He grinned. “That’s because you don’t dance with anyone.”
“Don’t change the subject. For Am’s sake—” I shoved him, and he snickered. “Just admit you like her! It’s obvious, Dayo.”
He sighed then and sat up, gazing out the chamber window. “Of course I like Ai Ling,” he said. “I love her . . . just like I love you. And Kirah. And Umansa, and all our council. But . . .”
“But what you feel for her is special?”
He was quiet for a long moment. “It’ll pass,” he said at last, twisting the rings on his fingers. “Like all crushes do. I was in love with Sanjeet when I was little. And with you. But all those feelings changed when I got older. Wiser. And now—”
“Now you’re in love with someone else,” I said. “And she’s just as crazy about you.”
He ground the sole of his sandal. “You don’t know that.”
“She practically told me. And even if she hadn’t . . .” I raised an eyebrow. “Dayo, Ai Ling hides her emotions better than anyone. She has to; that’s a High Ambassador’s job. But at the Peace Banquet, she refused to hide anything. She wanted to be there, in your arms. Wanted the whole world to know how vulnerable you make her. It was beautiful, Dayo.”
He brightened, then his dark brow creased, plunging into lines and shadow. I shivered at how much it aged him. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
I scoffed. “Why in Am’s name not?”
“You know why.”
“I know you haven’t asked her.”
“I can’t,” Dayo blurted, with a sharpness that surprised me. “She already swore her life away. All of you did. You gave up your home realms. Gave me your minds, forever. How could I ask Ai Ling to give up even more? Especially—you know. The one thing everyone in the world wants?”
“Not everyone,” I countered. “Not you, and others like you. The world is big, Dayo.”
“Mine isn’t,” he said quietly. “The moment I was born a Raybearer, my world shrank to twelve people. And that was fine. I never thought I’d want more with any of you. Until . . .”
He trailed off, and I paused, considering. “If you don’t ask,” I said slowly, “you’re making the choice for her.”
“But what if she says no?” Dayo fidgeted. “Or worse—what if she says yes, and then hates me for it?”
“It’s like you said,” I murmured, reaching to tidy his messy tufts of hair. “We can’t control why people love us, Dayo—or how much.” I leaned over to kiss his cheek. “We only get to choose what we give in return.”
His features remained stony, but before he could reply, a courier appeared at the door, panting, with a message.
“Apologies, your Imperial Majesties,” he wheezed. “But the queen of Songland and her consort—well.” He came to hand me a note. Min Ja’s measured handwriting, ink barely dry, gleamed from the page. “They’re leaving.”
Wearing nothing but a purple cape over my night shift, I tumbled from a palanquin into the sleepy streets of Ileyoba: the residential district of the nobles and home to the temporary Songlander royal villa. Already the building seemed almost vacated. Servants poured out of the villa with the queen’s possessions, loading carts with jeweled chests and silk-swathed baskets.
“In the name of the empress—let me see the queen,” I hollered, barreling through lines of servants and flashing my imperial seal. “Please. Just for a minute.”
When I burst into their private salon, Min Ja and Da Seo shot surprised, then guilt-stricken looks my way. Sheets covered the furniture. Both the queen and her consort were bundled in dark cloaks, dressed for a lengthy journey.
“We hoped to leave while you slept,” Min Ja said, with her usual bluntness. She gave an apologetic smile. “I do not excel at goodbyes.”
“But why?” I panted. “What about getting anointed?”
Min Ja and Da Seo exchanged a meaningful look. “Little Empress,” the queen said after a pause, “you don’t need us to fulfill your promise to the abiku. And we’ve been in each other’s heads for a month. I have a kingdom to run, and—Let’s be honest. If we had enough in common for love, don’t you think we would know by now?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it, heart sinking to my sandals. She was right.
At my forlorn expression, Da Seo tutted and came to plant a kiss on my forehead. “Cheer up, Lady Empress. I’m sure you’ll woo the others. Any girl who survived riding through twenty-six lodestones can convince the Arit rulers to join a council. And now that we hear you’ve put your nobles in line, you can count on their support.”
