to it. And things could change when Dayo’s emperor.”
“How many nightmares will I have by then? And how many will I have caused?” He smiled grimly, turning away on the pallet. “I guess Amah was wrong. I will always earn my keep by breaking bones.”
I scowled into the darkness, tracing patterns on his muscled back until he fell asleep. “This is not,” I whispered, “what I crossed a coal pit for.”
In the small hours of the morning, I lit a palm oil lamp and penned a calfskin letter, sealing it with my ring. Then I rapped on my tower door, which I had insisted be locked at night. I slid back the wooden hatch that hid a grate in the door’s center, allowing me to peer into the antechamber where my attendants slept. A yawning Bimbola staggered to the hatch, and I stuck my hand through the grate.
“This letter must be posted at first light,” I said, and dropped a hefty portion of my imperial allowance into her palm. “Divide this among the runners. They’ll have to use lodestones. Spare no expense.” Bimbola nodded, eyes round with curiosity. As she bustled out of the antechamber, she snuck a glance at the letter’s sealed front, which was addressed in my hurried script: KEEYA THE MERCHANT. PIKWE VILLAGE, SWANA.
THE NIGHT BEFORE MY FIRST RULING arrived, and the empress Raybearer masks were still nowhere to be found.
I paced my tower room, trying to drum out the parade of death in my head. Poison, contagion, gluttony, burning. The grit of sandstone pressed into the balls of my feet. Sanjeet watched worriedly as I tried to crush the words into the floor, pound them to dust, where they could never hurt anyone.
Drowning, suffocation, bleeding.
“The emperor doesn’t know,” I said aloud, shredding the hem of my sleeping scarf. “The emperor doesn’t know what The Lady’s weakness is.” The Lady had never finished anointing her Eleven, which meant she could still be killed by someone other than her anointed. Olugbade only needed to figure out how.
“He’ll probably try every one until he finds it.” My voice was barely audible. By now, the edge of my sleeping scarf was a tangled mess of thread. “It will hurt her. Even if she doesn’t die, it will hurt. Jeet—I don’t—I don’t know what to—”
He folded me into his chest, but I stood rigid as steel. “Dayo and the others will be happy to see you again,” he murmured. “They’re in the Children’s Palace, preparing for your ruling right now. When I left them, Kameron and Theo were, ah, debating whether Kameron could smuggle a meerkat pup into the ceremony.”
I laughed weakly, accepting the distraction. “Why?”
“Kam thinks you could use the emotional support.”
Sanjeet fetched The Lady’s enchanted glass from the window seat, and I watched as my council siblings stood like mannequins around the Hall of Dreams, swathed in jewels and finery, teasing each other as palace garment-makers hovered, attaching buttons and hemming trains.
Yesterday, the garment-makers had come to prepare my First Ruling garments, clucking over which hues suited me best. I had almost chosen a spicy green silk, embroidered with bursts of gold. Then Bimbola had cleared her throat.
“The emperor suggested you wear this, Anointed Honor.” She held up a stiff ream of brocade, bleached as bone, with the Kunleo sun-and-stars glittering in a pattern across the hem.
Empire cloth. So the world would know who owned me.
I spied on the Children’s Palace long into the night, even after Sanjeet had fallen asleep, and my siblings had collapsed onto their pallets. But one bed in the Hall of Dreams, I noticed with a frown, was empty.
A soft knock sounded on my tower door.
I sighed. That would be Bimbola, come to chide me for burning a lamp instead of resting. I padded across the room and opened the door hatch, peering through the grate.
My attendants had vanished from the antechamber. Only one person stood outside my door, shadowy in the dim moonlight.
“Dayo,” I breathed.
My hands flew up to my throat, seizing the sunstone. His broad features were still smooth and unlined, but somehow he looked older. Wiser. He wore only his bedclothes, laces undone at the collar to reveal his obsidian mask. He had been dressed the same way my last night at Yorua, when I’d lured him to that cliff.
“I’m sorry,” I said, choking through the flood of violent urges that still controlled me, and thanking Am for the locked wooden door. “I’m so sorry.”