as his father, whose hair had already been gray when Sanyu was born, but close.
Musoke held a cup in his hand but didn’t sip, lost in thought.
“Musoke?”
He startled and turned toward Sanyu, his expression one of almost tender recognition. Sanyu froze in his tracks—Musoke had always been so hard with him, had never looked at him like this. He’d never known how much he wanted Musoke to look at him like this, with something close to care, until this moment.
It was gone in a second, that tenderness, the old man’s expression tightening into the one Sanyu was most accustomed to—vague annoyance. “Hello, boy. What brings you here? Certainly nothing of import?”
Sanyu exhaled. “Well, yes, actually. I’m here about the funds you plan to use for the military parade. I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”
“You don’t think it’s possible. Even though you are head of the military so you should know whether it is.” Musoke nodded as if mulling it over. “Interesting.”
“That’s exactly why I should have been consulted about this.”
“I didn’t bother you because the answer is clear as the waters of our sacred lakes were before the Liechtienbourgers polluted them,” Musoke said. “The colonizers owe us that money and many times more. Why shouldn’t we use a tiny portion of it to celebrate our independence from them?”
“Because it’s been earmarked for charity use only.” Sanyu felt himself begin to wither under the advisor’s stare, but held his ground. “Using it for anything else would be unethical. And illegal. I don’t believe you’d do something illegal.”
“Under what law?” Musoke asked. When Sanyu didn’t answer immediately, as he searched through the various Njazan codes and regulations he’d memorized over the years, Musoke chuckled and shook his head. “Your father trusted me to handle these things, but you who are still a boy question me?”
Sanyu exhaled slowly, then answered, “I am older than both you and my father were when you reinstated the kingdom.”
Musoke just smiled. “We were tested by battle, while you’ve been coddled all of your life.”
Coddled? Coddled? Heat rushed to Sanyu’s face and his fists clenched as memories of countless reprimands, of hours of training and endurance exercises, of having almost all comforts stripped in that never-ending quest to prevent his being what was apparently the greatest disgrace: soft. He usually didn’t speak back to Musoke by choice, but in this moment he was so angry that he couldn’t.
“You’re still learning how this kingdom truly runs, and unlike your father I won’t indulge your deficiencies,” Musoke continued. “The kingdom would be overrun by colonizers or those who wish to humble us if I were to do that. Just leave everything to me.”
He leaned back in his seat, ending the conversation, and Sanyu finally found the words in the jumble of thoughts cramming his head.
“I’d prefer that you didn’t use the money,” he said, trying to fill his voice with the will he had supposedly inherited from his father, and the gods of his people. “We’re already deeply in debt, the last thing we need right now is a lavish ceremony.”
And besides that, it was wrong, the kind of wrong that made Sanyu’s skin crawl. The kind that was yet another reason that he hated being king—so many things he was told were right and necessary to be the king of Njaza felt terrible.
“Did I ever tell you about the night we reclaimed the kingdom?” Musoke asked in a voice softer than Sanyu had heard it in some time.
“I heard the story from either you or my father every night, you know this,” Sanyu said, aware that wouldn’t stop the story from being told yet again.
“My bandages were still sticky with blood and throbbing painfully from the land mine explosion that had taken out half of the fighters that backed us as we raided the Southern Castle. I had one arm around your father’s shoulder and the other around . . .” He grimaced. “They supported me. We were all bloody and broken, but we marched onward, with our warriors at our backs, with all the clans and factions united behind us and we reclaimed this kingdom. We made it a place where Njazans could live proudly. Freely.”
Sanyu felt that confusing mix of pride and guilt and shame—the shame had been magnified since his father’s death, since his attempt to run away. Musoke and his father had risked their lives for this kingdom and now that his father was gone, Sanyu felt nothing at all for it.
“I did