Thesolo? Njaza Rise Up asks for the most basic respect and you laugh. If the average Njazan citizen can’t discern whether they’re in a kingdom or a kleptocracy, what were your sacrifices for?”
His head whipped toward her and she felt a thrill of victory. After three months, he finally gave her the respect of meeting her gaze.
That’s right. Can’t ignore me now, can you?
Fury burned in his eyes and his hand squeezed the ornamental head of his cane so tightly she thought he might crush it. “You think you know anything about my kingdom, foreigner?”
You have no idea, she thought wryly, wishing she could tell him what she’d learned once she decided to stop waiting for the palace’s permission to help.
“Yes, I do. And if we had to go by your recent decision-making, this foreigner knows more than—”
“Wife.” Sanyu’s voice was harsh enough to draw the attention of everyone in the room, but not unkind. It brimmed with an energy she hadn’t heard from him since he’d first looked down at her and taunted her for wanting to marry him.
She turned and met his unreadable gaze. “Yes, Husband?”
“You may go.” He made a scooping palm motion toward the room’s exit.
“Yes, Husband.”
She curtsied so low she thought her nose might touch the ground, and then marched out. The swish of her gown trailing behind her on the stone floor covered the sound of her frustrated sigh as the doors closed behind her.
“Don’t walk too quickly, Madame Highness,” Rafiq, one of the guards lining the hallway said when she inclined her head in his direction. His wiry salt-and-pepper brows drew together. “The council advises that a queen should move ‘slowly, with regal grace.’”
“Of course, Rafiq,” she said with a taut smile as she slowed her pace. He was a nice man, and the nicest of the guards who had constantly rebuffed her, but he also treated her like a child.
She’d just faded into the background enough not to be followed every time she was outside of the queen’s wing, and she didn’t want to lose her newfound freedom.
She passed another guard, who didn’t even seem to notice her at all, as if her gown was a cloak of invisibility.
When she turned the corner she ran into Josiane Uwe, the head archivist in the Royal Library, who sucked her teeth as she juggled the stack of books she had in her arms. The wrinkles around the woman’s eyes bunched together as she squinted up at Shanti.
“Madame Highness, in Njaza we don’t just leisurely stroll with our head in the clouds, getting in people’s way. Do remember you’re not in Thesolo. Here, the very least expected of a queen is that she pay attention to her surroundings. Is that too difficult for you?”
The woman didn’t wait for an answer before marching off, thank goodness.
This is what I get for taking the main path, Shanti thought, looking both ways before turning on her heels and jogging to find one of the entrances to the artery of less well-maintained hallways used by the palace staff. It was the route that she usually took through the palace back to the queen’s wing now, hopping over palettes of linens and squeezing past garbage bags, even though it made the already long walk even longer. Though it was inconvenient, it did allow her to hear snippets of conversation and keep an eye on the temperature of things in the palace and outside of it. It also allowed her to avoid Musoke and the guards, and her husband, too. The staff gave her the minimum deference necessary to their temporary queen and continued on their way, which was fine by her.
After what felt like kilometers of walking, Shanti finally reached the queen’s wing, where Kenyatta, the primary guardswoman assigned to her section of the palace, was making her rounds. The woman was shorter than her, with dark locs pulled into a bun atop her head and a pleasant face that belied the fact that she was trained and ready to use lethal martial arts.
“Good morning, Your Highness,” Kenyatta said, stopping to tap her spear three times on the ground—she was the only guard who acknowledged Shanti with the official royal greeting.
“Good morning,” Shanti said, feeling a sudden rush of gratefulness for the guardswoman who’d been so kind to her over the last few months. While they weren’t friends, exactly, as they didn’t really speak of personal matters, the guard checked on her every day, helped her practice her Njazan, and