by Kate Elliott
“What are you saying?” Andevai whispered, face ashen, his triumph in ruins.
“It seems there is no Barahal blood in her at all,” said the mansa in a voice so soft it should not have made me shudder like a leaf tossed in a tremendous gale, and yet it might as well have been a roar. “And you, Andevai, you are too much a fool to have seen the trap even as they sprang it. How they must be laughing now. I wonder, how have we transgressed that a child born into a village of simpleminded field hands, the children of the children of slaves, should be a vessel of such abundant cold magic? And yet, in the end, one may as well have tried to train a dog to dance.”
“But I destroyed the airship—”
“That was the lesser of your assignments. The marriage was the crucial one. So much at stake! And you brought us this useless female!”
“Mansa,” Andevai said desperately.
“Get rid of her.”
Andevai grabbed my arm and dragged me to the door, pushed it open, and shoved me out. I staggered a few steps before I caught myself short and turned, knowing I must go back inside and ask a question or demand an explanation.
Andevai shut the door in my face. I sank to my knees, sagged against the door, and winced back from the touch of iron bands so cold they burned.
There is no Barahal blood in her at all. All strength sapped from me, I collapsed forward along the floor. No Barahal blood at all.
I lay this charge on you as well, Aunt had said to me when I was only six years old, when I had come to live with them, that you must protect Bee, for there will come a time when she will need your protection.
Four Moons House had wanted Bee all along.
That being so, what did it make me?
The sacrifice.
17
Lying against the door, too weak to rise, I could hear them perfectly.
“How can it even be possible that you—even you—after all the struggle we’ve undertaken to educate you properly—could have made such a fundamental and devastating error?”
“Mansa,” interposed the djeli. “There is no canoe so big that it may not sink. Also, he is young.”
The magister snorted. “You have always favored him. Did you breed the filly who birthed him?”
Air can change consistency when the temperature drops suddenly, as it might once a year when the rare ice blizzards swept down off the glacial shelf. My lips stiffened and I thought for an instant I could lick ice out of the air.
“Andevai!” The djeli spoke firmly. “Control yourself!”
“My mother did not—”
“Do not wield your anger against the mansa. It is forbidden.”
“My mother did not—”
“Your mother,” agreed the djeli, “is by all reports a woman as strong as iron, industrious, forgiving, even-tempered, and loyal. Mansa, it serves no purpose to insult a woman who does not stand here to defend herself. The young man knows who his parents are. That is all I have to say on the matter. Now I am finished with it.”
“I hear what you have said, Bakary,” said the mansa. “Yet can it be that in his arrogance he has forgotten his mother is alive only due to our generosity? It is we who obtain at much difficulty and cost the medicine that staves off her illness. Has he forgotten what his village owes Four Moons House? Remind him!”
The djeli sighed, then spoke in a cadence something like song and something like poetry.
“It is the Diarisso lineage that possessed the handle of power, the essence of spirit, which in the old country we called nyama.
“It is the Diarisso who warded off the terror that came out of the bush, that which attacked the great empire, the cities and towns and villages, the fields and houses.
“It is the Diarisso who with their chains of magic guided the people, guided them safely across the hidden paths of the waterless desert, and so to the sea, to escape the flesh-eating ghouls, the salt plague that overtook the kingdom.
“Twenty thousand marched out of the city; mothers carried their children; sons carried their elders.
“Ten thousand only reached the shores of the middle sea.
“They found the Kena’ani ships, they handed over the gold, and the ships carried our people north to this shore, so far it was, as far as we could journey away from the plague.
“Three hundred and twenty-nine years ago, this happened.
“Then at that time, when they reached the north, the Diarisso lineage founded the first mage House. Later, some among the children of their children founded Four Moons House.”
The mansa spoke. “Do you remember, boy, what your people owe to Four Moons House?”
“I do,” Andevai mumbled.
“Your ancestors had no sorcery, no weapons, no provisions, no water, no strength. You would have perished in the desert had we not fed you and carried you. In exchange, we accepted your labor and the labor of your descendants as guarantors for the debt incurred.”
“I have failed you, Mansa.”
“Of course! How I expected you, such as you are, to succeed I cannot imagine. And yet the task was so simple.”
“Mansa,” interposed the djeli, “if the young man was not aware the Barahals hoped to cheat him, he would not have been alert to answers devised to fool him. Outright lies on their part would have burned. It is obvious they schemed for many years in order to cheat us. They even had a girl ready to substitute in their daughter’s place. I must say, it was exceedingly clever of them.”
“Yes, Phoenicians are known for their cleverness, are they not? They are stoats in our poultry yard.” His tone, which remained angry but respectful when replying to the djeli, darkened to scorn. “What is it? You may talk.”
Andevai spoke in a tone so humble it was like scraping the floor. “I make no excuses for my failure, Mansa. It is my responsibility alone.”
