The charm pulses against her palm through the leather. Three dried seeds bound with her mother’s hair and soaked in extract of the yellow oleander that grows behind the compound kitchens. Nkemdirim’s breath steadies as she calculates the distance: twenty paces past the cooking fires where embers still glow like ancestor eyes, across the open courtyard where moonlight pools treacherous and revealing, through the commander’s entrance where the brass threshold guardian sits with its hollow eyes that seem to follow movement.
Her grandmother’s voice surfaces from memory: The trickster favors those who move like water, formless, flowing into spaces others cannot see.
She counts heartbeats. Three. Four. The guard at the eastern post shifts his weight, spear tip catching starlight as he turns to scan the opposite direction. Five. Six. A dog barks somewhere in the lower quarters, drawing attention toward the sound.
Now.
The charm’s warmth spreads up her wrist, into her forearm: whether from the poison’s heat or her ancestors’ approval, she cannot tell. Both, perhaps. The distinction matters less than the certainty flooding her limbs, the knowledge that this moment has been building since the night she watched flames consume her family’s compound, since the morning she woke with iron around her ankles and her name erased from the town’s memory.
Kolade’s water gourd sits in that alcove. Unguarded. Waiting.
She thinks of her mother’s final scream, cut short. Her father’s blood darkening the threshold stones. Her younger brother’s small hand torn from hers as they were separated at the auction block beneath the iroko tree.
The seeds pulse again, yes, yes, yes, a rhythm matching her racing heart.
Adisa’s signal came true. The path is clear. The spirits are watching.
Twenty paces between bondage and the first taste of vengeance.
The shadow takes her like the grove takes offerings, completely, without question. Her spine flattens against rough wood, the granary wall still holding the day’s heat against her shoulder blades. She becomes geometry: angles and absence, the negative space between moonlight and matter.
Fifteen paces. The courtyard sprawls before her, exposed as an open palm.
The eastern guard hawks and spits, his attention still caught by the barking dog. Seven heartbeats, maybe eight before he completes his turn. The embers breathe orange in the cooking pit, casting restless shadows that could hide her movement. Or expose it.
Her grandmother’s words again: Water finds the path of least resistance.
Not straight across the courtyard, then. Along the wall where darkness pools thickest, where the granary’s bulk blocks the moon. Three paces to the commander’s entrance, where the brass threshold guardian squats with its hollow eyes and open mouth that swallows offerings.
The charm burns hotter now, urgent. The yellow oleander speaking its poison language against her skin.
Adisa’s double-click cuts through her calculation, hurry, hurry, and her legs coil beneath her, ready.
Two clicks pierce the darkness: sharper now, stripped of patience. Adisa’s fear travels through the sound.
The window is closing.
Nkemdirim’s eyes fix on the alcove entrance, where torchlight spills across packed earth. Fifteen paces. The gourd waits on its carved stand, cork tilted at that careless angle Kolade always leaves it. Arrogant in his certainty that no hand would dare touch what belongs to the garrison commander.
Her fingers tighten on the charm until leather bites her palm. The oleander pulses its yellow heat, eager for the water that will release its purpose.
The eastern guard’s footsteps scrape closer. The dog’s barking stutters, dies.
Now. It has to be now.
Her muscles gather, but something holds her. Not fear, but the terrible weight of irrevocability. Once the poison touches that water, there is no calling it back.
The ancestor whispers rise. Not words but weight pressing through her bones. Her grandmother’s calloused hands steadying trembling shoulders. Her father’s hunting song thrumming beneath her ribs, teaching her body the difference between frozen prey and patient predator.
Nkemdirim’s breath finds the compound’s rhythm. Her pulse slows to match the sleeping guards, the dreaming slaves, the very earth that remembers her blood’s claim to this ground. She becomes what belongs here: shadow, memory, inevitable reckoning.
She moves. Three steps that erase her from one breath and deliver her to the next, feet finding the worn stones where countless boots have smoothed the path. The charm burns up her forearm now, eager, hungry for completion. Then torchlight sweeps left, wrong, too early, and the alcove’s entrance yawns five paces distant while her body hangs suspended between shadow and exposure.
The warriors’ voices thicken the air before their bodies arrive: complaints about the late inspection rolling across packed earth like smoke, low and bitter. One of them, Taiwo by the particular rasp of his laughter, speculates about which slave girl he’ll visit after, describing her body with words that make Nkemdirim’s jaw clench so hard her teeth ache. The others encourage him, their voices weaving a familiar tapestry of casual cruelty that she’s learned to let wash over her like rain.
But tonight her fingers close around the charm in her pouch, and the thing responds. It pulses against her palm, rhythm matching her hammering heart, and the heat that was merely uncomfortable now climbs past her elbow with purpose. The sensation isn’t pain exactly: more like recognition, as if the poison-laced bundle of herbs and grave dirt knows proximity to its intended target. Her mother’s voice surfaces from memory: The spirits hunger for justice, daughter. Feed them or be consumed.
She counts footfalls. Four distinct patterns of boot against earth, the slight drag of Taiwo’s left foot that speaks of an old injury poorly healed. Their trajectory cuts diagonal across the courtyard, and her breath stops as she calculates angles, distances, the inevitable intersection of their path and her destination.
The alcove. Kolade’s private water station sits exactly where Taiwo will position himself: she knows this because she’s watched three inspections from the shadows, memorizing patterns, learning the choreography of power. The commander always drinks before entering the quarters, a ritual of purification he performs without conscious thought. And Taiwo, as second-in-command, always stands guard at that precise spot, spear planted, surveying his domain while Kolade performs his theater of authority.
The charm burns hotter. The warriors draw closer. And the space between shadow and exposure collapses with each heartbeat.
The mathematics of survival crystallize in her skull: four warriors, thirty paces and closing, angle of approach seventeen degrees off her intended path. Her fingers release the charm back into its pouch before the heat can betray her with trembling. The alcove where Kolade’s water gourd waits sits exposed now, impossible, Taiwo will plant himself there like he always does, spear vertical, surveying the quarters with that proprietor’s gaze that makes her want to tear out his eyes.
She maps alternatives with desperate speed. Circle back through the kitchen compound. Scale the wall to the records room, possible, but Adisa’s window of emptiness is narrow, already half-consumed. Wait here, pressed to shadow, and pray they pass without looking left. The charm pulses disagreement through leather, through cloth, against her hip like accusation.
The torchlight reaches the courtyard’s edge. Taiwo’s voice rises, describing what he’ll do to the girl in detail that makes the night itself recoil. And Nkemdirim understands with absolute clarity: the spirits have arranged this test. Patience or boldness. Survival or vengeance.
The choice burns hotter than any charm.
The torchlight sweeps closer, painting wild shadows that dance and writhe across the packed earth like ancestor spirits in mockery. She forces her breathing to slow, to shallow, becoming as still as the wall itself, stone-patient, stone-silent, while her mind races through impossible alternatives. Abort now and lose this chance that Adisa risked everything to create. Wait here and risk Taiwo’s torch finding her pressed flat like prey, like the helpless thing they believe she is.
Her mother’s voice whispers through memory: The hunter who cannot be still becomes the hunted.
But the charm burns against her hip, impatient. Eshu favors the bold, not the frozen.
The warriors’ boots crunch closer. Fifteen paces now. Her fingers find the wall’s rough texture, mapping handholds she cannot use, escape routes she cannot take.
