heavy footfalls crept to my side, and a shadow fell across my mat.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” I whispered. “Where in Am’s name have you been?”
He looked haunted as he stared down at me, and faint, as though he hadn’t slept or eaten all day. He swallowed hard, holding out a hand to help me up. “Please,” he said.
“Did the emperor ask to speak with you? It’s all right. If it was scary, I can take the memories away—”
“My amah is dead,” Sanjeet whispered. “Father was taken to prison.”
I LET SANJEET PULL ME UP, AND WE WALKED silently to the abandoned palace playroom. Sheet-covered toys rose in white mountains around us. We sat on a dusty divan, Sanjeet’s head in his hands. My insides twisted in knots. I rubbed his broad shoulder as he shook with sobs. After a moment I reached for his face, removing my sleeping scarf to swab at his tears.
“Should we—” I paused. “Should we burn something for her shade?”
I had only seen a funeral twice before. The first was in Swana, when a deafening procession had passed Bhekina House: adults and children wailing, rattling seed-filled hosho gourds, and beating bruises into their chests.
The other time had been here at the Children’s Palace, when Dayo had anointed Theo of Sparti to his council. The moment Dayo had touched Theo’s brow, a Sparti candidate named Ianthe had risen from the banquet hall, walked calmly to the Hall of Dreams, and thrown herself from a window.
After retrieving the girl’s body, the Children’s Palace attendants had wailed and beat themselves, just like the mourners from Swana. But their eyes, I noticed, were dry. Their wailing was merely a ritual: It was unlucky to bury an unmourned body, and the Sparti girl had no family to cry for her. Ianthe had crossed two thousand miles to reach Oluwan and try for the council. Many Children’s Palace rejects, I would later learn, had traveled alone, and could not afford the lodestone journey home.
Once the mourners had left and the Hall of Dreams hushed with sleep, the High Priestess of Aritsar crept to the window from which Ianthe had jumped. Of all the Emperor’s Eleven, Mbali visited us most often. At night, she would drift between the lines of pallets, soothing younger candidates who had wet their sheets, and coaxing thrashing children from nightmares.
Pretending to sleep, I watched as Mbali placed a palm oil lamp in the windowsill and drew a gauzy cloth from her pocket: Ianthe’s candidate sash. She wept—real tears, not the shrieking performance of the earlier mourners—and held a corner of Ianthe’s sash to the lamp. As the cloth burned, the air in the hall suddenly turned cold. I froze in horror as a translucent girl floated into the hall, shadows clinging to her body like a shroud. She headed straight for Mbali.
I leapt to my feet to warn the priestess, but she held out a hand to stop me. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s the only time she has left. Shades can only appear once after death. They often don’t come at all … if they died at peace.”
Carefully, the High Priestess held out her arms. Ianthe’s shade rushed into them, and to my surprise, she embraced Mbali with arms as solid as a living child’s.
“I’ll miss you,” Ianthe said.
“Not for long,” whispered Mbali, kissing the girl’s translucent head and seeming to suppress a shiver. “You won’t miss a thing where you’re going. Go, child. You’re free at last.” Then she murmured a blessing, and Ianthe vanished.
“We should burn something of your mother’s,” I told Sanjeet, retrieving an oil lamp from a sconce in the playroom. “Then you can see her again.”
Hope flickered across Sanjeet’s face. He hesitated, and then pulled a golden anklet from his pocket. “It’s all I have.”
“It doesn’t have to be the whole thing,” I said, removing a tiny bell from the chain. A memory passed into me—a woman’s foot beating rhythmically on a dust floor, and the ring of throaty laughter. I cast the bell into the lamp, watching as the metal curved and smoldered.
Nothing happened; the air in the playroom was stagnant. Sanjeet’s expression fell.
“Mbali said shades only visit if they aren’t at peace,” I said. “Or if they have to tell you something. So maybe it’s a good sign.”
He nodded woodenly. Desperate to feel useful, I taught him the blessing that Mbali had spoken over Ianthe. We stared into the dwindling lamp and spoke it together: You are immortal now. Immoveable,