"I'll tell you this," Qaqamba said, turning half a grapefruit inside out. A breeze carried the smell of dew from the lawn onto the patio, and her nose crinkled. "Your grandmother hated me."
Nomvula chuckled. "Greatma didn't know how to hate."
"Hate is the wrong word." Ma scraped gristle off a thigh bone with her penknife. "She mistrusted you. Papa wasn't the healthiest man, but if he missed a training session with you he would be in a mood all day."
"Lucky him," Nomvula said. "When I missed a session, I was beaten."
Qaqamba sucked on the pink flesh of the grapefruit, the juices dripping onto her otherwise empty plate. "And how often did you miss a session?"
"Twice. The first time I slept in, then you whipped me so hard I had to miss the next one."
"And now you're the earliest riser I know. But not the best student."
Nomvula ticked off her fingers. "In the time I trained under you, I disarmed you twice, cut you three times, and knocked you off your feet once. Who holds a better record than that?"
"Six... let's call them victories, over eight years. Your skill was never in doubt, Nomvula, or your ironskin." Qaqamba tapped her temple with a gnarled finger. "But this got you every time."
Because she had promised herself a pleasant morning, Nomvula kept her good humour. "I'd hardly call myself hot-headed."
"Not hot-headed," Ma said. "Stubborn."
"Too stubborn to give ground in a fight," Qaqamba said, "even when it meant throwing me off balance. Your boy's like that too. Just look where his stubbornness got us."
"I told Ndoda he should have been smarter with how he got his revenge on Lifa. Unless you think I should have advised him to forgive the whole matter."
Qaqamba made a face of pure disgust. "Adders don't forgive and briars don't let go. But children, hmm. Children follow lifetime examples, not advice in hindsight."
Nomvula nibbled on a thick slice of bread fried in butter. Someone who had only just met her old mentor might have been offended, but she had not gotten to her place in life without the naked words of a few people who had lived longer than her. But where exactly was she? A ruler of land? She had been born to a chief, although one who ruled a patch even smaller than the Hundred Hills, and not even a tenth as rich. A peacemaker? Dumani had shown her how brittle that cup was.
The lessons she had taken from the Sunlands had no place in a pacifist's heart, or so that seedling of doubt told her. Those same lessons had made her children resilient, resourceful, and committed to their passions. But where were they now? Nomvula swallowed and flicked the rest of her toast back onto her plate.
"Relax," Ma said. "The sun hasn't even cleared the horizon yet. So long as Ndoda's gotten them across the Wayfarer by end of dawn, they'll be safe."
"I'm not worried about them." Ndlovu's true strength is in his spirit, and nothing corrodes a spirit like a broken oath. "Mostly."
"Dumani?"
Nomvula nodded.
"So what if he's due to be released today?" Qaqamba said. "He's been stewing in the holding cell for days, half-starved and dehydrated. Feed him a big meal full of salt and fat and he'll be so sick Ndoda will knock him over with a click of his tongue."
"The point of the Elephant Plains mission was to avoid all conflict," Ma said.
"For today."
Both elder women turned to Nomvula. She felt their gazes on her cheek, her own was on the misted river.
"Today, all things might go well. But what happens when Dumani goes home? His brother won't want war, not with his chief supplier of grain and timber, but Dumani lives in that house. He will have time and the King's ear."
Ma made a disapproving noise. "With Jabu among the Elephants, no one in the Inner Plains will want war, not while we hold Ndlovu's daughter. Your plan was to twist our three lands into a stalemate. If your children return, you will have succeeded."
"Complications," Qaqamba said. "That's what this pacifism nonsense gets you."
"No." Nomvula tapped her knuckle on the table. "Even in the Sunlands, peace was treasured."
"You're lecturing on lands that built me, child. In the Sunlands, we dropped sharks in enemy lakes to eat up all the trout. We poisoned grain furrows and stuffed famine ticks into every kraal. Then we waited, then we killed. The kind of peace you want, Nomvula, it only comes when it costs too much to go to war."
"It would cost the Inner Plainers six-tenths of their oats and barley. To burn us is to burn their granary."
"You don't threaten someone by taking away a loaf of bread. This--" Qaqamba held up Nomvula's toast, then flung it onto the lawn "--is worth less than the hour it took to bake it."
"That sounds like something a woman possessed of the Sunspear would say," Nomvula said, her smile twitching closer to a frown.
"Should say," Qaqamba corrected.She pointed at Nomvula's liver, then licked the juice from that finger. "That thing that sleeps inside you is not a warmaker. It's a god of peace."
"Now you're lecturing on the thing that built me," Nomvula said, the morning's pleasantness corroded.
"It built twenty generations before you. What makes you different?"
I am the last generation. She sighed. "How's your farm, old woman?"
Qaqamba shrugged her bony shoulders. "Tough to tend. I'll tell you, if your boy hadn't been pressed for time, I'd have made him pick my gourd harvest for me."
"How good was the yield?" Ma asked, doing her bit to bury the topic of the Sunspear.
"Lost some early. Didn't have enough onions to deter the worst of the seed-eaters, but those that made it through came out fat and hard."
"I'll send some pepper seedlings with you when you go home," Nomvula said. "A row planted every four does the trick."
Half an hour passed like that. As the full pitcher of amber cider dropped to half, then a third, then a quarter, the sun rose in similar fractions, until it cleared the east and seared its white glare into Nomvula's eyes.
"Come," she said, accepting a tile of mint chocolat from her mother. "Let's go set the dogs free."
Qaqamba turned down her own tile. "The elders don't have to release him for another hour. Let him stew."
