Nomvula

40 - The Glass Shell

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.