Raybearer

  “Beg pardon, Anointed Honor?”

  “Never mind.” From somewhere in the vast building, I heard a familiar ring of voices that filled me with longing and dread. They were here: my anointed siblings, chattering and laughing. I prayed they wouldn’t see me as I followed the chief librarian, who ushered me to a private study.

  The cramped room was lamplit and strewn with lion pelts. In the center, a mahogany kneeling desk curved around a large red seat cushion.

  “His Anointed Honor, the High Lord Judge, has been so considerate as to assist you in gathering sources,” said the librarian, gesturing to the books and papers piled on the desk. “He sends his regrets that he cannot join you. Complications regarding the Unity Edict’s enforcement have kept him . . . occupied.” The librarian bowed smartly and instructed my attendants to wait outside my study door, and fetch more dusty tomes if I needed them. Then he left me alone.

  With a sigh, I knelt behind the cold desk on the stiff tasseled cushion. The stacks of books and records had been neatly labeled. I peered at the note on the first pile: Treason laws, Enoba era to present. Books lay beneath with binding so thick, it had been fortified with leather string. The next pile was shorter, but the label made me uneasy: Disorders of the mind. Case studies: madness and acts of violence. Case studies: delusions of grandeur, belief in self as god; belief in descent from royal blood. The last stack was made entirely of scrolls and letters—and labeled with four words:

  Lady X: exile years.

  I tore into that pile, devouring the scrolls, hungry to fill in the gaps of my mother’s story. But even after hours, it felt even more piecemeal than before. The documents were varied: half-burnt letters, spy logs, pages from decades-old diaries. One sheet appeared to be a portrait of The Lady above a manifesto in Songul, the prevalent tongue of Songland. The paper was water-damaged, and my Songul was remedial, but I recognized the Arit words divine right and liberator. When my stomach gurgled for lunch, the palm oil lamp wicks now half their original length, I had more questions than when I began.

  Council sickness made my vision blur. I had not seen Sanjeet for hours, and nausea threatened to blossom into a headache. But when someone cleared their throat behind the study’s woven door, the pain between my temples mysteriously faded.

  “Come in,” I said, and my spirits rose when a round, cheery face peered around the frame.

  “Heard a rumor you were hiding in here,” Kirah announced, teetering beneath the weight of several books as she burst through the door flap. She wore a gauzy priestess’s kaftan, and looked well rested. Reuniting with Dayo and our council siblings had agreed with her. She dumped the books into a pile, dusted off her hands, and collapsed beside me at the desk. “Thought you could use some reinforcements.”

  “Thaddace gave me more than enough,” I groaned, and then noticed the titles on Kirah’s stack. Arit Imperial Policies: the Aiyetoro Era. Genealogy of the Kunleos. The Peace Age: A Treatise on the Preservation of the Oluwan Economy Under the Reign of Aiyetoro. “Oh.”

  “I heard about your First Ruling. Maybe proving The Lady’s lineage will delay the trial. I know you weren’t close with her, but . . .” Her expression grew stormy. “No one should have to kill their own mother. Am’s Story, it’s so cruel. How could the emperor . . .” She trailed off. On the theater of her face, I watched Kirah’s anger battle her allegiance to the throne. I had fought a similar battle in my head, ever since seeing the story in Melu’s pool. Kirah flushed, surprised at her own outburst. “I’m supposed to be rewriting old sacred texts,” she said, retrieving her imperial summons from her pocket. “Editing away verses that could ‘threaten empire unity.’ I know it’s wrong to question the emperor. But every time I think about changing the old songs . . . my blood wants to boil.”

  “Maybe,” I ventured, “it’s all right to be angry.”

  She pressed her lips together, and we stared at the desk in silence, sharing the bond of our uncertainty. In the bittersweet moment, I realized why council members were called siblings. Kirah and I were made of different clay, but the Children’s Palace testmakers had shaped us into similar vessels. Defending the Kunelos had been the carefully crafted goal of our existence. But in these last few months, that purpose had been stripped apart, leaving a hole with no stopper.

