“Boys will fight and compete to prove who is strongest. He should have bowed his head to those who stand above him, as a courtesy if nothing else. He would have done better with the youths he took his lessons with if he had not insisted on besting them in every trial.”

“That excuses it? Did all of you just look the other way while this kind of thing went on?”

A chill shuddered the air as his gaze tightened, but I did not retreat. “Do not be insolent, Catherine. One time it happened, in his first year at the House. Never after. The youths were warned they had gone too far in this instance.”

“Because you saw how powerful his cold magic could be? How useful he could be to you? Had he been a village child with no such promise, would anyone have cared?” Serena gave a shake of her head to remind me to be serene and placid. But I could not. “His own grandmother was impregnated against her will! She was not the only woman so used!”

He shrugged. “You will understand better when you must supervise the whole.”

“When I must supervise the whole…” I stared at the brilliant stain of beet soup mottling the rug. A dreadful fear gripped my heart. “What do you mean?”

He rose, leaving his full cup untouched. Serena rose gracefully alongside, a superb ornament, the sort of polished and splendid young woman of high rank a man may marry as his third or fourth wife, when he can choose for his own desire rather than the House’s needs and convenience. But he did not look at her. He was sure of her. He looked at me.

“You would do well to remember that he belongs to me, Catherine. Not to you. Not to himself. I will keep him in Four Moons House by whatever means I must.”

He clapped his hands. A steward appeared to escort me back to my prison.

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.