Three heartbeats. She moves before thought can cage her, slipping sideways along the wall’s edge where shadow pools deepest. Her shoulder grazes rough clay. The recruit’s stammering voice rises, defensive now, and Taiwo’s irritation sharpens to full contempt, his words cutting loud enough to mask the whisper of her indigo cloth against stone, the soft press of her feet finding the gap between torchlight and wall.
The leather pouch scorches her skin through the cloth wrapping, heat pulsing like a living heart pressed to her flesh. Her ancestors whisper urgency while Eshu’s laughter threads through the night breeze. The warriors’ voices grow louder. She must choose: retreat into familiar shadows and lose this chance forever, or step forward into the torchlight’s edge where audacity becomes either salvation or execution.
The decision crystallizes in the space between heartbeats, sharp and inevitable as a blade finding flesh. Nkemdirim’s hand drops from the wall to the pouch at her hip, fingers closing around the small clay vessel nested inside: the one Adisa marked with three scratches, the one containing not poison but powdered charcoal mixed with palm oil. A decoy, he’d called it, something to scatter and create confusion if she needed to run.
But running means the water gourd stays clean. Running means Kolade drinks safely tomorrow while she returns to the sleeping mats with nothing changed, nothing avenged, her mother’s voice growing fainter in her dreams.
The warriors’ shadows stretch long across the compound wall, torchlight announcing their approach like a slow-burning fuse. Five paces to the water barrel. Three men between her and the record room where the real poison waits in Adisa’s careful hands. The mathematics of survival war with the arithmetic of revenge in her skull.
Her grandmother’s words surface through the panic, spoken in the old tongue during the last harvest before the burning: The leopard who hesitates starves, but the leopard who leaps without looking dies on the hunter’s spear.
Nkemdirim’s breathing slows, deliberately, painfully. She counts the footsteps: heavy boots, military rhythm, three sets moving in casual formation. Not searching. Not hunting. Just patrolling, bored warriors making their rounds, expecting nothing more dangerous than rats in the grain stores.
The pouch’s heat intensifies against her palm, her ancestors pressing their urgency into her skin like brands. But beneath their whispers, she catches something else. It’s timing.
She waits, pressed into shadow, letting the warriors’ footsteps carry them closer. Watching. Calculating the precise moment when their torchlight will create the deepest shadows behind them.
Taiwo’s distinctive laugh cuts through the night. That same cruel sound he made while counting her lashes, each number announced like a merchant tallying goods. Her body remembers before her mind can intervene: muscles seizing, breath snagging in her throat like cloth on thorns, the old scars across her shoulders suddenly burning as if the whip were falling fresh across her skin. The memory has teeth. It bites down hard, dragging her back to that morning in the plaza, the sun too bright, the crowd too silent, his voice too pleased with itself as he called out “Fifteen… sixteen…”
She must bite her tongue until she tastes copper to keep from making a sound. The metallic tang floods her mouth, sharp and grounding. Pain in the present to anchor against pain in the past. Her grandmother taught her this too, though not with words: how to swallow screams, how to make your body a locked room where suffering cannot escape to betray you.
The warriors’ footsteps grow louder. Taiwo laughs again, telling some story she cannot hear over the blood rushing in her ears.
The charm pulses against her palm. Not in rhythm with her racing heart but against it, a counter-beat that feels like argument. Heat blooms where the leather pouch presses into her calloused flesh, and she understands with sudden clarity that Eshu is here, drawn by her terror like flies to overripe fruit. The trickster feeds on fear the way fire feeds on air, transforming it, alchemizing her paralysis into something sharper. The heat climbs her forearm, liquid and insistent, and her senses suddenly sharpen to impossible acuity: she can smell the palm wine souring on the warriors’ breath from twenty paces, can hear the distinctive scrape-drag of Taiwo’s left foot where a Dahomey spear caught him years ago. The god is giving her weapons. She need only choose to wield them.
The breathing technique steadies her enough to map the space between torchlight and shadow (her mother’s voice an echo beneath her pulse, breathe daughter breathe) but the gap she needs exists only in motion, in the half-second when Taiwo shifts his weight and the other warrior turns his head. Three breaths. She counts them against the charm’s contrary rhythm, muscles coiling, waiting for Eshu to tip the moment toward chaos or opportunity.
The spear’s thunk reverberates through her chest like a judgment. Taiwo settles his weight, legs spread, and begins speaking to his companion in the low tones of men with time to waste. Across the compound, Adisa’s lamp gutters. She can see the flame shrinking, starving, the careful deception dying breath by breath. Her fingers find the poison pouch at her hip. The window is closing.
The heat licks her skin like a living thing, and for one terrible breath she thinks the flame will catch the edge of her wrapper, that the cloth will ignite and announce her presence in a rush of light and burning. But Taiwo shifts (some unconscious adjustment of stance) and the torch swings away, plunging her back into merciful darkness.
Her heart hammers against her ribs. She can taste copper on her tongue where she’s bitten the inside of her cheek. The gap between the huts presses against her shoulders, her spine, tight as a coffin. She cannot move forward. Cannot retreat. Can only remain frozen while these men decide whether to linger or move on.
Taiwo’s companion grunts. She recognizes the voice now, Babatunde, younger, always eager to prove himself. “The forest does strange things,” he says, and there’s something in his tone that makes her pause. Not quite fear. Respect, maybe. Or memory. “My grandmother used to say the old powers never truly sleep. They only wait.”
“Your grandmother filled your head with nonsense.” Taiwo spits, and she hears the liquid splatter against packed earth. “There’s nothing in that grove but shadows and the rats that feed on spoiled offerings. The spirits were driven out when the merchants took control. When we. The silence stretches. Nkemdirim’s fingers tighten on the poison pouch. Across the compound, Adisa’s lamp flickers, struggles, the flame now barely visible. She counts her remaining breaths. Three minutes, perhaps four, before the deception becomes obvious. Before someone notices the record room sits empty despite its lit window.
Taiwo clears his throat. The spear shifts against wood, a small scraping sound that sets her teeth on edge. He’s thinking. Deciding. Her entire plan balances on this moment, on whether these two men choose to stand here talking or finally move on.
Taiwo’s voice drops lower, takes on the conspiratorial edge of men who speak truths they shouldn’t. “It’s not just the slaves hearing things. Three nights past, I woke to find Kolade standing in the courtyard, staring at nothing, his lips moving like he was answering someone. When I called to him, he startled like a guilty child.”
Babatunde shifts his weight. The leather of his sandals creaks. “My cousin serves in his household. Says the commander’s been burning protective herbs, making marks on his doorframe. Says he won’t drink water unless he’s watched it being drawn from the well.”
“Fear makes fools of strong men.” But Taiwo’s voice wavers, betraying his own unease. “The old blood families cursed this town when we,” He stops. Starts again. “When they were removed. Perhaps those curses have longer teeth than the merchants believed.”
The torch gutters. Shadows leap and twist across the compound walls. Nkemdirim’s grandmother’s voice rises unbidden in her memory: The spirits always collect their debts. Always.
Adisa’s lamp flickers again. Dying.
Babatunde’s agreement comes as a low rumble in his chest, and he shifts his spear from shoulder to ground. The iron tip scraping against stone, metal against earth, a sound that travels up through Nkemdirim’s bones and sets her jaw clenching. “The commander’s been strange these past weeks, jumping at shadows like a child who’s heard too many night stories. Yesterday he had me search the entire western perimeter, convinced someone was watching him from the tree line.” He spits into the dust. “Found nothing but crows and their shit. The birds scattered when I approached, laughing at us like they knew something we didn’t.”
