“Is that what you think? You surely were determined to escape him the last time we met.”

A flush warmed my cheeks. “I am something changed as well.”

The resemblance between the two men was keen, although Duvai was lighter, having a mother who had been born in a Celtic village, and being therefore more mixed of feature and complexion. Ten years older, he had the surety of a man in his prime strength, fully aware of who he is and of his place in the world. Besides that, he was a hunter who had braved the spirit world more than once and returned successfully.

“Are you something changed in the matter of my brother?” he said with a chuckle that made me blush yet more. “I would not have taken you for a woman to be bought by the offer of riches and rank, so I must suppose he found another way to capture you.”

“You are mistaken. No man can capture me. But he might have… courted me.”

His smirk resembled Vai’s. “So my brother finally smiled at you, did he?”

I had no answer to this, except to refrain from punching him.

“Grandmother made us promise never to fight each other. Out of respect for her, and knowing she watches over us still, I will speak in his favor. The elders of Haranwy have agreed to house as many of these refugees as we can until a decision is reached. The rest can shelter at Trecon and other House villages.”

The ice-bound House breathed like winter on our backs as we walked away.

No one would ever live there again.

The mansa was brought to Grandmother’s single-roomed house with its tiny private courtyard. The room smelled of pine wreaths even though no one had lived in it for some time. Vai was conveyed to the room where his mother had lived for so many years with her children. She directed him to be placed on a cot and asked for hot water to be brought so he might be stripped of his grimy clothes and washed. This task I asked to do, behind a screen for privacy. The furnishings in the modest room were nothing compared to the luxurious riches in Two Gourds House, but the modern circulating stove, the four-poster bed, an oak table, and the rosewood wardrobe revealed the concern Vai had taken both for his mother’s comfort and for her status in the village.

He mumbled incoherent syllables. Settled in the bed, he tossed and turned for the next three days, feverish one hour and shivering with cold the next as I forced broth down his throat. Every now and then he had lucid moments, during which I told him some of what had happened and fed him gruel. At length the worst of it eased, and he slept like the dead.