Cold Steel

The history of the world begins with a seed. The seed is the kernel of what you are, but it is also the promise of what you can become.

On the fourth day a delegation arrived from Trecon, where the rest of the House refugees languished. The mansa’s nephew had arrived with the mage House troop from Lutetia. Because the mansa had not regained consciousness, his nephew wanted to immediately convene the House council of elders to vote on the matter of the heirship.

I returned to Vai’s mother’s room to find Vai sitting on the edge of the bed clad in trousers and nothing else. With a hand braced on the wall he stood, trembling across his entire body as he steadied himself to take a step, another step, and a third. It was obvious he was headed for the screen behind which we washed and dressed and kept the chamber pot. He had not yet seen me.

He said in a strikingly peevish tone, “I will manage the business myself, Mama.”

Twice I thought he would topple right over, but he got behind the screen without mishap.

I crossed to where his mother sat on a chair, knelt beside her, took her hand, and smiled up at her.

“He was never a patient invalid as a child,” she remarked. “Fortunately he did not get sick often.”

The girls were sitting at the table beside a window, perusing a book. Wasa elbowed her sister. “Kayleigh used to say no one whined like Vai when he was sick.”

“I heard that!” said Vai from behind the screen, not in a jocular tone.

Because I understood how much he hated feeling weak, I ventured behind the screen to find him sitting, head in hands, on the bench. A mirror and razor rested on the bench next to him. My footsteps brought his head up. His beard was unkempt, and his hair squashed on one side. His skin had an ashy sallowness and his eyes a gray weariness.

“I don’t need help!” he snapped. “I can shave myself!”

“Nor have I the least desire to help you,” I retorted. “I merely came to inform you that the mansa’s nephew has arrived and is making an entirely predictable grab for the heir’s seat.”

“That would be a disaster for Four Moons House! Not to mention Haranwy and the other villages. It’s not his right anyway, to make such a demand when the mansa has already spoken.” He tried to stand but could not keep his feet under him. I had to catch him and ease him back down, for which he repaid me with a string of rude phrases directed not at me personally but at the uncaring world at large, which had not had the courtesy to allow him to heal faster.

“Stop it! Just pee and go back to sleep. Nothing will happen until you have recovered enough to face the elders.”

He ran a hand along his beard, and I was sure he was thinking that he could not face the elders looking so scruffy. “What of the mansa? What news of him today?”

I shook my head. “No change. Magister Serena is recovering well, although she grieves over losing the pregnancy. You didn’t tell me she’s a diviner.”

“You didn’t ask.”

I left him to it and went back to his mother. “I believe you are better suited than I to handle him when he is afflicted with this distemper.”

She regarded me with an equanimity matched only by Vai’s muttered cursing behind the screen. “Even as a child he had the habit of believing every sunny day would last forever to please him, and that clouds came as a personal affront.”

“Catherine. Love.”

That he used the endearment in his mother’s hearing worried me. I went back to find him stretched out on the bench, an arm flung across his face. He had mottled bruising on his ribs from either the battle or his captivity, his wrists were reddened and scarred with rope burns, and he was thin from the privation of the last days. Benevolent Tanit! The man needed to eat!

“Lord of All,” he murmured with disgust, “to think of how easily I was captured! I could not even break out of my captivity, nor prevent them from using me as a catch-fire for the entire cursed journey. When it came to the point, I could not even save the mansa. Now his useless nephew cocks about like a rooster crowing for attention, while I cannot stand.”

Annoyance and pathos warred in my breast, and after a short struggle, annoyance punched pathos in the snout like the voracious shark it was.

“I will say this once, and not again. You were easily captured because you had collapsed in an exhausted faint after saving the lives of other mages and no doubt many other people on the day of the battle. As for being exploited as a catch-fire, that was an obvious decision on Drake’s part for otherwise he could not have held you as prisoner. The problem is not that you are weak but that you are so unusually strong that Drake saw you as the means to effect his revenge. I may not fully agree with how the Taino treat catch-fires, but from what I saw they do regard them with respect. Drake stole the knowledge from them but not their care for the law and their respect for the balance that is needed to wield power responsibly. He was a thief, and a greedy, resentful, envious, selfish thief at that. Maybe his family stole his inheritance, or maybe they threw him out because they saw what a monster he was. I don’t know. But in the end, Drake’s frightening power came from the strength he took from you.”