It was a long, silent walk to the bottom of Third Hill. Nomvula passed through the manse with her jaw tight and her gaze set on the grass in front of her. Those who had lived on the hill long enough to see her grow from a stoic bride to a mettlesome ruler knew better than to disturb her in those rare moments when she became "the woman from the Sunlands" again. Ma walked beside her with an equally heavy silence, if not one with fewer thorns.
Lukhanya, of course, had only started frequenting Third Hill a year ago, when Khaya had caught her eye. Nomvula saw her approach from under the bowed branches of a goat tree, her stone mill still in hand. Whatever look was twisting Nomvula's face, it made the girl stop in her tracks and turn around. Only belatedly did she realise she was still holding her father's shortspear.
She left the early morning noise of a household preparing itself, walked past the broken kraal she could barely bring herself to look at without shuddering, and passed under the threshold of the fore-gate with hardly a glance at the man standing guard.
Passing under the gate was like shedding a light cloak. She felt immediately more exposed as she passed the border of Anathi's presence. Her spirit was still an ambient thing Nomvula could feel as she helped her mother negotiate the hillside steps, but her skin felt thinner now, and the Sunspear sensed that enough to flutter open one sleepy eyelid before it curled back into a deep slumber.
The damn thing didn't want to awaken out here. All the danger was either in the holding cell under the manse, or across the Wayfarer.
Such was their slow progress that they only reached the bottom of the hill a few moment before the leading horse. Nomvula slipped her free hand into her apron's pocket as she watched Ndoda's mount eat up the grassland between them. Ma pulled a tile of chocolat out of hers.
She held it up to Nomvula's mouth. "Eat this, it'll fix your face."
"My face is fine, Ma."
"Not for greeting Qaqamba, it's not."
Nomvula pushed her mother's hand away, but she massaged her frown into a neutral line all the same. Third wife status aside, she was Queen of the Hundred Hills, but it was a title she had borrowed after the death of her husband and his first two wives. Before her claim to it, she had been a daughter to the Sunlands -- and among Daring Qaqamba's brightest and most troublesome students. An old ache teased her jaw at the sight of the second horse trotting far behind Ndoda's.
It took a bold teacher to smack a student in front of her father. It took a legendary one to threaten the Chief with similar treatment if he didn't get his daughter in line.
When her son rode close enough for Nomvula to make out his expression against the sun rising behind him, a second ache rocked her. Ndoda had always been tall and lean; he wasn't a son who could get by on looks inherited from his maternal family like Khaya, but he had his father's presence about him, always drawing the eye as a spear did when it lay among clubs. His face was a mask, but there was a black fire banked under his brow, a readiness.
Nomvula had played with doubts up until now, but that look sealed it. There wasn't a sliver of fear in her son's eyes. Dumani would kill him, if he got the chance.
"She broke him," Ma said. Her voice barely cut through the thunder of hooves. "She was meant to strip away his arrogance, not harden it."
Nomvula ran her thumb over the engravings of the fireglass spear. "It won't matter now."
Ancestors bless and curse that woman, she's doomed us all.
Ndoda reined in his black mare just as his long shadow touched Nomvula's ankles. His dismount was stiff, and the mare's flanks were lathered with a foamy sweat. Asanda would beat him senseless for overworking his horse, and risking all six of their legs with hard riding before dawn. Qaqamba was still far in the rear, walking her mount for the last two hundred paces.
Despite that bushfire in his eyes, Ndoda broke into a smile as he approached, rein in hand. "Ma, I'm back."
"I see that. Three days early."
He stopped two paces away. Some uncertainty rocked him, and only then did Nomvula register the anger in her voice. Nomvula stepped forward, kissed him, hugged him -- mostly because she had genuinely missed her son, but also because she didn't want to examine just how brittle that warrior mask of his was. If she could crack it with a reprimand, Dumani would splinter him before a spear was ever raised.
She stepped back and looked up at him. That uncertainty had not left his face, and the tension in his chest clearly mirrored hers.
"Ma," he began.
"Go wash down your horse," Nomvula said, as gently as she could manage. "Treat her to some sweet cane after her grains. Then go greet your siblings."
