“I’ve just gotten started!” I shoved back my own chair and stood. “Either you want a wife who respects you enough to challenge you when she thinks you may be wrong, or you want a wife like the gracious Serena, whose manners are beyond impeccable, and whose desire and purpose is solely to serve the wishes and needs of a husband who chose her for her beauty.”

“How do you know she doesn’t challenge him in private? How do you know she didn’t desire and even seek the marriage? It may not seem so to you, but marriage to the mansa of Four Moons House gives a woman’s lineage significant prestige and valuable connections. For that matter, how do you know she isn’t a magister herself, married for her magical potency and not just her signal beauty?”

“How would you know what she is like in private?” I demanded.

He blinked. With a shake of his head the contemptuous mage vanished, and the Vai I loved returned. “Why, Catherine. Here is an unexpected sting of jealousy!”

How I hated that particular smirk of his. I fumed, not wanting to admit he was right or that I had simply assumed a dazzling beauty could not also be an accomplished magister.

“In fact, as the mansa’s heir, I am allowed to sit in his private parlor in the most casual manner imaginable. I may even converse easily, like a son, with his charming wife.” He slid into a light Expedition cant. “I reckon that gal’s a little lonely and like me company.”

“Peradventure some maku is going to find he own self a little lonely sleeping on the floor!”

He glided so quickly around the little table that I did not have time to step away before he pulled me to him. “Is he, now?” he murmured caressingly.

“Do you want to provoke me, Andevai?”

“Now that you mention it, I rather find that I do. You have no idea how attractive I find you when you get like this.” Given that he held me against him and his dressing robe had fallen half open, I had some idea. “I have been promised this whole day is mine to do as I wish.”

“To argue with me?”

“We can argue as much as we need to, love, as long as it is understood that we trust each other. I know this is unexpected and that it may seem like the wrong path that goes against everything we have discussed at such length. I admit I have some reasons that are not the right ones and that I just… to do this, to receive this… heir to the mansa…”

He kissed me in a tumult of emotion that he had no other way to express. I struggled not to give way to the intense desire I felt for him, to think with my mind instead of my body, but the two were woven too intimately together.