Whatever mischief she had planned, I wanted it now, out in the open. She couldn’t kill me with witnesses, and better a public humiliation than a dagger at night. “Then what,” I asked, “is your gift?”
“Why, Lady Empress . . .” Adebimpe rose and gestured with a flourish. “An akorin, of course. You should have had one weeks ago.”
I blinked in surprise, but it was true. By tradition, noble Arit families provided Raybearers with an akorin: a personal griot, tasked with immortalizing the Raybearer’s deeds in song. Upon Olugbade’s death, the court nobles had offered Dayo their most talented sons for griots, renowned scholars and skilled warriors, young lords, and even minor princes.
I, however, had received no one. I was the daughter of an exile, after all—a walking sacrifice at best. I had no connections or lands to offer them, and I would probably be dead within two years. I had assumed they wouldn’t bother. But now—
“Your akorin, Lady Empress,” Adebimpe sneered.
The courtiers stepped aside to reveal a squat, dazed-looking child. She looked no older than twelve. Beaded cornrows swung at her shoulders, and mottled stripes of skin, like bruises that had never healed, stretched from her ear to her hairline. She clutched a bundle to her chest.
The girl gulped and froze . . . but she squared herself, steadily meeting my gaze. “My n-name”—she grimaced, reddening—“is Ad-Adukeh, Your Imperial M-Majesty. I s-swear my drum t-to your s-service.”
The nobles snickered behind their palm fans, and my council siblings stiffened, recognizing Adebimpe’s gift for what it was: an insult.
Imperial akorins were grown men in sweeping emerald kaftans, trained at the knee of the empire’s most skilled griots, and seasoned with decades at the Imperial Academy.
They were seldom women, and never stuttering girls.
She blinked up at me, a sandy brown face with crescent-shaped eyes. Her wrapper was plain and fraying at the hem. I would later learn that she had blood from multiple realms—an isoken, perhaps with blood from both Oluwan and a realm of lighter complexions, like Moreyao.
I nodded at her, ignoring the nobles. “Where is your home province, Adukeh?”
She shifted her feet. “O-Olojari, Lady Empress.”
My heart raced. I tried a smile, feeling as trapped as the child did. “No need to be nervous,” I said brightly. “This isn’t real court—it’s just a silly Rising.”
“She isn’t nervous, Lady Empress.” Adebimpe’s smile brimmed with malicious glee. “She always stutters. Don’t you, child?”
Adukeh inhaled, puffing up with anger. Then she shot me a furtive glance, touching the mark on her brow. “Th-There was an ac-accident. In the m-mine, when I was l-little. A sh-shaft collapsed, and . . . well. I c-couldn’t talk for a while. Then, when I w-woke up, I sounded like th-this.”
My cheeks heated. The nobles were rubbing it in my face—the power they still held over the people of Olojari. The things they could do to hurt them, if I kept interfering.
“We found her busking outside the forge,” crowed another noble. “Begging, really. She doesn’t even have a gele.”
He pointed at Adukeh’s head. Most Oluwan ladies would never appear in public without their geles: towering headdresses made of starched fabric, folded elaborately to boast of marital status and rank.
“I do t-too,” Adukeh retorted, and held out her bulky orange bundle. She unwrapped the stiff embroidered cloth, revealing the scuffed, hourglass-shaped gourd of a talking drum. Goatskin strings threaded the gourd from head to head, meant to be squeezed and released, changing the drum’s pitch. “My grandmother was a griot,” the girl explained to me. “My drum was hers, b-but I couldn’t afford a c-case for it. So I use my g-gele instead. It’s treated with st-starch, so it’s very st-sturdy, and I c-can tie it to my back when I—”
The nobles howled with laughter, bangles jangling on their arms as their shoulders shook. Adebimpe watched me, hungry for my reaction. She wanted me to hop and shrill like a ruffled peacock—to stamp my foot, and dismiss Adukeh in fury.
“Stop laughing,” I said quietly, and beneath my wrapper, the eyes of the lioness mask shone ever so dimly.
