The holding cells were little more than a hole cut into the womb of the manse's foundations, ten lengths deep into the belly of Third Hill and accessible only by a winding staircase so tight and narrow Nomvula's shoulder brushed against the outer wall every time her step faltered. But, as he had always been in the fifteen years her husband had been dead, Khaya was there for her to lean against.
Though her own aches found new agony to squeeze into her muscles, she winced at the sternness on her son's face. The furrow between his brow deepened with every runelight they ghosted past as they descended steps of baked mud. His father had been a man of the Hundred Hills in every sense of the word, serene under fire, contemplative, vigorously optimistic. Khaya wore his Sunland side now; she felt it in the heat of his ribs against her own, the steadiness of his steps where her own faltered, the scowl that twitched on his lips whenever a new ache forced her to stifle a grunt.
He would have killed the General if I had not found him. The thought sent a shiver down her spine; it came back up twice as cold. As would I have, had he not found me.
She found his hand and squeezed it in the near darkness of the stairwell. Ndoda had to face the consequences of life, he was a man in rite if not mind. Asanda was her eldest living child, and the burden of head sibling was hers to bear, though she had been moulded for the comfort and freedom of a second daughter. A mother could lean on sons who were men and elder daughters, could love them as children and as independent people, but a son who had only seen sixteen harvests, who had yet to grasp the tether of his truest self...
"You're quiet," Khaya said at last, and Nomvula was shocked to find that she had misread his worry as sternness.
"Peace does not come before silence." For the Sunspear, it does not come at all. Tossed out of the protection of Asanda's mind walls, Nomvula felt the old weight over her left shoulder, the dark hand that lay there, waiting. "And this close to her soul seed, Anathi does not like how voices bounce off the earthen walls."
Khaya let the back of his hand brush against the wall. Something in his face eased at the contact, and Nomvula suspected Anathi had shared some sliver of peace with him, though where she found it in the turbulence that had swelled under her ceilings, the Queen did not know.
When they reached the small landing at the foot of the stairwell, Nomvula turned to her son, standing between him and the black iron door. Runelight illuminated the hazel grains in his right eye, the left was swathed in shadow.
"You must wait here," she said.
"Ma..." He swallowed a protest. "Why?"
"Because your mother loves you and your Queen commands it." And if my control should slip, Anathi will need a human hand to open an alchemically-locked door so she can put me down.
Khaya's silence was as much obedience as he could muster, so Nomvula made herself content with it, and entered the holding cell where the General was kept.
**
"You've aged five years in a day," Dumani said as Nomvula closed the door behind her.
To the ears Nomvula used in the worldly plane, the bolts made no sound as they slipped closed. What part of her lived as bride to the Sunspear felt the seals locked into the iron hum in gentle warning. If she were to touch the door now, there would be less pain in pushing her hand into a hornet's nest. It was the type of door that could ward off a house spirit as powerful as Anathi, or a naked-faced Khetiwe, but the room's true purpose shone on its walls, where the dark earth of Third Hill pushed up against the bubble of glass that was the holding cell. It was only when the light of a rune carved into a regular brick of rock bounced off the glass to refract on the General's face that Nomvula realised he had spoken. She had only been in this room twice before, and both times it had held only one prisoner.
Now, twenty bachelors sat along the curved walls, their eyes hard as the thick glass that trapped them. Their shackles tinkled against the floor, metal on glass. Dumani was strapped to the black iron beam in the middle of the cell, and he was smiling. She had not been thinking of him just then, but when their eyes met, that smile faltered the smallest touch.
"You struck my daughter," Nomvula said, working to gather thoughts and words.
"Oh, but Queen, I never lifted a hand to the Princess Asanda."
"To the heart of influence, the spear of consequence." The Genera's voice had echoed off the walls, Nomvula's did not. She found enough focus to concentrate on the raised angle of his chin. "When you lead armies to battle, it is the spears, swords, and arrows of others that work, but the General who claims the victory. It is the same in defeat. This is law."
Dumani found enough give in his shackles to shrug. "It is Hundred Hills law."
"And on what land were you arrested? The man who swung the club under your influence, did he strike a Princess of the Inner Plains? The Elephant Plains? And when you are brought to trial, is it not a court of the Hundred Hills that will condemn you?"
Some light entered his eyes as he caught her deliberate choice of words. "Condemn? The club was owned by your daugher's own guardsman, the bachelor who struck her was in the throes of strong herbs, and drunk, and incited by your daughter's words, not mine. For a woman working on such flimsy evidence, you make a great assumption about my fate."
"The fist does not make assumptions about the fate of the berry in its grasp. It knows only what will happen when it stops worrying about staining its palm and decides to squeeze."
The General put sweet innocence in his smile, if only to add bitterness to his words. "Have I stained your palms, Queen?"