Taiwo makes a gesture against evil, quick and furtive. “Crows remember faces. My mother always said.
Through the gap between their bodies, Nkemdirim watches the record room’s lamp struggle. Flame bending, straightening, bending again like something breathing. Fifteen paces of exposed ground separate her from Adisa’s carefully arranged deception. But these warriors stand rooted, their backs offering only partial cover, and Taiwo’s head keeps turning, his eyes catching every movement in that restless way of men who’ve survived by noticing what others miss.
The words settle like ash. Taiwo shifts his weight, spear rising, but his body angles wrong. Toward her darkness instead of away. His eyes begin their sweep, tracking the wall’s shadow-line where she presses herself into stone and prayer. The leather pouch burns against her hip bone, her mother’s tokens suddenly hot as forge-coals, and Nkemdirim understands: the ancestors are here, watching, their attention a weight that might save or condemn her.
The first warrior’s complaint cuts through the darkness like a blade through cloth, and Nkemdirim’s breath stops halfway down her throat. Doubled watches. The words reshape everything. All of Adisa’s careful observations, the patrol patterns she’s memorized by counting heartbeats between footfalls, the narrow gaps in coverage that were supposed to give her passage to Kolade’s quarters. Gone. Compressed into something tighter, more dangerous.
Her fingers find the wall’s rough surface, pressing until the dried mud bites into her palms. The pain helps her think. If they’re watching for information leaks, Adisa is already at risk. Every document he’s slipped her, every whispered warning about schedule changes. All of it could unravel with a single suspicious glance at his movements. And if Adisa falls, she loses her eyes inside the garrison, loses the knowledge of when Kolade drinks from his personal gourd, when he removes his protective amulets, when he’s alone enough to be vulnerable.
The leather pouch pulses against her hip again, insistent. Her mother’s voice surfaces from memory: Patience is the trickster’s first weapon. Haste is how the hunter becomes the hunted.
But patience requires time, and time is precisely what Kolade’s paranoia is stealing from her. If he suspects betrayal among his warriors, he’ll be watching everything tonight. The shadows in his quarters, the placement of his belongings, any disturbance in the careful order he maintains. The charm she’s prepared, blessed with words her grandmother taught her, soaked in extracts that will weaken his connection to the military cult’s protection: it must be positioned exactly right. In his gourd but not visible. Present but not detectable. Close enough to his lips to do its work before he notices the bitter aftertaste.
One mistake, and she becomes another body hanging from the iroko tree as warning.
The compound wall’s texture changes beneath her palms: from sun-dried mud to something older, smoother. Foundation stones from before the garrison was built here, when this ground held different purposes. Her grandmother’s voice surfaces: The earth remembers what men try to forget.
She needs to think like Eshu now. The trickster god doesn’t force doors that won’t open. He finds windows, cracks, the spaces between intention and execution. Kolade’s paranoia is a door swinging shut, yes, but paranoia creates its own vulnerabilities. A commander who trusts no one must verify everything himself. Must check his own quarters, his own provisions, his own protections.
Must be alone to do it.
The charm in her pouch isn’t just poison. It’s invitation. It’s the question that will make him look closer at the wrong things while missing what matters. But only if she can position it where his suspicion will work against him, where his need for control will make him careless.
Adisa’s window of opportunity shrinks with every doubled patrol, but perhaps that pressure is itself a gift. Perhaps haste, carefully performed, looks nothing like conspiracy.
The tokens burn hotter, and suddenly she understands: this isn’t warning about Taiwo discovering her. The spirits are marking time itself, the way her mother used to press heated stones wrapped in cloth against fever-sick skin. Drawing out poison. Drawing out hesitation.
Tonight. It must be tonight.
The doubled patrols aren’t obstacles. They’re Kolade’s own trap closing around him. A commander who spreads his warriors thin checking shadows leaves his center unguarded. She’s been thinking like prey, waiting for the hunter to look away. But Eshu doesn’t wait. He walks through the market in broad daylight, stealing what everyone’s watching.
The charm will work precisely because Kolade expects subterfuge in darkness, not boldness in his moment of vigilance.
She holds herself motionless as carved wood, breathing shallow through her nose. Taiwo’s shadow falls across the gap: so close she can smell the palm wine on his breath, see the ritual scars puckered along his knuckles. The ancestral tokens press against her ribs like hot coals. Not warning. Witnessing. Testing whether she’s learned that survival sometimes means becoming stone, becoming silence, becoming the space between heartbeats where death forgets to look.
Her fingers find the leather pouch by instinct, pressing against her grandmother’s tokens through the worn hide. The old words surface unbidden, àṣírí, òkùnkùn, má rí mi, tasting of copper and ash as they leave her tongue. The air thickens. Shadows pool deeper in the corners. Taiwo’s eyes sweep past her hiding place as though she’s merely another shadow among many, but the prayer has cost her: something vital bleeds away, leaving her hollow and trembling.
The words settle into her bones like iron weights, each syllable a new calculation. Nkemdirim’s hands continue their work (untying, lifting, the practiced motions of someone beneath notice) while behind her eyes a different kind of labor unfolds. Adisa watched. Adisa suspected. The careful architecture of their plan reveals its fault lines.
She catalogs what she knows: Taiwo speaks freely because he believes her deaf to anything beyond orders. The garrison breeds this particular blindness, this assumption that the enslaved possess no interior life worth guarding against. It has kept her alive. It has made her dangerous.
But Kolade’s paranoia is another matter entirely. A commander who watches his own record-keeper is a commander who trusts nothing, who sees conspiracy in every shadow. Tonight’s inspection, rare, unexpected, suddenly takes on new geometry. Not routine. Not chance. A test, perhaps. Or bait.
The poisoned charm presses against her hip through the leather pouch, its presence a constant whisper. She’d spent three nights preparing it, grinding the seeds her mother had taught her to recognize, binding them with grave dirt and words that left her throat raw. The charm would work. She’d tested smaller versions on the garrison’s dogs, watched them sicken and die with a satisfaction that frightened her. But the charm required proximity, required Kolade to drink from the gourd she’d touched, required the window of time when no one would notice her near his personal effects.
Required Adisa’s diversion.
Her fingers fumble the knot and she bends lower to work at it, using the motion to hide the way her jaw clenches. If the record room is compromised, if Adisa has been marked, then she needs another path. The Whispering Grove rises in her mind, its cool shadows and watching presence. The ancestors had shown her fragments of tonight in dreams she half-remembered. Had they shown her this complication? Or had she been too eager to see only success?
“The commander sees what others miss,” she says, letting her voice carry the flat deference they expect, the words shaped carefully to sound like agreement rather than observation. Her fingers worry at the hemp rope binding the gourds, deliberately clumsy now, giving her reason to stay bent over her task while her mind races through new calculations.
If Adisa is marked, then every movement he makes draws eyes. The record room (empty or not) becomes a place of scrutiny rather than concealment. And she, approaching Kolade’s quarters during the diversion, would be walking into light instead of shadow.
The charm’s weight against her hip shifts from promise to liability. Three nights of preparation, her mother’s knowledge made manifest in ground seeds and whispered invocations, and now the path to its use narrows to nothing. Or transforms into something else entirely.