Every noble in the room fell quiet. Some gagged, as if something had knocked the air from their lungs. As their faces slackened in confusion, an eerie sensation made my skin itch. The last time nobles had obeyed me quickly had been at my Peace Banquet, when I ordered the continent rulers to sit down. To this day, I wasn’t sure what had happened . . . and why the Songlander had been immune to it. But I was too angry to wonder on it now.
I turned to Adukeh. “Play,” I said.
The air thickened with whispers. The girl swallowed hard, but folded the gele over her shoulder and removed a curved beating stick from her wrapper folds. She clicked with her tongue and yelled the invocation of storytellers: I have three b-bells in my mouth, I do not t-tell a lie! Then she cradled the gourd in her arm, and struck.
The girl’s music filled the bedchamber, reverberating from the lofty ceiling. Her stutter weakened as her song progressed, until it fell away all together. Hours could have passed, and I would not have felt them.
Adukeh sang first of my anointing: the day of the Children’s Palace fire. She trilled to portray the screams of terrified candidates, and thrummed her fingers on the gourd, imitating the crackle of flames as I pulled Dayo to safety.
She pounded the drum on both sides, painting the din and chaos of the crowd as I revoked Thaddace’s Unity Edict in every language.
She rocked, groaned, and chanted, reenacting my ride from Sagimsan, my body broken and stained with blood, the crack of the Imperial Hall doors bursting open as I ordered the Treaty to stop. Then at last, she finished—beating stick falling to her side, hips swaying to a stop.
No one was laughing now.
The courtiers stood agape, as though in a trance, and Adukeh knelt on the carpet, offering up her drum to me with both shaking hands. She said again, “I do not t-tell a lie.”
My first impulse was to kneel with her. I wanted to clutch this girl to my chest, to steal every day of terror and abuse she’d ever had, hurling the memories into oblivion. The years in that mine had . . . done something to her—something unspeakable, and I would have known it even without the bruised marks on her forehead.
Adukeh sang with a skill too familiar with grief. For this child, evil was not the monster of a cookfire tale, but an intimate, constant friend.
But I did not hold her. Instead I kept my face solemn, and wordlessly unclasped a gleaming coral necklace from my throat. “Rise, Adukeh,” I said, placing the necklace over her head, “akorin to the Empress Redemptor.”
The girl froze, eyes wide as moons . . . and then she flashed a grin so radiant, it could have rivaled the power of my obabirin mask. A rush as heady as honeywine filled my head, nearly toppling me with relief.
I had helped someone as empress. I had fixed something—changed a life for the better. Self-doubt had itched on my shoulders, a mantle so constant, I hadn’t noticed until it lifted. I savored the brief euphoria, immediately craving more. If I helped more people, fixed more problems, maybe the ojiji would be appeased. That’s what they wanted, wasn’t it? And what else was an empress for?
“Take the imperial griot to be fitted for her wardrobe,” I said, smirking at Adebimpe. “She’ll be staying here, in the Imperial Suite. Oh, and”—I glanced down at Adukeh and winked—“make sure she gets a proper case for that drum.”
CHAPTER 14
“Twelve realms,” I swore, hanging back to hide behind Ai Ling. “It just looks so . . . intimate.”
A low, sky-blue tent sat near a reflecting pool, perfume wafting lightly from the drapery. White gravel paths and fragrant orange trees dotted the side of Palace Hill. After the Rising, Ai Ling and I had hurried to the Imperial Orchard Garden, where I would hold my first meeting with Min Ja of Songland.
The outdoor gathering had been Ai Ling’s idea. She insisted that gardens were more neut
ral than salons, encouraging friendliness and vulnerability.
Well. I felt vulnerable all right.
Cozy carpets and mudcloth pillows decorated the tent’s insides, and brunch waited on carved teak trays, along with pitchers of water and spiked orange punch. The tent could easily have held five people, though we couldn’t stand without the canvas grazing our hair. A brazier of kuso-kuso leaves lay unlit, and its presence confused me.
“Wasn’t the kuso-kuso for after I anoint a council?” I asked Ai Ling. “To communicate across distance?”
She shrugged. “I thought it could ease sharing your memories, as well.”
Foreboding seeped into my stomach. Of course. Kuso-kuso caused a powerful trance state. One could dream several weeks’ worth of memories in a single hour of sleep. If I passed on my memories as dreams, the vassal rulers could absorb my life in rapid time . . . and decide whether or not I had earned their love.
