Asanda tried to move as the old bachelor charged across the lobby, cutting a hot path towards her as spittle lathered his smoke-stained beard. Her left side went stiff before the paralysis washed over her spine and then the right side of her body. Panic crashed against a wilful calm, the instinct to flee burned all the way to the end of her nerves, even as a heavy stone settled between her shoulders and forced her to square them. Lathering every valve-tearing heartbeat, there was the abstract, absolute idea that there was nothing more important in her life than standing still right now.
Listen as though I were your own thoughts, Ma had said, and trust both our judgement as if it is yours alone.
Asanda stared up the length of the bachelor as he closed the final three metres between them. She raised her chin defiantly...
...and only Athi's shield kept the old man's club from shattering it.
Athi wrapped the old man's knuckles with his club, a warning that would have needed only a little more force to be a disarm. "Back, Old Man. Which of you has been giving Doti blackherb? You know what it does to a dulla–"
The second swing would have caught a less experienced melee fighter off guard. Doti swung at Athi's ear but only connected with the top of his shield. His eyes were wide, the whole of his pupils surrounded by a sea of bloody whites. They flicked to Asanda again, and this time her spine turned to water.
"That's enough, Doti," Dumani said, arms folded. "Step back, old soldier."
Doti's eyes never left Asanda, but he took a step back, his silence a startling thing after the depth of his roar.
Asanda's shoulders started to relax... A sun exploded behind her left eye. Ma, what's happening?
"Yes," Asanda heard herself say, in a whisper crafted to only be heard within Doti's earshot. "Step back into your nothingness."
The old bachelor's pupils dilated. "What did you say?"
"Go away. You have no name."
The third strike Athi read before Doti's club was even in the air. The heat behind Asanda's face intensified, and she saw the next three heartbeats with the eye of someone who knew breathing only slightly more intuitively than they knew battle.
Doti stepped forward, moving as if suspended in honey, his yellow-grey teeth bared in a slowly widening snarl. He raised his club for an overhand strike while taking a step forward so that his striking arm would reach over the shield for a clean blow to the skull. His footing was expertly placed to transfer as much of his mass through the balls of his feet into the head of his club. Instinct must have told Athi that, at best, he could parry the blow only the meat of his shoulder, so most of his movement was dedicated to swinging his own club in a vicious low arc that would crack Doti's knee. Athi would take a knock, but he would stun the giant.
The third heartbeat knocked against her chest, and it all went wrong.
Asanda shrieked as she was pushed into the corner of her own mind and her mother's conciousness rolled into the centre of it, a shift in gravity that felt like it would tear her apart at the stitching. Her hands were suddenly not her own as they pushed Athi away at the last minute.
In swelling horror, she watched Doti follow through and felt the hollow jarring of the clubhead striking her cheekbone. The world spun until the floor fell onto her, and no sooner had she been ripped out the centre of her own existence than was she placed back. Ma shrunk into near-nothingness, leaving nothing but a faint trail of shame as the real, worldy pain in Asanda's cheek blossomed until it was a fire dancing inside her ear. As she knelt on hands and knees, a trickle of blood ran down her nose and dripped onto the soft flesh over her right hand's first knuckle.
Ma... What did you do to me?
Ma!
NOMVULA!
The tears came before Asanda a moment before Asanda touched the depths of what she was feeling. Her skin crawled with more than pain, not even the floor felt solid.
As sound slowly returned to the world, she heard only her own sobbing, because the men were deathly quiet. There was no noise from the crowd outside. Not even the Hills dared to grow as she dragged shallow breath after shallow breath through the spasms of restrained sobs. Piercing that newfound silence was Athi's sharp, elongated whistle. It rang out until the footfalls of over twenty guards stormed the den.