My cheeks felt the sting of the flames that had not quite touched me in the workshop.
It was so hard to speak that my voice came out as a husky whisper. “Growing up in the Hassi Barahal household, I was taught to keep silence. About anything and everything, really. It’s the only thing I remember my mother telling me.”
He uncrossed his arms and shifted back to gaze at me, waiting. Cautious. Reserved. But he had not closed me off yet, for I would know it when he did.
“‘Tell no one, not ever.’ The words I grew up by.”
The widening of his eyes was so brief I would have missed it if I was not staring at him as if his expression held every truth that mattered.
My voice gained strength with surety. “You’re right, Vai. I didn’t trust you, not the way I should have. So I said nothing except what I thought I had to, to pay my way and tell my story. But I should have told you. And I’m sorry for it. I’m especially sorry for it if it made you think I don’t respect you. Because it was wrong.”
The sounds of conversation and laughter drifted from the patio. Night eased the heat just a little, and the breeze lifted the intoxicating scent of night-blooming jasmine.
“That’s the first time I’ve understood why you say things the way you say them,” he said in so low a voice it might have been the wind muttering over the roofs. He looked toward the clipped hedge of bellyache bush as might a man surprised to see secrets woven into the branches. “Being cruel while being clever was how I learned to endure Four Moons House. Before I could crush them all, that is. But it was wrong to do it to you tonight. I just…” He shook his head impatiently, still not looking at me. “The truth is, I suppose I wanted to know I could hurt you as badly as I felt hurt. And yet I’m the one who thought for one awful day that I had to kill you. I’m sorry, Catherine.”
My tongue was lead, but I got it to work. “Thank you for saying it. As for the mansa commanding you to kill me, when I said before I forgave you for that, I meant it.”
We sat in awkward silence.
I had to ask. “Vai, what would happen to you if our marriage dissolved? Would the mansa know? Or could you keep it a secret?”
“The mansa would know because the djeli who chained our marriage would know, and would send him word.”
“What would the mansa do? Would he be very angry?”
“Angry?” He glanced at me and quickly away. “No. More likely he’d be relieved. Before I was sent to marry you, he’d had at least ten advantageous offers to marry me. They might look down on me, but no one can ignore what I am. So I’m accounted a valuable catch for mage House women both inside and outside Four Moons House.”
“Is such an advantageous marriage…what you would want?”
That other face, the face of the arrogant magister, settled on his features: proud, aloof, and cold. But his voice remained absolutely level. “The mansa won’t consult me. He’ll seal whatever alliance he wishes in my name and then inform me afterward to whom I am now married. You should know that, Catherine.”
“Oh.” I did not know what else to say, and maybe neither did he.
He rose. “I was taught never to insult a woman by refusing to eat the meal she had cooked. We should join them at the table.”
I folded the letter and handed it to him. He tossed it carelessly on the bench, as if he cared not if a rainstorm pounded it into so much pulp. We walked to the dining patio where the others were already digging into bowls whose contents smelled so delectable my mouth watered. Never let it be said I could not eat. The professora had left a place for me beside Gaius Sanogo and one for Vai opposite, between the two trolls. They were brother and sister, Chartji’s aunt and uncle by some arcane measure of kinship I did not understand. Mostly they remembered to speak human language but then they would forget and ascend into flights of trollish that were intriguing to listen to but quite meaningless, lacking words as I knew them. When they remembered to speak human words, they and the professora debated the properties of heat, whether heat was dynamical or undulating, and Bee asked them questions. I ascertained that the caloric theory of heat had been discredited. Vai picked at his food, scarcely touched his wine, and replied with scrupulous courtesy when spoken to.
I, on the other hand, launched into a jocular evisceration of the prospects of the Anolis in the upcoming cup that got the warden laughing even as he vociferously defended his team.
Bee said, “I’d be curious to know where you learned all this about batey, Cat.”
Vai glanced at me as if to warn me that to speak of waiting tables might condemn Aunty Djeneba. After all, Sanogo had told me the wardens had never known where I was.