She thinks of the Grove, how the ancestors showed her fire and water in her dreams, but never the sequence. Never the clear instruction she’d wanted. Trickster gods favor the adaptable, her mother had said. Those who can dance when the drum changes rhythm.
The knot finally gives way.
She releases the gourds with deliberate care, watching them roll slightly before settling. Taiwo’s bulk shifts above her, distracted, satisfied with his own intelligence shared. The moment stretches.
Adisa doesn’t know. The certainty settles in her bones like recognition. He moves with a scholar’s careful precision, not a hunted man’s wariness. Those ink-stained fingers have been documenting, gathering, building his careful case against injustice. And now they’ve marked him for death.
The sun bleeds orange through the garrison walls. Dusk comes fast in this season.
She could abandon the plan. Warn him. Save the ally who’s risked everything to create this opening. Or she could let him draw their eyes while her mother’s poison finds Kolade’s throat.
The ancestors whisper no guidance. Only wind.
The pouch burns against her ribs. Not with heat but with weight of purpose. Inside, wrapped in spider silk and her own blood, the charm waits. Herbs to make a warrior’s heart stutter and fail. She remembers her mother’s final scream, how it cut off mid-breath. Her father’s skull cracking under Kolade’s boot. His face empty of everything but duty.
Tonight. It must be tonight.
The gourds settle heavy against her hip, water sloshing with each measured step. Her eyes track shadows, counting heartbeats between patrol routes. If Taiwo’s suspicions have teeth, if Adisa’s careful dance has faltered: the ancestors press against her skull, their voices splitting into argument. Strike now, some hiss. Wait, others caution. Her fingers brush the pouch. The charm pulses like a second heart, hungry for Kolade’s throat.
The torchlight throws dancing shadows across the courtyard stones, turning familiar geometry into something treacherous and alive. Nkemdirim’s fingers find the leather pouch at her waist: her mother’s tokens press against her palm through the worn hide, small bones and cowrie shells that once adorned a free woman’s hair. She draws what courage she can from their touch while her breath comes shallow and controlled, each inhalation measured to silence.
Three spear-tips catch the flame’s gleam. Three sets of footfalls strike the packed earth in rhythm. The synchronized step of men who have trained together, who trust each other’s peripheral vision. She calculates angles like her mother once calculated market prices: the water barrel’s curve, the depth of shadow it casts, the precise degree one of them would need to turn his head before torchlight would find her face.
Her body knows this mathematics of survival. Years of moving through her enslavers’ compound have taught her how to read the language of sight-lines and shadow. She makes herself small, makes herself stone, makes herself nothing: a trick learned from watching lizards freeze against tree bark.
The warriors move closer. Close enough that she can smell the palm wine on their breath, the iron-tang of weapon oil, the particular musk of men who wear their violence like a second skin. One of them laughs at something another has said, the sound sharp in the night air.
Her grandmother’s voice whispers from memory: The mouse that watches the cat’s eyes survives. The mouse that watches the cat’s feet dies. So Nkemdirim watches their feet, tracks the pattern of their steps, feels the rhythm of their movement like a pulse against her own frozen stillness.
If they stop. If they linger. If one decides to fill his water skin from this very barrel. The torchlight slides away like a receding tide.
The passage Adisa mapped should have been clear: she’d counted on it, timed her breathing to match the intervals he’d scratched onto bark-paper with his careful hand. But these warriors wear crimson arm-bands that catch the torchlight like fresh wounds, and her stomach drops with recognition. Kolade’s personal guard. The ones who answer only to him, whose movements follow no roster, no pattern Adisa could have documented.
The commander has changed his methods. Added chaos to order, made the predictable treacherous.
She tastes copper on her tongue where she’s bitten the inside of her cheek. Her mind races through possibilities, each one narrowing to the same dark conclusions. The whipping post stands in the center courtyard where everyone must see. Or worse. The auction block, sold away from this town before she can finish what her mother’s spirit demands. Before she can speak the names that need speaking, perform the rites that will let her family’s souls rest.
Eshu, trickster, lord of crossroads, she prays silently, desperately. I am at your crossroads now. Show me the path that bends but does not break.
The warrior’s spear shaft grazes the water barrel’s rim as he shifts his weight, and Nkemdirim stops breathing entirely. Her fingers press against rough wood, splinters biting into callused palms. She can count the brass rings on his wrist, see where sweat darkens the leather binding of his weapon’s grip.
Shadows, hold me. Grandmother’s blood, make me nothing.
The prayer moves through her like water through cloth, and something answers. Not quite the ancestors, not quite her own will. The darkness around her thickens, becomes textured, substantial. The warrior’s gaze passes over her hiding place without catching, slides away as though the space she occupies has simply ceased to exist in his mind. His amulet swings, reflecting torchlight, then he turns to address his companions.
The youngest warrior’s voice carries poorly suppressed anxiety: “The commander’s been like a wounded leopard since that record-keeper started acting nervous.”
Nkemdirim’s breath catches. Adisa. They mean Adisa.
“Kolade watches him now, questions why he asks about old patrol logs, property records from the burning years.” The warrior spits. “Says someone’s been copying documents after dark.”
Her ally is compromised. Every route he mapped, every schedule he provided. All suspect now. She might be walking directly into Kolade’s teeth.
The eldest warrior grunts, his brass armband catching torchlight as he gestures toward the western wall. “Forget Kolade’s spy-hunting. Three slaves vanished yesterday. Farmers found their tools abandoned at the forest boundary.” His voice drops. “The grove.”
His companions make warding signs against spirits.
Nkemdirim’s pulse quickens. Runaways seeking ancestor protection means the garrison will choke every path she’d mapped. Her escape routes are closing like a trap.
The youngest warrior, barely older than Nkemdirim herself, shifts nervously. “My cousin serves in the record house. Says the commander’s been going through documents himself, checking what’s been copied, what’s been filed. Never seen him do that before.”
“Adisa’s work, you mean?” The eldest spits into the dirt. “That ink-fingered scholar? He’s too clever to leave traces. If there’s a spy, it’s someone with less sense.”
Nkemdirim’s chest tightens. They’re circling Adisa already. Her fingers find the small leather pouch at her waist, her mother’s tokens pressing against her palm through the worn hide. The ancestors whisper at the edges of her hearing. Not words, but sensation. Warning or encouragement, she cannot tell.
The scarred warrior leans his spear against the wall, close enough that Nkemdirim could reach out and touch the shaft. “You ask me, the commander’s seeing shadows because his conscience finally caught him. All those families he helped the merchants destroy, all those lineages erased. Maybe the spirits are coming for their due.”
“Watch your tongue.” The eldest’s voice sharpens. “The military cult protects us from ancestor curses. We did what was necessary for order.”
“Order.” The word hangs bitter in the air. “Is that what we call it when we burn compounds and chain children?”
Silence stretches. Nkemdirim can smell them now: palm wine on breath, the oil they use on their brass fittings, old sweat and leather. Her legs cramp from holding position, but she doesn’t dare move. One sound, one shadow falling wrong, and everything ends here.
The eldest finally speaks, lower now. “The past is done. We serve the present. And presently, we need to finish this patrol before the commander adds us to his list of suspects.”
Their footsteps resume, fading toward the eastern corridor.
