Cold Steel

33

I woke to a warm cloth wiping my face. Opening my eyes, I looked up at a woman with gaunt cheeks and short wiry hair more gray than black.

“Do not speak,” she said in a raspy voice, careful not to jostle the crossbow bolt sticking out of my body. Stabs of pain pulsed through my right shoulder. “Here comes the surgeon.”

Over her shoulder I caught a glimpse of a man in a traditional boubou, carrying a leather bag and a small drum. I lay on a cot in a hospital tent spacious enough to house a dozen soldiers, although I was the only patient. Before the doctor could reach me, a soldier cut him off.

“Catherine Barahal. I have been looking for you.” Lord Marius stared down at me with such loathing that I whimpered. “Where is Legate Amadou Barry?”

My nurse looked up with no sign of servility. “My lord, she will do better once the arrow is out and the wound cleaned.”

“Ah.” He cut away my clothes and probed the wound in a way that made me almost stop breathing as I struggled not to cry out. “It’s hit the bone, but the bolt must have been at the end of its range. Nothing I haven’t dealt with on the battlefield.”

He fixed a hand around the shaft and pulled it out. The pain made me go blind and deaf for the longest time, oblivious to everything except the pulse of my heart, or the earth, or a drum: I was not sure what I felt. Nor did the pain ease as my body was washed and handled, wet clothes stripped from me, and a stinging poultice laid atop the red-hot center of the wound.

After an agony of time I sought with my mind along the length of my body and found my right foot. Focusing on the foot, which did not hurt, I opened my eyes. The roof of the tent billowed with odd patterns of light that made my eyes water. I was naked, a blanket tucked modestly around my body and folded under my armpits. My right shoulder had been bandaged. When I shifted, a wave of pain spilled outward from the shoulder, and I whimpered.

“Here you are,” said the gaunt woman, still seated beside me.

Two girls stood behind her with huge dark eyes a-goggle. Their striking resemblance to Vai snapped me into full wakefulness. One girl was a head shorter than her sister and as thin as a reed; she leaned on a crutch. The taller girl was robust.

The woman leaned forward. “Drink this. It will ease the pain.”

Again Lord Marius appeared, a god out of a Greek tale, ready to smite. He snatched away the cup before it could touch my lips. “I want an answer to my question.”

She nodded calmly. “Of course, my lord. But it is hard for the young woman to speak with dry lips.”

I could speak!

“The Legate Amadou Barry is responsible for his own death.” My voice emerged as more of a hoarse croak. “It was his choice to follow us into a dangerous place. He thought he had the right to possess Bee simply because he wanted her. Yet he didn’t respect her enough to trust her when she tried to save him. He was swept out of the spirit world by the tide of a dragon’s dream. I don’t know what happened to him after that.”

“My lord, if you will allow her to take willowbark tea to ease the pain, she will come to her senses.”

“She is not delirious.” White-lipped, Lord Marius glared at me. “The punishment for murdering a Roman legate is death. The punishment for murdering my beloved brother is that I will hound you until you show me his grave and then I will water it with your blood.”

From outside I heard men shouting angrily. Lord Marius turned to look at the tent’s entrance, where two soldiers in the colors of the Tarrant militia stood guard.

“No! They’re saying one of them was shot! I will see my sisters!” The voice was Vai’s.

A second male voice replied in the loud and mocking tone of a highborn man who means to be heard by as many people as possible. “Your sisters, or your daughters? I know how your kind are. Everyone sleeps in the same bed.”

“I’ll kill you,” said Vai in a raw, ugly tone I had heard only in his nightmares. The smack of a fist hitting flesh was followed by the thud of a body hitting dirt.

The other man shrieked, “Get the stinking goat off me!”

A commanding voice I recognized as the mansa’s spoke. “Enough! Tie his arms back if he can’t control his fists.” The grunts and curses of a scuffle faded to silence.

