Raybearer

by Jordan Ifueko

  “I didn’t mean to,” hyperventilated the other. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Typical of you Djbanti! Lazy head in the clouds, never at your post—”

  “Leave my people out of it,” another Djbanti warrior snarled, punching the Nontish man in the jaw.

  “No,” Mayazatyl rasped. “No, no. This is not the time . . .”

  “Man your stations,” Sanjeet boomed up at the fisticuffing warriors as they teetered precariously on the wall. “We’re in the middle of a battle! People are dying, you idiots; I said man your—”

  Both warriors fell two stories to the ground. Then another swarm of beasts rose from the Breach.

  The Imperial Guard warriors broke ranks. Instead of manning the cannons that might have saved us all, the panicked men and women scrambled to protect their own kinspeople. Warriors from Nyamba ignored shrieking wounded Spartians to help Nyamban courtiers. Moreyaoese warriors stepped over a bleeding child from Djabanti, ignoring him to help a woman dressed in Moreyao silks. Oluwani commoners, who had found cramped shelter behind upended chairs and tables, hissed away people from Nontes and Dhyrma seeking refuge. As the cannon fire stopped, the beasts wheeled overhead, and then dove.

  I shrieked, adrenaline coursing through my veins as talons scooped up bodies and sunk into backs. Blood soaked through festival robes. I choked back bile, then spotted a small figure crouched beneath a stone table, flower crown drooping over eyes like forlorn moons.

  Ye Eun.

  “Leave me and find shelter,” Dayo hollered at our council, and then pointed at the mask on his chest. “For Am’s sake, I can’t die, remember? Protect yourselves!”

  It was enough to break my trance. Pulling out of formation, I dove across the hellscape of bodies, beasts, and flies to join Ye Eun beneath her table. I pressed an arm around her trembling shoulders, and used the other to brandish my spear.

  “It’s all right,” I rasped, trying to shield her from view of the Underworld beasts. “Don’t worry. We’re getting out of here.”

  She did not move, limbs turned to stone as she watched a beast rip a man to pieces.

  She said, “It’s because of me, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I lied, gritting my teeth against the unfairness of it all. “Don’t think that, Ye Eun.”

  Her tear-stained, intelligent features fixed slowly on mine. “You’re right,” she whispered. “None of this is my fault. It’s yours.”

  My heart missed a beat.

  “You were supposed to stop it.” Her bottom lip trembled, then hardened. “The Redemptors believed in you. You were supposed to change everything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no such thing as heroes, is there?” The girl spoke tonelessly to herself. She watched the teeming battleground, all at once, looking four times her years: innocence lost in the space of a breath. “Outcasts only have ourselves.”

  Then she wrenched my arm off her shoulders and sprinted from beneath the table.

  “Don’t—” I grabbed for her and missed, heart pounding with dread. “No. No. Ye Eun—”

  But she had already cleared the length of the chamber, standing over the yawning blue mouth. The force of the miasma blew her hair around her face as she balled her small hands into fists. She looked back only once—a reproachful stare that shook my bones—before closing her eyes and stepping over the ledge.

  The temple went quiet. A cry echoed across the stone, and I would later realize it was mine. The abiku beasts had vanished. The debt was satiated.

  Afternoon light shone on the limestone with terrible serenity, and over tiles strewed with corpses. I crossed the chamber, moving as though through water to the Breach’s edge, deaf to the yells of my council siblings.

  My chest racked with sobs as I crumpled in a pile of petals. Ye Eun’s lily-of-the-valley crown remained at the lip of the Breach. The buds, barely opened, lay soiled in pieces.

  CHAPTER 12

  Six months passed.

  The freedom of Yorua Keep paralyzed me at first. The old fortress, located on a perennially sunny cliff at the coastal tip of Oluwan, had no trials or testmakers. No drums to make us dance from prayers to meals to lessons. No painted facades, hiding eyes that watched our every failing. Strangely, I missed those eyes. In the weeks after the disaster at Ebujo, freedom had lost its romance for my council. We crept through the airy, salt-scented halls of Yorua Keep in a whispering huddle, ghosts of our own castle. Shyly, we asked for schedules from our new servants: peasants from the village below our cliff, along with a chef and steward from the palace.

  “When should we report to dinner?” Dayo asked the head steward.