  “I’m sorry you’re in this mess with me,” I said, throat tight with guilt. “I’m sorry you had to see Dayo bleeding. I’m sorry you had to keep secrets from our council, and cross the empire with Woo In. But—” I squeezed her hand. “I’m so happy you’re in my story, Kirah.”

  She squeezed back. “And I’m happy you’re in mine.” We smiled at each other, and then a flash of mischief darted across her face. “You know,” she said. “Traveling with Woo In wasn’t always that bad.”

  My brow shot into my hairline. “How not that bad?”

  “Mayazatyl was right,” she observed lightly. “Kissing isn’t gross after all.”

  I gasped, then laughed, then gasped again. “Kirah.” “Like you haven’t devoured Sanjeet’s face a million times by now.” “Not a million.” My face heated. “More like . . . six.” We both dissolved into giggles, but when we caught our breath I asked, “Why Woo In?”

  “Why not? I mean, I didn’t know he had tried to kill Dayo when I kissed him.”

  “But he’s odd. And sullen. And old enough to be your . . .” I considered. “Older brother. All right, that could be worse, but still—”

  “I know nothing can happen,” she said abruptly. “He isn’t a council member, so it wouldn’t be right.” Her voice grew uncharacteristically soft. “I just . . . felt we had something in common. A hunger, I guess.”

  “He tried to burn down the Children’s Palace.”

  “You lured a man to a cliff and stabbed him with a knife.”

  “Good point,” I conceded. “When it comes to friends and lovers, you have horrible taste.”

  “Mama would be appalled,” she agreed, but she didn’t sound ashamed in the slightest.

  Every day, Kirah returned to the study, keeping me company at my desk while buried in studies of her own. Instead of rewriting sacred texts, she had tracked down every record in the Imperial Library about Songland. For hours she bent over the texts, scribbling notes and occasionally reading lines out loud.

  “Look,” she insisted one morning, showing me an etched diagram of rice fields. “Their irrigation techniques are more advanced than ours. They grow mountains of rice, but they can’t trade it with the rest of the continent. So their villages remain poor. It’s not fair, Tar. It’s just not fair.” Minutes later, she blurted, “‘I crest at dawn with the world on my arms. Welcome: My heart rises and breaks. Come and stay awhile.’ A shepherdess wrote that. A shepherdess! People in Songland compose poems for everyday life. Not just for rituals or histories, like Arits do. Tar, isn’t it amazing?”

  “I wonder if Ye Eun liked poems,” I murmured. I still dreamed of the girl often, wondering if she had survived. “Did Woo In tell you what the Underworld was like?”

  Kirah turned pink, as she always did when I brought up the prince of Songland. We hadn’t heard from him or Kathleen since they’d left Bhekina House. Kirah considered my question. “Woo In said that every step was like dying. Not pain, exactly. Just the cold, gnawing emptiness that every creature feels before its last breath. It’s something you’re only supposed to feel for a moment. Then death relieves you, and you pass into the true afterlife, Core: a paradise at the center of the earth. But Redemptors aren’t really dead . . . so that relief never comes.”

  When a living thing passed through the Breach, Kirah went on to explain, it was only a temporary form of death. If Redemptors found their way out, they could return to the land of living. The only other escape was being killed in the Underworld: their final death. In the Underworld, abiku could not cause physical harm to a living creature, unless the creature asked of its own free will. But the feeling of cold emptiness was so unbearable, most children only lasted for a
few hours before begging for the final release.

  Woo In had lasted seventeen days.

  “He focused on remembering every warm thing he’d ever felt,” Kirah whispered. “Festival bonfires. His mother’s arms. The sound of his sister’s laugher. He was only ten.” Her voice broke. “The only way out was via the map on his skin. The birthmarks glowed, even in the dark, so he was able to follow a path. But every step was torture. The spirits tried every trick they could. Illusions of twisting caves and pits full of snakes, meant to lure him off track. Voices of his loved ones who had died—his father, his grandparents—whispering from the shadows, pleading with him to join them. He lost track of time. His body ached with hunger and thirst, but he couldn’t die. He would have given up if not for Hyung. The emi-ehran found him in the Underworld, and breathed strength into him. Step by step, they made it out together. But the nightmares still plague him. It helped when I sang.” She smiled sadly. “Our families are alike, Woo In’s and mine. We both had parents who kept us in bubbles. Families who feared change, even if it could mean helping our own people. Woo In and I both grew too big for our homes. So we left, and we’ve been lost ever since. And now—” She sighed, scowling at her imperial summons. “I wonder if we left one cage, only to find ourselves trapped in a bigger one.”