Vai burst into the tent. His arms were trussed up behind his back with rope bound around a stout stick that could be twisted to control him. The brawny soldier who had hold of the stick brought him up short as he saw the girls.

“Bintou! Wasa!”

The bigger girl bolted to him and pressed her face against his shoulder. He kissed her hair, then looked with a frown toward the other girl who, with her too-short crutch, hadn’t tried to move. His glance skipped from the invalid girl to the woman. His lips parted. A jolt of stunned shock rolled through his body. But he recovered quickly. In a cunning move worthy of a sly Barahal, he slammed back into the soldier, jostling the stick. With a wrench, he freed himself and staggered forward to drop to his knees before the woman.

“Mother.” He rested his forehead on her knees. “Forgive me for bringing this trouble on you and the girls.”

“Son.” She laid a hand on his head in a blessing. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but her tone was implacable, even a little aloof. “You will be strong, as I taught you. I am told this woman is your wife and thus my daughter.”

His head and shoulders came up as if yanked. With an intake of breath, he stared into her face to read the truth of the words. Then he turned and saw me.

“Catherine!” He leaped to his feet. “What can you have been thinking? You weren’t to follow me… did they capture…?” I recognized the moment he saw the bandage because of how his entire body shuddered. He was not speechless. He spoke through his magic. A grinding roar of noise rumbled far above as masses of air crashed and cooled. A waterfall of illusions spilled around us like deformed creatures writhing as they were twisted inside out.

“Andevai, this is not the behavior I expect from you.” His mother did not raise her voice, yet her tone cut right through the fury of his emotions.

He fought down from the storm, but it was a hard descent. He was so passionate about things. My shoulder hurt horribly, but I had my wits tucked about me like the blankets. He needed a task to take the edge off the surge of frustrated feelings of impotence and wounded pride.

My voice scraped out a whisper. “I thought you would need someone to help take care of the girls. They looked so frightened. But honestly, Vai, I wish you would get Lord Marius to stop threatening me. Bee and I truly did try to save Amadou Barry in the spirit world, but he wouldn’t listen to us. She wept buckets of tears when he was swept away in the tide. Now Lord Marius says he means to kill me to get satisfaction. But it was the legate’s foolish choice and not any scheme of ours. And he won’t let me drink my willowbark tea.”

Illusions vanished. Even with his arms tied behind him, Andevai could draw himself up with the arrogance of an exceedingly powerful cold mage who does not expect to be crossed.

“Lord Marius, my wife is not to be bullied or threatened. The legate should never have believed he could walk into the bush as if it were a country garden. Even those who have studied its secrets and passed down this lore know how dangerous it is to walk there. He was a fool twice over. Once to rush after them. Twice to not heed them.”

“Were you there, Magister, to see how it all transpired?” Lord Marius asked. “How can I even believe such a wild tale?”

“I have told you the truth. Give me the tea so I can give my wife relief from the pain of her injury.”

As angry as Lord Marius was, he also had a sense of the absurd. “How will you manage that, I wonder, with your hands bound behind you?”

Vai’s mother rose. That she scarcely had the strength to stand was evident by the tension in her frail frame, but to look at the stately lift of her head and the pressure of her gaze, one might never guess she was anything but a woman of power.

“I will take the cup, my lord, and minister to the young woman, as was my intention.” She held out her hand.

Something in that voice struck him. His forehead wrinkled as he obediently handed over the cup. “Are you mage House born, Maestra? For you have something of the manner about you, although I can’t quite figure your accent.”

“I am a peddler’s daughter, my lord. Not even a garden or hut to our name. We were the least among people you could ever meet. Lift her head. Gently, if you will, my lord.”

To my astonishment Lord Marius tucked a strong hand under my neck and carefully raised me. Obviously he had practice assisting wounded people to drink. The cup she set to my dry lips did not interest him. He examined her. “Ah. Then some Houseborn man took a fancy to you, did he? I know that happens.”

