He flashed a smile, silently laughing at me. “She’s angling for a prestigious marriage with a very promising magister from Five Mirrors House. There are two powerful candidates to be heir, and the mansa there wants to move one out of the way so there is no trouble.”

Bee batted her eyelashes as her most dangerously honeyed smile lit her face. “If that is the case, don’t you worry about bringing such a powerful magister into Four Moons House?”

He looked at her blankly. “No. Why would I?”

Kofi stuck his head in. “I shall ride up front to see the countryside. Fair wild, I call this!”

“I want to hold on in back with the eru,” I said.

“No!” Bee and Vai spoke at the same time, as Kofi shut the door.

“You are so recently recovered, dearest,” said Bee. “It really is outside of enough that you are making such a long journey so soon.”

“It was your idea!”

“It was your idea!” retorted Bee primly. “I only agreed because it is time I got to have an adventure!”

“Because giving radical speeches and slamming down rude hecklers as soldiers march to arrest you is not an adventure? Wrestling an overloaded rowboat for hundreds of miles down the Rhenus River with only a lazy cat for company is not an adventure? Sleeping with the most famously handsome radical in Europa—”

“What?” said Vai. “Bee and Brennan Du… what?”

“—is not an adventure? Not to mention the part where you marry a prince of the Taino, or are asked to run for a seat on the first elected council in Europa.”

Bee sighed happily, paging through her sketchbook with the dreamy blush of an addled schoolgirl. “Yes! Who knows what will happen next?”

The latch’s sliver eyes and wire mouth glittered as its sour little voice woke. “I won’t know. No one tells me anything.”

In the sudden hush that throttled the ones I loved best in all the world, the coachman snapped his whip and cried, “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!” The eru leaped onto the back of the coach, and we rolled out onto the street, wheels rumbling on stone.

Bee put her nose down by the latch, which matched her glare for glare.

In a low voice Vai said, “I thought you were just making that up to entertain us, like you do.”

“What do I ever make up, I should like to ask? Andevai! You do believe I punched a shark, don’t you?”

“Yes, love, I believe you punched a shark just like I believe you drank coffee with the Master of the Wild Hunt on the streets of Havery on Hallows’ Night.”

Bee sat up. Her eye turned on me as her expression bloomed into the full flower of indignant suspicion. “But she did punch a shark. James Drake was on the beach and saw it happen. He told the general and me all about it.”