“You really do think of everything,” I said, and Ai Ling held back the tent flap as I stooped inside.
We sat against the cushions, but before I could touch the food, Ai Ling dove to stop me.
“Wait,” she barked. I watched with confusion, then dawning horror as she rushed to seize tiny portions of every dish, then stuff them daintily into her mouth. She chewed, swallowed, held up a hand to wait . . . then spread a close-lipped smile. “All clear, darling.”
“Ai Ling,” I gasped. “You didn’t have to do that. What if—what if you had—”
“I wouldn’t have died,” she said calmly, sticking her finger in the wooden carafe of punch and licking it before I could stop her. Then, just managing to hide her relief, she poured me a glass. “At least . . . I don’t think so. We’ve been building immunity to poisons since the Children’s Palace. And we can’t trust the palace servants—what if a noble bribed them? Anyway, better I get sick than you. You’ve got work to do.”
“So do you,” I sputtered. “Please, Ai Ling. Don’t do that again.”
To my surprise, she huffed with offense. “So you’re allowed to risk your life for millions of people you barely know, but I can’t get a stomachache for my own sister?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. She was right. Still . . . “What would I have told Dayo if you died?”
“He’d have understood,” she said after a pause, her brown gaze soft and serious.
She was right about that too. As I stared at her, I realized for the first time how similar her disposition was to Dayo’s. It was hard to tell at first, with his bright-eyed optimism and her sharp political savvy, but whenever Dayo or Ai Ling determined a path to be right, however treacherous, they pursued it with unshakeable tenacity. How else could Dayo have kept me at his side all those years, knowing I was destined to kill him?
My appetite had vanished, but I nibbled a fig pastry so Ai Ling’s risk wouldn’t be in vain. The orange punch sparkled on my tongue, burning as it went down, roiling in my already-nervous stomach.
“Don’t worry about Queen Min Ja seeing your memories,” Ai Ling said after a moment, sensing my distress through the Ray. “What’s it they say in Swana? ‘For every field of cattle, a ditch of skeletons.’ We all have stories we aren’t proud of, Tarisai.”
I scowled down at my plate of sweet fried chin chin. “But I tried to kill someone.”
Ai Ling’s jaded smile returned. “This is An-Ileyoba,” she pointed out soothingly, reaching to squeeze my knee. “Who hasn’t?”
I laughed shortly—and then, as I watched her, a memory slipped from my mind to hers. I jerked my knee away, eyes widening with horror. “Am’s Story,” I muttered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just, you reminded me of—”
“It’s all right.” She gazed into her chalice of punch. “I was thinking of it too.”
I had seen Ai Ling’s memory of Dayo’s thirteenth birthday party, before he was immune to death.
Amidst mountains of presents and throngs of laughing children, a masked assassin had burst into the Children’s Palace playroom.
The intruder flung darts into the necks of our guards. Sanjeet managed to grapple the assassin in a headlock, nearly subduing him, but the man grunted and reached up, fumbling for Sanjeet’s neck. Only after three sleep darts did Sanjeet slump heavily to the floor. I rushed the intruder next, hoping to steal his memories, transforming him into a confused husk. But he tossed me aside like a sack of yams. The assassin unsheathed a knife and headed for Dayo, grim with purpose.
Then Ai Ling burst from the crowd of wailing children, balling her slender fists. “You don’t want to hurt him,” she squeaked, “do you?”
The assassin stopped, staggering back. Ai Ling’s suggestion lodged in his body like an arrow. Still he grimaced, shook it off, and advanced.
“You don’t want to hurt him,” she repeated.
Again he shrugged off the invisible arrow, even more quickly this time. “Oh,” he growled, “but I do.”
Ai Ling’s heart-shaped face blanched. “You don’t, because you’re a good person. It’s beneath you.”
The assassin hesitated, then laughed, hoisting her up by the scruff of her candidate tunic and jeering at her with rotting teeth. “You don’t know me at all, little girl.”
“Fine,” she gasped. “You’re a bad person, then. The worst. A piece of garbage, a rat who kills children, and . . . and no one will ever love you.”
