“Aiei!” The djeli’s sigh penetrated the air like storm winds, making me shudder.

“But, Mansa,” said Andevai, “I don’t understand. A binding marriage… a chained contract…”

“Can you not see the solution even so?” demanded the mansa. “Is even this beyond you?”

“But, Mansa,” said my husband, “the only way out of such a contract is through the death of one of the parties involved.”

“Yes. Kill her.”

18

The words were simple, the silence that followed complex, ugly, smothering. It was so quiet I was sure I heard my husband blink.

“I beg your pardon, Mansa. I have not understood you.”

“You heard what I said.”

I pushed up gently to hands and knees, careful to make sure my head did not spin, but I was not at all dizzy. My heart was cold steel. I shifted to my feet and walked to the corner, a hand tracing the wall because I was part of the wall and nothing more than the wall, and after that I was window, nothing more, and then I was the door that did not open, curse it, but the next door did. I slipped through and closed it behind me and was out in the garden, all this really before I realized I had developed the thought, I. Have. To. Run. Now.

The garden was a rectangle, with its length extending to a wall beyond which rose evergreen trees. Several paths wound between tall yew hedges, perfect for skulking, so I ducked behind the screen of densely packed leaves and worked my way like a scuttling rat from hedge to hedge toward the far wall.

A bell rang, and I jerked as if a rope had caught me up short. But it was only a calling bell, because in response I heard the shouts and laughter of children racing down interior corridors of the wing that lay to my right. I reached the high wall that bounded the garden. It had no gate whatsoever and was far too high for me to climb over.

I had to go through the house.

I saw a sturdy double door set next to the corner where the wing to my right met the garden wall. Here I paused, panting, my hand on the latch.

“Catherine!” Andevai’s voice carried into my prison.

Kill her.

I had no sword, only my wits and determination. My hand tightened on the latch, and it clicked blessedly free. Mouthing a prayer to Tanit, I slipped into a gloomy corridor. Halfway down the long corridor, children pushed through an open door in a mob of chattering and giggling that subsided as they vanished into whatever rooms lay beyond. None had seen me in the shadows. At the opposite end, where light spilled through windows, doors stood ajar into the main building. I could not go back into the garden or ahead into the main house.

I followed where the children had led and found myself in a narrow corridor lined with heavy coats hanging from posts on one side and a series of doors on the other. From behind the closed doors I heard the noise of children—ranging from the boisterous, cheerful young to the gossipy intense olders—settling down to lessons. I had fled into the school wing.

A new bell rang with an alarming clangor. Men shouted in the distance with deep voices full of malevolent purpose. A breath of shiveringly cold air stirred, like an invisible icy hand searching behind the furniture and down unseen halls for what it had lost.

Kill her.

A matron’s voice called sharply, “In your seats! That’s the warning bell. In your seats! Silence!”

A foot scraped softly on the plank floor. Too late I shoved back behind a layer of hanging coats. A hand pulled aside a fur-lined sleeve and a small face peered at me.

“Who are you?” the child whispered with a puzzled frown. A boy with a brown face and close-cropped black hair, he was neither scared nor angry. He looked like he might be very sweet, as long as he liked you.

“I’m Cat,” I said with an attempt at a friendly smile, nothing too pathetic or false, I hoped.

“To hide,” he added, “you have to move four coats down and stand where the thread is. That’s the concealing spot they made.”

“That who made?”

“It’s a holding illusion,” he said with a bright grin. “The matrons say they’re too young to weave magic, but they’re not, and they promised to teach me if I keep their secret. Go there. It’ll hide you. No one knows but me and Sissy and Cousin.”

Footsteps drummed elsewhere, the flooring trembling with an echo of their movement. Soon they would come this way.

“Maester Kendall!” a woman’s voice called, and he skipped off, opened the door of the last schoolroom, and plunged inside to a fall of excited laughter from his cohort.

Men were stomping this way. I sidled four coats down and stopped when a thread tickled my nose. There I stood, no more than a coat myself, with a cozy fur lining and a heavy wool outer shell, just right for wearing out in the winter air…. So why, then, were coats hanging so conveniently in this corridor if not to be used by children at their break? Which meant that either they played in the garden, where their shouts and laughter might entertain—or annoy—the mansa, or there was another exit to the outside from this wing.