“Did they?” I ventured.
Her frown was daunting! “It is so easy for good-looking boys to be ruined by praise. It has taken all my effort to make sure he has learned proper manners. You must resist any inclination to let him have his way in things beyond what a man has a right to ask for, cooking and children.”
This hard speech did not upset me. Indeed, I found it enlightening. I stirred, wishing I dared sit up. “Maestra, I beg you, please lie down, for you are looking exhausted. Bintou, please bring your mother some of that hot broth, for I hope it will soothe her lungs.”
The grim line of her lips softened. The ghost of a younger, healthier woman danced briefly in her face, then vanished, but it was the way she carried herself that caught the eye. All this time I had been thinking that Vai’s pride came from his close study of the mansa.
Bintou brought her mother broth, then settled her on a cot. Meanwhile Wasa took my hand in the familiar manner of a little sister, tracing my fingers with her own. As her mother’s harsh breathing gentled to sleep, the girl spoke.
“Was he really going to kiss you right in front of Maa?”
I met her gaze gravely. “I think he was.”
She leaned closer with a smirk on that seemingly innocent little face. Her fingers crept up my arm. “He likes you.”
I grabbed her ear with my uninjured hand. “He does like me. What do you really want?”
“The locket.”
“You can’t have it. My father gave it to me.”
“I never met my papa. He died while my mama was big with us.”
“I’m sorry about that. I lost my father when I was six. I might let you look at it later if you’re very good.” I released her ear. “Where is my cane? And the basket?”
“No one can touch the cane. It bites. Also, there is a skull in that basket. I looked, even though Bintou told me not to. Then it talked to me.” She eyed me. “Do you believe me?”
“It would depend on what the skull said to you. Then I would know for sure.”
“She spoke like a foreign person. She was hard to understand. I think she asked me to tell her who I was and why I was staring at her so rudely.”
Hard to say if Wasa had a gift or was just exceedingly quick-witted. “If you are very well behaved, I will introduce you to her.”
She glanced at her sleeping mother. “I am always well behaved. Or at least, I am when Maa is awake.”
I smiled as she sat back to allow Bintou to bring a cup of broth. I sat up with a bolster propped behind me and handled the cup with my uninjured arm. Afterward, with my right side held motionless along a rolled-up blanket, I was able to doze.
Later I heard the girls whispering in the village dialect, and their mother scolding them.
“They will despise us no matter what we do. But we will give no cause for scorn by speaking like uneducated people. Recite to me from the primer.”
Pronounced with careful enunciation in the sweet, high voices of the girls, the simple, rhyming phrases spun me down into sleep.
At dawn the entire camp was taken down. My skirt and petticoat were dirty but wearable. The lovely cuirassier’s jacket was a loss. An ill-fitting and homespun wool tunic replaced it, although I had Bintou salvage the jacket in case I could repair it.
We traveled in the bed of a wagon. The jostling caused me so much pain that it was all I could do not to sob the entire weary day and the next and the next. I became feverish as the wound throbbed. Not a word of complaint passed the lips of Vai’s mother, although her cough got worse, shaking her entire frame, and sometimes she went gray as she struggled to suck in a breath of air. At night Bintou dosed her with a syrup that drugged her into a stuporous slumber.
Days passed. We slept in the hospital tent, in servants’ quarters, in stables, always under guard. Of Vai I saw no sign, but the locket’s warmth told me he lived. With what tendrils of thought still remained to me, I imagined we were returning to Four Moons House. Instead we came to rest at last in a locked room with a hypocaust floor. Wood-barred windows overlooked a walled courtyard past which I heard the sounds of city life. The room had four rope beds and a table and bench. Wasa set the cacica’s skull on the table, as she had started doing at every stop on the way, careful to ornament her with a flower or bit of greenery.
Once the incessant jostling had ceased, I slowly recovered. A dignified older woman in a head wrap and burgundy boubou applied poultices to my shoulder and prescribed a diet of broth, beets, and barley. After some days I was strong enough to ask where we were.
“In the city of Lutetia.”
“Lutetia!” Twenty years ago, in this very city, General Camjiata had overseen a committee of legal scholars and bureaucrats who had written up his famous law code. My father had written extensively on the meetings in his journal. “Why are we here?”
“No more can I say, Maestra, except that you bide in Two Gourds House by the courtesy of the mansa of Four Moons House.” The healer spoke slowly so we could understand her. “The woman’s lungs are stubbornly inflamed. The syrup of poppy has weakened her badly. The girls tell me she has taken it for four years. No person ought to drink the syrup for so long. I am surprised she has survived this long. As the gods will, so will it be.”
I did not like to hear talk of dying. “Might we wean her off the syrup?”
“It would be difficult with her so weak.”
“But we can try!” The cacica would not give up so easily! With her training as a healer, she might know how to help. “Might we get a mirror so we can tidy our faces?”
“I have been told I may never bring a mirror into the room.”
I refused to give up. Obviously Vai’s mother needed a degree of nursing the mage House had never been willing to provide and that her daughters were too young and inexperienced to manage. First I begged for richer food and more of it. I asked for pen and paper so I could record dosages of the syrup. I held a pot of water steeped with the needles of Scots pine so she could inhale its steam. We rubbed oil of mint into her chest. Day by day, one drop at a time, I cut down on the amount of syrup she ingested.
She was not an affectionate or genial woman, nor was she easy to talk to, so I talked. She could never hear enough about what Kayleigh had done and said in Expedition, and what manner of fine, honest, loyal, and hardworking man Kayleigh’s husband Kofi was and what sort of people his household had in it. I would have sewed, but our captors refused me needles and pins. They had no idea that my cane was a sword at night.
I acquired a schoolbook primer and slate tablets for the girls. When I noticed how avidly their mother watched them recite, I informed her that the girls would become better readers if she would allow them to teach her the letters, for I was sure she would never ask for her own sake.
She was very proud. I liked her for it.
As it grew warm, we took her outside to sit in the sun.
“How did you come to marry Andevai’s father?” I asked her one day in the courtyard as I bounced a rubber ball from knee to knee. I had coaxed the attendants with stories of Expedition until they had managed to find me a suitable ball. With but a single flower trough of withered stalks for decoration, the walled and paved courtyard offered just enough space to play.
Vai’s mother was strong enough now to weave stems of grass, and could plait anything into marvelously decorative baskets. “My father sired ten daughters. My mother was dead with the last. A peddler’s daughter may not hope for much. My eldest sister married our cousin. That was accounted good luck. The others had no such offer. My father was a good man but he had not the means to feed us all…” Her eyelids dropped, shuttering a memory. “I would not become what they were forced to. I was not wax for candles to be dipped in.”
Seated on a stone bench bent over the schoolbook, Bintou and Wasa looked up with wide eyes. I caught the ball and held it against my hip.
“Then you came to Haranwy,” I prompted.
