From the height, hidden in my shadows, I surveyed a sprawling compound of courtyards, wings, and separate buildings. I balanced along the wall, looking into an herb garden, an open ground where children were playing in the sun, a well-tended rose garden where two richly garbed and very pregnant women were holding hands on a bench. Their affection for each other was so tender. How I missed the ones I loved!

What ought I to do? Summer had come, and autumn would follow. If I was stuck here on Hallows’ Night I had no hope of escaping my sire’s anger. Yet should I run, Vai’s mother and sisters would receive the brunt of the mansa’s punishment. Like Vai I could not consider myself free as long as others were in chains. The mansa had known exactly how to trap him.

“Are you sorry you swam to shore, now you’re stuck with us?” Bintou asked when I returned.

“No,” I said truthfully. “I met you, Bintou. That made it all worthwhile. Wasa, of course, I might easily have lived many years longer in peace for not meeting.”

The girls giggled and hugged me, then reached around me to try to pinch each other, as Bee and I used to do. The press of their bodies against mine brought tears to my eyes, not of sorrow but of sweetness.

“Vai and I will find a way. I don’t know how yet. But we will.”

The scrape of a foot at the open door brought my head around. Vai’s mother leaned against the door frame, watching us with the haughty look that was a cloak for her vulnerability. Just like her son. I no longer wondered that he had found the strength to survive the misery heaped on him in his first years at the mage House, or how he had endured without getting melted down into slag.

In the last week the trough of flowers had finally bloomed, stalks and branches blasted with color like fireworks exploding. Was this what it was like for a person, who had drifted all the years of his life without magic, to bloom with power? One day you are closed, and the next you are open.

Vai’s mother smiled at me.

I shook off the girls and hurried over to take her hand. “Awake so soon?”

“I heard you laughing,” she said in the tone of a woman who has only just remembered that she once knew how to laugh. “My son is fortunate to have found one such as you, Catherine.”

I laughed, because otherwise I would have cried. “Have you not heard the story of how we were forced to marry, and then he wouldn’t let me eat my supper? Look! Here they are come with our supper! Mmm! Is that yam pudding? I’ll tell you while we eat.”

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