by Kate Elliott
He shouted, staggering up so off balance that I needed only to nudge his knee to send him tumbling ignominiously onto his backside.
“Noble Ba’al, forgive me, Magister!” I cried, slapping a hand to my chest in an exaggerated gesture worthy of Bee. “From the garbage that came out of your mouth, I mistook you for the slops bucket.”
The older men laughed appreciatively and the younger nervously, while the servants looked as if they wished they were anywhere except in the dining room.
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 was trouble, Catherine. It seemed obvious by your haste and tone. I could as well ask why you warned me. You could have said nothing and hoped they killed me, since they vastly outnumbered me. The people at the inn were not inclined to take my part.”
“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 shie
lded 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.”
“I promised myself I would not cut it until we were reunited.”
I would have made a joke about it, but my heart was too full. He held me as I lightly stroked his chest, and after a while I thought he had fallen asleep.
“Catherine.” His whisper made me shiver as from a touch of winter. “Everything has changed, love. Everything.”
My wandering hand stilled. “What has changed, Vai?”
I wished I could see his face, and then, after all, I was glad he could not see me.
“You must have suspected when you were brought in to pour wine. That honor is granted only to the mansa’s wife or daughters. When you saw where I was seated. The mansa has adopted me as his son and named me as his heir.”
“But… what about… your village, and clientage, and Chartji’s court case, and Camjiata’s legal code, and Kofi and the radicals?”
“It’s not even that I’ve bested them, every cursed one of them. For all those years the mansa scorned me as the village boy. He never thought I would amount to more than a lamplighter who renews cold fire each night at mage inns. No matter what I did, it was never good enough. But now he knows. Think of the honor to my mother! I will become mansa of Four Moons House.”
Exhausted by his climb up Triumph Spire, he fell asleep in my arms. But every time I closed my eyes, I remembered the troll lunging to rip out the belly of the horse.
The mansa had trapped him in the most gilded cage of all.
35
In the gray light of dawn, the singing of birds woke me. I eased out of his embrace, pulled on his shirt for modesty’s sake, and crept to the table to pick my way through the untouched food, for I was ravenously hungry. He stirred soon after and propped himself up on an elbow.
“You look very fetching in my shirt, Catherine,” he said in a tone that fetched me right back to bed.
Afterward I fell asleep. He woke me some time later by pulling a cover up over us, and I pretended to be asleep while servants bustled about the space. When they left we washed each other behind a screen where pitchers and a basin were set out for our use. He presented me with a linen dressing robe dyed a sumptuous midnight blue, while he slipped on a dark-gold silk dressing robe embroidered in bold geometric designs. The table had been laid with sliced meats and cheeses, fresh bread, and berries smothered in cream. A cup of coffee woke me right up.
“Why is my dressing robe so plain and yours so excessively decorative?” I asked.
He fed me a spoon full of nothing but the sweetened and whipped cream, and smiled as my eyes rolled back in ecstatic delight at its melting goodness. “You may have whatever you wish, love.”
“Did you arrange for the clothes?”
“As it happens, I did. In the field, I received a report every week, so I knew you had recovered and that my mother’s health was improving. When I heard we were coming to Lutetia, I insisted you be fitted with clothing suitable to my station. I remembered the dressmaker’s measurements from Sala. Do you like the style and cloth I chose?”
“They’re exactly what I like. Andevai…” I hesitated, not sure how to start.
“Why is it you only say ‘Andevai’ when you’re annoyed with me?”
Daylight revealed the cloth walls as canvas embroidered with elaborate garden scenes. I peered out through the slits to make sure no attendants waited within earshot, then sat back down.
“Vai, my love, I’m not annoyed with you. Far from it. Can I have shown you my feelings any more clearly than I already have?”
Because it pleased him to do so and it pleased me to accept, he fed me another fat spoonful of the glorious cream. A bit smeared on my lip. He leaned over the table to lick it off.
I had to forge forward before he mistook the nature of my hesitation. “I know the mansa has shown you an unbelievable honor by naming you as his heir. But it troubles me. He told me last night that you belong to the House. To me, this looks not as if he is freeing you but as if he is binding you more tightly to him.”
He tapped the spoon against the rim of the bowl half full of cream and berries. A pure faint tone rang. “I know, love. But… you should have seen my mother’s face when I told her.”
