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From the height, hidden in my shadows, I surveyed a sprawling compound of courtyards, wings, and separate buildings. I balanced along the wall, looking into an herb garden, an open ground where children were playing in the sun, a well-tended rose garden where two richly garbed and very pregnant women were holding hands on a bench. Their affection for each other was so tender. How I missed the ones I loved!
What ought I to do? Summer had come, and autumn would follow. If I was stuck here on Hallows’ Night I had no hope of escaping my sire’s anger. Yet should I run, Vai’s mother and sisters would receive the brunt of the mansa’s punishment. Like Vai I could not consider myself free as long as others were in chains. The mansa had known exactly how to trap him.
“Are you sorry you swam to shore, now you’re stuck with us?” Bintou asked when I returned.
“No,” I said truthfully. “I met you, Bintou. That made it all worthwhile. Wasa, of course, I might easily have lived many years longer in peace for not meeting.”
The girls giggled and hugged me, then reached around me to try to pinch each other, as Bee and I used to do. The press of their bodies against mine brought tears to my eyes, not of sorrow but of sweetness.
“Vai and I will find a way. I don’t know how yet. But we will.”
The scrape of a foot at the open door brought my head around. Vai’s mother leaned against the door frame, watching us with the haughty look that was a cloak for her vulnerability. Just like her son. I no longer wondered that he had found the strength to survive the misery heaped on him in his first years at the mage House, or how he had endured without getting melted down into slag.
In the last week the trough of flowers had finally bloomed, stalks and branches blasted with color like fireworks exploding. Was this what it was like for a person, who had drifted all the years of his life without magic, to bloom with power? One day you are closed, and the next you are open.
Vai’s mother smiled at me.
I shook off the girls and hurried over to take her hand. “Awake so soon?”
“I heard you laughing,” she said in the tone of a woman who has only just remembered that she once knew how to laugh. “My son is fortunate to have found one such as you, Catherine.”
I laughed, because otherwise I would have cried. “Have you not heard the story of how we were forced to marry, and then he wouldn’t let me eat my supper? Look! Here they are come with our supper! Mmm! Is that yam pudding? I’ll tell you while we eat.”
34
Some days later, on a sunny afternoon, I read sentences aloud as the girls wrote them out on slate tablets. Vai’s mother rested on her bed. In this isolated wing of the huge complex, the sounds and smells of each day had a familiar rhythm as the servants went about their tasks. An unexpected drum of footfalls surprised me into setting down the schoolbook. The door opened and four guards entered. I grabbed my cane.
The mansa strode in. The damask of his flowing indigo robes gleamed. His hair was braided into canerows, the ends ornamented with white beads that clacked softly. I looked in vain for the old djeli, Bakary, who I was sure liked me. In the passage waited a younger man with a djeli’s gold earrings; he wore a dash jacket instead of Bakary’s traditional robes.
Vai’s mother got to her feet as Bintou and Wasa rose, Wasa fumbling with her crutch.
The mansa barely glanced at them. He studied the cacica’s skull briefly, but in truth his interest was all for me. “Catherine Bell Barahal, I have been blind to how valuable a person you are.”
He glanced toward the door as Lord Marius walked in. The soldier had an arm in a sling and a lurid but healing cut across his forehead and the bridge of his nose.
I made a pretty courtesy. “Your Excellency. My lord! You arrive with no warning, quite to my astonishment. I find surprise has made my mouth too dry to speak. Surely a soothing pot of tea and some news of my husband might help me find my voice.”
Lord Marius slapped me.
The force rocked me back. My skin stung so fiercely that tears welled in my eyes.
Wasa lost hold of her crutch and fell. Lord Marius grabbed my arm to stop me from going to her, so Bintou had to help her sister to her feet, both girls crying with fear.
“For shame,” said Vai’s mother. “The girl is defenseless and a prisoner.”
“Enough!” The mansa signaled toward the door. “Bring tea.” He regarded Vai’s mother with a considering frown. “I was told you were likely to die on the journey here to Lutetia, and sure to die within a week. Yet here you stand, still living. How does this come about?”
“Mansa,” she said, not answering, although she kept her gaze lowered.
“Stubborn, like your son. He lives,” he added, looking at me. “Satisfy me, and you will be allowed to see him. Defy me, and he will bide here never knowing you are held so close.”
I kept my chin high, for of course if Vai were here, he knew I was here.
The mansa chuckled, reading more into my expression than I intended. “Do not think to be prowling about to find him with the curious magic you possess. We have djeliw set to watch you. Right now, I have promised Lord Marius a full accounting of the fate of Legate Amadou Barry.”
“Will you be seated, Your Excellency, so Andevai’s mother may be seated?”
“They may sit, for whom standing is a burden,” he agreed magnanimously. A chair was brought for him. The moment he sat, Vai’s mother sank onto the bed, the girls pressed to either side.