The middle warrior, younger but scarred across his jaw, laughs bitterly. “Meanwhile those three field workers are probably halfway to the coast by now, or dead in the grove if the spirits got them.” He adjusts his spear, the iron tip catching what little light penetrates this corridor. “But does Kolade care? No, he’s convinced the real threat is someone writing down his business.”
The eldest warrior grunts. “Three runaways aren’t worth the effort. Let the forest have them.”
“Unless they make it to the coast. Tell their stories to the wrong ears.” The scarred one’s voice drops. “You know what the merchants fear most? Not rebellion. Not even the ancestors. They fear their deeds traveling beyond their control, reaching places where their gold can’t buy silence.”
Nkemdirim’s breath catches. The runaways, if they survived the grove, if they carried stories with them, could they speak her family’s name? Would anyone beyond these rivers remember the lineage that was erased?
The youngest warrior shifts again. “The commander wants the grove searched at dawn. Full company.”
“Waste of men.” But the eldest sounds uncertain now, almost afraid.
Nkemdirim’s fingers find the leather pouch at her waist, pressing against her mother’s tokens through the worn hide: the cowrie shell, the iron ring, the fragment of carved bone. Each one a name, a witness. She calculates the distance to the next shadow: fifteen paces across exposed ground. The patrol schedule Adisa gave her is now worthless: these men shouldn’t be here for another hour. Every route compromised. Her mind moves like water finding cracks: if the schedule is wrong, either Adisa’s information has gaps, or someone changed the rotations deliberately. A trap, perhaps. Or simple chaos, which Eshu favors. The warriors’ boots scrape against packed earth. She needs them to move, now, before her leg cramps from this crouch.
The words strike like a blade between her ribs. Adisa. They’re watching Adisa. The warrior’s voice carries the weight of suspicion ripening into certainty. She tastes copper. Has bitten her tongue without realizing. Her ally, her only eyes inside these walls, already marked. The ink that preserves their people’s stolen stories now stains him with guilt. How long before watching becomes accusation? Before Kolade’s paranoia finds its target?
Her mother’s tokens burn against her hip through the leather pouch. The ancestors whisper in the space between heartbeats. Forward means risking everything on this single strike. Retreat means Adisa lives another day, but Kolade’s guard rises higher. The warriors’ boots scrape closer. Her breath stops. The decision crystallizes like iron cooling: she cannot save them both tonight.
The youngest warrior spits on the ground, the sound sharp in the humid night air. His voice carries the particular edge of a man forced to perform loyalty he doesn’t fully feel. “The commander has us all jumping at shadows now: convinced there’s a traitor in the garrison feeding secrets to the malcontents.”
Nkemdirim presses herself deeper into the darkness between the supply huts, her spine against rough wood still warm from the day’s heat. Her heart hammers against her ribs, each beat a drum announcing her presence to spirits and men alike. The warriors stand less than ten paces away, their brass armor catching fragments of torchlight from the compound’s perimeter.
The net is tightening around someone.
“It’s that record-keeper he’s fixated on,” another warrior adds, older, his voice carrying the weariness of a man who has conducted too many searches on his commander’s paranoid orders. He adjusts the spear on his shoulder with practiced ease. “Adisa: we’ve searched his quarters twice this week already, going through every scrap of paper, every ink pot. The man can barely do his work with Kolade breathing down his neck.”
Nkemdirim’s breath catches in her throat. Her fingers move without conscious thought, reaching for the leather pouch at her waist. The ancestral tokens inside seem to pulse against her palm, hot as coals, as cold dread floods through her veins like river water.
Adisa. Already suspected. Already watched.
The third warrior, silent until now, makes a sound of disgust. “If there is a traitor, Kolade will find him. The commander always does.” The certainty in his voice carries the weight of witnessed consequences. “Remember what happened to the last man accused of disloyalty.”
Nkemdirim remembers. Everyone remembers. The body displayed for three days in the market square, a lesson written in decomposing flesh.
The cold spreads from her chest outward, numbing her fingers where they clutch the ancestral tokens. Adisa. The name echoes in her skull like a death knell. Every careful plan, every whispered conversation in shadowed corners, every document he’d risked copying for her: all of it suddenly precarious as a clay pot balanced on a knife’s edge.
She forces herself to breathe slowly, silently, though her lungs want to heave with panic. The warriors’ voices continue their casual discussion of a man’s potential destruction, and she must remain stone, must become shadow itself. But her mind churns with terrible arithmetic: if Kolade suspects Adisa, how long before suspicion becomes certainty? How long before the record-keeper’s careful neutrality cracks under interrogation?
The tokens burn against her palm, and she realizes her ancestors are trying to tell her something. A warning, perhaps. Or permission.
Tonight’s mission was supposed to be simple. Retrieve the garrison schedule Adisa had hidden for her, learn Kolade’s movements for the coming week. But if the commander is already watching, already searching, then every step she takes now carries double weight. One mistake, and she condemns them both.
The youngest warrior shifts his weight, spear butt scraping against stone. “Twice this week already. Had us turn out every scroll, every ledger. Adisa just stands there with that careful face of his, answering every question like he’s reciting market prices.” A pause, then lower: “But you see his hands? They shake now when the commander enters the records room.”
Nkemdirim’s chest constricts. She knows those hands: ink-stained fingers that had traced maps for her in the dirt, that had copied patrol schedules with meticulous care. Shaking hands make mistakes. Mistakes draw attention. Attention brings the hot iron, the questions that strip away careful lies like flesh from bone.
Her ancestors’ tokens pulse against her palm. The warning crystallizes: tonight might be her last chance to act before Kolade’s suspicion becomes certainty, before Adisa’s courage crumbles into confession.
The third warrior’s voice carried the weight of understanding: perhaps too much understanding. “Can you blame the commander? After what he’s built, what he’s done to secure his position…” A deliberate pause. “He can’t afford trust. Not with whispers of the old families stirring.”
Nkemdirim’s rage ignited beneath her fear. Kolade’s paranoia was a blade that cut both ways: it endangered them, yes. But a man who trusted no one could be turned against his own.
The youngest warrior’s nod carried resignation more than agreement. He kicked at a loose stone, sending it skittering across packed earth. “Still makes for bitter duty. We watch each other now: wondering who might whisper to the wrong ears, who carries sympathy for the bound ones.”
Nkemdirim’s breath stopped. The truth crystallized like poison in her chest: one mistake tonight, one careless footprint or displaced item, and Kolade’s suspicions would harden into certainty. Both their lives would end.
The eldest warrior’s laugh cuts through the humid night air, harsh and knowing. Nkemdirim presses herself deeper into the shadow between the storage huts, her spine flat against rough wood that still holds the day’s heat. His voice carries with the casual cruelty of a man who has seen power change hands through violence and learned its lessons well.
“The commander has reason to be careful: he didn’t rise to his position by trusting anyone, not after what happened to the last garrison commander who got too comfortable.”
The words settle over the compound like ash. Nkemdirim’s fingers find the leather pouch at her waist, touching her mother’s tokens through the worn hide. The gesture steadies her, though her pulse drums against her throat. She knows this story. Every enslaved person in Oja-Titun knows fragments of it, whispered in the brief moments between labor and sleep.
The middle warrior, his voice younger, uncertain at the edges, speaks next. “That was before my time. They say Commander Ogunlade thought his military brotherhood made him untouchable.”
