He slipped his fingers between mine until our palms touched. “You chose their safety over what you must have believed to be your own happiness. That is how it is with you, Catherine. You never questioned what your aunt and uncle thrust on you. You stayed loyal to their wishes up to the moment the mansa commanded me to kill you. Even then, love, you stayed loyal to your cousin. You didn’t run away to save yourself. You ran back to save her. Just as you jumped into the river because you thought my sisters looked frightened, and probably because you thought that together you and I could rescue them. Just as you tirelessly nursed my mother.” I thought he was going to kiss me, but that was not what he was about. “Your mother was right about you. ‘Loyalty will be the bright light this child will bring to the world.’ Never think otherwise, my sweet Catherine.”

A balmy night breeze chased through the cloth hangings that shielded us from view. Every cresset of cold fire in the garden went out.

I leaned into him.

He kissed my hair.

I raised my head and brushed his mouth with mine.

For a very long while neither of us spoke a single word, except what was in our hearts.

Much later we lay in the bed, drowsy and contented, yet I could not stop caressing him. I traced his lips, his chin, his throat, and then his shoulders and up the back of his neck.

“You’ve kept your beard trimmed but decided to let your hair grow out.”

“I promised myself I would not cut it until we were reunited.”

I would have made a joke about it, but my heart was too full. He held me as I lightly stroked his chest, and after a while I thought he had fallen asleep.

“Catherine.” His whisper made me shiver as from a touch of winter. “Everything has changed, love. Everything.”

My wandering hand stilled. “What has changed, Vai?”

I wished I could see his face, and then, after all, I was glad he could not see me.

“You must have suspected when you were brought in to pour wine. That honor is granted only to the mansa’s wife or daughters. When you saw where I was seated. The mansa has adopted me as his son and named me as his heir.”

“But… what about… your village, and clientage, and Chartji’s court case, and Camjiata’s legal code, and Kofi and the radicals?”

“It’s not even that I’ve bested them, every cursed one of them. For all those years the mansa scorned me as the village boy. He never thought I would amount to more than a lamplighter who renews cold fire each night at mage inns. No matter what I did, it was never good enough. But now he knows. Think of the honor to my mother! I will become mansa of Four Moons House.”