He bowed his head and covered his eyes with a hand. He said nothing, did not move at all except to breathe. I dared not move for I felt to do anything would profane the tears I doubted he had ever let anyone see except perhaps his beloved grandmother.
At length he took in a deep breath and wiped his cheeks. I buttered a piece of bread and handed it to him wordlessly. He ate it.
“I think I comprehend a little of what it must mean to her. And to you. But I cannot be easy with it. In fact, I think it is a mistake.”
A frown flickered. “How much choice do you think I have in this, Catherine? What was I to say to the mansa?”
“Doesn’t the mansa have sons?”
“He has four living sons. None have more than a candle’s worth of cold magic. That’s the first test, you know. Quenching a candle’s flame without touching it. But consider the advantages. As heir to Four Moons House I can change the customs of the House. I’ve already written to Chartji to ask her to meet with me here in Lutetia to discuss how we might go about it. I can walk among the magisters and elders and speak to them of why clientage is wrong and how it harms the mage Houses more than it helps them.”
“Have you done so? What did they say?”
“It has only been one month! People are naturally fixed on the crisis created by Camjiata.”
“Whose legal code you were once so determined to champion!”
“Camjiata is using James Drake to fight his war.”
I grasped his hand. “Bold Melqart! You’ve seen battle, haven’t you?”
His eyes shuttered. Then he spooned up another mound of cream. The way he fed me, with his lips slightly parted and his body leaning toward mine so his dressing robe gapped to give me a splendid view of his chest, was as delicious as the cream.
“I was never in danger. As for the war, you heard a great deal last night. You may be surprised to hear I have seen Professora Nayo Kuti’s pamphlets being passed among the soldiers of the Coalition Army. The radical philosophies are being talked about in our army, not just theirs.”
“Our army? The last time we were together, we were running from ‘our army.’ When exactly did the mansa make you his heir?”
“After the battle of Lemovis, a month ago. He saw that no one else had enough imagination to realize what was going on, much less the discipline and intelligence to discover ways to counter it. Furthermore, I am the only cold mage in Four Moons House besides the mansa who can truly build and hold a thorough illusion. There are other forms of cold magic that take more reach, but for illusion you must marry intense skill and discipline with the ability to reach deep into the ice.”
“You are the only one besides the mansa? Even including the women?”
To his credit he paused, forehead wrinkling. “I suppose I don’t know about the women. Although honestly, Catherine, to hear that anyone besides the mansa could best me in this would surprise me.”
I leaned across the table to give him a kiss. “Of course it would surprise you. My point is that the mansa may yet sire more sons and choose to replace you with one of them. Furthermore, you said Five Mirrors House in Noviomagus is ruled by a mansa who is not as powerful as the magister who tested you. She happened to be a woman, and thus according to House custom ineligi
ble. So let us say the mansa truly wishes for you to become mansa after him. If you do not have the support of the elders of Four Moons House, what is to stop them from demanding a more eligible if less powerful man once the mansa has passed on? Then you would have waited for all that time, perhaps for decades, only to find yourself just as powerless as you were the day you came to Four Moons House. All that time when you might have been working for a greater cause. It is the perfect means to keep you in harness.”
An eddy of cold air pooled around us. “Do you suppose I am too uneducated and common-born to have thought of exactly these sorts of complications?”
“Of course I don’t! I will thank you not to pretend that I do so you can wallow in your wounded feelings! You have just bested the rivals who tormented you for so long. You have raised your mother to a position of honor beyond anything she can ever have thought to expect. And you have been proven in the starkest way possible as exactly the rare and uncommonly potent cold mage you have always known you are. All laudable things. I want to know if you have forgotten your promise to Kofi.”
Ice crackled as frost across the surface of the cream as he pushed back his chair and rose with a curl of his lip. “I think that is enough! Do not believe you understand my promise to Kofi.”
“I’ve just gotten started!” I shoved back my own chair and stood. “Either you want a wife who respects you enough to challenge you when she thinks you may be wrong, or you want a wife like the gracious Serena, whose manners are beyond impeccable, and whose desire and purpose is solely to serve the wishes and needs of a husband who chose her for her beauty.”
“How do you know she doesn’t challenge him in private? How do you know she didn’t desire and even seek the marriage? It may not seem so to you, but marriage to the mansa of Four Moons House gives a woman’s lineage significant prestige and valuable connections. For that matter, how do you know she isn’t a magister herself, married for her magical potency and not just her signal beauty?”