I sank despondently onto a sheet-covered divan. “You mean, now that my nobles are afraid I’ll kill them.”
Min Ja laughed. “In my court, we call that being popular. All hail Tarisai the Reaper: arbiter of death upon haughty nobles.”
I smiled half-heartedly. “But I didn’t want them to fear me. Not that way. I think I’d rather be hated as a weakling than loved as a monster.”
To my surprise, Min Ja’s face closed up immediately, and she expelled a short, bitter laugh. “You know,” she said, “for all your speeches . . . your sacred Hallows, your magical sprite clouds . . . you really are still little more than a child.”
I glared at her, taken aback. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” she said, “that not all of us get to be noble. We don’t all get to be the selfless heroine, flitting gracefully through life, adored by all. Some of us get our hands dirty. Some of us . . .” Her voice hitched. “Have scars.”
“Min Ja,” Da Seo intoned, a gentle reprimand.
Min Ja colored and sucked in a breath. When she released it, her voice was as calm and cool as ever. “Forgive me, Little Empress. That was unfair. I suppose you can’t help being a saint, any more than I can help being a viper.”
“I’m not a saint, Your Majesty.”
“Could have fooled me.” She shrugged and sighed. “Look . . . it doesn’t matter anymore. We have enjoyed our days here—considerably more so than we expected to. If relations continue to improve between our realms, you may consider me an ally. It is a milestone no other Kunleo has achieved. You should be proud, Tarisai.”
But I wasn’t proud. I hadn’t done enough. Even though I’d fought to give them my best story. Had shielded them from my rough points, my nightmares . . .
Then, with dawning realization, Adukeh’s words echoed in my mind, punctuated by her proud, disfigured features.
What good is a voice with no story to tell?
I thought then of how vibrant Ai Ling had looked, when she had shed her serene High Ambassador mask to dance in Dayo’s arms. I thought of when my heart first warmed toward Adebimpe: when she had cowered in the suite, ashy-skinned and without the plainest gele.
In that moment, I had known Adebimpe better than in weeks of her flawless appearances at court.
“Don’t go,” I told Min Ja and Adebimpe, rising to my feet with conviction. “I . . . I think I’m ready to prove I’m not a saint.”
I had brought no kuso-kuso leaves, and so this time, Min Ja and Da Seo were wide awake when I fed them my memories. We sat on cushions in Min Ja’s parlor, holding hands in a circle as the ugliest scenes from my life played out on an invisible stage.
First, I showed them the firepit.
We are a nine-year-old girl so desperate for her mother’s touch, warmth draws her like a moth to a flame. She indulges mad fantasies, giggling at the kitchen fire in Bhekina House. She lets it caress her, imagining human fingers, and speaks to it—Yes, Mother. I love you too, Mother—until at last she topples in.
The servants scream prayers to the Storyteller, tossing water on the fire and sustaining nasty burns as they haul the girl to safety . . .
And she’s laughing.
The girl is laughing on the ground, chortling breathlessly as her clothes smolder. She clutches her waist, shuddering, wheezing: See? I didn’t burn. You’re all so silly. I didn’t burn, because my mother loves me. That mean
s she’ll come back. She has to come back.
Doesn’t she?
The girl rocks back and forth. By degrees, her laughter shrills into keening, wrenching sobs. The sound grates on our ears as we bleed into the next memory.
We are eleven now, meeting a doe-eyed prince for the first time. Dayo cowers behind a curtain in the Children’s Palace, his dark face the picture of innocence. He smiles, gap-toothed, warming the girl from head to foot with curious affection.
And she wants to kill him.
The fantasy plays out in her head, over and over. First, her hands around his throat. Then his cries of protest, strangled and desperate. Then the light, fading at last from his guileless black eyes.
She recoils, knowing that the fantasy is evil. This boy is a good person, better than she’ll ever be. He deserves to live, and so she should leave forever to keep him safe. It would be so easy to fail the Children’s Palace tests on purpose. Then she would be sent far away, where she could never hurt him. It’s the right thing to do, even though she likes the way he makes her feel. To stay is to actively put him in danger.
But she returns the boy’s smile and says, “I’m not going anywhere.”
