I knelt under cover of laughter. “One word more, Magister,” I whispered, “and I will tell the tale of what a fool the Phoenician girl made of you, the day you and your soldiers and your highborn magic could not catch me when you found me unarmed on the road. I’m sure every man here wants to hear the part about how I mocked you and then stole your horse.”
Picking up the fallen wineglass, I rose, handed the empty tureen back to the stunned serving man, and to my surprise was greeted by the head wine steward handing me a full carafe.
“Well done, Maestra,” he murmured.
“Do go clean up, Jata,” said the mansa to his fuming nephew, who was picking bay leaves out of his hair. “Now, Andevai, describe in greater detail for our guests why and how you believe General Camjiata is using fire mages to fight his battles. More wine.”
As if more wine were what a pack of half-drunken men needed! But Serena nodded at me, so I poured, one eye always on Vai. He did not drink or eat a single morsel more. He explained crisply and in detail what he had seen and what conclusions he had drawn. Someone who did not know him might have mistaken the edge to his voice as arrogance when by the set of his shoulders and the angle of his chin it was clear he was covering humiliation.
The meal dragged on long past my patience for it, but I smiled and served to the end. The men departed in a mood half martial and half jocular, soaked in wine. Vai was sent out with the visitors to see them safely on their way home.
The mansa remained, lost in thought as the servants cleared the table around him and themselves departed. When only the mansa and Serena and I were left in the room, she poured three glasses of wine. The first she gave to me. She set the other two on the table and seated herself on a cushion next to her husband with an enigmatic smile.
I was so thirsty and angry that I drained the wine in one swallow, a rush like wet earth and giddy flowers. “Why do you let the powerful abuse the powerless? Why would you allow the one who had the least to fear to abuse the one who had no one to help him?”
“The magic should never have bloomed so strongly in a common-born slave like him, a boy whose own mother has not even a village lineage to claim,” said the mansa harshly. “When it did so, he ought to have been grateful we brought him into the House.”
“Where he was mocked and reviled every single day?”
“Boys will fight and compete to prove who is strongest. He should have bowed his head to those who stand above him, as a courtesy if nothing else. He would have done better with the youths he took his lessons with if he had not insisted on besting them in every trial.”
“That excuses it? Did all of you just look the other way while this kind of thing went on?”
A chill shuddered the air as his gaze tightened, but I did not retreat. “Do not be insolent, Catherine. One time it happened, in his first year at the House. Never after. The youths were warned they had gone too far in this instance.”
“Because you saw how powerful his cold magic could be? How useful he could be to you? Had he been a village child with no such promise, would anyone have cared?” Serena gave a shake of her head to remind me to be serene and placid. But I could not. “His own grandmother was impregnated against her will! She was not the only woman so used!”
He shrugged. “You will understand better when you must supervise the whole.”
“When I must supervise the whole…” I stared at the brilliant stain of beet soup mottling the rug. A dreadful fear gripped my heart. “What do you mean?”
He rose, leaving his full cup untouched. Serena rose gracefully alongside, a superb ornament, the sort of polished and splendid young woman of high rank a man may marry as his third or fourth wife, when he can choose for his own desire rather than the House’s needs and convenience. But he did not look at her. He was sure of her. He looked at me.
“You would do well to remember that he belongs to me, Catherine. Not to you. Not to himself. I will keep him in Four Moons House by whatever means I must.”
He clapped his hands. A steward appeared to escort me back to my prison.
I found Vai kneeling before his stern-faced mother, his head bowed. He had an arm around each sister. Servants collected our things.
Seeing me enter, Bintou leaped up. “Cat, we’re leaving.”
“Leaving Lutetia?” I asked, watching Vai. He did not look at me.
“No, we’re leaving this room. Vai says we are to have a grand set of rooms with a large garden! What do you think of that?”
Grand they were, as we soon discovered. An invalid chair was wheeled in, big enough for Wasa to sit on her mother’s lap. Although servants now swarmed everywhere, Vai himself pushed the chair through the corridors to the guest wing and a suite of rooms just down the hall from the parlor and dining hall where the mansa and I had had our conversations. A lovely entry and a charming little audience room gave onto a sitting room, off of which lay two bedrooms.
One of the sleeping chambers had been arranged with two beds, one for the girls and another for Vai’s mother. Its glass doors opened onto a courtyard lit by cressets of cold fire to display a fountain, benches surrounded by troughs of blooming flowers, and an arbor that screened a garden beyond. The girls hung on him, whispering secrets to him and giggling at their own jokes, as I settled his mother comfortably for the night and placed the cacica’s skull to watch over them.
After we kissed the girls he took my hand. He led me past the arbor and into the garden to a tiny summer cottage, a gazebo hung with cloth walls. Inside stood a bed draped with gauze curtains and flanked by two privacy screens. Bowls of food crowded a small table set for two people. Servants waited. He thanked and dismissed them, and they left.
“You must not have eaten,” he said. “There is fish, and fruit. And yam pudding that I had the kitchen make specially for you.”
Looking at the proud lift of his chin and the mulish set of his lips, I knew he would not speak of it, not now and maybe not ever.
“Vai, do you remember the Griffin Inn, in Southbridge Londun? When I came out from the supper room and you took one look at me and got up and came over to me? Why did you just get up like that and take my word there was trouble?”
He blinked. “But there
“Think of how many people would have been hurt or killed if you had unleashed your magic! It was better to go on with you than to risk injury to people who had no part in the fight.”
He slipped his fingers between mine until our palms touched. “You chose their safety over what you must have believed to be your own happiness. That is how it is with you, Catherine. You never questioned what your aunt and uncle thrust on you. You stayed loyal to their wishes up to the moment the mansa commanded me to kill you. Even then, love, you stayed loyal to your cousin. You didn’t run away to save yourself. You ran back to save her. Just as you jumped into the river because you thought my sisters looked frightened, and probably because you thought that together you and I could rescue them. Just as you tirelessly nursed my mother.” I thought he was going to kiss me, but that was not what he was about. “Your mother was right about you. ‘Loyalty will be the bright light this child will bring to the world.’ Never think otherwise, my sweet Catherine.”
A balmy night breeze chased through the cloth hangings that shielded us from view. Every cresset of cold fire in the garden went out.
I leaned into him.
He kissed my hair.
I raised my head and brushed his mouth with mine.
For a very long while neither of us spoke a single word, except what was in our hearts.
Much later we lay in the bed, drowsy and contented, yet I could not stop caressing him. I traced his lips, his chin, his throat, and then his shoulders and up the back of his neck.
“You’ve kept your beard trimmed but decided to let your hair grow out.”