  CHAPTER 28

  My own studies progressed at a glacial pace. Sources on the only empress in Kunleo history were sparse and contradictory. Like all Kunleo girls, she had been raised in obscurity, away from court. Some sources described her as fragile, weeping in secret beneath the weight of her reign, and leaning on the men around her for support. Other sources painted her as conniving, a vain and irrational shrew, caring only for her own survival. But neither of these portrayals supported the empress’s legacy. No historian, no matter how begrudging, could deny that in less than twenty years, the quiet, obscure Kunleo girl had abolished the Arit slave trade, crushed the ensuing rebellion, and brought an era of peace that had lasted for centuries.

  The daughter of Folu Kunleo had not been summoned to the palace until she was almost a woman. When it became clear that her father would produce no sons, the reluctant priests had acknowledged her as Raybearer. She arrived at court friendless and without protection, without even an official birth name. The nobility had rubbed their palms, expecting a puppet empress they could bend to their interests. When the short, thin-boned girl arrived in the throne room, the rulers of each realm had swarmed, insisting on the privilege of naming her.

  “She will be called Ireyuwa,” announced the king of Swana. “For she is half Swanian and will bring a time of great wealth for my realm.”

  “She will be called Cihuacoatl,” demanded the king of Quetzala. “Do not my people supply gold and weapons for the throne? Her power will come from us.”

  “She will be called Etheldred,” crowed the queen of Mewe. “For she spent her years of obscurity in my realm. She will not forget the land that raised her.”

  As they argued, the girl had soundlessly pushed through the crowd. She mounted the great dais, plain sandals slapping the marble, and seated herself on the gold-encrusted throne. The carved wooden staff of her father lay before her. She picked it up and beat the floor, once, with a resounding crack. The room fell silent.

  “I will be called Aiyetoro,” said the daughter of Folu. “For mine will be an era of peace at any price.”

  “I just wish we knew more about her,” I told Kirah. It was two weeks before my First Ruling. We had left the library for the Imperial Theatre Garden, where we mediated daily. “When Aiyetoro died, all her journals—her letters, the books her council wrote about her—were lost in a fire. The record keepers say it was an accident. I bet it wasn’t.”

  “Stop it,” Kirah scolded. She knelt across from me on a prayer mat, eyes serenely closed. “No conspiracy talk during meditation, remember? You’ll only get distracted.”

  I sighed, squirming on my own mat. Several yards away, Kirah’s attendants sat with mine, gossiping as they watched the stage far below. The Imperial Theatre Garden was sculpted into the side of Palace Hill. Designed by master architects from Quetzala, the garden was composed of shelves of vine-covered terraces descending steeply to a stone platform. Audiences picnicked on the terraces, and when a performer stood on triangles cut into the stage, their voices echoed throughout the garden.

  “The mantra,” Kirah coaxed.

  “I have a purpose,” I intoned reluctantly. “There is music deep inside me—”

  “A song,” she corrected.

  “A song,” I muttered. “I learned the song at birth. I draw it from within . . . Kirah, is this really helping?”

  “Better than nothing. You’ve got to find your bellysong somehow.” She hummed and crossed her legs, touching the pendant on her chest. “And if you never slow down and think, how will you ever know what your greatest good is?”

  Greatest good. Best desire. The phrases had plagued me every day since we left Melu’s pool. Hours of meditation had not made the words clearer. What greater good could I possibly have than protecting Dayo? Out of all the things I loved—all the things I had ever cared about—his life was the purest. But if protecting Dayo was my bellysong—my purpose—how could I fulfill it while The Lady still controlled me?

  I flopped onto the grass. “Why did Melu think I could do this? He’s the wise immortal one. Why doesn’t he just find his purpose and free us both?”