The love-starved girl decides to stay by his side. She chooses to keep herself warm, even at the risk of setting the boy aflame.
At last, the girl is sixteen years old. The wind whips around Enitawa’s Quiver, causing the tree’s branches to shudder in high moans. The girl, or what is left of her, peels away Dayo’s shirt and places her hands on his bare chest. He smiles at her trustingly. A silver dagger swings in a pouch at her side.
The girl wishes that she were an automaton, a mere ehru shell, doing its master’s bidding. If she were a soulless monster, her betrayal of the prince would mean less. But her conscience is still present—a small vessel in a vast, raging storm, flailing to keep afloat. For the rest of her life, she will wonder if this is a battle her soul might have won. If only she had willed it a little harder, resisted a moment longer.
But instead, the ship slips beneath the waves . . . and the dagger slides into Dayo’s stomach.
Min Ja, Da Seo, and I emerged from the memory in a chorus of gasps. Without the calming kuso-kuso, our transition back to the present is violent, and I could see the pain of each memory throbbing behind the queen’s eyes.
I bit my lip, face heating with shame. “I’m sorry I wasn’t honest before,” I told the queen, gaze cast down to the elaborate lotus-patterned rug where we sat. I fidgeted with the tassel of my seat cushion. “I know it’s probably too late. But I thought—after all the time you spent, getting to know me . . . I owed you this much, at least.”
Min Ja nodded slowly and said nothing. She had wrapped her arms around herself, still shuddering from the grim montage. I winced and stood, backing toward the door.
“I interrupted your packing,” I observed, bowing to Min Ja and Da Seo. “So I guess I’ll go now. May Am grant you safe journey back to—”
“It gets better, you know,” Min Ja interrupted. “The guilt.”
We exchanged a long look, sweet in its painful understanding. “I find that a little hard to believe,” I said.
“So did I.” Min Ja winked ruefully at me. “You’re not alone, Tarisai.”
It was the first time she had used my name instead of Little Empress. At the word alone, I swallowed hard. The chorus of voices reminding me of my guilt, of my inadequacy to solve the empire’s injustices, rang always in my ears, just out of hearing. I wished I could believe her. And more than that . . . I wished she would stay.
I took at the queen’s shining braided bun and finely chiseled features, lined with strength and hard-won good humor. I had come to love her, I realized: the fearless big sister with whom I might have shared a mind, even when miles of lodestone travel separated us.
I may not be a saint, Min Ja of Songland, I thought as I turned to exit the room. But you aren’t a viper either. Goodbye, almost-sister.
I am not so easily gotten rid of, Little Empress.
I froze in the doorway. When I met Min Ja’s gaze again, mouth agape, her sharp brown eyes were full of tears. She grinned as the Ray coursed between us, a beam of invisible sunlight, warming us from head to toe. Da Seo jumped at the suddenly crackling air. Realizing what had happened, she gasped with incredulous laughter.
I lost seven sisters to marriage, Min Ja Ray-spoke, and then she added aloud: “I will not lose one more to something as immaterial as distance.”
CHAPTER 20
Ji Huan of Moreyao and Uriyah of Blessid Valley took longer to adjust to my new memories than Min Ja and Da Seo, but to my relief and surprise, neither of them left in disgust.
“So you really just stabbed Emperor Ekundayo?” Ji Huan asked for the fifth time as I helped him fly a pelican-shaped kite in the palace gardens. “Just stabbed him right there in the open? Was it hard? Bet it was messy. With loads of blood.”
“You saw what happened,” I told him, squirming uncomfortably. “I showed you the memory.”
“Yes, but . . .” The young king nearly lost his grip on the kite strings, eager brown eyes fixed on my face. After I had shared my unaltered memories, Ji Huan’s shyness around me had evolved into morbid admiration. “It all happened so fast. Could you show me again? Maybe that fight on the palace roof too—when you made Anointed Honor Thaddace kill Emperor Olugbade, and the High Priestess fell but Woo In saved her. Then that part when you flew through the sky, and arrows flew everywhere and—”
“No. Ji Huan, those memories weren’t fun for me! You felt how much pain I was in. Why would you want to relive that?”