  The man blinked in confusion. “Your council . . . reports . . . to no one, Your Imperial Highness. Meals are at the times you schedule them to be.”

  And so week by week, the ghosts of Ebujo began to fade, making way for the numbing addiction of running our own household. Our council reserved mornings for prayer and meditation, and then trained on the beach, conducting drills on sand shaded by palm trees. We bathed in the sea and returned to lunches of roasted fish and palm wine. Then we scattered to our favorite crannies of the keep—always in pairs, to stave off council sickness. We studied for hours, anxious to practice the imperial roles we would someday fill.

  Ai Ling and Umansa usually took to the fortress turrets. She yelled diplomacy speeches at the clouds while he wove tapestries on his loom, charting prophetic constellations that only his sightless eyes could see. In the courtyard far below, Kameron kept a caterwauling menagerie, treating beasts for rare diseases as Mayazatyl drew diagrams for weapons and defense towers in the dirt beside him. Thérèse tended her sprawling orchard while Theo plucked chords on his zither, coaxing her plants to grow with griot stories and love poems. Emeronya and Zathulu sealed themselves in one of the keep’s dusty studies, murmuring over scrying glasses and essays by budding Imperial Academy scholars.

  I spent most of my days on a shady balcony with Kirah, fretting over my court cases, while she scowled at her theology scrolls. To my disappointment, Sanjeet was often called away, and Dayo joined him, leaving the keep to lead the Imperial Guard on its peace campaigns. When Dayo was home, he had the formidable task of learning all our disciplines. He shadowed us for hours, taking voracious notes during the day and informing his father of his progress with long, formal letters at night. I began to wonder if he ever truly slept. Then again, none of us slept well after Ebujo.

  Our favorite distraction came once a month, when peddlers were permitted in the heavily guarded keep courtyard. A glut of luxuries—embroidered wrappers, jewel-studded bangles, roasted kola nuts, and pots of flavored cream—were spread before us in a maze of stalls and blankets. The miniature market was for council members only, and musicians and tumblers entertained us as we shopped and made sizable dents in our generous imperial allowance.

  The fortress had twenty pristine bedchambers, and we used every single one for storage. Sleeping separately, after all, meant eight hours apart, and the resulting nausea of council sickness was too steep a price. Instead we slept on the floor of the keep banquet hall, rolling out pallets as we had in the Children’s Palace and snoring together in a sweaty pile.

  The banquet hall floor was a mosaic of the Kunleo sun and moons. Dayo lay in the golden center, with the rest of us scattered among the eleven pale orbs. Sheer curtains hung from floor-length, unglazed windows, screening us from the warm night air. As moonlight glowed across the tiles, we could hear the Imperial Guard warriors changing watch and the crash of the Obasi Ocean, churning on rocks hundreds of feet below.

  The lullaby was almost enough to chase away the screams of commoners speared by talons. The jeers of citizens who had refused each other shelter. The scent of Ye Eun’s lily-of-the-valley crown, marking where her birthmarked feet had leapt into the breach. Almost, but not enough.

  Some demons could not be soothed by any lullaby.

  I was fast asleep on my pallet. Thaddace routine
ly sent me cases from the capital, and today’s collection had been particularly exhausting: everything from village disputes over cattle to housemaids reporting their masters for rape. I frowned into my pallet, burying deeper into the down pillows as a hand jostled my shoulder.

  “Go’sleep, Dayo,” I mumbled. He woke me often these days, requesting dreams to help him sleep. “I’m tired.” The hand was insistent, so I grimaced and sat up.

  It wasn’t Dayo. Sanjeet knelt over me, shirtless and disheveled. “He’s gone,” he said tersely. “Don’t wake the others.”

  “What?” I whirled around. Dayo’s pallet was empty.

  “He’s sleepwalking.” Sanjeet held a finger to his lips. “If the guards hear a commotion, they’ll come running. We don’t need rumors that the crown prince is unstable. I saw where he went, but we’ll need to use your Hallow.”

  All of us suffered from night terrors, but Dayo had it worst. Once a terror took him, only one thing woke him up: removing the most grotesque of his memories. I sighed and pulled off my satin sleep scarf as Sanjeet woke Kirah. Then the three of us wove through the sleeping bodies of our council siblings, stealing out onto the banquet hall balcony. A steep whitewashed stairway led down to the garden, and far beyond it, the pale gold beach.