“Thought wrong.” The eldest spits into the dirt. “Kolade was just a sergeant then, hungry and sharp. When the merchant council decided Ogunlade was getting ideas about who really ruled this town, they needed someone willing to do what was necessary. Kolade volunteered. Led the midnight raid himself.”
Nkemdirim’s jaw clenches so hard her teeth ache. The darkness around her feels suddenly alive, pressing close. She can almost hear her mother’s voice in the night wind: Listen. Remember. Every truth is a weapon waiting to be sharpened.
“Killed him in his own bed,” the eldest continues, matter-of-fact. “Then turned on the old families who’d supported him. Fifteen years ago, that was. The purge that made Kolade indispensable.”
The youngest warrior finally speaks, his voice barely above a murmur. “My uncle served under Ogunlade. He never spoke of what happened that night, but his hands would shake when the commander’s name came up.”
“Smart man, your uncle.” The eldest warrior’s tone carries approval mixed with warning. “Those who survived learned to forget. Kolade made sure of it. Proving his loyalty with blood and fire.”
Nkemdirim’s breath catches in her chest. Blood and fire. The same words the old women use when they think no one listens, when they pour libations in secret and speak the names of the disappeared. Fifteen years ago. She would have been seven years old, still free, still sleeping safely in her mother’s compound before,
The warriors shift their stances, spear butts tapping against packed earth in unconscious agreement. She can see their silhouettes nod in the torchlight that doesn’t quite reach her hiding place. Her lungs burn. She holds the breath, counting heartbeats (one, two, three) willing herself to become shadow, to become air, to become nothing these men would notice. The ancestor spirits press close around her, and she swears she can smell smoke from fires long extinguished.
The middle warrior shifts his weight, and his voice drops to something harder, textured with memory. “I was there. Just a boy, newly sworn to the garrison.” He pauses, and Nkemdirim can hear him swallow. “Kolade went compound to compound that night. Methodical. Started with the lineage heads, then anyone who might carry their blood-claim. The merchant council wanted no challenges to their authority, and he…” Another pause. “He made certain. Personally certain.”
The eldest warrior grunts acknowledgment. “That’s why he wears the three scars on each cheek now. Earned them that night.”
Three scars. Nkemdirim’s vision blurs. She knows those scars. Has served palm wine to the man who wears them, kept her eyes down, her face blank, while her mother’s tokens burned against her skin.
The youngest warrior’s voice carries worship in it, the kind reserved for legends. “Proved his loyalty with blood and fire.”
The words pierce through Nkemdirim like iron through flesh. Her fingers find the leather pouch at her waist, clutch the tokens inside: her mother’s, still warm somehow. Fifteen years. She would have been seven. Old enough to remember the screaming. The smoke that turned dawn orange. The night her name became nothing, and this man’s ascension began.
The eldest warrior spits into the dirt. The moisture darkens the earth between Nkemdirim’s hiding place and his boots. Close enough that she can see the brass rings circling his ankles, protective charms that mock the spirits he doesn’t believe in.
“That’s why he’ll find whoever’s betraying him,” the warrior says, voice thick with certainty. “The commander knows every trick, every shadow-path, every way a rat might think itself clever.” He shifts his spear, and torchlight runs along the blade. “He’s already killed everyone who tried.”
The silence after their departure feels heavier than their presence. Nkemdirim’s breath comes shallow, controlled: a rhythm learned from years of making herself small, unremarkable, beneath notice. But her mind races with the velocity of panic barely leashed.
The tokens press against her hip bone. Her mother’s voice, fragmented and dream-distant, had called them protection. Carry the ancestors close. They will know you. But what the spirits know and what the living can prove occupy different territories of danger. If they search her, when they search her, because Kolade’s paranoia has the patience of a python, the tokens become a map leading directly to her true lineage. Evidence of who she was before they made her nothing.
And Adisa. Sweet, conflicted Adisa with his scholar’s hands and his careful conscience. She sees it now as Kolade will see it: the record-keeper who knows too much, whose eyes carry guilt like a visible stain. The patrol schedules she memorized didn’t conjure themselves from prayer. The gaps in the guard rotations, the blind corners, the precise timing of shift changes: all of it required someone with access, someone who could read the duty rosters and understand their implications.
Three slaves. The price of a man’s life, measured in bodies. She knows how the garrison warriors think, how they calculate worth. Most of them own nothing, possess nothing beyond their spears and the promise of plunder. Three slaves represent wealth, status, the possibility of becoming something more than a blade in someone else’s hand.
Every warrior in this compound will be watching now, measuring each other’s movements, weighing loyalties against ambition. And Adisa, with his ink-stained evidence of literacy, his access to forbidden knowledge, his visible discomfort with violence: he might as well have painted a target across his back in the same red dye as Kolade’s cape.
The promotion dangles before them like bait on a hook, and every warrior with ambition will bite. Three slaves: enough to change a man’s standing, to lift him from the ranks of those who serve to those who command others to serve. She knows this arithmetic of flesh, has watched it calculated in the eyes of men who weigh human worth against their own advancement.
Adisa. His name forms silent on her lips, a prayer or a curse. Those ink-stained fingers that decoded military correspondence for her, translating the formal script into whispered intelligence. The careful questions he’d asked, seemingly idle, about which records were kept where, which seals authenticated which orders. His access to the duty rosters, the supply manifests, the documentation of patrol patterns that only someone inside the garrison’s administrative heart could possess.
Kolade’s mind works like a trap closing. He will list everyone with access, eliminate those without motive, and arrive at the scholar who flinches during punishment details. The man whose eyes carry their own testimony of guilt.
The records building squats three structures away, its doorway visible between shifting bodies and torchlight. Her route, memorized through Adisa’s patient instruction, walked in her mind until muscle knew it as well as thought, has become meaningless. Warriors cluster where empty space should be. Voices carry from passages that should lie silent. The careful architecture of timing and absence that made tonight possible has collapsed into unpredictable presence.
She counts four men between her and the entrance. Then six. The numbers shift like water, refusing to settle into pattern. Her body understands before her mind accepts it: the document will not be retrieved tonight. The proof of her lineage, the legal claim that could transform her from property to plaintiff, remains locked behind doors she cannot reach.
But Adisa’s life: that she might still preserve.
The vial’s weight against her ribs feels suddenly wrong. A tool shaped for precision now useless in chaos. Three drops would silence one guard for hours. But six warriors? Four? The numbers refuse to hold still. And poison leaves evidence, questions, investigations that would sweep through the garrison like fire through dry grass, consuming Adisa first.
The ancestors’ voices fracture into syllables she almost recognizes, her grandmother’s cadence, her father’s warning tone, but the words scatter like startled birds before she can grasp them. What reaches her instead is feeling: the spiritual equivalent of a hand gripping her shoulder, holding her back. The vial meant for tonight suddenly feels like a child’s weapon brought to a war already lost.
Her breath comes shallow and measured, each exhale timed to the distant sound of drumming from the market quarter, a rhythm she uses to anchor herself against the panic threatening to flood her chest. The grain sacks smell of millet and mouse droppings, their rough weave pressing patterns into her shoulder blades as she makes herself smaller, darker, a shadow among shadows. The tokens pulse against her sternum: not heat exactly, but presence, as if her mother’s spirit is pressed against the same wall, breathing in sync with her daughter’s fear.
The first patrol’s footsteps fade toward the eastern gate, their complaints dissolving into the thick night air. She counts to thirty, the way Adisa taught her, giving them distance before she dares shift her weight. Her left foot has gone numb, pins and needles spreading up her calf, but she doesn’t move. Can’t move. Not yet.
