He relaxed, stretching out his feet to tangle with mine. “My grandmother warned me it is rash and reckless for a man and woman to join their affections in marriage just for the sake of physical attraction. Marriage is meant to be arranged by the elders so no trouble comes of it. Falling in love with my good looks would have been a terrible mistake. If an understandable one.”
“I certainly had no chance to fall in love with your humble demeanor. Since I doubt you have one.”
He glanced at me through half-lidded eyes in the coy way he had when he had drawn out just the sort of teasing joke he loved me to make. Rory stuck his head in, gave me a kiss, embraced Vai in a brotherly farewell, and bounded away into the house far too eagerly.
“I was surprised when Rory decided to stay behind,” I remarked.
“You see, I did forget it!” cried Bee as she clambered in, plopped down next to me, and set a basket on my lap. “Sweet yam pastries, crescent rolls, rice and peas that Kayleigh made for Kofi, and a jar of Serena’s yam pudding. Rory has made me a bet that he will seduce her before we return.”
“Good fortune with that,” Vai said. “Serena is not interested in dalliance.”
“How would you know?” I demanded.
He flashed a smile, silently laughing at me. “She’s angling for a prestigious marriage with a very promising magister from Five Mirrors House. There are two powerful candidates to be heir, and the mansa there wants to move one out of the way so there is no trouble.”
Bee batted her eyelashes as her most dangerously honeyed smile lit her face. “If that is the case, don’t you worry about bringing such a powerful magister into Four Moons House?”
He looked at her blankly. “No. Why would I?”
Kofi stuck his head in. “I shall ride up front to see the countryside. Fair wild, I call this!”
“I want to hold on in back with the eru,” I said.
“No!” Bee and Vai spoke at the same time, as Kofi shut the door.
“You are so recently recovered, dearest,” said Bee. “It really is outside of enough that you are making such a long journey so soon.”
“It was your idea!”
“It was your idea!” retorted Bee primly. “I only agreed because it is time I got to have an adventure!”
“Because giving radical speeches and slamming down rude hecklers as soldiers march to arrest you is not an adventure? Wrestling an overloaded rowboat for hundreds of miles down the Rhenus River with only a lazy cat for company is not an adventure? Sleeping with the most famously handsome radical in Europa—”
“What?” said Vai. “Bee and Brennan Du… what?”
“—is not an adventure? Not to mention the part where you marry a prince of the Taino, or are asked to run for a seat on the first elected council in Europa.”
Bee sighed happily, paging through her sketchbook with the dreamy blush of an addled schoolgirl. “Yes! Who knows what will happen next?”
The latch’s sliver eyes and wire mouth glittered as its sour little voice woke. “I won’t know. No one tells me anything.”
In the sudden hush that throttled the ones I loved best in all the world, the coachman snapped his whip and cried, “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!” The eru leaped onto the back of the coach, and we rolled out onto the street, wheels rumbling on stone.
Bee put her nose down by the latch, which matched her glare for glare.
In a low voice Vai said, “I thought you were just making that up to entertain us, like you do.”
“What do I ever make up, I should like to ask? Andevai! You do believe I punched a shark, don’t you?”
“Yes, love, I believe you punched a shark just like I believe you drank coffee with the Master of the Wild Hunt on the streets of Havery on Hallows’ Night.”
Bee sat up. Her eye turned on me as her expression bloomed into the full flower of indignant suspicion. “But she did punch a shark. James Drake was on the beach and saw it happen. He told the general and me all about it.”
They looked at each other, sharing an unspoken thought, and then they looked at me.
In the depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt, and when it wakes, all tremble in fear. In the depths of the black abyss there drifts in a watery stupor the leviathan whose lashing tail can smash ships into splinters and drive the sundered hulks under the waves. In the depths of the smoke lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All Dragons. If she stirs, waking, the world changes. So we are told.
But none of that seemed at all frightening compared with the prospect of Bee and Andevai united in exasperation and anger, against me.