Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

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.”