“Cat, are you saying that by using Andevai as his catch-fire, Drake becomes as powerful as Andevai is vain?” Bee smiled at me with brows lifted in the way she had that provoked me to mischief. Her smile broke through the wall of relentless concentration I had raised around my fears. We broke into hysterical giggles.

The mansa stared as if to scold us but instead sat back with a stiff but honest smile. “I suppose a little levity cannot harm our cause. Anyway, it may well be an apt analogy that should give us pause, given what we know of Andevai’s monstrously bloated conceit.”

Bee snickered. I wiped tears from my eyes.

He set a fist on the window’s rim and studied the orchard as we passed. The first time I had been driven this way, I had seen Kayleigh walking in the orchard among the field hands. Vai had halted our carriage to greet her. I had begun then to comprehend that the man I thought I saw was merely the clothes he showed to the world. What made him who he truly was ran far deeper. Just as it did in all of us.

The main house lay almost two miles from the road. Smoke boiled up above the trees, shimmering with heat.

“What better way to humiliate Vai than by destroying the House he has pledged to uphold and maintain?” I cried. “And likewise practice for the greater destruction he means to visit on his own home?”

“I fear you are right,” said the mansa. He did not take his gaze from the smoke. “My surviving troops and magisters will be days behind us on the road. Beatrice, you must remain in the coach so you do not yourself need rescuing. Catherine, are you ready?”

Shared laughter had polished away the weight of my dread. I knew what I had to do.

“Mansa, the only way to kill James Drake is with cold steel.”

“Andevai taught us how to pull the backlash off another and into ourselves, so I will keep the fire mages from using you as a catch-fire for long enough that you can reach him,” he said without the least sign that he appreciated the irony of protecting me after he was the one who had once demanded I be killed. “I will not let you burn. Best you scout first, however.”

“Be safe, dearest.” Bee grasped my hand, kissed my cheek, and let me go.

I pushed down the latch as we rumbled along the drive. As the door swung open I leaned out, feet in the coach and body braced on the door. The coach came to a halt just out of sight around the last curve of the drive from the House.