My nose twitched, and I sneezed.
“More smoke and more fire.” Rory rubbed at eyes reddened by days of breathing ash.
The coach jolted to a halt.
The mansa flung open the door, then sucked in a harsh breath. “We are too late.”
I scrambled out after him.
The turnpike from Audui to Cantiacorum was built atop the old Roman road in layers of crushed stone. South of the road a high stone wall demarcated the perimeter of the main estate of Four Moons House. A wide fan driveway fronted four arches, each ornamented with a phase of the moon. Between turnpike and wall lay a garden and the gatehouse supervised by the women magisters who tended the purification baths and gave or revoked permission for visitors to enter.
Ruin engulfed the gatehouse and the stables behind it. The carefully pruned hedges poured a greasy smoke into the air. Every tree was on fire. A dead woman sprawled on the steps, her face turned away from us and her bare back a grotesque fabric of savage burns.
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, you will be glad he is fighting on your side.
A powerfully cold wind rocked the coach. As the mansa started walking to the gatehouse, icy sleet began to fall. I drew my sword.
“How did they get past the gate?” I asked. “Is it not protected by a cold magic binding?”
“She who holds the keys to the gates must be alive to close or open them.” His right hand clenched as he looked toward the body on the steps. He let out the hard exhalation of a man determined to get on with the painful task that has to be done.
“Was she your kinswoman?” I asked, for she had hair the same color as his.
“My sister,” he said curtly. “Let Rory scout in his cat form. Go around to the back. I think they will not think to use a cat as a catch-fire. Go on.”
Rory shed his clothes and turned from man to cat. He nudged my hands, licked Bee, yawned assertively at the mansa, and loped off. We got in the carriage.
The shadow of the arch passed over us as we entered the estate.
“Here is a riddle,” the mansa said as we rolled down the wide avenue past black pine and a reed-choked pond. “Fire will burn as long as it has fuel and is not doused by water. If this man Drake uses Andevai as a catch-fire yet cannot fathom the well of Andevai’s power, what then?”
“I told Vai once that the potency of his cold magic is the inverse of his modesty,” I said.
“Cat, are you saying that by using Andevai as his catch-fire, Drake becomes as powerful as Andevai is vain?” Bee smiled at me with brows lifted in the way she had that provoked me to mischief. Her smile broke through the wall of relentless concentration I had raised around my fears. We broke into hysterical giggles.
The mansa stared as if to scold us but instead sat back with a stiff but honest smile. “I suppose a little levity cannot harm our cause. Anyway, it may well be an apt analogy that should give us pause, given what we know of Andevai’s monstrously bloated conceit.”
Bee snickered. I wiped tears from my eyes.
He set a fist on the window’s rim and studied the orchard as we passed. The first time I had been driven this way, I had seen Kayleigh walking in the orchard among the field hands. Vai had halted our carriage to greet her. I had begun then to comprehend that the man I thought I saw was merely the clothes he showed to the world. What made him who he truly was ran far deeper. Just as it did in all of us.
The main house lay almost two miles from the road. Smoke boiled up above the trees, shimmering with heat.
“What better way to humiliate Vai than by destroying the House he has pledged to uphold and maintain?” I cried. “And likewise practice for the greater destruction he means to visit on his own home?”
“I fear you are right,” said the mansa. He did not take his gaze from the smoke. “My surviving troops and magisters will be days behind us on the road. Beatrice, you must remain in the coach so you do not yourself need rescuing. Catherine, are you ready?”
Shared laughter had polished away the weight of my dread. I knew what I had to do.
“Mansa, the only way to kill James Drake is with cold steel.”
“Andevai taught us how to pull the backlash off another and into ourselves, so I will keep the fire mages from using you as a catch-fire for long enough that you can reach him,” he said without the least sign that he appreciated the irony of protecting me after he was the one who had once demanded I be killed. “I will not let you burn. Best you scout first, however.”
“Be safe, dearest.” Bee grasped my hand, kissed my cheek, and let me go.