She leaned closer with a smirk on that seemingly innocent little face. Her fingers crept up my arm. “He likes you.”

I grabbed her ear with my uninjured hand. “He does like me. What do you really want?”

“The locket.”

“You can’t have it. My father gave it to me.”

“I never met my papa. He died while my mama was big with us.”

“I’m sorry about that. I lost my father when I was six. I might let you look at it later if you’re very good.” I released her ear. “Where is my cane? And the basket?”

“No one can touch the cane. It bites. Also, there is a skull in that basket. I looked, even though Bintou told me not to. Then it talked to me.” She eyed me. “Do you believe me?”

“It would depend on what the skull said to you. Then I would know for sure.”

“She spoke like a foreign person. She was hard to understand. I think she asked me to tell her who I was and why I was staring at her so rudely.”

Hard to say if Wasa had a gift or was just exceedingly quick-witted. “If you are very well behaved, I will introduce you to her.”

She glanced at her sleeping mother. “I am always well behaved. Or at least, I am when Maa is awake.”

I smiled as she sat back to allow Bintou to bring a cup of broth. I sat up with a bolster propped behind me and handled the cup with my uninjured arm. Afterward, with my right side held motionless along a rolled-up blanket, I was able to doze.

Later I heard the girls whispering in the village dialect, and their mother scolding them.

“They will despise us no matter what we do. But we will give no cause for scorn by speaking like uneducated people. Recite to me from the primer.”

Pronounced with careful enunciation in the sweet, high voices of the girls, the simple, rhyming phrases spun me down into sleep.

Candle flame is candle bright.

Can you quench the candlelight?

At dawn the entire camp was taken down. My skirt and petticoat were dirty but wearable. The lovely cuirassier’s jacket was a loss. An ill-fitting and homespun wool tunic replaced it, although I had Bintou salvage the jacket in case I could repair it.

We traveled in the bed of a wagon. The jostling caused me so much pain that it was all I could do not to sob the entire weary day and the next and the next. I became feverish as the wound throbbed. Not a word of complaint passed the lips of Vai’s mother, although her cough got worse, shaking her entire frame, and sometimes she went gray as she struggled to suck in a breath of air. At night Bintou dosed her with a syrup that drugged her into a stuporous slumber.