The boy looked sheepish. “I forgot about that part. I’m sorry, Lady Empress.”
“It’s all right.” I sighed, melting at his dejected expression and ruffling his hair. “And we’re friends now. Call me Tarisai.”
“Sorry, Tarisai.” He paused. “It’s just—I’ve never gotten to do anything. At least, not go on adventures, like you. My uncles won’t let me go anywhere.” He shuffled his silk-slippered feet and cast a furtive look at two men with flowing robes and long, gray beards: the Lord Regents of Moreyao. They sat a short distance away, sipping tea on a blanket, and occasionally casting dour looks at me and Ji Huan.
“They won’t even let me fly a kite without supervision,” Ji Huan grumbled. “And I can’t have friends they don’t approve of. They’re probably trying to read our lips right now.”
I frowned in sympathy. “I used to live in a place like that.”
“Bhekina House?”
“Yes.” I still wasn’t used to how much Ji Huan and the other rulers knew about me. My memories weren’t my own anymore. My whole life, or copies of it, floated freely in other people’s minds, free to be shaped to their prejudices.
“Even at the Children’s Palace, eyes were always watching you,” he said. “I know what that’s like.”
I took in his round innocent features, my former anxiety mirrored there. “Ji Huan, if you join my council, I’ll never control whom you talk to, you know. There won’t be any tests. No judging. All we have to do is be there for each other. Plus, thanks to Ray-speaking . . .” I tapped his head and winked at him. “We can talk anytime you like. And no one can read our lips.”
He brightened. “Can I really tell you anything?”
My mind flashed back to another little boy, peeking out at me from behind a Children’s Palace curtain.
You’re going to be another one, aren’t you? A person I like. A person they take away.
“Anything,” I said, placing my hand over his on the kite string. Then, I let the Ray blaze around my ears and sent a message into the crackling beam: Did I tell you about the time I threatened a Bush-spirit with a stick?
“Yes,” said Ji Huan, “but I want to hear it again, especially the part when you saved Anointed Honor Sanjeet from—” He broke off, realizing what had just happened. “I . . . I . . .”
“You heard me.” I sighed. “And I’d much rather show y
ou Bush-spirits than memories of me stabbing people.”
Ji Huan dropped the string and pulled me into a hug, then stepped back just as quickly, flushing. The sun kite escaped, dancing in circles on the wind, then drifting to a dot in the cloudless Oluwan sky.
Someday I’ll be free like that, came Ji Huan’s voice in my head. But until then—tell me another story, my Tarisai.
Uriyah’s love for me was more complicated, and not in a way I liked. The old chief reminded me of Olugbade, in that he seemed especially fond of those more ignorant than himself—or at least, those he perceived to be. When I showed him my ugliest flaws, his features took on a paternal glow.
“ ‘The wisest ruler must also be humble,’ ” he intoned, reaching to raise my downcast chin. “ ‘Take heart, therefore, in your mistakes.’ ”
We sat together in Uriyah’s study, at his villa in the Ileyoba district. Mountains of books and dusty scrolls surrounded us on the musty carpet, smelling vaguely of ink and camel hair.
“Thank you,” I told him, swallowing my irritation at being patronized. “I’ll certainly give that some th—”
“Cassius Mehedi the Surefooted,” he interrupted, stroking his silver-streaked beard. “Ninth treatise, fifth verse. Mehedi’s writings on humility are truly illuminating, and were my greatest comfort as a budding young ruler. I should have recommended them to you ages ago,” he murmured, whirling around his study and selecting a pile of tomes. He dropped them in my lap, rheumy eyes winking with excitement. “Take these for tonight. I’ve included Ahwadi the Dune Dweller’s verses on filial piety—due to the complex relationship you had with your mother—and the poetry of Yakov the Wanderer, though I admit his work is elementary. You’ve read him, of course . . .” At my blank stare, he chuckled indulgently. “Ah. Well, don’t be ashamed, child. In fact, I envy you. To be young again, at the very beginning of one’s moral journey . . .” He trailed off, blinking at me wistfully. “There’s nothing quite like it.”
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