She did not look at him, not from shame, I thought, but because she considered the tea more important than the answer. “No, my lord. I am no man’s jade. I was the third and last wife of a village man who was born into clientage to Four Moons House. Lest you wonder, he was the only man who ever touched me. The boy is his, and mine. You may lower her head now, my lord.”

“Proud Jupiter,” muttered Lord Marius, setting me back. He looked Vai up and down. They had given Vai dry clothes, now scuffed from whatever fights he had been in, but for all that he wore someone else’s clothes and a smear of mud on his cheek, he still looked magnificent. “I had no idea the magister was not born to the House.”

She handed the cup to the tall girl, and then sank onto the chair. I could hear the hoarse crackle of her labored breathing. Yet when she found breath to speak, her words were firm. “He is not of their making. So powerful he is that they must bind him lest they lose him.”

“Mama,” muttered Vai.

“I did not raise you to be ashamed, Andevai. Now go, you and the lord both. You can return at a more proper time, and when you have wiped the mud off your face, for I am sure I did not teach you to appear so slovenly in public.”

Lord Marius whistled under his breath, but his amusement was a blade, flashing and then sheathed. “I will return to hear a full accounting.”

Vai stepped forward to kiss me, but before his lips met mine his mother’s voice cracked over us.

“Son! Are these the manners I taught you? To insult your wife by touching her in public before the eyes of others?”

He jerked away from me. The girl with the crutch clapped her free hand over her mouth to hide a smile. She had a rascal glint in her eye, that one. I had seen its like before.

“Go on, Son.”

He kissed the girls and left obediently. All the men fled, leaving the four of us and a pair of womanservants. His mother coughed with a dry wheeze. At length she could speak again, if barely in a whisper. Her proud aspect did not waver. Had she worn cloth of gold and sat on a throne, I would have called her a queen.

To the tall girl she said, “Bintou, fetch some of that broth we were brought this morning.”

To the short girl she said, “Sit down, Wasa. You will need your strength later.”

To me she said, “Bad enough you use his name, but I suppose your ways may be different.”

“What am I supposed to call him if not by his name?”

“A woman does not call her husband by his name. After her first child is born, she may address him by the eldest child’s name, as I did my husband, as ‘Andevai’s father.’ Despite your ignorance in such matters, I can see you have an idea how to handle him. I must warn you that his father and grandmother spoiled him.”

“Did they?” I ventured.

Her frown was daunting! “It is so easy for good-looking boys to be ruined by praise. It has taken all my effort to make sure he has learned proper manners. You must resist any inclination to let him have his way in things beyond what a man has a right to ask for, cooking and children.”

This hard speech did not upset me. Indeed, I found it enlightening. I stirred, wishing I dared sit up. “Maestra, I beg you, please lie down, for you are looking exhausted. Bintou, please bring your mother some of that hot broth, for I hope it will soothe her lungs.”

The grim line of her lips softened. The ghost of a younger, healthier woman danced briefly in her face, then vanished, but it was the way she carried herself that caught the eye. All this time I had been thinking that Vai’s pride came from his close study of the mansa.

Bintou brought her mother broth, then settled her on a cot. Meanwhile Wasa took my hand in the familiar manner of a little sister, tracing my fingers with her own. As her mother’s harsh breathing gentled to sleep, the girl spoke.

“Was he really going to kiss you right in front of Maa?”

I met her gaze gravely. “I think he was.”

She leaned closer with a smirk on that seemingly innocent little face. Her fingers crept up my arm. “He likes you.”

I grabbed her ear with my uninjured hand. “He does like me. What do you really want?”

“The locket.”

“You can’t have it. My father gave it to me.”

“I never met my papa. He died while my mama was big with us.”

“I’m sorry about that. I lost my father when I was six. I might let you look at it later if you’re very good.” I released her ear. “Where is my cane? And the basket?”

“No one can touch the cane. It bites. Also, there is a skull in that basket. I looked, even though Bintou told me not to. Then it talked to me.” She eyed me. “Do you believe me?”

