I sighed, for of all the things I had thought of, how to answer this question to anyone except Bee or Rory was not one of them.

Rory said, “He’s a prisoner of his vanity.”

“I beg your pardon? A prisoner of the banditry?” Brennan rubbed his ear. The roar in the chamber was astoundingly clamorous. Chartji and Caith flanked Bee, who was now wrangling with hecklers sure that women had no cause or right to speak in a public venue. “Come this way.”

We moved into a low passage and emerged into an old storage room lit by two basement windows. Lines of afternoon light cast gold over a table strewn with pamphlets, blank sheets of foolscap, and pens and ink.

He slid a pamphlet out of a heap. “Your account of the revolutionary philosophy of the Expedition radicals has traveled across Europa while you have laid low. Many have read it. Have you been a prisoner or a spy?”

“Cat!” Bee appeared, trembling as she rushed to embrace me.

“Oh, Bee! I’m so glad you’re here!” To my horror, I again burst into tears.

“Dearest! Has some terrible calamity befallen Andevai?”

Pleased with his cleverness, Rory repeated himself. “He’s become a prisoner of his vanity.”

Brennan chuckled. “Was he not that already? As the djeliw say, vanity is a mark of weakness, humility that of strength.”

“The mansa made him his heir!” I cried.

Brennan whistled with real admiration. “When I suggested you spy in the mage House, I had no idea you would do so with such success!”

“Heir to Four Moons House?” demanded Bee. “So he will become the next mansa?”

I nodded, too choked to speak.

She patted my hand. “Blessed Tanit! No wonder you’re crying! If there is one enticement Andevai could not resist, that would be it.”

“It gets worse,” I sniveled. “The mansa brought Vai’s mother along to be prisoner with his sisters. Now with his elevation his mother is elevated, too! She was born a peddler’s daughter and now she’s the honored mother of the heir to Four Moons House!”

Brennan whistled again. “Bold Teutates! Remind me never to play chess with the mansa. That will have secured the young man’s loyalty. You can’t ask a man to take a course of action that will seem to him to be dishonoring his mother.”

“Did you ask him to give up the heirship, Cat?” Bee asked. “Or did he cast you out so he could secure a more valuable bride?”

“Of course he didn’t cast me out!” I crumpled a pamphlet in my hands. I hated the way my anger and distress surged like storm tides, ripping me this way and that until I could not even think straight for wanting to cry one moment and rage the next.