  Kirah laughed and gave up on her meditation. “Maybe alagbato purposes don’t work that way,” she mused. “And alagbatos aren’t immortal, not really. In Blessid Valley, we called our alagbatos juniyas. They all died thousands of years ago, when the rivers dried up and left a desert.”

  I squinted up at the cloudless sky, considering this. “Maybe Melu’s purpose is to inhabit Swana,” I murmured. “Swana’s crops were fertile once, and that stopped once The Lady enslaved him. I guess as long as he’s confined to that tiny grassland, he can’t do what he was made for.” I sighed and sat up, hugging Aiyetoro’s drum to my chest. The more I learned about Aiyetoro, the less comfortable I was with leaving the drum unattended. So I had brought the hourglass-shaped gourd to the garden, leaning it against my thigh as we meditated.

  Kirah peered at the inscription emblazoned on the instrument. “‘The truth will never die, as long griots keep beating their drums,’” she murmured. “What an odd thing to write. Can’t you take its memories?”

  “I’ve tried.” I pulled the heavy instrument onto my lap and ran my fingers across the goatskin tension cords. “Most of the memories are from spiders and beetles, and whatever else crawled across it in storage. I tried to take more of its story, but—” I shook my head. “It’s just so old. Using my Hallow, I’ve never seen further than a few decades. I’d have to go back two hundred years to reach Aiyetoro.” I didn’t mention that sometimes, when I slept with the drum beside me, I dreamed as someone else. My body belonged to a woman with long, slender fingers and a low alto voice, beating the drum as she swayed side to side.

  “Maybe it would help if you played it,” Kirah suggested.

  I shivered. “Isn’t it bad luck to play another person’s drum? Especially one belonging to a griot?”

  Kirah shrugged, biting back what I knew she was thinking. No worse luck than being born half-ehru, destined to murder a prince and forced to sentence your own mother to death. At this point, my luck could only improve.

  I slipped the drum’s beating stick from where it had been tucked beneath the tension cords, then squeezed the drum against my rib cage. “Sorry,” I told the gourd, then held my breath and struck.

  The sound was surprisingly muted. Talking drums were known for their resonance, and were used to communicate across miles. Why did this one sound flat? Then again, it was two hundred years old. It was a miracle it hadn’t fallen apart after I dragged it across Aritsar. I tapped again, using my Hallow this time, and several dozen spiders scuttled across my consciousness. I shuddered, withdrawing from the drum�
�s memory.

  “Still nothing,” I told Kirah.

  “You’ve only played one note,” she pointed out.

  “Easy for you to say,” I retorted. “You’re not risking the wrath of a malevolent griot spirit.” I made a face and squeezed the cords for different pitches. Facetiously, I began to beat out the military sequence for retreat, which could also mean the effort is going nowhere. But instead of finishing the phrase, which ended on three high notes, the drum made a low bong, followed by a throaty gun godo. I frowned, trying the phrase again. This time, all the notes came out wrong. “Tuning must be damaged,” I said.

  But as I continued to play, Kirah grew very still. My mouth went dry. No matter how many phrases I tried, the drum made the same sequence of pitches, over and over. Bong, gun, godo godo gun.

  I released the gourd, letting it tumble to the grass as a chill rushed up my spine.

  Kirah croaked, “You don’t think . . .”

  My palms were sweating. “I think it’s talking to us. It’s happened before. Aiyetoro’s drum saved me in the Bush.”

  I racked my brain for the drum phrases Mbali had taught us as children. The first bong-gun matched the pitches for eternity, which could also mean always. The last half, godo-godo-gun, sounded like the all clear, come now phrase miners used in quarries. “Always come here?” I guessed.

  Kirah shook her head. “It’s the wrong pitch for a command. And the note goes down at the end, so it’s talking about the past. Not come here . . . more like, I was here. I was inside”

  I frowned. In drum language, I could just as easily be she, or they or it. “Always . . . it . . . was inside,” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  After a pause, I took up the drum again, half-hoping our ears had been playing tricks on us. But again the drum intoned: It was always inside. It was always inside. Bong, gun, godo godo gun.

  “We should stop,” I said, glancing down at the garden stage. “We’ll distract the warriors.”