Light flashed across Nomvula's vision like lightning striking. In the brief flash, she saw under the General's skin, saw the strong muscles of his heart, the decade-old cracks and knits on his bones, the threads of his nerves and the still-sleeping tumour by his left temple. It would only take a touch, a word, a little cut on her skin to bring the Sunspear into the worldly plane to awaken the seed-sized ball of death there. When the light faded, she was looking just above Dumani's left eye. When she looked down at them proper, those eyes belonged to Khaya, as dark as wild honey.
"Stained is a good word," she said softly. "Now, if you're done pretending the forty other lungs in here aren't burning away what little air came through the door with me, I would like to bargain for my son's life."
**
The clay avatar that was Anathi sat halfway down the stairwell, ready to jump down if called upon, but her attention was split. Only the most immediate, physical parts of her being were focused on the Prince at the bottom of the stairwell. She smelled the salt of the sweat drying on his neck, heard his slow breathing rasp up the earthen walls, a wind-whisper over his heart's thunder. Some of that basic consciousness was rationed out elsewhere, too: the conversations while men rebuilt the kraal, grandmother milling flour under a palm tree to ease her sore heart, the leopard prince silently praying in the guesthouse.
Maybe one fifth focused on all that. Another fifth stayed in the clay ceilings of the hallways, absorbing conversation like thatch locking in the soot of a cooking fire. All of these she would mould into a vision to be massaged into the Queen's dreams that night.
Three fifths of her attention, however – for it took that much to see further than the shadow of her own hill – was trained at the foot of First Hill, where the wind slowly blew gold flakes and ash from the untended grave hidden there. The ash, when unbalanced by the man-magic in the gold, was to ward against worms and anything else that might disturb what was part grave and part prison. Gold and ash to keep things from coming in. Under the earth were heavy iron chains that had been bound around the flesh of a stillborn foetus. Iron to keep a thing from coming out.
With each passing day that the Royal Diviner was not there to scatter fresh ash and gold, a little more of that prison door was pushed aside by a gentle but relentless wind. Though most of Anathi's attention was fixed there, it was purely out of a fascination for how the scattered gold flakes burned holes in the surrounding grass like living embers. There was nothing to fear from that prison-grave peeling open. Anathi knew as well as the Queen did that it had been empty for nineteen years.
**
"The first thing you need to understand," the General said, "is that you have nothing to bargain with."
"I have your trial." Nomvula caught something out of the corner of her eye. She didn't move her head as she looked at the bachelor who had struck Asanda. The fever of deprivation was on him, and some of his fellows seemed genuinely concerned. "And I have the lives of these twenty men. If I told them I would offer freedom in exchange for one of your fingers or toes..."
"...then you would not be the self-proclaimed pacifist you try so hard to believe you are."
Peace is the summit, not the goat path. It had been an empty threat anyway, but it slipped a mote of hope into the eyes of the bachelors; they would turn on the General the moment it served their self-interest to do so. Nomvula made note of that, then made a reminder to banish them all to exile once this ordeal was over. A man who could turn on his leader was like a husband who could leave his wife for a mistress; the mistress might enjoy him a moment but the seed of betrayal was in him forever, and soon enough even her soil would do.
"I say this, General, to remind you that you came here with a mission: to secure your food supply without the threat of open battle between Ndlovu and I. Your only way to do that would be to instigate the war early and pick a winner to feed the Inner Plains."
"And while we're reminding each other of the obvious, you'll do well to note that all I do is in service of my home, not out of malice."
Nomvula's earlier conversation with Asanda cut along the edge of her concentration. Mother. Matriarch. Monster. And only one keeps the wolves at bay.
"Why does that upset you, Queen?" The heat of many breaths had put a sheen on Dumani's brow, but there was genuine curiosity on his face. "Did you think I was here for anything so petty as goading you on for my own amusement?"
Nomvula bit the inside of her cheek in an effort to dissolve her frown. "So truly, then, you fear the Sunspear?"
And there was the proof before he even spoke his lie, in the lines that eased around his face, the slump in the shoulders that only came when a ball of fear was poisoning your guts. Dumani huffed. "I fear nothing."
"All the same, the threat is real."
A deep exhale from the General. "All the same, the threat is real."
"I need proof."
"Send your alchemist child back with me and I will show her."
"No," Nomvula said, more vehemently than she had intended. A deep breath, a decision. "If you speak of the demon of my homeland, then I will go myself."
She surprised herself by believing the General, though she knew she had no right to. Here was the Sunspear, kneeling behind her shoulder, the heat of its shin warming the back of her neck, its breath like a wind rolling over her shoulders. If there was enough stillness, she could bring herself to hear the beating of its thirteen hearts; they had been so loud when she had been eight years old, but now she was forty, and could no more tell the hearts apart than the sound of blood rushing past her ears. And yet she read the first bit of sincerity all over Dumani. Whatever he had seen, it was not the Sunspear, but it was likely just as worrying.
