Ndlovu's gaze made water of Asanda's spine.
"Don't think me cruel," he said, rubbing his bloodshot eyes as he leaned his head against the door. "I could have locked you away the moment you came into my home, but then I wouldn't be able to see what resourcefulness Nomvula had stuffed into the two of you."
The bronze point of Khaya's spear winked as his fist tightened. "By all means, Chief, stand up and--"
"Khaya, don't." Asanda put a hand on his arm. "A fight is the last thing we need."
"If it's a ruckus you're worried about, don't be," Ndlovu said. "Nothing would make me happier than letting you both go. You drug my daughter, desecrate guestrite, and plot kidnapping, yet I know no better punishment than letting you go home before the sun rises today."
Asanda stepped forward, keeping Khaya at her back. "Great Elephant, if you don't plan to hold us, then let us go."
"The trouble with that, Elder Child, is that I promised your mother I wouldn't."
"Keep her name out of your mouth," Khaya said.
"Keep her spirit out of yours. You who is the youngest and yet most full of her violence. More than your fighting brother, more than your twin-spirited sister."
Khaya stepped right and Asanda moved to block him a moment before he ducked left. She caught his wrist as he walked past, but it was like grabbing stone. He broke her grip gently, but he didn't break stride.
"Idiot," she said, clawing at his shoulder. "We need to go. Whatever Ma is planning, we need to get back before she follows through."
"Let him come," Ndlovu said. His eyes were dark stones rimmed by candlelight. "Let him mourn as men must, or he will stay a boy forever."
The shift in Khaya's spirit was day to night. His anger struck Asanda like ice water on burnt skin, so sharp the ancestral plane briefly melted into the physical one. She was quick in regaining her focus, but by then, Khaya was halfway across the room, his club poised to bat away anything in its path, his spear arm coiled to skewer. He was one moment strength, the next speed and balance, the next guttural, pained violence.
Ndlovu was all those things at once.
The Chief lurched forward onto the balls of his feet and pushed off with thighs like iron chords. He ducked under a swinging club and put shoulder to belly so hard Khaya's feet left the ground. Ndlovu rose with him, hooking one leg with an arm, and pinning the spear with the other. Asanda watched in horror as he held her brother in mid-air with all the effort of an elephant lifting a boar before launching him halfway across the room.
Too balanced for his own good, Khaya landed on his feet and tried to rush again. Having disarmed it through some deft trick, Ndlovu still had the spear under his arm. He dropped it as his eyes followed the club. Khaya changed direction at the last minute, and the Chief leaned into the feint. Khaya sidestepped again, shifting his considerable weight with powerful legs, and swung his club in a vicious flat arc aimed at Ndlovu's exposed ribs.
Ndlovu twisted at the last moment and struck Khaya's grip with his fist. There was the wet pop of cartilage, followed by the thud of the club hitting the floor, then Khaya's delayed scream pushing through gritted teeth as he stumbled out of Ndlovu's reach. The Chief watched him retreat with little interest.
"Striking an unarmed man is a disgrace to your father," Ndlovu said. "Failing to kill one is a disgrace to your mother."
Khaya stepped forward again but this time Asanda was quick enough to get in his way. He made to push her aside before she grabbed his hand and put her thumbs over his dislocated fingers.
"Use your head or I'll make the stupidity hurt," she said.
The tears in his eyes had nothing to do with pain. When his shoulders slumped, Asanda let go of his hand and pressed her own to his heaving chest.
"You're smart on your feet, boy, and hard." Ndlovu kicked the club, sending it sliding to Khaya's feet. "But it'll be a few years before you're strong enough to hurt anything worth fighting."
"Enough," Asanda said, wheeling on Ndlovu. "Release us. Please."
When Ndlovu knelt to pick up Khaya's spear, his knees popped, drawing a grunt out of him. He rose and tossed it out the closest window.
"I can't," he said. "Not until noon, at least. That was the promise I made your mother two nights ago."
