Cold Steel

I found Vai kneeling before his stern-faced mother, his head bowed. He had an arm around each sister. Servants collected our things.



Seeing me enter, Bintou leaped up. “Cat, we’re leaving.”



“Leaving Lutetia?” I asked, watching Vai. He did not look at me.



“No, we’re leaving this room. Vai says we are to have a grand set of rooms with a large garden! What do you think of that?”



Grand they were, as we soon discovered. An invalid chair was wheeled in, big enough for Wasa to sit on her mother’s lap. Although servants now swarmed everywhere, Vai himself pushed the chair through the corridors to the guest wing and a suite of rooms just down the hall from the parlor and dining hall where the mansa and I had had our conversations. A lovely entry and a charming little audience room gave onto a sitting room, off of which lay two bedrooms.



One of the sleeping chambers had been arranged with two beds, one for the girls and another for Vai’s mother. Its glass doors opened onto a courtyard lit by cressets of cold fire to display a fountain, benches surrounded by troughs of blooming flowers, and an arbor that screened a garden beyond. The girls hung on him, whispering secrets to him and giggling at their own jokes, as I settled his mother comfortably for the night and placed the cacica’s skull to watch over them.



After we kissed the girls he took my hand. He led me past the arbor and into the garden to a tiny summer cottage, a gazebo hung with cloth walls. Inside stood a bed draped with gauze curtains and flanked by two privacy screens. Bowls of food crowded a small table set for two people. Servants waited. He thanked and dismissed them, and they left.



“You must not have eaten,” he said. “There is fish, and fruit. And yam pudding that I had the kitchen make specially for you.”



Looking at the proud lift of his chin and the mulish set of his lips, I knew he would not speak of it, not now and maybe not ever.



“Vai, do you remember the Griffin Inn, in Southbridge Londun? When I came out from the supper room and you took one look at me and got up and came over to me? Why did you just get up like that and take my word there was trouble?”



He blinked. “But there was trouble, Catherine. It seemed obvious by your haste and tone. I could as well ask why you warned me. You could have said nothing and hoped they killed me, since they vastly outnumbered me. The people at the inn were not inclined to take my part.”



“Think of how many people would have been hurt or killed if you had unleashed your magic! It was better to go on with you than to risk injury to people who had no part in the fight.”



He slipped his fingers between mine until our palms touched. “You chose their safety over what you must have believed to be your own happiness. That is how it is with you, Catherine. You never questioned what your aunt and uncle thrust on you. You stayed loyal to their wishes up to the moment the mansa commanded me to kill you. Even then, love, you stayed loyal to your cousin. You didn’t run away to save yourself. You ran back to save her. Just as you jumped into the river because you thought my sisters looked frightened, and probably because you thought that together you and I could rescue them. Just as you tirelessly nursed my mother.” I thought he was going to kiss me, but that was not what he was about. “Your mother was right about you. ‘Loyalty will be the bright light this child will bring to the world.’ Never think otherwise, my sweet Catherine.”



A balmy night breeze chased through the cloth hangings that shielded us from view. Every cresset of cold fire in the garden went out.



I leaned into him.



He kissed my hair.



I raised my head and brushed his mouth with mine.



For a very long while neither of us spoke a single word, except what was in our hearts.



Much later we lay in the bed, drowsy and contented, yet I could not stop caressing him. I traced his lips, his chin, his throat, and then his shoulders and up the back of his neck.



“You’ve kept your beard trimmed but decided to let your hair grow out.”



“I promised myself I would not cut it until we were reunited.”



I would have made a joke about it, but my heart was too full. He held me as I lightly stroked his chest, and after a while I thought he had fallen asleep.



“Catherine.” His whisper made me shiver as from a touch of winter. “Everything has changed, love. Everything.”



My wandering hand stilled. “What has changed, Vai?”



I wished I could see his face, and then, after all, I was glad he could not see me.



“You must have suspected when you were brought in to pour wine. That honor is granted only to the mansa’s wife or daughters. When you saw where I was seated. The mansa has adopted me as his son and named me as his heir.”