"You cannot be spared," Dumani said. He must have read the pity in her, because he straightened against his shackles. "You are needed here to tend to your harvests and defeat Ndlovu."
Nomvula reached after a flimsy gamble. "Ndoda is my secondary war advisor."
Dumani's smile was tinged in sadness. "I will not spare him, not until I have your absolute assurance that you will deal with Ndlovu."
"I could have your trial held tomorrow at dusk, and your judgement sealed by mid-morning."
"And still my punishment would be suspended until after the duel, lest the future king of the Hundred Hills be forever seen as the boy whose life was saved by the women in his life."
Nomvula sighed. "Ndlovu is dealt with. His daughter is pledged to Ndoda."
Dumani shook his head. "All I hear is that you have given him free passage to bring his thousand soldiers onto your land."
"Soldiers you could take with you to fight this threat in the Inner Plains."
"Ndlovu would never allow that. Even you are sceptical about the existence of the Sunspear demon – and you are a Sunlander."
"I know for a fact that it is not the Sunspear, but I do believe you fear a very real threat. You forget that I supply your King because he protects my northern border from Centralists."
Dumani stared at her for a long time, despite the fact that the air was becoming uncomfortable to breathe. His eyes narrowed to slits. "You don't seem upset about the harm that befell your daughter."
"Excuse me?"
"The mere threat of harm to your oldest son was enough to drive you to anger and drastic measures. Your daughter actually suffered and you barely pay the man who struck the blow a glance. Why?"
"You beat your nephew to the edge of his sanity and yet you claim to act out of love for the land he will one day inherit. Why?"
"Sometimes, one must humble their neighbour to preserve the village," the General said.
And shed blood to spare it, a twenty-year-old Nomvula would have said. What had she told Jabulani mere days ago? What new adventures you experience will be twenty years in my past. Why was she facing them again now, without the tools to end them without personal consequence? The General would not give up his poisoning of her household until either she or Ndlovu died so the other could prosper for the sake of the Inner Plains.
It would only take a cut from Ndlovu's weapon to awaken the Sunspear within her, and then the war would be done. All that bore his name and blood would be burned with ancestral vigour. Then what? She would rule over a land that she didn't have the resources to hold – a land that would have Hundred Hills prosperity, until the tribes of the South Coast tried to push in to claim the scraps. And so the cycle would go. No. Killing Ndlovu would be like pushing a fist into an undisturbed sinkhole. It would swallow any hope of peace.
"If the Elephant Princess marries Ndoda, Ndlovu will become my son's law-father. It will be within his right to take Ndoda's place in the duel."
Now it was Dumani who looked at her with pity. "And is that the kind of power you want to give the Great Elephant? Leave the fact that he has more fighting men than you have villagers, that would be handing him a life debt payable only by a future king. But I applaud the gambit, so much so that I will tell you the truth: Ndlovu is the only man I fear in combat. All the same, it would cost you too much to beg that favour of him."
Injure him, said the Sunspear. Its voice was so clear that Nomvula had to fight to gather enough breath to push her out of a shocked stillness. One could feel sunlight against their back and think little of it, but give the sun a voice and the war god over her shoulder could have still put it to shame. A curled finger struck through a tendon, two cracked ribs – one on either side, at differing heights to kill all balance, an elbow driven through a kidney and our son will fell him with ease.
Our son, as if the Sunspear had laid claim to Ndoda as one of its own. As if he is not of the demon's blood.
"Nomvula."
She found enough focus to glare the General down for using her given name. "Dumani."
"Kill the Great Elephant." He closed his eyes and rested his head against the iron pillar. "For all Lifa's faults, he was right about one thing: It is your ancestors we want against this Sunspear, not Ndlovu's."
"If two suns were to collide, they would not cancel each other out, they would simply scorch the earth and burn every last river from the land."
"You describe it as if you've seen the devastation first hand." He looked at her through eyes hooded with exhaustion. "You are so in love with your peace, with your hate of violence, sometimes I forget that you are an offshoot of the Sunspear's demonic line. I shudder to think what you would look like with it inside you."
You have seen it already, as a fragment. Nomvula wiped beads of sweat from her nose with a heavy hand. "So there is no dissuading you?"
He stared at her, then, "With my land at stake, no. I wish your son the best of luck."
"On his behalf, I wish you luck too. He will need it more than you, but you would do well to remember that he too shares blood with the Sunspear."
When she whistled for Khaya to open the iron door, she took her time exiting, so that a little more clean air could enter the holding cell. Give a starving man nothing and he will survive a week. Give him a pig hoof and the hunger will sharpen until it cuts him up in a matter of days. It was petty revenge. The Sunspear did not smile, but it was not displeased.