answer. There must be another way to crown The Lady.”
“We could exile Prince Ekundayo instead of killing him,” Kathleen suggested brightly. “Off to some island where he can never threaten The Lady’s claim—”
“Dayo’s not going to an island,” Kirah snapped at her. “Once we find Aiyetoro’s masks, Dayo and Tar can rule together. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
I sputtered with exasperation. “Can we forget about my supposed Ray for a second and focus on protecting Dayo?”
Kirah ignored me, narrowing her eyes at Woo In and Kathleen. “You’re the ones who gave Tarisai that drum. So you have access to Aiyetoro’s possessions. Where do you think the masks are?”
“If we knew where to find Aiyetoro’s masks,” Kathleen replied, “then we would be breaking The Lady out of prison right now, not babysitting you in this backwater savannah. The empress and princess masks are the only remaining proof of The Lady’s right to rule. She has spent decades searching, and has never come closer to finding them.”
“What about the drum?” I asked.
“The Lady stole it from the palace as a child. When she found out that you had erased your memories, she made us deliver the drum to you in Ebujo, hoping your shared lineage with Aiyetoro would awaken your true identity. Clearly,” she added dryly, “it didn’t work.”
“We’ll help you search Bhekina House,” Woo In told me. “The Lady stored most of her records there. She likely has leads on where to look for the masks.”
I frowned. “If she did, wouldn’t she have told you?”
Woo In and Kathleen exchanged an uneasy look.
“The Lady told us what we needed to know for the tasks we were assigned,” Kathleen said at last, her tone defensive. “Not all Raybearers are as naive as your prince, spilling secrets left and right. The Lady likes her privacy.”
The insult to Dayo angered me, but the feeling melted to pity. Kathleen and Woo In had given their lives to my mother, and still she held them at a distance. Where they could not hurt her, I realized. As her brother had, as the world had. I pitied The Lady too.
We turned toward the shimmering red rooftops of Bhekina House. The compound was smaller than I remembered. As a child, the palisade gates had towered over my head, an impossible-to-cross barrier to the whole world.
“Is anyone still living here?” I asked, my lungs constricting.
“The Lady dismissed most of her servants after sending you to the capital,” Kathleen replied. “But some of your tutors were my anointed siblings. They’re traveling to Songland as we speak, hoping to convince Queen Hye Sun’s army to break The Lady out of An-Ileyoba. A few servants still live here to open the gate and look after the chickens. But the compound never needed farmhands.” Kathleen looked unsettled. “The orchard has always cared for itself.”
The perfume of mangoes washed over me as Woo In called a password, and the palisade gates creaked open. A rheumy-eyed guard peered at us, then gasped when he recognized my features.
“She is not here,” he wailed. “The Lady is gone, gone.” Wrinkled, leathery skin covered his arms as he operated the heavy gate crank. I recognized him. The man had guarded the gate when I small. He had been just as old then as he was now. How could such a frail man survive for so long? Then again …
How could an orchard of mangoes bloom year-round with no one to care for them?
“What are you looking at?” Kirah asked me, squinting up at the guard, and I realized that she and Sanjeet could not see or hear him. They could not sense the towering gates, or even smell the ripe orchard yards away.
I shivered, bid them goodbye, and entered the compound with Woo In and Kathleen. When I turned back to wave, Sanjeet and Kirah stared straight through me, looking unnerved, as though I had vanished into thin air.
The courtyard, manor, huts, and fruit trees of Bhekina House were eerily still. The heat of Melu’s enchantment seeped through every wax-coated leaf, every brick and cobblestone. How could I not have noticed, before, how the walls hummed quietly with power? This place had once seemed so ordinary. Then again … it had been all I’d known.
I remembered Melu’s words about Bhekina House: The magic of that place is not easy on one’s mind. I pitied my former tutors and servants. No wonder they had been so stiff and paranoid. It was a mercy they had not gone mad.