"You should forgive her."

Asanda glared at Anket through the gaps between his fingers. He prodded around the bruise on her cheekbone, his sharp focus a contrast to the rheum in his eyes. The old man was no healer, but his palms were the warm, leathery texture of one who cared well for plant life, and his air of patience had always wrapped itself around Asanda like a wood-oil fragrance

She brushed his hand aside. "No."

"Why not? I know you do not think her a monster. Not truly."

"Anket--"

"I would know if you did." He went back to prodding the tender spot in the middle of the bruise. "I have a daughter too, you know."

"Your travel tablet says you only have a son to your name."

"Of blood, clever one. But I have also had students that I loved, yelled at, and feared for as though they were my own children. Some were girls and women. Therefore, I have daughters, and though my sons can climb hills, my daughters bare mountains."

He stopped speaking there because he knew her. Asanda chewed at her frown as she waited for Anket to throw back the veil between her and his point, because it would be easier to hear him make it aloud. But he didn't, and so the eternally incoming wave that was her mind carried the jagged coral of his metaphor to shore. 

Her grandmother loved to tell of all the things Asanda and her brothers had inherited from their mother; she spoke of their father's traits too, but never with the same convictions. 

To a woman of the Sunlands, a father's traits were garments, things to put on to impress guests or to hide yourself from those who only knew your clan name. But to hear Grandmama tell it, Ndoda had taken iron skin from his mother.  The trouble was Asanda had always thought of him as the most sensitive between them -- the last to bruise in battle, but in wits, the first to bleed. Khaya -- and here Asanda agreed -- had inherited Nomvula's back. He had a rod of pride running down his spine. Grandmama spoke highly of this, but Asanda knew that bones were made to bend. A proud bone shattered. 

For Asanda, Grandmama had insisted, Nomvula had set aside a blindness of sorts. When she'd first heard this, Asanda had laughed, then at her grandmother's silence, she had feared. The blindness was not to the outside world, no -- Mama always saw the world for what it was. It had a different name in the older tongues of the Suns, a word for the numbness of a body that has been in the desert heat too long but refused to collapse. 

"The ability to carry a mountain and not feel your bones breaking and your sinew tearing," Grandmama had said.

Asanda, in her Nomvulaness, had asked the clearest question in her mind. "But bones are still breaking and sinew is still tearing?"

"Hmm, but your feet walk and the mountain has not fallen from your back."

Asanda looked up at Anket. "I shouldn't have to think of my mother as a mountain to bare."

He stepped away and stretched until his back popped three times. "No, you should not. Nor should you have to spend your free time theorising about cages to contain her or milkwater elixirs to drown the war god roiling under her skin." Anket's gaze flitted to the Diviner sleeping on one of the beds by the far wall. "And no, Wayfarer clay wouldn't help to contain it. You would be safer holding a lump of firestone in a damp fist."

Ever restless in that unhurried way of his, Anket walked to the three beds against the far wall. Clasping his hands behind his back, he bowed to inspect the dressing on a sleeping Lifa's leg.

Asanda thought to get up off her desk, then thought better of it. If she stood, she'd either want to go to her garden or her bed, and she would find no rest in either, just more time wasted while the Sunspear in her mother stirred and a madman waited to kill her brother.

"Do you think Khaya will make a good king?" Anket asked.

Now Asanda was glad she had not stood, because she would have slapped the old man and felt no guilt. 

"Dumani will not kill Ndoda."

"Of course he will. He has the capacity and soon he will have the opportunity."

"Qaqanda--"

"--is the greatest spear-and-club fighter the south has ever produced, but she is old, and she is only training your brother, and for a fortnight at that." Anket straightened. "If anything, that will only fill Ndoda with overconfidence. It is also a two days ride to Qaqanda's hill, and two days back. So Ndoda will spend four days in that fortnight on horseback, sore and tired, and with nothing to do but think on his impending bout. So the truth is he will either be overconfident or frightened. But your brother has a king's ambition. I wouldn't put it past him to be both at the same time."

Asanda's glare was wasted on Anket's back. He was too preoccupied with reappling Wayfarer clay on a faded patch of skin on the Diviner's cheek. But there was a bellows in Asanda's lungs that made her chest swell, and every bead of sweat on her skin was in inverted thorn. When had she come to stand? 

"Ndoda was sent away to buy your mother time to avoid a duel altogether," Anket continued as he massaged the clay with the knuckle of his forefinger. "She tried to do it herself, and failed. She begged after your help and got halfway to success, then you failed her by not being blind. Rather than bear your mountain, you shaved your head out of spite and severed your bridge to your ancestors, whom your mother has always relied on more than you."

