“Our army? The last time we were together, we were running from ‘our army.’ When exactly did the mansa make you his heir?”
“After the battle of Lemovis, a month ago. He saw that no one else had enough imagination to realize what was going on, much less the discipline and intelligence to discover ways to counter it. Furthermore, I am the only cold mage in Four Moons House besides the mansa who can truly build and hold a thorough illusion. There are other forms of cold magic that take more reach, but for illusion you must marry intense skill and discipline with the ability to reach deep into the ice.”
“You are the only one besides the mansa? Even including the women?”
To his credit he paused, forehead wrinkling. “I suppose I don’t know about the women. Although honestly, Catherine, to hear that anyone besides the mansa could best me in this would surprise me.”
I leaned across the table to give him a kiss. “Of course it would surprise you. My point is that the mansa may yet sire more sons and choose to replace you with one of them. Furthermore, you said Five Mirrors House in Noviomagus is ruled by a mansa who is not as powerful as the magister who tested you. She happened to be a woman, and thus according to House custom ineligible. So let us say the mansa truly wishes for you to become mansa after him. If you do not have the support of the elders of Four Moons House, what is to stop them from demanding a more eligible if less powerful man once the mansa has passed on? Then you would have waited for all that time, perhaps for decades, only to find yourself just as powerless as you were the day you came to Four Moons House. All that time when you might have been working for a greater cause. It is the perfect means to keep you in harness.”
An eddy of cold air pooled around us. “Do you suppose I am too uneducated and common-born to have thought of exactly these sorts of complications?”
“Of course I don’t! I will thank you not to pretend that I do so you can wallow in your wounded feelings! You have just bested the rivals who tormented you for so long. You have raised your mother to a position of honor beyond anything she can ever have thought to expect. And you have been proven in the starkest way possible as exactly the rare and uncommonly potent cold mage you have always known you are. All laudable things. I want to know if you have forgotten your promise to Kofi.”
Ice crackled as frost across the surface of the cream as he pushed back his chair and rose with a curl of his lip. “I think that is enough! Do not believe you understand my promise to Kofi.”
“I’ve just gotten started!” I shoved back my own chair and stood. “Either you want a wife who respects you enough to challenge you when she thinks you may be wrong, or you want a wife like the gracious Serena, whose manners are beyond impeccable, and whose desire and purpose is solely to serve the wishes and needs of a husband who chose her for her beauty.”
“How do you know she doesn’t challenge him in private? How do you know she didn’t desire and even seek the marriage? It may not seem so to you, but marriage to the mansa of Four Moons House gives a woman’s lineage significant prestige and valuable connections. For that matter, how do you know she isn’t a magister herself, married for her magical potency and not just her signal beauty?”
“How would you know what she is like in private?” I demanded.
He blinked. With a shake of his head the contemptuous mage vanished, and the Vai I loved returned. “Why, Catherine. Here is an unexpected sting of jealousy!”
How I hated that particular smirk of his. I fumed, not wanting to admit he was right or that I had simply assumed a dazzling beauty could not also be an accomplished magister.
“In fact, as the mansa’s heir, I am allowed to sit in his private parlor in the most casual manner imaginable. I may even converse easily, like a son, with his charming wife.” He slid into a light Expedition cant. “I reckon that gal’s a little lonely and like me company.”
“Peradventure some maku is going to find he own self a little lonely sleeping on the floor!”
He glided so quickly around the little table that I did not have time to step away before he pulled me to him. “Is he, now?” he murmured caressingly.
“Do you want to provoke me, Andevai?”
“Now that you mention it, I rather find that I do. You have no idea how attractive I find you when you get like this.” Given that he held me against him and his dressing robe had fallen half open, I had some idea. “I have been promised this whole day is mine to do as I wish.”
“To argue with me?”
“We can argue as much as we need to, love, as long as it is understood that we trust each other. I know this is unexpected and that it may seem like the wrong path that goes against everything we have discussed at such length. I admit I have some reasons that are not the right ones and that I just… to do this, to receive this… heir to the mansa…”
He kissed me in a tumult of emotion that he had no other way to express. I struggled not to give way to the intense desire I felt for him, to think with my mind instead of my body, but the two were woven too intimately together.
I eased the dressing robe off his shoulders. “I shall need more of that ambrosial sweetened and whipped cream when I am done with you.”
“Not yet, not yet,” he whispered in a hoarse murmur that made me wild.
All entangled and kissing him, I nudged him toward the bed.
“Announce me.”
The mansa’s voice fell like the stroke of a sword. Vai would have leaped back as if cut from me, but modesty made me cling to him. The mansa had in fact already announced himself, standing on the upper step with the entry curtain held away in his left hand and his thick eyebrows raised interrogatively. I thought he looked amused or, perhaps, relieved that the young man he had chosen as his heir was capable of the deed. He stepped back and dropped the curtain to give us privacy in which to straighten and retie our dressing robes.
“Thank Tanit we hadn’t made it to the bed,” I muttered, my face aflame.
But after recovering from his surprise, Vai did not look displeased. He lifted the curtain. “Mansa, please. Come in.” To a servant beyond, he said, “Bring more coffee and a fresh cup. Another bowl of berries and cream.”
The mansa sat in my chair and Vai opposite him, leaving me to accept the new pot and cup when it was expeditiously brought. I squelched an urge to pour coffee over both their heads and instead poured for them and afterward for myself. I heaped my cup with two spoonfuls of the cream, after which I retreated to stand off to the side.
“There is news,” said the mansa, careful not to look at me, for although I was covered from neck to ankles in the dressing robe, his presence in the gazebo felt strangely intimate. “Camjiata’s skirmishers have been sighted in Cena. He may intend an assault on Lutetia.”
“He proclaimed his legal code here in Lutetia in the year 1818,” I said. “Twenty-two years ago. That must mean something to him.”
The mansa sipped thoughtfully at his coffee. “Indeed. Handbills and broadsheets and seditious pamphlets circulate in the streets. They claim to be the text of a declaration of rights. By this means he has deluded gullible villagers and illiterate laborers with an idea they will be better off with his imperial rule than with the rule of local lords and mages who know their people and are concerned for the health of their lands. Can you imagine?” He paused to give Vai a long look.
Vai would never stare down an elder, but his respectful manner was not meek. “I would not call them gullible, Mansa.”
“I suppose you would not. Yet should the general succeed, he will need governors to oversee provinces. Such people will skim off bribes for themselves and hand the right to collect taxes and tithes to their cronies and favored underlings. A great deal of petty and grand corruption will ensue. Meanwhile, there is the problem of fire mages. You are sure he is using fire mages, Andevai? The mansa of Gold Cup House was an old man. His heart might simply have given out.”