“You are the eldest Adurnam Hassi Barahal daughter?” he repeated.
“I am the eldest.”
“You are the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter?”
“I’m the eldest.”
“If I may, Mansa,” said the djeli. “What she says is no lie, but I am troubled. If you will allow me, may I ask?”
The mansa nodded.
“Repeat these words as I speak them,” said the djeli in his resonant voice. “ ‘I am the eldest daughter born into the Adurnam Hassi Barahal house.’ ”
“I am the eldest—” daughter. I meant to speak the word, but no sound came out of my mouth. “I am the eldest—” Hassi Barahal. Still no voice emerged. “But I am older than Bee is,” I said hoarsely.
“There was another one?” asked the djeli. “Another daughter of the Hassi Barahal family, in the house, when you were taken?”
My face burned hot and my hands burned cold. Lips sealed, my father had said. Tell no one, my mother had said. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.
“There was another girl of the right age in the house?” demanded the mansa.
Andevai blinked, and blinked again. “Yes, Mansa.”
“You asked three times?”
Stammering, Andevai forced out words. “Th-three times. They said to me exactly what she said to you. She is the eldest. So I married her, by the binding marriage, sealed by a bard, just as you commanded me to do, Mansa.”
“And did you first ask, specifically, is this one the right girl or is that one the right girl? The girl we wrote the contract for?”
After a silence, he said in a chastened voice, “No, Mansa. I did not ask specifically about the other girl.”
In the depths of the earth, wreathed in fire, lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All Dragons. Dreaming, she stirs, and the earth shakes, and volcanoes spit ash and fire, and the world changes.
In the depths of the ocean, deep in the black abyss, there drifts in a watery stupor the Taninim, called also leviathan. Yet they may be roused, and if they are so, then the lashing of their tails smashes ships into splinters and drives their sundered hulks under the waves while the shores are swept clean in a tidal fury.
In the depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt, and when it is woken, all tremble in fear.
So we are told.
But when a magister powerful enough to rule as the head of a mage House is struck rigid with fury and he is standing not ten paces from you, then you will wish you had to face one of the others instead.
The house was built of stone, and yet it shuddered. Glass in the paned windows cracked. The iron bands on the door groaned, as though shrinking in fear. Beneath the floor, ceramic shattered.
“What a fool you are!” said the mansa.
“Mansa,” said the djeli, “you can send out a young person on your errand to rest your feet, but it won’t rest your heart. Let me discover what has happened.” He turned to face me, extended a hand palm up in a gesture that might have seemed reassuring if it were not a spell to call my voice to speak truth. “Is yours the blood of the Hassi Barahal clan?”
I opened my mouth to speak, and then I closed it, because the word I wanted to say would not come out. All I could say was, “So I have always been told.”
A sick dread crawled in my belly. I swayed, sure I was about to faint. Andevai stared at me as if I were a serpent that had reared up to confront him. To contest him.
To cheat him.
“They said—!” he exclaimed. “They said she was the eldest Barahal daughter.”
“Is that what they said?” asked the djeli. “They must have chosen their words carefully, knowing the contract was sealed by magic.”
“What are you saying?” Andevai whispered, face ashen, his triumph in ruins.