Because now she hears the second group approaching, and everything in their cadence is different.
These warriors don’t shuffle or stumble. Their footfalls land in perfect unison, the synchronized tread of men who’ve trained together until their bodies move as one weapon. No conversation. No complaints. Just the whisper of leather against skin, the soft clink of brass ornaments, and breathing controlled through military discipline rather than palm wine haze.
She risks a glance through the gap between sacks. Torchlight slides across crimson cloth: the inner circle’s mark. Four of them, not three, moving in a pattern she recognizes from watching the garrison train: the formation they use when hunting something specific, when failure means punishment. Each warrior bears the triple scars, fresh oil gleaming in the cuts to keep them raised and visible. Kolade’s chosen. His teeth. The ones who remember how to kill in the old ways, before iron and gunpowder made warfare impersonal.
They’re not patrolling. They’re searching.
For her.
The second patrol moves differently: spear-tips angled forward, not resting on shoulders, each warrior scanning his assigned quadrant with the methodical precision of men who’ve killed together enough times to trust each other’s blind spots. They check doorways by pairs, one covering while the other peers inside, movements economical and practiced. No wasted motion. No casual glances.
She recognizes two of them from the market square beatings. The tall one with the keloid scars winding up his forearm had held a woman down while Kolade administered justice for theft. The shorter, broader warrior had laughed when the woman’s child tried to intervene, had kicked the boy aside like refuse.
These are the ones who remember her family’s compound burning. Who dragged the survivors to auction. Who wear their triple scars like titles of nobility, earned through participation in Kolade’s rise.
The tokens against her chest pulse harder now, insistent, and she tastes copper on her tongue: her mother’s warning sign, the flavor that preceded violence in her childhood. Whatever has stirred Kolade’s paranoia tonight, it’s pulled his monsters from their kennels.
Her mind races through possibilities as she watches a third group emerge from the command building, their body language tense with the excitement of men given permission for violence. If someone betrayed Adisa’s involvement, he would already be in chains. She would hear screaming from the interrogation cells, that particular music of broken loyalty. If they discovered her true identity, they would be searching the slave quarters with fire and questions, not patrolling the inner compound like nervous dogs. Which means the threat Kolade perceives is something else entirely, something that has made him pull his forces inward to protect his own position rather than project outward. He’s defending himself, not hunting her. The distinction matters. A man who guards his treasures cannot simultaneously guard his gates.
The ancestor-voice curls through her like smoke, speaking the old proverb her grandmother once whispered: the hunter guarding his back door forgets the snake already coiled inside his house. Understanding blooms sharp and sudden. Kolade’s fear has made him stupid. His warriors cluster inward like frightened cattle while the paths to his private chambers lie exposed, unwatched. His paranoia has become her doorway.
The gap opens like a held breath released. She flows through it. Not the careful creep of a thief but the liquid certainty of water finding its level. Her grandmother’s hands seem to guide her feet past the torch-light, around the corner where bronze gleams, through the colonnade where Kolade’s paranoia has stripped away his own protection. Fear makes men gather close what they should scatter wide.
The charm whispers against her skin before she even extends her hand: a prickling heat that makes the scarification marks on her shoulders burn in warning. Nkemdirim pulls back, her breath catching. This is no market trinket blessed by half-trained charm-sellers. The weaving speaks of someone who knows the old ways, who understands that protection and possession are threads of the same cord.
She circles the table, studying the charm from different angles. The mirror shards are positioned to reflect not outward but inward, toward the gourd itself, creating a cage of watching eyes. Anyone with hostile intent would see themselves reflected back, multiplied, their ill-will turned inward like a blade. Her mother had warned her of such workings. Charms that fed on the enemy’s own malice, growing stronger with each attempt to circumvent them.
The dried blood troubles her most. It sits in the knots with the dark gleam of something still potent, not the dusty brown of old sacrifice. Fresh enough to hold power. Fresh enough to carry a name.
Nkemdirim’s fingers drift to the leather pouch at her waist, feeling the shape of her mother’s tokens through the worn hide. She has fragments of the ritual words, pieces of protection passed down in whispered moments between beatings and labor. But fragments are not enough. Not for this. The charm before her is complete, whole, woven by someone who remembers what her people have been forced to forget.
Kolade could not have made this himself. The warrior who dismisses ancestor worship, who relies on his military cult’s crude protections. Someone else crafted this binding. Someone who knows the old tongue. Someone who might recognize her bloodline if she speaks the wrong words in the wrong way.
The window Adisa created closes with each passing moment. But touching this charm without proper counter-blessing would be worse than failure. It would be announcement.
The decision crystallizes in her chest like river water turning to ice. She must go to the Whispering Grove. Tonight. Now. Before the poison loses its potency in her pouch, before Adisa’s careful arrangements unravel, before the narrow gate of opportunity swings shut.
But the Grove demands time she doesn’t have. The journey there and back, even moving quickly through the darkness, will consume hours. The ritual itself, if the ancestors choose to answer, cannot be rushed. Spiritual work follows its own rhythm, indifferent to human urgency. By the time she returns with a proper counter-blessing, Kolade’s routine will have shifted. The servants’ passage will be watched. Adisa’s forged duty roster will have expired, leaving him exposed.
She rocks back on her heels, jaw clenched against the scream building in her throat. Every fiber of her body strains toward the gourd, toward vengeance so close she can taste its bitterness. But her mother’s voice echoes in memory: Haste is the fool’s prayer. The ancestors answer patience.
The charm glints in the lamplight, waiting. Watching.
Her fingers drift toward the gourd, pulled by momentum and desperation, by the weight of Adisa’s risk and her own hunger for justice. But something arrests the motion. Not thought, deeper than thought. A prickling that begins in her scarred shoulders and cascades down her arms like cold water.
The charm radiates presence. Not the hollow swagger of garrison magic, all show and borrowed power. This thrums with knowledge, with words spoken in the old tongue, with blood freely given. Someone who understands the architecture of spiritual protection made this. Someone who knows what they’re guarding against.
Her hand hovers, trembling. The heat intensifies, recognition building between her skin and the woven threads. The charm is reading her intention.
Her hand withdraws, fingers curling into a fist against her thigh. She forces her breathing to slow, makes herself see beyond the immediate prize. The room is sparse. Warrior’s discipline or calculated emptiness, she cannot tell. But beneath the sleeping mat’s edge, where shadow pools thickest, another working catches her eye. Smaller. Cruder threads, hasty knots. Yet positioned with absolute precision to snare whoever neutralizes the first defense. A trap within a trap.
Cold knowledge settles in her bones like river water in the rainy season. This is not garrison magic. Crude protective symbols bought from market charlatans. This working carries the weight of true knowledge, the kind her people guarded before the burning. Someone with bloodline authority made this. Or worse: someone who has learned to steal what should never be taken, twisting inherited power into service of those who destroyed its rightful keepers.
The pattern speaks to something deeper than protection. Her mother’s voice surfaces from memory, The three-cord binding holds what single strands cannot, words spoken over dying firelight while teaching Nkemdirim the difference between charms that guard and charms that witness. This one does both.