Two nights... The warmth of kitchen ovens seeped into Asanda's skin, the fragrance of olive oil filled her nose, and the simple comfort of watching her mother kneading dough in the early hours filled her vision in a flash. When it faded, the afterimage of Ma's tight smile was layered over Ndlovu's pitying eyes.
"I am many things you do not respect in the Hundred Hills," he said, "but I do not break oaths."
His words robbed her of whatever had kept her going these last few hours. Asanda fought against the fatigue that weighed down her mind and made her back throb. She looked for... something. Anger. Desperation. In the end, she fell back on a sigh and simple logic.
"You know my mother, Great Chief."
Ndlovu's brow twitched.
"Better than any of us do," she continued.
"As well as I wish you did," Ndlovu said.
"Then you know that, whatever she's plotting, you'll be the first to hate it."
"Of course I will."
"Then why won't you let us go prevent it?"
Ndlovu massaged two of his fingers which had started to swell. He sighed, even deeper than she had. "Because if she goes through with it, I won't be the last."
"To shadowless graves with all of that," Ndoda said, climbing through the far window. He had a black hide shield in one hand, a black club in the other. "Khaya, pop your fingers back in and pick up your club. We're going home."
"The crowned prince graces my home," Ndlovu said. "Nomvula said you'd be the trickiest one to handle."
Ndoda stepped into the middle of the room. "We're leaving, Chief."
"The door's right behind me. If you're half the man you came from, you're welcome to it."
Ndoda bashed with his shield but Ndlovu caught it in two massive hands, a moment before Ndoda whipped his spear into the Chief's ankle with a thunderous crack. Ndlovu had the wherewithal to yank the shield away as he stumbled back. Ndoda let him have it and struck again, this time at the outside of the knee. Off balance, the best Ndlovu could to was stumble out of range as a third strike grazed the inside of the same knee. Ndoda had barely moved from where he'd started.
"That's Qaqamba's wickedness." Ndlovu was chuckling as he armed himself with the spear. "Try that again and let me show you mine."
Ndoda turned to Asanda. "Grab the Princess and go. We'll hold him off."
"You won't," Asanda said. "And even if you did, he'll just call the guards."
"Athi can lead you through the guard points."
"Not while we're carrying someone," Khaya said. In the brief chaos of Ndoda's arrival, he had followed his brother's instructions and fixed his fingers, though they were too swollen to bend. He had his club in his left hand. "Besides, I'm not done mourning."
"You should go anyway, Asi. If anyone needs to be back in the Hundred Hills right now, it's the brains of the family."
"No," she said. "It's the family. End of discussion."
Khaya stared at his swollen fingers. "Hope you have a plan."
"I'll have one in a moment, if you can distract him that long."
Her brothers stared at her. Khaya's shoulders slumped and Ndoda's jaw twitched, but they both turned to face Ndlovu.
"Chief, I want my shield back," Ndoda said, "but whatever you do, don't hand it to me. I want to know that I took it from you."
Ndlovu sunk into a defensive crouch, shield in front, free hand as dangerous as any weapon. "Make your father proud, boys."
They engaged, which was all Asanda could say for it. Her mind had already honed in on Buhle's tea table. The world around her blurred to swirls of ochre and flickering lights, and the only sounds over her heartbeat were the cracks of clubs and feet sliding across a mud-packed floor.
Asanda grabbed her travel bag and pulled out a palm-sized tile of citruswood. The jade pin was still on the table. She hovered the back of her fingers over it again. No, no. There. The tuning rhythm. She flicked the pin, transmuting it back into regular pig iron, now with tiny craters where there had once been rust. With pin in one hand and tile in the other, Asanda set about carving her most ambitious rune yet.
Its construction broke rules she had learned in her most basic redirection lessons. It followed some of the most niche and impractical ones, and contradicted two chapters of bonding law from a tome in her mother's study. By the time Asanda got to the failsafes, she was inventing new rules altogether. Part of her mind stored her new discoveries for later, but her thoughts were moving too fast to absorb anything properly, and her fingers were close to trembling with the effort of keeping up without making mistakes. And yet... No respectable alchemist tolerated the word magic – it was a dismissal of the craft – but what she worked here was as close she'd ever come to anything mythical. And she didn't even have time to savour it.