Asanda didn't realise how cold the skin over her bruise was until a hot tear cut across it.

Anket's voice was level, rational. "No, Clever One, I do not know if Khaya will make a good king or not. But I do know that your weakness thrust the crown into his lap, with Ndoda's severed head still wearing it."

"Get out."

"I knocked but you didn't answer. I can come back later but--"

Asanda's hand closed around something hard. "I said get out."

"--you don't look too well," Khaya said.

The sweat on her neck cooled and her chest shrunk to the size of a fist. Asanda blinked and found herself bent over the Royal Diviner, a tub of Wayfarer clay trembling in her white-tipped fingers. There was a single tear on the Diviner's lip, or where her lip would have been if the light could touch her skin. It stood there, a pearl on a dark face. Asanda wiped the wet streak running along the side of her nose and turned.

Khaya was only half a head taller than her, but he was wide, thick where his shoulder joined his chest and a little at his gut. His smile was the frailest thing about him, curled just enough to disguise his agitation from a stranger.

Grateful for that very small courtest, Asanda sniffed and squared her shoulders. "Can I help you?"

Shadowless ones, her voice. It was hoarse enough to make her wince, and it completely shattered any polite ignorance Khaya had mustered up. He closed the space between them in two steps and cupped her shoulders. Then he said something only a younger brother would be stupid enough to.

"What did Athi do?"

She smacked his gut half-heartedly, but he only pulled her into a tight embrace.

"Is it your hair? Tell me if he doesn't like it, I'll twist him like a new braid."

"You an imbecile," she said into his shoulder. 

He was silent for a long while, and Asanda was happy enough to lean into his warmth and think.

"Have you ever wondered what the Diviner looks like?" he said after a while. "Do you know?"

"Don't."

"Just a quick smear."

She pulled away a moment before he was ready to let go. "What do you want, Khaya?"

He shrugged his heavy shoulders and put his hands behind his back so he could massage the haft of his shortspear. Worry, then, boiling over the brim.

"Ma won't let me stand in Ndoda's place for the duel," he said. "I need you to change her mind."

"I won't." Khaya almost as good a fighter as Ndoda, and if Dumani kills him, at least the first-in-line Prince will be spared. Asanda bent over and dry-heaved at the thought. "I won't, Khaya."

She motioned him away when he stepped closer, and licked the taste of iron off the insides of her cheeks. She heard him sit down on the spare bed in the middle, the one their mother's body had been chained up on when... No. Not yet.

"If you want to save Ndoda, help me get to the Elephant Plains. I need to speak with Dumani."

When Khaya crossed his arms, the muscle and suet in his chest bunched, but all the tension was in the chord running down the side of his neck. "Why?"

Bare your mountain. "Ma's orders. We're to secretly negotiate the marriage between Jabulani and Ndlovu's daughter."

"Why would Ma--"

"Think."

He did, so he understood. That only made him squirm on the bed. "But even if Ma negotiates a peace with Ndlovu then chains Dumani's lot to that peace through marriage, she still risks uniting her enemies against her."

There were unsaid words there. Ma would be safer wedding herself to Ndlovu. But the Hundred Hills would revolt at the idea of calling a kingslayer King. It would have been shrewder to wed Khaya to Ndlovu's daughter. And again run the risk of tying the Elephant ancestors to the Hundred Hills thrown. Easiest of all would have been to chain Asanda to Ndlovu and have her live out the rest of her days far away in the Elephant Plains. But that would...

It would...

It's the perfect solution. So why hasn't she taken it? It would just be another mountain.

Yes, perfect. Swapping herself for Jabulani stoked more fires than it put out, and put the lion's share of power in the hands of a man who had killed her father. It relied entirely on that man's word. It left the Hundred Hills -- it left her mother's queenship -- as vulnerable as a face under a descending club. The only thing it truly protected...

"...is you," said Anket over her shoulder.

"Asi," said Khaya, "this whole scheme relies on Ndlo--" It took ten heartbeats for the tightness to leave Khaya's throat; when it did, he looked deflated. "On that bastard's word. We have no way to know he will keep his word. And there is no telling what chaos Dumani will cause the moment he's let out of the holding cell."

 "There's one way." 

Will you trust me, advisor? Mama had asked. 

"What, we give Jabulani over to Ndlovu as a hostage?"

Asanda stared down at the Wayfarer clay in her hand. It was a dark hole in the middle of her palm. "Yes, that -- and we steal away his daughter without him knowing."