Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (52 page)

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.

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.”