  I swore. “Did he really take these stairs? He could have broken his neck. Why didn’t the guards stop him?”

  “He wouldn’t have died, even with a broken neck,” Kirah pointed out. “And the guards probably don’t know he’s sleeping.” “Don’t tell them. Try to look calm.”

  We nodded at the guards at the foot of the stairs, as if midnight strolls in our underclothes were nothing out of the ordinary. The armed warriors bowed. After an awkward pause, one of them ventured, “Will Your Anointed Honors also require a shovel?”

  I blinked. “Shovel?”

  “It is what His Imperial Highness asked for, Your Anointed Honor. We did not ask what for.”

  “Oh.” Kirah cleared her throat. “No. I’m sure one shovel is sufficient for the prince’s business.” Whatever that is, she Ray-spoke dryly.

  Sanjeet addressed the guards in a smooth, low voice that made me shiver. “There is no need to mention Prince Ekundayo’s activity to anyone.”

  “Yes, Anointed General.” The warriors nodded curtly, and then one of them lifted a flaming brand from its niche on the wall. “Will you take a torch, Anointed Honors?”

  The torch’s heat murmured across my face, crackling and wicked. Every bone in my body turned to jelly. For a moment I was melting, and the flame grew louder; the blazing doors of the Children’s Palace rose in my vision, opening their mouths to devour . . .

  “Anointed Honor,” the guard began, peering at me as my breath came in shallow gasps. “Are you—”

  “She’s fine,” Sanjeet replied curtly. “As you were.” He and Kirah led me down the path, gripping my petrified hands. We passed through an arbor of hanging wisteria into the keep garden, lit on either side with more bright torches.

  “Don’t look at them,” Sanjeet advised me.

  “Still?” asked Kirah. “After almost two years?”

  I nodded mutely, staring at my bare feet. My arms prickled with goose bumps, free of the burn scars I should have received the day of my anointing. The day Dayo had almost died in the Children’s Palace.

  Burn scars marked his face, but mine were all inside. For years, the heat of fire—the sound and smell of it—had turned my knees to water. The flames mocked me, hinting at secrets, summoning demons from the pit of my memories. With practice, I had learned to light candles without trembling, but bonfires—and torches—were still out of the question.

  “It’s strange how that fire took your memories,” Kirah said with a frown. “Maybe it’s time we found a healer from the capital—”

  “I’m fine,” I said, avoiding her gaze.

  The garden gate opened to a sandy incline, tumbling down to the Obasi Ocean. At first, I thought Dayo had disappeared. Then a loc-covered head of hair popped up behind a ledge and vanished again. What was Dayo doing in a hole?

  We padded across the beach and stopped at a shallow pit, yards from the churning tide. His nightshirt damp with sweat, Dayo hurled shovelfuls of sand over his shoulder, muttering. The obsidian mask dangled precariously from his neck.

  “Dayo,” I panted. “Dayo, you’re not well. Wake up.”

  He continued digging, bloodshot eyes glassy and unfocused. After exchanging a look, Kirah and I climbed into the pit. Sanjeet ducked to avoid the arc of Dayo’s shovel, then wrestled the tool away. Dayo paused, staring blankly at his now empty hands. They were bleeding.

  My stomach knotted. “Dayo, you idiot.” I cleaned his fingers with the hem of my nightshift. “What in Am’s name are you dreaming about?”

  “Bring them back,” he mumbled. In the moonlight, the burn scars shone pale against his dark skin. Sand clung to his sweat.

  “Bring them back? Bring who?”

  “Children,” he said. “Redemptors. I’m the future emperor. I should—I should save them.”

  “This year’s Redemptors are gone, Dayo,” Kirah said softly. “Most of them are already dead, or lost.” She grasped his arms. “This has to stop. You have to accept things you can’t change. You can’t keep scaring us like—”

  “Underworld,” Dayo repeated.

  I stared, realization slowly sinking in. “You asked for a shovel so you could dig to the Underworld?”

  Sanjeet, Kirah, and I looked at each other. Then we began to laugh, a breathless, wheezing noise that sounded suspiciously close to sobbing. Our shoulders shook, and we held each other up for support. Dayo stood quietly, watching us with those vacant black eyes.

