Cold Steel

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.”

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.