the tutors said. But their dilated pupils and terse smiles told a different story. My adventure had confirmed their most sinister suspicions.
My mother was the devil, and I, her puppet demon.
THE SWANA GRASSLANDS WERE WARM EVEN in the rainy season. But the air around me always chilled. As birthdays passed—eight, nine, ten—I shivered through Bhekina House, coddled by servants who never broke the surface of my bubble. Sometimes I longed for human touch so much, I would bend my cheek to open flames. The tendrils would sear my skin, but I would smile, pretending to feel The Lady’s fingers.
Eventually, I fell in the kitchen firepit by accident. The servants dragged me out, sobbing, shrieking prayers to Am the Storyteller. I shook all over and rasped, “I can’t die, I can’t die, Mother’s going to come back, so I can’t die.”
But I had not burned. My clothes hung in ruined smolders, but my coily black hair had not even singed.
As my maids looked on in shock, I remembered the wording from The Lady’s wish for Bhekina House: a place my friends and I will always be safe.
“It’s Mother,” I said breathlessly. “She protected me.”
From that day on, I multiplied the gray hairs of my servants by jumping off walls, submerging my head in buckets of water, and catching venomous spiders, encouraging them to bite.
“I didn’t die,” I would laugh as the servants set my broken bones and poured antidotal teas down my throat.
“Yes,” a nursemaid would say through gritted teeth. “That’s because we reached you in time.”
“No,” I would insist dreamily. “It’s because my mother loves me.”
My tutors grew more relentless. The sooner they could make me into what The Lady wanted, after all, the sooner they would be rid of me. So the lessons continued, lectures droning in my ears like gadflies. Ink fumes stung my nose each day, and the scent of jasmine haunted me each night. But Melu’s memory had awoken a hunger inside me, one the mango orchards of Bhekina House could not satiate. I dreamed and lusted for the world beyond the gate.
An enormous globe rested on a wooden stand in my study. Jagged continents curved around a deep blue ocean I had never seen. The largest continent, which included Swana, was a patchwork of savannahs, forests, deserts, and snowy tundras. This was Aritsar, my tutors said. The Deathless Arit empire, may Kunleo live forever.
Most of the history scrolls in my study were edited. My tutors would blot out lines and sometimes whole pages with black ink, refusing to tell me why. Once, I managed to hold papers to the light, reading several paragraphs before a tutor snatched them away.
Long ago, the papers said, Aritsar had not existed. In its place, a jumble of isolated islands had floated on a vast sea. The twelve weak, rivaling lands were ravaged by abiku: demons from the Underworld. Then a warlord named Enoba “the Perfect” Kunleo had unleashed a power from the earth, uniting the lands into one massive continent. He had crowned himself emperor, enlisting twelve of the continent’s rulers as his vassals. Then he battled the abiku with his newly christened Army of Twelve Realms. The mortal and immortal armies had been so evenly matched that Enoba’s war dragged on for decades before, at last, the exhausted forces struck a truce.
Enoba was celebrated as Aritsar’s savior. The continent rulers credited him for bringing peace, and so, for centuries, his line had ruled Aritsar from their home realm of Oluwan, uniting twelve cultures in a network of art, science, and trade. Whenever caravans passed by Bhekina House, I heard merchant families singing of the empire, rocking infants on their hips as children skipped across the savannah:
Oluwan and Swana bring his drum; nse, nse
Dhyrma and Nyamba bring his plow; gpopo, gpopo
Mewe and Sparti see our older brother dance—
Black and gold, isn’t he perfect!
Quetzala sharpens his spear; nse, nse
Blessid Valley weaves his wrapper; gpopo, gpopo
Nontes and Biraslov see our older brother dance!
Black and gold, isn’t he perfect?
Djbanti braids his hair; nse, nse
Moreyao brings his gourd; gpopo, gpopo
Eleven moons watch our older brother dance:
Black and gold, isn’t he perfect?
Aritsar’s current older brother, or emperor, was Olugbade Kunleo: a direct descendant of Enoba the Perfect. I used to croon the patriotic anthem in our mango orchards. As I wove between branches, I would talk to an invisible emperor, sharing my thoughts on Arit history and governance. Sometimes I imagined him gazing down like the sun through the clouds, warming my bare shoulders