His jaw twitched under his scraggy half-beard, and there was suddenly very real anger in his eyes, then shame, then that uncertainty riding under it all again. When his eyes flicked up to the top of the hill, Nomvula knew. He had spent this whole journey telling himself exactly what he would feel when he came home: a hero's welcome, intimidation in the foe, a rousing victory. Not a mother's telling off.
"Go," she said, pointing over her shoulder with the shortspear.
He frowned when he looked at it. Though Ndoda wasn't a king yet, by Hundred Hills law he was entitled to his father's lands and his maternal grandfather's possessions, but the last thing Nomvula was going to do now was send her son into the manse with a fireglass spear in hand.
"It's for your own good," Ma said with a wink. "You don't want to listen to old women greeting each other, do you? Besides, it will do well to walk home on your own accord and not with us crones in tow."
It wasn't much, but Ma gave him a way out that would save some of his pride. Ndoda kissed his grandmother on the cheek as he passed. Nomvula didn't turn around in case she caught him looking back.
"I hope you have a plan, Vali," Ma said when Ndoda was well out of earshot.
"Having a plan is never the issue."
Qaqamba was only fifty paces away now, close enough for her pendant to throw around visible curves of colourful light. Nomvula heard the jangle of her anklets and forced her foot to stop bouncing.
"Execution, however..."
Such was Qaqamba's service to the Sunlands that Nomvula's father had named her as his daughter's personal bodyguard the day of her wedding. At that point, Qaqamba had been in her sixties, of respectable retirement age, though she had been wearing her hippo-hide armour on the day. When they had come to the Hundred Hills, where the grass was lush and the people just starting to get used to the idea of year-long peace, the old woman had grown bored, as tends to be the case with people of legendary ability put to menial tasks.
When Nomvula had her first warship built, Qaqamba trained its crew -- and whichever guard she deemed competent -- in melee and the art of three-man ambushes. Those crew members and guards had learned enough from her in the three years she trained them to train every subsequent crew and guard under Third Hill's rule. There were three reasons why Ndlovu's numerically superior army had never crossed the Wayfarer, and why Nomvula's Long Walkers could terrorise their borders at will: ships, longarrows, and Qaqamba's boredom.
So when she finally came to stand in front of Nomvula, there was a brief moment of awkwardness since neither woman knew who should defer to who.
Old age had shrunk her former mentor, but she still almost shared an eyeline with her horse. Nomvula had to look up at her grey eyes and her hard brow and her thin mouth. Large ears peeked out of ash-white hair that fell over her bony shoulders in thick twisted locks. Though the last decade had reduced her to sinew, Qaqamba's feet looked as hard as horn, and her hands were strong, knuckly things half-bent into fists.
Nomvula almost bowed, not out of respect but the almost forgotten anxiety that came with Qaqamba's unflinching inspection. She felt the strength in her shoulders critiqued, the child-bearing softness in her neck and thighs and arms examined, her posture and balance... Rather than step back in fear or forward in a poor show of intimidation, she stood her ground, and that earned her a grain of approval from those still grey eyes. She was not proud of how readily she took it.
Ma, whose wit had always been swifter in these situations, simply stepped up to embrace her oldest friend.
"Qaqi, isolation has made you an old beauty," Ma said as she wrapped her arms around Qaqamba's shoulders.
Qaqamba flinched at the touch, and Nomvula's heart tripped on its own beat. Sunlander combat training worked on honing instincts, and a three-year novice could accidentally break the arm of a loved one who'd simply tapped their shoulder if they didn't pay attention to their own reactions. But Ma had trust and Qaqamba control, so it was only a small surprise when the old woman's mouth twitched into a small smile.
"You're fatter than I remember," Qaqamba said. "It's good. Your daughter's been treating you well."
"I'd be fatter if her youngest didn't eat all my food."
"Well, if the middle one ate more, I could have made a fighter out of him." Qaqamba pulled away and gave Nomvula an accusitory look. "The boy fights like a Hundred Hill man taught the Sunland way by a Hundred Hill man. Why haven't you trained him yourself?"
Nomvula was about to answer that she hadn't lifted a weapon in years, then she remembered the shortspear in her hand. "These days I try to resolve conflicts without bloodshed."
