The scars on his cheeks made him seem forbidding until he smiled. “They shall have to find yee guilty first. I tell yee, gal, I have heard yee scold men before, but to watch yee tear into that fire mage Drake made me skin turn cold.”

“I know I shouldn’t have spoken like that. I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on.”

He laughed.

I leaned my head against Kofi’s shoulder, so broad and solid, but I wished it were Vai I was leaning against. The shock of Caonabo repudiating Bee and her departure with him on a journey sure to be miserable and unpleasant had torn away my shield of determination. All my ugliest fears surfaced like Leviathan breaching the waves.

“Vai’s so accustomed to being the most powerful magister, to winning. What if my sire breaks him? What kind of man will he be? And will I still love him?”

“Peradventure Vai shall not survive this. But I reckon I have never met a man with such a high opinion of he own consequence. In such a dark place, a man’s vanity and arrogance can be what save him.”

I sniveled out something meant to be a chuckle. “If any man’s conceit can survive captivity by the Master of the Wild Hunt, it would be his.”

“There. Yee have brought yee fear out into the light. I reckon yee have been fretting.”

I sniffled, wiping my eyes. “Now Bee’s thrown away her future trying to save me.”

A windblown branch tapped on one of the glass doors that led out to the courtyard.

“Cat, she done no different a thing than yee did for her. Chance it shall even be for the best. The Taino nobles is a high and mighty people who look down on folk like us. Maybe she would fancy a life in their court, or maybe she would find she own self in a cage that squeeze like a trap. Vai told me one time that the day he was brought up from the village to Four Moons House and taken before the mansa, he reckoned he was the most fortunate lad alive to have such a chance. He came to find they did not want him but dared not turn him away. They treated him like the worst kind of mangy cur. So he decided to become better at being one of them than any of them was at it. Yee said to me one time that the worst thing for Vai shall be if he go back to the mage House and become a cold mage like to what he was when yee two first met. I see now what yee meant. ’Twas no good home for him at the mage House. So why is yee so sure the Taino court would be a good home for yee cousin?”

“Do you think they could crush her?”