The man staggered back, dropping her. Ai Ling had struck at something the assassin believed already, tripling her Hallow’s power. She stared up at him from the ground, tears of pity pooling in her wide-spaced eyes. But she wiped her cheeks and plowed on. “Admit it. No one cares about you. The people who say they do are lying, probably. So why go through all this trouble, when you’re going to die alone? You don’t want to be here.” She glanced at Dayo, who stood frozen and vulnerable behind her. Then she turned back to the intruder and delivered the death blow. “I think . . . you don’t want to be anywhere.”
Then the whole room watched, dumbstruck, as the assassin nodded, sobbed . . . and plunged the knife into his own stomach.
The next day, Dayo anointed Ai Ling into his council. We had celebrated with a party, but from then on, the other candidates had shivered at the sight of her, covering their ears with whispers of eviltongue and murmurwitch.
“While we’re confessing morbid secrets,” Ai Ling told me airily, hair feathered out against the tasseled pillows as she reclined. “I had sex for the first time in a tent just like this one.”
“Oh.” A piece of braised goat froze on its way to my mouth. “Really? But—when? With whom?” I knew many council siblings had dalliances. But we were constantly together, and our schedules had always been so strict. When would Ai Ling have snuck away for an affair?
“Our last year in the Children’s Palace.” She stared up at the sky-blue canvas, rolling a tassel thread hard between her fingers until her skin turned white. “His name was Omar. He wasn’t a candidate—just one of the temple boys who helped the griot priests during catechism. Goofy smile. Training to be a priest for the Wing, sworn to purity and all that. Anyway, I was impressed, and before we knew it . . . we were sneaking down to the gardens after dark. The sex was boring, really. Messy at first. And painful when he didn’t do it right. Mostly, I did it to feel like the empire didn’t own me. But I liked him a lot. He smelled too sweet, but in a good way, like incense. And I liked”—she ripped the thread from its tassel—“I liked that he called me silvertongue instead of murmurwitch. We got caught, of course. It’s not hard to follow a boy who sneaks through the palace gates every night. But when the priests found us in the act, Omar . . . He shoved me away. Shook himself off, and shuddered like I was—was some dirty animal.” She gave a hoarse little laugh. “Then he said I forced him to do it.”
I gasped. “Ai Ling. The bastard.”
She shrugged, though the corner of her mouth trembled. “Omar told the priests he couldn’t control himself. That I’d put him under some kind of spell, and e
ntrapped him with my eviltongue wiles. But I hadn’t used my Hallow. Not since that assassin at Dayo’s party, years ago. Anyway, I didn’t get in trouble, obviously. The priests knew they’d be held responsible if word got out that their acolyte had lain with a sacred Anointed One. But I swore I’d never let a boy get close to me again. Not unless he trusted me completely, with no room for doubt, not even an inch. The kind of person with faith to fill an ocean. And if I found that person . . . nothing else about him would matter.” Her eyes met mine. “Nothing.”
I said, squeezing her hand and sending a pulse of understanding through the Ray, “I know a boy like that.”
“I do too,” she whispered. Then she smiled, swabbed a single tear from her eye, and sat up, crisp with composure once more.
The flap to our tent rustled.
Now, Tari-darling, Ai Ling Ray-spoke. Are you ready to show that queen your skeletons?
CHAPTER 15
When Min Ja’s silk-swathed form appeared in the entryway, she nodded stiffly in greeting, then glanced at the array of treats and cozy hangings, stopping on the brazier of kuso-kuso leaves.
“You’ve endeavored to make this painless, I see,” the queen of Songland remarked. Her voice was sharp as usual, but humor shone in her hooded eyes. “A bit stuffy, though.”
With a word and a sweep of her hand, Min Ja summoned a cool breeze that rustled through the tent. I tried, and probably failed, not to gape with wonder. I had only seen Woo In perform wind sowanhada, the elemental language of the Songland royal family.
Behind Min Ja, a second figure entered through the tent flap: Da Seo, the shy consort I had met at my Peace Banquet. Vivid moth-wing eyes shone over the mask concealing the bottom half of her face.
Ai Ling shifted in surprise, glancing at three cups around the breakfast trays. “Forgive us—we were only expecting Queen Min Ja.”
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