Adder-quick, Qaqamba whipped an arm out and grabbed Nomvula's wrist. Nomvula's own instinct surprised her as she twisted Qaqamba's wrist sideways and pushed back against its own momentum. She managed it just before Qaqamba's fingers could lock onto the tiny bones in her wrist. In her prime, the counter would have fractured something in her assailant; now, it barely broke Qaqamba's grip, however strong it still was.
Another grain of approval, this time given over with a nod. Qaqamba parcelled out her praise in morcels. "I did the same thing to your son when I met him. He yelped, actually yelped, and then complained that I sprained his wrist. If the boy fails to defend himself with a spear--"
"--the blame will be on me," Nomvula finished irritably. "That opinion is neither new or welcome."
Only when Qaqamba laughed did Nomvula realise she had shifted her weight to dodge a cuff to the ear that never came. Some things were instincts, others, old habits.
"I did the best I could with him," Qaqamba said, stroking the lather from her mare with hand. "There was no physical training I could give him in five days that would have left him any better than when we started. In fact, it made sense to bring him back three days early to give his body time to recover from hard riding. Mentally, he's a stallion that refuses to be broken, and he thinks that makes him tough."
It clicked then. Ndoda's mask had been his own; the brittleness under it had been a healthy paranoia injected by the only person Nomvula knew who had made their name with a spear and still lived to eighty.
"He'll still lose," Qaqamba said, "but at least this way he'll be cautious enough to just get cut and avoid a killing blow. I hope."
"I'm quite tired of hope, actually."
"Isn't that what all these dreams of peace your husband fed you are built on?"
"They were built on careful planning, not hope."
"There's no difference."
Nomvula bit down on her tongue before she thought to click it. "Plans suggest a level of control, and I've forgotten what that feels like lately."
This time, both Qaqamba and Ma laughed. These beings the only two women in the world who could get away with it, Nomvula simply tightened her grip on the shortspear as her ears grew hot.
"You broke my hold well enough," Qaqamba said, "but if you truly lacked control, you would have put that spear through my neck." A hint of old pride sharpened her mentor's smile. "Or rather, you would have broken your arm trying, at least. Control isn't felt, Lang'engaveli, it is exercised."
Nomvula squared her shoulders. "Then bow, Qaqamba."
It was such a rare thing, surprising the old woman. Her hand stilled on the mare's flank. When she turned, Nomvula made a point to drop the spear in the grass, because if Qaqamba tried one of her tricks again, she didn't want it in hand. Qaqamba steepled her fingers and inclined her head, a socially acceptable bow for an elder, then she greeted Nomvula by reciting her ancestral names, all twenty-three of them. She smiled as she did them, until the got to Lang'engatshoni.
At hearing its name, the Sunspear stirred, and Nomvula felt its awakening as a physical pressure in the air. Then it yawned, because Qaqamba was more friend than threat, and slept again. Nomvula couldn't tell if Qaqamba felt it, but the old woman's smile had been scrubbed from her face.
"When I didn't sense the Sunspear in Ndoda," she said flatly, "I thought you might have passed it on to one of your other children."
"The Sunspear dies with me."
Qaqanda arched an eyebrow. "You've harboured the Sunspear all this time and you still haven't laid waste to this valley?" Her laugh was mirthless, and she had set a hand on the side of her startled mare. "Never again lie to me and say you don't have any control."
"It weakened significantly when..." Nomvula's eyes went to the foot of the distant First Hill. She sighed. "When my first daughter died, she took most of the Sunspear with her. What's left is easier to rein in now. I'd rather not talk about it."
"Of course." Was that pity in her old mentor's voice? How unnerving. "We still have a battle to prepare for."
"And I've a trial to attend," Nomvula said.
"And before that," Ma added, "Neither of us have had a proper breakfast. Qaqi, does pork still wreak havoc on your insides?"
There was Ma again, leaking what pressure she could before the barrel burst.
Qaqamba gave Ma a conspiratorial look. "Is it fried?"
"In herb butter."
"I'll survive."
Nomvula let the two of them walk up the hill together so they could catch up. That brief moment of isolation, free of house and crown obligations as well as Anathi's omnipresence leaning against the back of her neck, it would have made for a good time to reflect. Only she had made her decision as soon as she looked into Ndoda's eyes.
Too tired to weep, she spat at the grass between her feet, picked up the shortspear, and climbed back up Third Hill alone, or as alone as she could be, with a slumbering war god turning, waiting, and taunting with dreams.