  Sanjeet hoisted him from the pit, and I pressed Dayo’s temples with both hands. Heat pulsed through my fingertips as I silenced his memories. I erased the shrill of wounded villagers, the shrieking hyenabeasts, the cries for help, the ghosts of vanished children.

  Dayo sagged in Sanjeet’s arms. Then he revived and stood, looking about dazedly. “Tar . . . Kirah. Jeet.” He took in our beach surroundings, and his face shaded with understanding. “Twelve realms, not again. I’m so sorry.”

  “Do me a favor, little brother.” Sanjeet dusted sand from Dayo’s hair and clapped him gently on the back. “Next time you’re digging to the Underworld, bring a bigger shovel. Thérèse could weed her dahlias with this one.”

  “And be more careful with this,” I added, securing the obsidian mask back around Dayo’s neck. His immunities to death were not affected by whether or not he wore the mask. Still, the thought of him damaging it made me shiver.

  “What would happen, I wonder?” Kirah asked, frowning at him. “If you lost it?”

  Dayo shrugged. “Not much. There are only two Raybearer masks, mine and Father’s. And according to legend, they always find their way back to their rightful owners.”

  When we returned to the garden, I grimaced and touched my wrist—I’d hurt myself helping Dayo from the pit. Sanjeet noticed, scanning me immediately with his Hallow.

  “You pulled a tendon,” he said. “We’ll need to stop by the medicine shed.”

  “I can fix it,” Kirah piped up.

  I shook my head. “Save your Hallow to help Dayo get back to sleep.”

  “We won’t be long,” Sanjeet put in. “Go on. We’ll catch up.”

  Dayo nodded, giving me an apologetic smile before Kirah helped him climb the banquet hall steps. Sanjeet and I stood in the garden alone.

  I raised an eyebrow. “We don’t have to do this. My wrist can wait till morning.”

  “Do you feel like sleeping right now?”

  “No.”

  “Me either.”

  Night had aged into the indigo hours before dawn. Our feet crunched on white gravel as we passed beneath the wisteria again. Sanjeet was too tall for the arbor; violet petals tumbled down his bare russet shoulders. Somewhere in the dark, an owl cooed. I let my fingers pass over the wisteria vines, and my e
ars rang with lisps and giggles: the whispered conversations of council siblings long ago. Generations of Anointed Ones had frolicked where I stood, unaware of the eavesdropping branches overhead.

  Nestled between orange trees, a wooden shed stood in the shadows, and Thérèse’s herb garden sprawled around it. When healers were unavailable from Yorua Village, Sanjeet, Kirah, and I practiced medicine here, using our Hallows to treat our guards and servants. Sanjeet would scan a patient’s body for ailments, and if the problem was physical, Kirah would attempt poultices or a healing chant. But if the problem was mental, I extracted memories and reshaped them, setting old demons to rest.

  I had never tried to heal myself. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I sensed that Ye Eun’s fate had been my fault. The day after the disaster at Ebujo, I had tried to invoke Ye Eun’s shade, burning the remains of her flower crown and sitting up all night. But she didn’t appear, not even to reprimand me, which somehow felt more damning. I dared not hope she had survived. So I allowed her reproachful stare to haunt my memories, hoping guilt would make me a better Anointed One than I had been at Ebujo.

  Sanjeet unbarred the shed door and ducked inside, lighting palm oil lamps from the garden torches. The medicine shed was long and narrow, lined with shelves of bottles and bundled herbs. I waited on a crumbling stone bench until Sanjeet emerged, armed with bandages and a stoppered vial. I winced as his calloused fingers bathed my wrist in primrose oil.

  “Keeps down swelling,” he said. His touch was clinical, precise, sensing the tendons beneath my skin as he bandaged. “You’ve hurt this hand before. You were thirteen, training in spearwork in the palace courtyard.”

  “Your Hallow showed you all that?”

  He looked sheepish. “No. I just remember when it happened.” He tied the bandage and cut the excess with a knife. “Keep it dry. Kirah can fix you up properly tomorrow.”

  “You’re good at this.” I turned my wrist, admiring his handiwork. “Do you ever wish you could be a healer full-time? Instead of training to be High Lord General?”