Because I understood how much he hated feeling weak, I ventured behind the screen to find him sitting, head in hands, on the bench. A mirror and razor rested on the bench next to him. My footsteps brought his head up. His beard was unkempt, and his hair squashed on one side. His skin had an ashy sallowness and his eyes a gray weariness.

“I don’t need help!” he snapped. “I can shave myself!”

“Nor have I the least desire to help you,” I retorted. “I merely came to inform you that the mansa’s nephew has arrived and is making an entirely predictable grab for the heir’s seat.”

“That would be a disaster for Four Moons House! Not to mention Haranwy and the other villages. It’s not his right anyway, to make such a demand when the mansa has already spoken.” He tried to stand but could not keep his feet under him. I had to catch him and ease him back down, for which he repaid me with a string of rude phrases directed not at me personally but at the uncaring world at large, which had not had the courtesy to allow him to heal faster.

“Stop it! Just pee and go back to sleep. Nothing will happen until you have recovered enough to face the elders.”

He ran a hand along his beard, and I was sure he was thinking that he could not face the elders looking so scruffy. “What of the mansa? What news of him today?”

I shook my head. “No change. Magister Serena is recovering well, although she grieves over losing the pregnancy. You didn’t tell me she’s a diviner.”

“You didn’t ask.”

I left him to it and went back to his mother. “I believe you are better suited than I to handle him when he is afflicted with this distemper.”

She regarded me with an equanimity matched only by Vai’s muttered cursing behind the screen. “Even as a child he had the habit of believing every sunny day would last forever to please him, and that clouds came as a personal affront.”

“Catherine. Love.”

That he used the endearment in his mother’s hearing worried me. I went back to find him stretched out on the bench, an arm flung across his face. He had mottled bruising on his ribs from either the battle or his captivity, his wrists were reddened and scarred with rope burns, and he was thin from the privation of the last days. Benevolent Tanit! The man needed to eat!

“Lord of All,” he murmured with disgust, “to think of how easily I was captured! I could not even break out of my captivity, nor prevent them from using me as a catch-fire for the entire cursed journey. When it came to the point, I could not even save the mansa. Now his useless nephew cocks about like a rooster crowing for attention, while I cannot stand.”