“Yes, yes, I suppose it was inevitable.” Evidently groveling appeased the mansa, because he went back to hammering on my people. “Especially when faced with cunning and self-serving mercenaries like the Barahals. They fostered the rise of Camjiata through their secret networks. They pretended they had no part in the monster’s early successes and his later wars. They proved themselves adroit, indeed, in holding out empty hands to plead their innocence after his capture. It is pure accident we found evidence of their complicity, which we could use to control them. Yet the Hassi Barahals still scuttle across the continent like so many cockroaches.”
Indignation, once stirred in a cat’s heart, is like nourishment. My fainting heart began to swell and strengthen. Still listening, I carefully turned my head to survey the hall.
Two attendants stood on either side of the double doors leading to the corridor. They were, I thought, making an effort not to stare at me lying stretched like a slaughtered heifer before the mansa’s closed door. Otherwise, this large, elegant chamber was furnished with four low, wide benches padded with pillows and a mirror set against the wall at the end of the chamber opposite from where I lay. A mural painted along the walls depicted a desert crossing: powerful, handsome men and strong-as-iron women clothed in gold and orange striding over the tumultuous sands with their chains of power wreathing them like vines, using divination to forge a path and using a chain of sorcery to keep the salt plague and its ghouls at bay. They were followed by a train of much smaller sized people, their children and dependents and retainers, and the even smaller figures of their slaves.
“There is much you do not understand,” the mansa was saying beyond the door, evidently to Andevai. “You are young, and inexperienced, and ignorant.” He clearly expected no answer to this self-evident description, because he kept talking. “Now listen carefully. The diviners warned us in their maze of sand and shells that a general would rise to trouble Europa with his schemes. But we did not realize until too late the threat the Iberian Monster truly posed. We did not realize that he had gained a mage House as his willing ally. We did not know until too late that he was using the vision of a woman who could walk the dr
eams of dragons to plot his campaign of conquest. Too late, we understood that the dreamer had attracted the notice of the masters of the Wild Hunt. Too late. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mansa,” Andevai murmured.
“The Wild Hunt obliterated Crescent House, but not to aid us. They care nothing for us. We are less than vermin in their eyes. Yet, ironically, the Hunt’s intervention saved us. For it was only after the death of Crescent House and the woman who walked the dreams of dragons—the woman Camjiata had married—that the Second Alliance could capture Camjiata and defeat his army. But I tell you now: Peace will not last, for princes will quarrel and laborers will remain ungrateful for that which benefits them. War and suffering wait at the door, eager to enter. So we listened closely when the diviners told us their shells and sands revealed that the eldest daughter of the Adurnam Hassi Barahal lineage will walk the dreams of dragons.”
Walk the dreams of dragons?
What did that mean?
In the tone of a man goaded by curiosity into imprudence, Andevai spoke. “Can such people truly exist?”
The mansa said, as if Andevai had not spoken, “Am I doing the right thing, Bakary? To bring a woman who walks the dreams of dragons into a mage House puts us all at a terrible risk. We know what the Wild Hunt did to Crescent House. We saw the ruins.”
“It is true, Mansa. So my father taught me and his father before him. This is known to us, but we never speak of it. To bring one who has learned to walk the path of dreams into a mage House is like bringing fire into a field of dry straw. One spark and all is consumed.”
“Yet she is too valuable to lose. I thought it would be enough to bind her to us through the contract and let her remain, untouched and untrained, in her family’s arms. If we bound her and kept her hidden in plain sight with her family, then no one else could take her, and we placed no risk on our House. That way, we held her in reserve. In case the storm came.”
“Plans are dust thrown into the wind,” said the djeli.
“So the storm comes, as we feared. We must take the risk.” The mansa’s words fell as heavy as iron.
I shifted to get a better look at the glass-paned wall that looked out over the garden: high arched windows, paned doors, velvet curtains swagging from the walls and tied back with ropes of red braid. Warmth breathed up from the raised floor, embracing my belly. Here in the protected halls of Four Moons House, it was difficult to imagine what risk they faced.
“I n-never knew…,” stammered Andevai, and an older, simpler accent surfaced in his voice, quickly stifled. “I had nay idea—no idea. Only a story I heard as a boy about a woman born with the gift that is a curse. She learned to walk the dreams of dragons, and so the Wild Hunt killed her. If that’s so, Mansa, and if an entire mage House was destroyed by the Wild Hunt because of one dreamer, then what would be so terrible that you would risk bringing such a person into Four Moons House?”
His question was met with a drawn-out silence.
When the djeli spoke, it seemed his voice penetrated the foundations of the house. “Camjiata has escaped his island prison.”
If the roof had fallen in on me, I could not have been more stunned. Perhaps I made a noise. The attendants glanced toward me and as quickly away. Bad enough to be humiliated like this without them smirking at me in my mortification. I dug deep for the concealing glamor, letting it embrace me like a cawl.
The mansa’s anger stung like sleet. “The Houses will keep the secret of Camjiata’s escape for as long as they can, but all too soon the news will get out. And when it does, the Barahals may try to seek him out and gain his protection. They do not know what the girl is, but we can be sure Camjiata will recognize her importance immediately. He will claim her, if he finds her before we do.”
“The other girl,” murmured Andevai. “When I saw Catherine, I was sure Catherine must be the one waiting for me… and then they told me she was the eldest…. She said she was two months older than the other girl.”
