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“Why are there five place settings?” asked Bee.
“Will you help me with the platters, Beatrice?” she asked. “The kitchen is this way.”
Bee looked at me, but I shrugged, so she followed the professora. I had of course brought my cane. The sword’s ghostly hilt had flowered with the dusk, and it pulsed, tasting magic. I looked up at the pair of glowing lamps and their twisting, flickering flame. Yet there was not a breath of wind. Nor did the lamps hiss.
“Really, ’tis impossible to tell, if yee don’ already know,” said Sanogo, sitting on one of the benches. He pointed down a brick path laid through a gap in a hedge. “Past the bellyache bush, yee might find somewhat of interest.”
My heart had begun to gallop like a reckless horse bearing for home on a storm-wracked night. “Why am I always the last to know or guess?”
“A rhetorical question, I assume. I shall pour the wine. Don’ feel yee must hurry back.”
Vestiges of daylight clung to the western sky. Far in the distance niggled the clug and clut of factory machines that, with gaslight, could run all night. Closer, smoke puffed lazily up from one of the buildings within the compound.
Past the hedge the path speared through columns of dwarf fruit trees trimmed into spheres and rectangles; it emerged like the mouth of a stream onto a brick pavement fronting a long whitewashed one-story building. Once, I thought, this wing had served as the living quarters of an extended family, each wife or widow or adult sister with her own room, her own bed, and her own children. Between each pair of doors stood a bench set against the wall. A thick vine had over the years been coaxed along the eaves, and falls of purple flowers adorned the expanse. I stared at a bench and wall and flowers just like the sketch I had seen in Bee’s sketchbook. Seeing it, I grew flushed, and then I grew cold, for the workings of a deeper force had spun this moment into being. Not the bench or the building, built by ordinary means, but the energy or will that had directed Bee’s hand. This was a meeting place. Or would have been, had the bench not sat empty between two closed doors.
However, there was another bench. On it sat a male figure wearing a dash jacket perfectly tailored to his well-proportioned frame. Eyes shut, he had his head tilted back to rest on the wall, one hand curled lightly on his lap and the other tapping a rhythm on a thigh. A folded paper with a broken wax seal rested on the bench beside him.
I sat at the opposite end of the bench, my heart as fragile as a trembling songbird cupped in sheltering hands.
“Ah,” he said, without opening his eyes. “My tormenter.”
No, after all, my heart was not a trembling songbird but a hissing, outraged goose in full rampage.
“What puzzles me is how a man willing to spend weeks courting a woman to convince her that she was really in love with him, or could be in love with him if she would just set aside her perfectly reasonable and pragmatical concerns about being in all essentials owned by a mage House…” I had to pause to take a breath and sort out my line of argument. “What puzzles me, is how he could spend weeks—weeks!—entrenching his plans and carrying out his campaign, and then in one instant be willing to think the worst of her without making any effort to let her explain.”
His drumming fingers stilled. “Was I to doubt the evidence of my eyes?”
“Am I meant to conduct my entire explanation in questions?”
“Can you do so?”
“Do you actually think I’m lying about the questions?”
“Can I know what to believe?”
“Did you read my pamphlet? Get my message?”
“Would you be sitting here if I hadn’t?”
“You arranged this?”
“Who do you suppose sent Professora Alhamrai to the general’s household in the first place over three weeks ago to see how a certain…person was doing?”
“Wouldn’t the esteemed professora be capable of sending herself??”
“Do you think she would have thought of you at all? Do you think you are the first person on everyone’s mind?”
I opened my mouth, and shut it. The hammering of my heart eased from an erratic cacophony to a mere pounding but no-less-irritated clamor. “Might some vain young man’s pride have been hurt?”
“Why would a person trust a person who had lied to him?”
“Why do you think I lied?”
His eyes opened as his head raised. “Was the appearance of the general, his fire mage, and your cousin not reason enough? Not to mention the wardens?”
“What if a lost young woman had had no inkling of any machinations behind her abandonment on the jetty and was as surprised as anyone at the appearance of the general, his fire mage, and her cousin? Not to mention the wardens?”
He cut me a dagger-like glance from his lovely eyes. “Am I meant to believe anyone could be that naïve?”
