did not raise her voice, yet her tone cut right through the fury of his emotions.
He fought down from the storm, but it was a hard descent. He was so passionate about things. My shoulder hurt horribly, but I had my wits tucked about me like the blankets. He needed a task to take the edge off the surge of frustrated feelings of impotence and wounded pride.
My voice scraped out a whisper. “I thought you would need someone to help take care of the girls. They looked so frightened. But honestly, Vai, I wish you would get Lord Marius to stop threatening me. Bee and I truly did try to save Amadou Barry in the spirit world, but he wouldn’t listen to us. She wept buckets of tears when he was swept away in the tide. Now Lord Marius says he means to kill me to get satisfaction. But it was the legate’s foolish choice and not any scheme of ours. And he won’t let me drink my willowbark tea.”
Illusions vanished. Even with his arms tied behind him, Andevai could draw himself up with the arrogance of an exceedingly powerful cold mage who does not expect to be crossed.
“Lord Marius, my wife is not to be bullied or threatened. The legate should never have believed he could walk into the bush as if it were a country garden. Even those who have studied its secrets and passed down this lore know how dangerous it is to walk there. He was a fool twice over. Once to rush after them. Twice to not heed them.”
“Were you there, Magister, to see how it all transpired?” Lord Marius asked. “How can I even believe such a wild tale?”
“I have told you the truth. Give me the tea so I can give my wife relief from the pain of her injury.”
As angry as Lord Marius was, he also had a sense of the absurd. “How will you manage that, I wonder, with your hands bound behind you?”
Vai’s mother rose. That she scarcely had the strength to stand was evident by the tension in her frail frame, but to look at the stately lift of her head and the pressure of her gaze, one might never guess she was anything but a woman of power.
“I will take the cup, my lord, and minister to the young woman, as was my intention.” She held out her hand.
Something in that voice struck him. His forehead wrinkled as he obediently handed over the cup. “Are you mage House born, Maestra? For you have something of the manner about you, although I can’t quite figure your accent.”
“I am a peddler’s daughter, my lord. Not even a garden or hut to our name. We were the least among people you could ever meet. Lift her head. Gently, if you will, my lord.”
To my astonishment Lord Marius tucked a strong hand under my neck and carefully raised me. Obviously he had practice assisting wounded people to drink. The cup she set to my dry lips did not interest him. He examined her. “Ah. Then some Houseborn man took a fancy to you, did he? I know that happens.”
She did not look at him, not from shame, I thought, but because she considered the tea more important than the answer. “No, my lord. I am no man’s jade. I was the third and last wife of a village man who was born into clientage to Four Moons House. Lest you wonder, he was the only man who ever touched me. The boy is his, and mine. You may lower her head now, my lord.”
“Proud Jupiter,” muttered Lord Marius, setting me back. He looked Vai up and down. They had given Vai dry clothes, now scuffed from whatever fights he had been in, but for all that he wore someone else’s clothes and a smear of mud on his cheek, he still looked magnificent. “I had no idea the magister was not born to the House.”
She handed the cup to the tall girl, and then sank onto the chair. I could hear the hoarse crackle of her labored breathing. Yet when she found breath to speak, her words were firm. “He is not of their making. So powerful he is that they must bind him lest they lose him.”
“Mama,” muttered Vai.
“I did not raise you to be ashamed, Andevai. Now go, you and the lord both. You can return at a more proper time, and when you have wiped the mud off your face, for I am sure I did not teach you to appear so slovenly in public.”
Lord Marius whistled under his breath, but his amusement was a blade, flashing and then sheathed. “I will return to hear a full accounting.”
Vai stepped forward to kiss me, but before his lips met mine his mother’s voice cracked over us.
“Son! Are these the manners I taught you? To insult your wife by touching her in public before the eyes of others?”
He jerked away from me. The girl with the crutch clapped her free hand over her mouth to hide a smile. She had a rascal glint in her eye, that one. I had seen its like before.
“Go on, Son.”
He kissed the girls and left obediently. All the men fled, leaving the four of us and a pair of womanservants. His mother coughed with a dry wheeze. At length she could speak again, if barely in a whisper. Her proud aspect did not waver. Had she worn cloth of gold and sat on a throne, I would have called her a queen.
To the tall girl she said, “Bintou, fetch some of that broth we were brought this morning.”
To the short girl she said, “Sit down, Wasa. You will need your strength later.”
To me she said, “Bad enough you use his name, but I suppose your ways may be different.”
“What am I supposed to call him if not by his name?”
“A woman does not call her husband by his name. After her first child is born, she may address him by the eldest child’s name, as I did my husband, as ‘Andevai’s father.’ Despite your ignorance in such matters, I can see you have an idea how to handle him. I must warn you that his father and grandmother spoiled him.”