“So there is still time before the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter reaches her majority and the contract expires,” said the mansa.
A new uneasiness stirred in my heart. I pushed up my head to see if my arms worked and lowered myself down again. The attendants paid no attention to my movement.
“What must I do, Mansa, to regain your favor?” Andevai asked in a low voice.
“Return at once to Adurnam and marry the Barahal girl, as you were commanded to do.”
The djeli said, “The marriage already made was bound by an irrevocable chain, Mansa.”
“Then it must be undone.”
“It can’t be undone, Mansa,” replied the djeli patiently. “You know this as well as I do. And furthermore, the contract stipulates that the girl must be the sole wife of the magister who marries her.”
“So she will be,” said the mansa, each word ice, purposefully, deliberately. “The one you married in error is useless to us, Andevai. Indeed, she was party to the fraud. The marriage will be undone and the other girl recovered and brought under our control before the winter solstice. Andevai will carry out his duty to show his obedience and prove his worth.”
From the chamber on the other side of the door, silence fell. The attendants at the other double doors yawned, oblivious to the tension pouring out over me. In the garden, a breeze set the treetops swaying. I heard, rising from elsewhere in the building, the voices of children in full spate, laughter and teasing and stories and dares.
“Aiei!” The djeli’s sigh penetrated the air like storm winds, making me shudder.
“But, Mansa,” said Andevai, “I don’t understand. A binding marriage… a chained contract…”
“Can you not see the solution even so?” demanded the mansa. “Is even this beyond you?”
“But, Mansa,” said my husband, “the only way out of such a contract is through the death of one of the parties involved.”
“Yes. Kill her.”
18
The words were simple, the silence that followed complex, ugly, smothering. It was so quiet I was sure I heard my husband blink.
“I beg your pardon, Mansa. I have not understood you.”
“You heard what I said.”
I pushed up gently to hands and knees, careful to make sure my head did not spin, but I was not at all dizzy. My heart was cold steel. I shifted to my feet and walked to the corner, a hand tracing the wall because I was part of the wall and nothing more than the wall, and after that I was window, nothing more, and then I was the door that did not open, curse it, but the next door did. I slipped through and closed it behind me and was out in the garden, all this really before I realized I had developed the thought, I. Have. To. Run. Now.
The garden was a rectangle, with its length extending to a wall beyond which rose evergreen trees. Several paths wound between tall yew hedges, perfect for skulking, so I ducked behind the screen of densely packed leaves and worked my way like a scuttling rat from hedge to hedge toward the far wall.
A bell rang, and I jerked as if a rope had caught me up short. But it was only a calling bell, because in response I heard the shouts and laughter of children racing down interior corridors of the wing that lay to my right. I reached the high wall that bounded the garden. It had no gate whatsoever and was far too high for me to climb over.
I had to go through the house.
I saw a sturdy double door set next to the corner where the wing to my right met the garden wall. Here I paused, panting, my hand on the latch.
“Catherine!” Andevai’s voice carried into my prison.
Kill her.
I had no sword, only my wits and determination. My hand tightened on the latch, and it clicked blessedly free. Mouthing a prayer to Tanit, I slipped into a gloomy corridor. Halfway down the long corridor, children pushed through an open door in a mob of chattering and giggling that subsided as they vanished into whatever rooms lay beyond. None had seen me in the shadows. At the opposite end, where light spilled through windows, door
s stood ajar into the main building. I could not go back into the garden or ahead into the main house.
I followed where the children had led and found myself in a narrow corridor lined with heavy coats hanging from posts on one side and a series of doors on the other. From behind the closed doors I heard the noise of children—ranging from the boisterous, cheerful young to the gossipy intense olders—settling down to lessons. I had fled into the school wing.
A new bell rang with an alarming clangor. Men shouted in the distance with deep voices full of malevolent purpose. A breath of shiveringly cold air stirred, like an invisible icy hand searching behind the furniture and down unseen halls for what it had lost.
Kill her.
A matron’s voice called sharply, “In your seats! That’s the warning bell. In your seats! Silence!”
A foot scraped softly on the plank floor. Too late I shoved back behind a layer of hanging coats. A hand pulled aside a fur-lined sleeve and a small face peered at me.
“Who are you?” the child whispered with a puzzled frown. A boy with a brown face and close-cropped black hair, he was neither scared nor angry. He looked like he might be very sweet, as long as he liked you.
“I’m Cat,” I said with an attempt at a friendly smile, nothing too pathetic or false, I hoped.
“To hide,” he added, “you have to move four coats down and stand where the thread is. That’s the concealing spot they made.”
“That who made?”
“It’s a holding illusion,” he said with a bright grin. “The matrons say they’re too young to weave magic, but they’re not, and they promised to teach me if I keep their secret. Go there. It’ll hide you. No one knows but me and Sissy and Cousin.”
Footsteps drummed elsewhere, the flooring trembling with an echo of their movement. Soon they would come this way.
“Maester Kendall!” a woman’s voice called, and he skipped off, opened the door of the last schoolroom, and plunged inside to a fall of excited laughter from his cohort.