“Gracious Melqart, Cat! If I protest that I do not want to, you’ll know I am lying. And if I say yes, love will carry me across the distance like wings, I’ll appear as giddy in love as you! Maybe after things are more sorted out here and the household is better established and everyone has a decent cot to sleep on… Prim Astarte! What I wouldn’t give for decent plumbing!”

We discussed such mundane matters all the way home, and I cherished every word of it.

So it was that at midday on the last day of October, I finished darning a worn elbow on the last of Vai’s dash jackets that needed repair, the much-abused but lovingly tended gold-and-red chained pattern he had worn the night of the areito and Hallows’ Night and thus into the spirit world. As a fine elegant dash jacket suitable for court, it was utterly ruined, but I could read the course of our love across its mended injuries and still-shining threads and know it for the glorious garment it was.

He had selected the sturdiest of his jackets to labor in, and they did get worn. I had worked hard to get all the mending done to my liking, sitting at an old secondhand table at the window in the corner room Vai had picked out for the mansa’s study. At this table in the evenings, while I sewed and Bee drew or practiced declaiming and while visitors came and went, he wrote letters, planned lessons, practiced illusions, and had me read out loud to us from a recently published monograph by Professora Alhamrai regarding accounts of how shrinkage in the ice sheets correlated with the creep of hardy trees into the Barrens.

Besides the table and chairs, necessary for when the mansa wished to meet people, the spacious chamber was furnished with his clothes chests, the chest with my father’s journals in it, a copper basin and pitcher on a stand, and the rolled-up mat on which he and I slept. Because Vai wasn’t there, I heated the air with a little brazier. The hypocaust beneath the planks was blocked by old rubble and not yet cleared out because the dormitories had to be readied for winter first. Fortunately it had been an unusually mild autumn, with not a single snowfall.

“Cat!” Bee hurried in without knocking, as she always did when she knew Vai was elsewhere. “I just heard Andevai tell Serena that she must sell all his dash jackets. He wants them out of the house today, so he may begin the new year knowing he has sacrificed like everyone else.”