“I am on a Grand Tour. My coach overturned this morning. It will take days before it can be repaired. Likewise, my servants were injured. I left them behind with the coach and driver and came ahead myself with my wife to have a hope of acceptable accommodation and some manner of edible food. Really, the fare at the mage House hostels in this part of the world is unpalatable. I had heard that the magnificence of the architecture and the lavishness of the table fare at the mage Houses in old Roman territory were beyond description, but I admit myself sorely disappointed in what I have so far experienced.”

Here stood the Andevai I had first known and loathed!

The steward’s stare made my neck prickle. “Ah, of course. This way, Magister.”

He ushered us into an antechamber furnished with plain wooden benches and a set of tapestries depicting the diaspora from the Mali Empire. A heavyset woman in an indigo robe offered us water in the traditional way.

“Magister, you must be purified through water.” She indicated that Vai should go with the steward. “I will myself attend you, Maestra.”

The House had splendid baths in the Roman style, split into a men’s and a women’s half just as they had been at the gatehouse of Four Moons House.

“Tell me what happened,” she said after I immersed myself.

We had deposited Bee and Rory and our luggage at a modest hostel at the edge of town and sent the carriage back to Sala, but naturally I was not going to tell her any of that.

“It was so frightfully rough to be tumbled in such a vile manner. And I had to leave all my gowns behind.” I simpered into a digression on why I preferred wool challis to damask that soon caused her expression to glaze over in a satisfactory manner.

Servants brought clean underthings and a shapely gown with a shawl. In this pleasing garb I was escorted to a parlor fitted with low couches. Attendants brought a tea tray with tiny almond cakes and jellied berries. Vai was shown in, and we were left alone. He wore the same dash jacket he had arrived in, although it needed to be cleaned and pressed.

“Did they not offer you a change of clothes?” I asked.

“Nothing I could lower myself to wear,” he said in a combative tone.

Refusing the bait, I reclined on the cushions and drank three cups of tea and ate four almond cakes and all of the jellied berries while Vai glared over the bare branches of a winter courtyard as if his gaze had ripped the leaves from the shrubs. The way he tapped a drumbeat on his thigh was a sure sign he was churning with restlessly unpleasant thoughts.