The mansa insisted we break our headlong pace and spend one night at Audui’s resplendent mage inn. In truth the amenities of a bath, a change of underclothes, the promise of a comfortable bed, and a decent supper improved my mood considerably. The steward in charge told us there had been a plague of fires tormenting the countryside, a freakish set of frightful blazes no one could explain although they had passed as quickly as they had come.

“How long ago?” I asked over a delicious meal of soup, roasted beef, yam pudding, fish in dill sauce, and apple dumplings.

“Just yesterday did all the reports come in, Maestra,” said the steward in charge. “One of our own young grooms escaped a terrible fire yesterday at West Mile Post just four miles west of town.”

“Can we talk to him?”

The lad was brought, white and trembling. He had a tendency to jump every time a door closed elsewhere in the inn, but Bee hastened forward to take hold of his hand as if he were a long-lost kinsman. No lad his age could resist her radiant glamour.

“You are the only one who can help us!” she exclaimed. “What was your name again?”

“They call me Rufus, Maestra, for my red hair.”

“Tell us everything you saw, Rufus!”

“It was all fire, Maestra,” the lad whispered in a hoarse voice. “But the man gave me a message.” His gaze flashed toward me. “He said there would be a woman with black hair and golden eyes come after him. I was to speak to her when I saw her.”

Had Vai managed to get a message to me? Hope surged.

“Go on,” said Bee in her most encouraging tone.

The lad handled the words as cautiously as a knife. “He said, ‘Nothing you can do will save him.’ ”

I recoiled as if struck.

Bee smiled. “Very good! Thank you for remembering. What did he look like, the man who spoke those words? Had he red hair and white skin, like yours?”

He nodded, gulping down a sob. “He did burn the whole compound, Maestra.”

“Had they prisoners?” asked the mansa. “Any they treat differently from the rest?”

Concentration furrowed his brow. “Hard to count, I was that scared. But there was one they did hold away from all the others. Maybe he was sick, for he could barely walk. He was whistling a song, that one, and they did kick him to shut him up.”

“What song?” I asked.

Like any Celt, he could remember a tune after hearing it once. He hummed the melody the djeli had sung when he had led Andevai to the meeting with the Romans, the one I had first heard in the spirit world on the fiddle of Lucia Kante.

The mansa handed the boy a coin. “You have done well.”