“It would depend on what the skull said to you. Then I would know for sure.”

“She spoke like a foreign person. She was hard to understand. I think she asked me to tell her who I was and why I was staring at her so rudely.”

Hard to say if Wasa had a gift or was just exceedingly quick-witted. “If you are very well behaved, I will introduce you to her.”

She glanced at her sleeping mother. “I am always well behaved. Or at least, I am when Maa is awake.”

I smiled as she sat back to allow Bintou to bring a cup of broth. I sat up with a bolster propped behind me and handled the cup with my uninjured arm. Afterward, with my right side held motionless along a rolled-up blanket, I was able to doze.

Later I heard the girls whispering in the village dialect, and their mother scolding them.

“They will despise us no matter what we do. But we will give no cause for scorn by speaking like uneducated people. Recite to me from the primer.”

Pronounced with careful enunciation in the sweet, high voices of the girls, the simple, rhyming phrases spun me down into sleep.

Candle flame is candle bright.

Can you quench the candlelight?

At dawn the entire camp was taken down. My skirt and petticoat were dirty but wearable. The lovely cuirassier’s jacket was a loss. An ill-fitting and homespun wool tunic replaced it, although I had Bintou salvage the jacket in case I could repair it.

We traveled in the bed of a wagon. The jostling caused me so much pain that it was all I could do not to sob the entire weary day and the next and the next. I became feverish as the wound throbbed. Not a word of complaint passed the lips of Vai’s mother, although her cough got worse, shaking her entire frame, and sometimes she went gray as she struggled to suck in a breath of air. At night Bintou dosed her with a syrup that drugged her into a stuporous slumber.

Days passed. We slept in the hospital tent, in servants’ quarters, in stables, always under guard. Of Vai I saw no sign, but the locket’s warmth told me he lived. With what tendrils of thought still remained to me, I imagined we were returning to Four Moons House. Instead we came to rest at last in a locked room with a hypocaust floor. Wood-barred windows overlooked a walled courtyard past which I heard the sounds of city life. The room had four rope beds and a table and bench. Wasa set the cacica’s skull on the table, as she had started doing at every stop on the way, careful to ornament her with a flower or bit of greenery.

Once the incessant jostling had ceased, I slowly recovered. A dignified older woman in a head wrap and burgundy boubou applied poultices to my shoulder and prescribed a diet of broth, beets, and barley. After some days I was strong enough to ask where we were.

“In the city of Lutetia.”

“Lutetia!” Twenty years ago, in this very city, General Camjiata had overseen a committee of legal scholars and bureaucrats who had written up his famous law code. My father had written extensively on the meetings in his journal. “Why are we here?”

“No more can I say, Maestra, except that you bide in Two Gourds House by the courtesy of the mansa of Four Moons House.” The healer spoke slowly so we could understand her. “The woman’s lungs are stubbornly inflamed. The syrup of poppy has weakened her badly. The girls tell me she has taken it for four years. No person ought to drink the syrup for so long. I am surprised she has survived this long. As the gods will, so will it be.”

I did not like to hear talk of dying. “Might we wean her off the syrup?”

“It would be difficult with her so weak.”

“But we can try!” The cacica would not give up so easily! With her training as a healer, she might know how to help. “Might we get a mirror so we can tidy our faces?”

“I have been told I may never bring a mirror into the room.”

I refused to give up. Obviously Vai’s mother needed a degree of nursing the mage House had never been willing to provide and that her daughters were too young and inexperienced to manage. First I begged for richer food and more of it. I asked for pen and paper so I could record dosages of the syrup. I held a pot of water steeped with the needles of Scots pine so she could inhale its steam. We rubbed oil of mint into her chest. Day by day, one drop at a time, I cut down on the amount of syrup she ingested.

She was not an affectionate or genial woman, nor was she easy to talk to, so I talked. She could never hear enough about what Kayleigh had done and said in Expedition, and what manner of fine, honest, loyal, and hardworking man Kayleigh’s husband Kofi was and what sort of people his household had in it. I would have sewed, but our captors refused me needles and pins. They had no idea that my cane was a sword at night.