"I'd rather deny him the ceremony."
They walked through the manse together, Ma and Qaqamba at the front, Nomvula trailing three steps behind. She had her hands behind her back, head bowed so she could soak in morning noises. Water bubbled between smooth pebbles as a young boy crouched by the quad pond, feeding fish. A pair of gardeners weeded out the flower beds ruthlessly, lending the snip of scissors and the unmistakable sound of roots being ripped out the earth to the building rabble. On the other side of the corridor wall, an axe cracked through a log, though not all the way through. A splintering sound, then a grunt and a tear. Two thunks against the ground. There we go.
Those they passed greeted Ma and gave Qaqamba a wide birth. Nomvula would have been content to not invite pleasantries with eye contact, but she had promised herself a good morning, so she took her time and greeted anyone who passed by name. By the time they cleared the quad, she had a dull throb at the base of her skull. When she looked back, the boy by the pond was massaging his neck.
Anathi met them at the top of the stairs that led down to the holding cells, a shadow given depth and weight. She was a stark outline against the lesser darkness of the hallway and the light refracting off the fireglass spear in her hand didn't touch her leg. Her face twitched to Ma in acknowledgement, then Qaqamba.
My last born. Nomvula touched her iron-hard shoulder as they descended. In all but blood.
By the time they reached the bottom of the winding stairs, Anathi was waiting for them by the glass door. The ceiling above them was stripped of its clay. The runelights along the wall were fading, casting the cramped space in a paper-skin yellow light.
"With her around, why do you need guards?" Qaqamba asked.
Because she's not a guard. "You can let the other men out," Nomvula said to Anathi. "Leave Dumani inside for now."
Anathi handed Nomvula the spear, opened the door, and entered. There was silence at first, overshadowed only by the clink of iron shackles hitting the glass floor. One of the old men must have seen Anathi in the near darkness, because there was screaming then. Shortly after, the first of them burst out the door, sprinting past Nomvula and stumbling up the stairs. The rest followed in similar fashion. When Anathi came to stand outside the door again, Nomvula entered, and the old women followed.
Dumani was still bound to the central pillar, his chin planted on his chest, heavy shoulders heaving as he sucked in fresh air for the first time in days.
"All I can see is your face and pale silk." He laughed, then winced, then coughed. "Are you Death, come to kiss me in the dark?"
Nomvula walked to his side, and tried to eye his chains in the dark.
"Don't murder me here." Dumani leaned his head against her thigh and tried to laugh again. "Even cattle are slaughtered in the light, Queen, or else the meat tastes of panic."
But for a twitch of her eyelids, Nomvula was as still as Anathi had been.
"Are those regrets?" Dumani asked. "Have I displeased you, Queen?"
She dropped, and put all her weight on the knee she drove into his thigh. Dumani screamed into her shoulder, his massive arms taut as he twisted against his bindings. Nomvula spotted the chains behind the centre beam, and roughly where his hands were. She touched the Sunspear, barely a brush against its shadowed form, and drove the point of the spear through the shackles. The iron shattered as the speartip buried itself in the wooden beam. When she ripped it out, part of the beam splintered.
Dumani's voice was a cold wheeze, but it was warming. "Oh, that doesn't frighten me. I've seen worse than the Sunsp--"
Nomvula put three fingers in his mouth and dragged him to his feet by his teeth. "Walk."
He limped lightly on the leg she had struck, but kept his head tall as he marched beyond Ma and Qaqamba.
"Queen Mother," he said as he passed. "General."
Both had only cold eyes for him.
"Not very pacifist of you," Qaqamba said as Nomvula passed her.
"About time," Ma added.
Nomvula passed the threshold of the glass door and turned to face the two women still inside. "I'll be a pacifist tomorrow."
Ma's face slackened, but Qaqamba was already stumbling towards the door. Anathi shut and locked it before she got there.
"What's this?" Dumani asked, bruised eyes humourless in the fading runelight.
Nomvula shoved his hip, forcing him to march upstairs. Again, Anathi was waiting at the landing. Dumani shuddered when he saw her, and it took him a moment to accept the bronze-tipped spear and hide shield she held out for him. Nomvula led him back to the patio. No one greeted them. No one even cast their eyes up.
The dull throb in her skull became a second pulse.
By the time Nomvula's bare feet touched the rune-warmed tiles of the patio, the sun was high enough to burn away the mist and make the Wayfarer glitter. Nomvula passed the table, which now only had half a grapefruit and a knoll of butter on either side of a near-empty pitcher of cider on it. She dropped down to the lawn and picked up the slice of toast Qaqamba had thrown down. The ants had not gotten to it yet, not that it mattered.
She threw it at Dumani, and it hit him in the stomach.
"Eat," she commanded. "Then drink."
There was shouting in the quad, so loud Nomvula could hear it from here. Inner Plainers. Two of Dumani's men screaming commands.
"What's all this?" he asked. Now in the sunlight, she could see that, though his frame hadn't withered, his lips were flaked skin and the circles around his eyes were black disks. "Nomvula what are you doing?"
"Law in the Sunlands is this: a man's blood debt passes to the next fittest kin," she said, turning her back to him so she could stare at the river. "The same is true for women. Ndoda is not here to fight you, so by law that debt would fall to his father, who is dead. With that, it would fall to Khaya. If not him, an uncle. If not an uncle, the fittest woman in the family." Rainbow light whorled in the glass spearhead. "My sons are not here and my husband died an only child. So eat, General, then call your men to witness."
"Witness what? Speak sense, woman."
"Your death or mine."