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I understood nothing: not this place, not my companions, not my life.

I hate tears.Advertisement

Tears had not brought back my parents, not the tears I had wept when I was six nor the ones shed occasionally as I grew up an orphan reading my father’s journals and so desperately missing him and what he could have given me had he only been there in person, he and my voiceless mother, the Amazon warrior who no one ever spoke of.

Tears flowed unbidden now. I pressed a fist into my belly just below the curve of my ribs to stop myself from sobbing out loud. The djeli put her fiddle to her chin and tuned the strings. Was she indifferent to my crying or simply polite enough to give me what privacy she could by pretending not to notice me?

“Catherine? Are you weeping?” He strode out from under the tree.

The sable cat leaped up on the rock beside me and sat on sleek haunches as it yawned widely. This display of fearsome teeth and muscular bulk brought Andevai up short. He muttered a crisp, ferocious curse.

Gracious Melqart! The man had bothered to change his clothes out of the practical but rustic country garb he had previously been wearing and back into the fashionable clothing worn by men born to wealth and style. Wrinkles marred the perfection of dash jacket and sleek trousers, and his boots were wiped clean but still smudged. Seeing him revert to the form in which I had first beheld him dried my tears better than any sympathetic words could have. How on earth had he managed to change clothes with that injured arm? The man was clearly insanely devoted to looking fashionable.

The cat leaned against me. Much the same size and height as me, it possessed the warmth of a living soul. Its presence gave me comfort, not least because I knew perfectly well, as did Andevai, that it could rip him open. I scratched the back of its neck, and it rumbled a purr.

“That beast is wild, not domesticated,” he said in a choked voice. “It could turn on you at any moment, however much it seems sympathetic to your situation just now.”

“It rather reminds me of you, then,” I retorted without wiping my tear-streaked face. “It was kind of you to forebear to murder me just now, when I was unprepared to defend myself. I appreciate it. But I can’t know when you will change your mind. When you will hear the mansa’s command echoing in your thoughts. When you will think of your village, for which I am sure I do not blame you for wanting to spare them whatever punishment you can. I would do so myself, had I kinfolk who care for me as yours clearly do for you.”

“You are mocking me.”

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“Am I? Why do you think so?” The tears were drying. I withdrew my hand from the big cat’s nape. “Or is it only that you expect mockery, having become accustomed to it in Four Moons House, where, I am given to understand, they despise you for being the son of slaves and yet envy you for the rare and unexpected potency you carry in your person. I think that when small-minded people envy and despise, then they will mock, thinking it their only weapon. I am not, I hope, a small-minded person. I will not mock you. I’ll tell you straight to your face that I don’t trust you and can’t trust you, and that despite my concern for the generous and upright people in the village who decided it was better to aid me and keep their faces clean before the ancestors than to betray me and truckle favor with the mansa, I intend to stay alive. I intend you shall never have”—wasn’t it better never to use her name, especially in the spirit world?—“the other one. After the winter solstice passes, the other one makes her majority and can no longer be coerced into marriage. Perhaps then I might be allowed to live, since there will be no particular reason to benefit from my death. Do you think that is remotely possible?”

His gaze seemed likely to freeze me where I sat, only he had no mage power here. He had only a sword that, in the spirit world, seemed just an ordinary sword. But I also had a sword, and I had a friendly pride of saber-toothed cats to guard me. Also, I had wounded his right shoulder.

“I think it not likely,” he said as slowly as if each word were being scraped from him by gnawing teeth, “that you can escape the mansa’s anger once he has set it on you.”

By rising, I silenced him. “I’ll do what I must to survive. Can you possibly expect me to do otherwise?”

He crossed to the third stone bench and awkwardly drew on his greatcoat. “The mansa will spread his net wide in looking for you. He will call in favors owed him by the local princes and dukes. His net will be difficult to evade.”

“I am used to evading those who seek me.”

A man with such cursed remarkable eyes ought not to be allowed to stare so provocatively at women. He seemed about to speak, then did not. pqdm.com