“Catherine,” Andevai said, grasping my left elbow with his right hand.
I wished I had my sword as he guided me toward closed double doors reinforced with strips of sullen iron. My father had written: The strength of the most powerful cold mages can be measured by the magister’s ability to extinguish fires and shatter iron.
A servant opened the right side door. Andevai stepped back to allow the elderly djeli to go in first. Then I had to walk beside him. My throat was choked with tears. My pulse was a hammer of sound in my ears, like runaway horses.
The mansa was standing at a table beneath a rank of windows, surveying papers strewn across some kind of architectural drawing unrolled and fixed at its edges to lie flat. He could be no one else. He was tall and heavily built. He looked neither old nor young. His face was black and his eyes blacker, although his hair, close-cut, was a coarse, tightly curled red. Maybe he resembled the warden of the gate. Maybe they were cousins, or maybe they weren’t related at all but simply both descendants of blacksmiths and sorcerers, their ancestors the mixed children of the Afric south and the Celtic north who had made common cause long ago. They had countered the power of chieftains and princes but had not become lords themselves, at least not in name. For after all, the only son of a prince may rule after his father whether he is a good prince or an incompetent one, but if the only son of a magister is not a mage, then nothing can raise him to that position.
The mansa looked at Andevai, and the mansa looked at me, and I stopped dead because my heart could not beat and my feet could not move. Maybe they spoke formal greetings, the three of them between themselves. I could not be sure because I was empty.
Then the mansa spoke directly to me. His voice was a voice, nothing special and nothing strange in it, except that it commanded me.
“Are you the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter?”
“I am the eldest,” I whispered, eyes cast down, remembering Aunt’s words.
“You are the eldest Adurnam Hassi Barahal daughter?” he repeated.
“I am the eldest.”
“You are the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter?”
“I’m the eldest.”
“If I may, Mansa,” said the djeli. “What she says is no lie, but I am troubled. If you will allow me, may I ask?”
The mansa nodded.
“Repeat these words as I speak them,” said the djeli in his resonant voice. “ ‘I am the eldest daughter born into the Adurnam Hassi Barahal house.’ ”
“I am the eldest—” daughter. I meant to speak the word, but no sound came out of my mouth. “I am the eldest—” Hassi Barahal. Still no voice emerged. “But I am older than Bee is,” I said hoarsely.
“There was another one?” asked the djeli. “Another daughter of the Hassi Barahal family, in the house, when you were taken?”
My face burned hot and my hands burned cold. Lips sealed, my father had said. Tell no one, my mother had said. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.
“There was another girl of the right age in the house?” demanded the mansa.
Andevai blinked, and blinked again. “Yes, Mansa.”
“You asked three times?”
Stammering, Andevai forced out words. “Th-three times. They said to me exactly what she said to you. She is the eldest. So I married her, by the binding marriage, sealed by a bard, just as you commanded me to do, Mansa.”
“And did you first ask, specifically, is this one the right girl or is that one the right girl? The girl we wrote the contract for?”
After a silence, he said in a chastened voice, “No, Mansa. I did not ask specifically about the other girl.”
In the depths of the earth, wreathed in fire, lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All Dragons. Dreaming, she stirs, and the earth shakes, and volcanoes spit ash and fire, and the world changes.
In the depths of the ocean, deep in the black abyss, there drifts in a watery stupor the Taninim, called also leviathan. Yet they may be roused, and if they are so, then the lashing of their tails smashes ships into splinters and drives their sundered hulks under the waves while the shores are swept clean in a tidal fury.
In the depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt, and when it is woken, all tremble in fear.
So we are told.
But when a magister powerful enough to rule as the head of a mage House is struck rigid with fury and he is standing not ten paces from you, then you will wish you had to face one of the others instead.
The house was built of stone, and yet it shuddered. Glass in the paned windows cracked. The iron bands on the door groaned, as though shrinking in fear. Beneath the floor, ceramic shattered.