"Whatever you're whipping up better be worth it." Khaya's voice pushed through the haze of the world, bringing Asanda back into it.
He was leaning hard on the back of Buhle's chair, the blood in his mouth dripping onto his swollen fingers. He pushed himself back into the haze. Asanda carved three deep groves for the cypher points, and when she was done, she held what could only be described as an abomination of theoretical alchemy, warped universal laws and, well, hedge magic. Now came the difficult part.
She turned her attention inward and focused on the fear that had sat in her chest these last few days. She tore off that layer of terror as a buzzard tore carrion from bone. What swirled under the terror was rage, thick as magma. She let it slough off. Beneath it was helplessness, smooth and polished and cold. It cracked like an eggshell under the weight of her thinking mind. Each shard fell into darkness, and what was left was a seed no larger than a grain of sand but denser than diamond. It had no name her thinking mind could tag it with. The closest description was safety-and-love-bound-to-doom, but that was as inefficient as calling lightning light-bound-to-noise. All the same, it was what she was looking for.
Ignoring the dark scarab hovering above her consciousness, Asanda broke that grain of sand wide open, and nearly died for it.
There was a reason mind and body worked to hide such unstable essence under layers of more digestible emotion. With her heart rate doubling, tripling, and sweat beading across her back, Asanda pricked her thumb and smeared her blood across the three cypher points. The wood absorbed it greedily. The rune hummed then cracked three-quarters of the way through, already overloaded. Like a clam coating an irritant, her mind set about layering that grain of sand until it went from love-and-doom to something merely to be feared or angry at. The dark scarab hummed as Asanda dragged herself back into the physical world.
Her body was slumped over on the table, Buhle's carvings digging into her cheek. The damp fabric of her shirt clung to her back, and every pulse of her heart seemed to cleave her head open. But there was work to be done.
Asanda pushed herself off the table, the corners of the tile hard inside her fist. She had enough of her wits left to pick up the steaming kettle with the flute still inside it. The world was a mist except for the patch of clarity in front of her feet and the sparks that flared when Ndoda threw out his ancestral names as a challenge.
"Who are you, coward?" her brother said, briefly materialising in the mist, his left eye shut under a stream of blood. "Let the Grainlords and the Spears know who their son beats down on today!"
A giant hand grabbed his throat and pulled him back into the mist, leaving only the echo of Ndoda's laughter. Asanda stumbled towards the sound of flesh hitting stone and club hitting shield. Khaya appeared in that patch of clarity, Ndlovu's leg hooked under his arm as he tried desperately to protect his head from the massive fist overhead. Each hammer blow made a bone-rattled thud. Ndoda appeared again, keeping Ndlovu off balance by focusing his blows on the Chief's standing leg. Ndlovu was still deft enough to block most of them.
But for all the valiance of her brothers, Ndlovu was far from felled. He yanked his leg violently, and each fist to the back of Khaya's neck weakened the grip, until Khaya's arms were weak enough for sweat and force to take over. Ndlovu slipped his grip, planted his foot, then drove the other through Khaya's chest with the sound of wet clay dropped on stone.
"Again," Asanda said, stumbling past Khaya as he tried to draw breath. "Hold him down."
"Great," Khaya wheezed.
Asanda took three steps forward, then her brother was sprinting past her again. He snaked around Ndlovu and grabbed his leg again, careful to keep himself behind the Chief this time. Ndoda almost took advantage of this, but he misread where Ndlovu's attention would go. A meaty hand caught his club and drew him in before he could think to let it go. Somehow keeping himself upright, Ndlovu wrapped his elephant trunk of an arm around Ndoda's neck and lifted him off the ground.
"No." Asanda's voice was a shade of its normal tones. She was vaguely aware of her tears, but she kept dragging herself forward. "No."