I acquired a schoolbook primer and slate tablets for the girls. When I noticed how avidly their mother watched them recite, I informed her that the girls would become better readers if she would allow them to teach her the letters, for I was sure she would never ask for her own sake.

She was very proud. I liked her for it.

As it grew warm, we took her outside to sit in the sun.

“How did you come to marry Andevai’s father?” I asked her one day in the courtyard as I bounced a rubber ball from knee to knee. I had coaxed the attendants with stories of Expedition until they had managed to find me a suitable ball. With but a single flower trough of withered stalks for decoration, the walled and paved courtyard offered just enough space to play.

Vai’s mother was strong enough now to weave stems of grass, and could plait anything into marvelously decorative baskets. “My father sired ten daughters. My mother was dead with the last. A peddler’s daughter may not hope for much. My eldest sister married our cousin. That was accounted good luck. The others had no such offer. My father was a good man but he had not the means to feed us all…” Her eyelids dropped, shuttering a memory. “I would not become what they were forced to. I was not wax for candles to be dipped in.”

Seated on a stone bench bent over the schoolbook, Bintou and Wasa looked up with wide eyes. I caught the ball and held it against my hip.

“Then you came to Haranwy,” I prompted.

“Not then. We came to the Midsummer market outside the city of Cantiacorum. Andevai’s father had come there on behalf of his village, with cattle to sell. Men who walk in the world will take their fancy where they can. I was then about the age Kayleigh was when she left for Expedition. Men do fancy the young ones they guess are untouched. More than one man offered money to my father, but I refused. Then Andevai’s father came and made the same offer. He was a rich man to our eyes. By this time my younger sisters were crying from hunger. My father beat me when I refused again. The man said, ‘I can feed a third wife if she will cook for me and give me strong children.’ ”

“So you agreed?”

“I never thought I would find such fortune. He gave my father a cow as my bride price. I saved my sisters with that cow.”

I managed to keep my eyes from popping open. For the daughter of a man forced to sell his own daughters rather than starve, this was astoundingly good fortune indeed. “Your son says you once told him that his father was the handsomest man you ever saw.”

There crept a reminiscent smile to lighten her expression, but her tone remained cool. “My husband was a good man. He treated me well. I was a good wife to him. I did not listen to what people in the village spoke about me. Their spite could not bow my shoulders.”

I thought of how Andevai’s brother Duvai had told me his own mother, the second wife, had left Haranwy and returned to her own village after the arrival of Vai’s mother. I dared not venture into such turbulent waters. However, there was a thing I was curious about.

“Maa, you love to hear me speak of Kayleigh, but you do not like it when I speak of your son. May I ask why that is?”

She lifted her chin in a proud gesture so like Vai that I knew he had picked it up from her. “He can no longer be part of my thoughts. His life is lifted beyond ours now.”

I knelt on the gravel, looking up into brown eyes. “Maa, he will not leave you behind.”

“He must. So I have told him.”

I pressed a hand to hers. “He cannot. Don’t demand that he turn his back on you and the girls and the village. The mage House almost ruined him.”

“He will stand high in the world!”

“Don’t destroy the good man that he struggles to be. Don’t dishonor that man by asking him to become the mage the mansa wants him to be and that you think is best for him. Let him fight in the way he must.”

Her fingers crushed the basket she was weaving. I had not known she had such strength in those frail hands. “I am weary. I must lie down.”

Bintou and I helped her in, and I washed her face and sang a lullaby until she went to sleep.

In the first days of our captivity, several attendants had remained in the room at all times, but as the weeks passed they had grown complacent. Seeing no one around I steered Bintou to the garden wall. She made a basket with her hands and hoisted me up. My shoulder still twinged, and my illness had weakened me, but I got my stomach atop the wall they thought was high enough to pen me in. Of course it was not high enough.

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.”