“Are you finished?” I demanded when there came a pause, rather embarrassed at my rudeness but really beginning to shake now. I could use fear if I turned it to anger. “Begging your pardon, maestra.” I drew my sword, and the cats rose as if in answer, yawning to display their ferocious teeth, although they stayed by the well. “I thought you were dead.”
He swung around to look at the cats, then back to face me. His own sword remained sheathed. “A more correct statement would be that you wished I was dead.”
“I wished no such thing. I am sure I hold no animosity toward you at all except for the small detail that you tried to kill me. Indeed, for all I know, you did kill me, and I am wandering here as in Sheol, with saber-toothed cats stalking my trail and you plaguing me. I suppose you intend to attack me again, perhaps by the light of this lovely—” I broke off.
The fire was burning without stint.
His presence was having no effect on the fire.
“I want my horse back,” he said wearily, paying no attention to this marvel.
“Why are you not extinguishing the fire?” I demanded.
“Because,” said the djeli, “while magisters draw their power through the spirit world, they have no power in it.”
The look he shot at her should have been a spear of killing ice, but the fire burned regardless and nothing happened to her for violating such precious secrets.
Fiery Shemesh! He wielded no cold magic here!
I snorted, and his gaze flashed to me as his lips curved into the supercilious frown I was becoming familiar with. But I also noticed how stiffly he held his right shoulder; dried blood marred the sliced edges of his coat.
“You’re strong and fast, but your technique is sloppy,” I said as I sheathed my sword with a flourish meant to challenge him. I was beginning to see that the angrier he got, the more he climbed the pinnacle of arrogance, but without cold magic to throw around, and unless he decided to physically attack me with his sword arm injured and within the aura of firelight under the gaze of the djeli, he could do nothing but listen. And I had a lot to say, words I had swallowed for too many days. “My question, though, is why you did not use the weight and height of the horse to your advantage but instead dismounted to attack me. No Barahal would ever make such a mistake.”
“I wasn’t aware,” he said cuttingly, “that you were a Barahal.”
“A weak rejoinder! Not up to your usual standard. Next thing, you’ll accuse me of being in on the fraud.”
“You aren’t actress enough to have managed that. It was obvious you knew nothing of the scheme.”
I lost my rhythm at this unexpected parry. No cutting retort sprang to my lips.
“Anyway,” he added, speech clipped as if the words were difficult to get out, “I thought if I was required to kill you, as I had been commanded to do, that I ought to show enough respect to you to do so face-to-face.”
“How decent of you, truly! What courtesy you’ve shown me! First, you drag me from my home against my will, refuse to let me eat perfectly decent food, are rude to perfectly respectable innkeepers, and then when you’re told to kill me because of a mistake you made and through nothing I have ever done, you try to kill me.”
“I didn’t try very hard!”
“You tried hard enough! You drew blood!” I touched my fingers to the cut on my chin.
He flinched, then drew himself taut. “You should be dead,” he agreed coldly, his color very high and his posture very rigid.
“But I’m not!” I cried. “No thanks to you!”
He shook his head. “If the Barahals had given me the other girl, then none of this would have happened, would it? She would be married according to the contract, and treated well and living better than you could possibly have been in that run-down and ill-furnished house, while you would remain safe and unmolested in the bosom of your so-called family. It seems to me they’re at least as much at fault for handing you over while knowing the mansa would discover the cheat and take out his anger on you. So why aren’t you railing at their part in this?”
Tears pricked at my eyes. “What makes you think I’m not?”
He had the decency to look startled. A foggy notion crept into my head that he might be ashamed, and that his shame might be fueling his anger. No, that way lay insanity. He was whipping himself because he had not yet fulfilled the mansa’s command. He might even conceivably be worried about his village, or his loyal sister, and I was bitterly reminded that he had brought an escort and a spare horse for Kayleigh, which was far more than Aunt and Uncle had arranged for me. They, who had thrown me to the wolves. I hated them all over again. Hated them. Loved them. Choked on despair and anger and sheer exhaustion.
