My lips caressed the burn scar on his jaw. He roused, confused, and I held a finger to my lips. I pulled him up, and hand in hand we wove around the sleeping bodies, slipping from the banquet hall. We stole through keep corridors, bare feet pounding on stone.
“Tar, what’s going on?” Dayo yawned. I didn’t reply, snatching a torch from its sconce and hurrying down a staircase. He puffed to keep up. “Are you all right? Is someone hurt?”
He sounded distant, an echo in my head. “Enitawa’s Quiver,” I told him, rounding a corner. After several drinks at the Nu’ina festival, Mayazatyl had revealed the tree’s hiding place. A passage ran through the bowels of the keep, circumventing the guards and leading outside Yorua.
Dayo stopped dead in his tracks.
I glanced back at him impatiently. His pupils were dilated from sleep and disbelief. He wore nothing but trousers and a linen shirt, undone to reveal his collarbone.
“Tar,” he whispered.
“What?” I asked. “Isn’t this what you want?”
His gaze searched mine, shy and vulnerable. “I—I don’t know. It’s what’s expected of us. But then I saw you with Sanjeet, and I thought—”
“You thought wrong,” I said, seizing his hand and sweeping down a narrow staircase. We passed through a heavily barred door into a passage beneath Yorua Keep.
As we charged into the damp darkness, Dayo noticed my torch. “Aren’t you afraid of fire anymore?”
“No, Dayo.” The flames snickered in my ears. “Not anymore.”
According to Mayazatyl, the passage let out onto a mossy plateau, shielded from outside view by an outcrop of brush and sharp boulders. Before long, a breeze teased my face in the passage. I hung the torch in a niche and stepped out into the open.
A single tree grew in the plateau’s center. It had a slippery pale trunk with branches like twisting arms, tinted purple as they reached for the sky. A soft, high moan shivered in the air as Enitawa’s branches sang, heavy with the secrets of lovers who had rolled beneath its shadow. The ground was spongy beneath my feet, damp with a bed of ochre leaves.
“Come,” I said. Run, Dayo. A dim voice struggled to rise in my thoughts, like a seabird keeping abreast in a storm. “Come here.”
Run, Dayo. Run, please.
“I don’t understand,” he said, but drew near anyway. When I stroked the raised scar on his jaw, he relaxed into my touch. Words seemed to escape him as my fingers traced the veins in his neck. I explored the bones beneath his warm skin, admiring their weakness. Marveling at how easily they could break.
Dayo, get away. Run as far as you can. The voice was wheeling, drowned out by waves and crashing thunder. My fingers were steady and cold as they peeled off Dayo’s shirt, caressed the obsidian mask, and danced across his bare chest. He stiffened.
“Tar,” he whispered. “There’s something I should tell you. I don’t … I don’t think I want sex. Ever. And I don’t mean with you, I mean—with anyone. Girls, boys. Anyone.” He stared at the leaves on the ground, smooth brow furrowing. “I mean, I’ve had crushes before. On you, on Jeet, and some of the others. I’ve just … never been interested in the sex part. Sometimes I wonder if I’m broken.”
You aren’t broken, protested the voice inside me. You’re the kindest, most loving person I know. Run. Live.
“But I’m crown prince,” he continued, grimacing, “and I have to have heirs someday, so … I guess—if I could choose anyone—”
“There is no choosing,” I intoned. There were only suns and moons. Demons and wishes. Curses written into the stars.
He sighed. “Do you love me now, Tarisai of Swana?”
“She did love you,” I whispered. “But she wasn’t strong enough.”
Then the girl under the tree, the one who shared my face and voice, plunged the silver knife into Dayo’s stomach.
“Don’t look.”
We are twelve years old, sitting side by side in a palanquin as it ambles through the Oluwan City Imperial Square. Dayo peers through the embroidered window flap. I wrestle him away, ignoring his protests as I clap my hands over his eyes.
“Don’t look,” I tell him again.
“Why?” Dayo’s head nestles against my neck, tickling me with his soft curly hair. He thinks I’m playing a game. He laughs, a warm, gurgling sound.
Through the window flap, guards lead an old woman in white rags through the square. Her hair hangs in matted clumps. Onlookers spit and hiss as she is forced to climb a