The muscles in Ndlovu's arm bunched as he squeezed and crushed. She would not make it in time. The kettle in her hand was too heavy and her head hurt too much. The tile in her other hand stabbed at that fresh layer of terror over her heart, daring her to flee, to hide, to coil up and stop breathing. It went against everything she knew in that moment to take an extra step, but she did.
And her will was rewarded.
There was a shuffling sound to her left, then Athi appeared through the mist, quick as a hunting dog. He put his shoulder into the back of Ndlovu's standing leg and hooked his ankle, sending the Chief crashing down onto his knee with a sharp crack. He barely managed to howl in pain before Ndoda took advantage of a loosened grip. He drove the back of his head into Ndlovu's mouth before rolling over to pin down the arm that almost crushed the life out of him. Athi pinned down the other arm. Khaya, barely holding his own weight, picked up the Chief's ankles and held on for dear life.
So the last step was left to Asanda, and by the time she arrived, she had just enough energy to collapse on Ndlovu's massive chest. She pressed the rune tile over his liver and poured scalding water over it to open up the wood. She watched her fingers redden and her nails turn translucent under the water, and only managed to blink at the pain that would come later. She found herself staring into Ndlovu's eyes, but without the strength to read what stared back.
With the boiling water warping the ether-soaked citruswood, with the iron rune cracking again, and with the essence of Asanda's very spirit swelling in the tile, she only had to press a little of her fear into it before it shattered under her palm, pushing half its essence back into her, and pushing half into Ndlovu.
One's own emotion was easy to keep in proportion, but when it was a foreign element in another's body, the mind saw the threat as tenfold. So by the time her fear, her anger, her loneliness, her love settled into Ndlovu, she was perhaps the only one in the room not surprised to see him weeping. His great chest heaved in shudders.
"I understand you," he said, laughing through his welling tears. "I understand you."
Overwhelmed, the Chief's mind retreated to sleep, and his limbs went slack as his chest steadily rose and fell.
The mist receded, first to Ndoda, who was massaging his neck, then to Khaya, who had fallen to his knees, hunched over as he kept rolling his shoulder and touching his breastbone.
Strong, slender hands helped Asanda to her feet. Athi. She blinked away the last of the haze that came when the ancestral and physical planes blended together. After the chaos of diving into herself and walking between two worlds, the relative calm of simply being in this room was deafening. The cicadas outside were too far away, the skin beneath Athi's touch too numb, her tongue too heavy in her mouth.
Her senses were just starting to settle when Ndoda ripped his shield out of Ndlovu's grip.
"You look worse than the two of them put together," Athi said, throwing her arm across his shoulders. "Was the Elephant Princess that boring?"
Asanda coughed a laugh, and was surprised that her throat didn't hurt. "We need to go."
Ndoda grabbed the scruff of Khaya's shawl and dragged his younger brother to his feet. "Athi, clear the route ahead, we'll bring the Princess."
"All things considered, big man, I think I'm the only one strong enough to carry a body right now."
"You might have spared us by not leaving your entrance so late," Khaya said. He shrugged Ndoda's hand off, earning a nod of approval from his older brother.
"A Longwalker holds stealth until surprise means victory," Ndoda said. "Fine." He coughed, then winced. "I'll clear the path and you follow with Asanda and Khaya."
"The three of you should go," Athi said, somehow finding a smile. "There's strength in numbers, but these two will only slow me down."
"And whatever happens from this point on," Asanda said, "it happens with the three of us sticking together."
Ndoda's jaw twitched. "Fine."
"Pity there isn't time to wave goodbye to Jabu," Khaya said, gingerly leaning out the window Ndlovu had tossed his spear out of. There were bruises already forming across his left shoulder blade.
Athi helped Asanda transition onto Ndoda's shoulders.
"I'd say there's only two hours before dawn," Athi said. "I'd be impressed if you crossed the Wayfarer by first light."
Asanda found that she had recovered enough to be the one supporting Ndoda instead of the other way around. Her injuries were hardly physical.
She slotted the rune fragments in her hand into her pocket. "It'd hardly be the biggest achievement of the night."