She shifts her weight, testing the floorboards for creaks, and studies the weaving more closely without bringing her hand nearer. The ochre strand catches what little moonlight penetrates the shuttered window: earth, grounding, the weight of oaths spoken into soil. The ash-black strand seems to drink light rather than reflect it: endings, the smoke of funeral pyres, the space between breaths where spirits linger. But it’s the blood-red strand that makes her throat tighten. Not dyed with plant matter but stained with something that once carried life.
Whose blood? The question coils in her mind like smoke. Someone gave their essence willingly for this working, or someone powerful enough took it. Either possibility means Kolade has protection she hadn’t accounted for, roots that dig deeper than his brass armor and iron-tipped spear.
She pulls back slowly, careful not to let her shadow fall across the gourd. The charm doesn’t just guard against poison or theft: it guards against her specifically. Against anyone carrying the weight of ancestral claim, the fury of dispossessed bloodlines, the intention to reclaim what was stolen. It knows the difference between a servant’s resentful touch and a descendant’s righteous rage.
Her jaw clenches. Someone taught Kolade to fear the right things. Someone who understands that the greatest threat to men like him doesn’t come from daggers in the dark but from the patient, inevitable return of what they thought they’d buried. The charm is a confession wrapped in protection: he knows the old powers aren’t dead, only waiting.
The air thickens as her palm hovers three finger-widths from the gourd’s curved surface. Not touching, never touching, but close enough to feel what the charm wants her to know. Heat blooms against her skin. Not the warmth of sun-baked clay but something alive, something watching. Her breath catches. The sensation spreads up her forearm like fever, and beneath it, a vibration she feels in her teeth rather than hears.
The charm isn’t waiting for contact. It’s tasting her intention with every heartbeat, reading the murder she carries like words written on her bones.
She shifts her hand left, then right, mapping the invisible boundary. The heat follows, intensifying when her thoughts sharpen toward violence, cooling slightly when she forces her mind toward neutral observation. Testing. Always testing. But the answer settles heavy in her chest: no amount of clever handling will fool this working. Cloth won’t help. Leaves won’t help. Even Adisa’s carefully prepared gloves would be useless.
The charm doesn’t care what touches the gourd. It cares why.
Her knees crack as she lowers herself, peering beneath the woven mat where Kolade’s body has pressed the earth smooth. The second charm sits in deliberate shadow, and her throat closes.
This one speaks a different language than the first. Where the gourd’s protection gleams with military precision, tight knots, measured spacing, this working sprawls crude and hungry across a flat stone. The symbols cut deep enough to hold blood. She knows these marks. Saw them once, carved into doorposts that hummed with old power, the compound where the priestess Iyawo lived before the garrison came for her in the night.
Either Kolade found that woman in whatever hole they threw her, or he’s discovered someone who learned at her feet.
The numbers arrange themselves like stones on a divination board. Grove: forty minutes through forest paths her feet know even in darkness. Invocations: an hour if the ancestors are generous, longer if they test her worthiness. Return: forty minutes. Then the actual work, poison, arrangement, escape. Five hours. Perhaps six if Eshu decides to play his games.
Dawn breaks in four.
The weight of it settles in her chest like stones dropped into deep water. Adisa’s careful work, weeks of shifted patrol schedules, forged signatures, created gaps in the garrison’s rhythms, all balanced on this moment. By morning, someone will notice. They always notice. And Adisa, with his ink-stained fingers and guilty conscience written across his face, will be the first they question. The first they break.
The charm pulses with malevolence even before her fingers come close. Red thread wound tight as a strangling cord, cowrie shells arranged in the pattern of watching eyes, and yes. That dark crust on the knots is blood, human blood, given willingly by whoever bound this protection. Military cult work. The kind of magic that doesn’t sleep.
She extends her hand slowly, watching the air shimmer and distort around the gourd like heat rising from sun-baked earth. The ward’s energy reaches for her, testing, tasting the intention in her blood. Her fingertips enter its sphere and pain lances up her arm: not the clean pain of a blade but something deeper, something that wants to write itself into her bones, to mark her spirit with a signature that would scream her guilt to Kolade no matter where she ran.
Nkemdirim jerks her hand back, cradling it against her chest. Her mother’s voice rises unbidden from memory: Never touch a warrior’s protection with naked hands, daughter. Their magic knows only enemies.
She circles the small table where the gourd sits, studying the charm from different angles, hoping for weakness. But the cowrie shells track her movement, their hollow mouths gaping in silent accusation. This isn’t just an alarm: it’s a trap, a spiritual snare that will bind her essence to the violation. Kolade would know not just that someone tampered with his water, but who. He would taste her name in his dreams. His spear would find her in any crowd, drawn by the mark this ward would burn into her soul.
The poison in her leather pouch suddenly feels useless, a child’s weapon brought to a battle of gods. Without the ancestors’ intervention, without a counter-blessing strong enough to blind these watching shells, touching that gourd would be her death: just slower and more certain than a blade.
The weight of it crushes her chest like stones piled on a drowning woman. Forty minutes through streets where even shadows have eyes, where her pass, forged by Adisa’s hand, might not survive close inspection by a bored guard looking for entertainment. Then the grove itself, where paths twist back on themselves for those who come in desperation rather than reverence, where the ancestors might test her worthiness for hours before granting audience, if they grant it at all.
And the petition: she knows the words, the gestures, the offerings required. But will fragments of ritual language be enough? Her mother taught her in whispers, incomplete lessons stolen between labor, never the full invocation. The ancestors might demand more than she can give, might require proof of her lineage through recitations she only half-remembers.
Even if everything aligns, spirits willing, paths clear, guards blind, she’ll return with barely moments to spare. No room for error. No second chances.
The mathematics of impossibility, written in her racing pulse.
Her mind conjures him with painful clarity: Adisa bent over the garrison ledgers, his fingers trembling as they reshape duty rosters and patrol assignments, creating absences where there should be presence, gaps in the watch that shouldn’t exist. Each stroke of his brush compounds his risk. He’s wagered everything on her success. His position, his safety, perhaps his life.
When Commander Ogunlade conducts his routine inspection at dawn, those alterations will shimmer like heat-mirages under his scrutiny. The old warrior’s memory is sharp as his spear; he’ll sense the wrongness immediately. And Adisa, poor Adisa with his scholar’s hands and his conscience that won’t let him look away from injustice, will have no defense when they come for him with questions and iron.
The choice splits her open like a blade finding the seam between ribs. Take the gourd now: let Kolade’s protective charms sink their teeth into her spirit, feel them tear through whatever ancestral blessing still shields her, burn from the inside while she pours the poison and prays her body holds together long enough to watch him drink. Or run to the grove, beg the ancestors for stronger protection, and return to find Adisa’s blood already darkening the garrison courtyard dust.
The night air bites her skin as she moves through shadow-paths only the desperate know, her mother’s tokens pressing against her hip like accusation and promise both. Every stride away from Kolade’s quarters feels like betrayal: of opportunity, of Adisa’s risk, of the rage that has sustained her through years of degradation. Yet her feet know what her mind resists: a corpse cannot pour poison, and these charms would hollow her out before dawn touched the iroko tree’s highest branches.
The grove’s boundary manifests as a physical sensation. A membrane of cooler air that raises gooseflesh on her arms. She pushes through it with the desperation of someone who has no other choice, feeling the town’s rules and hierarchies fall away behind her like a discarded garment, replaced by older laws she only half-understands. Her breath comes sharp and shallow. The darkness here is different. Something brushes her shoulder. Not wind. Not branch. She freezes, every muscle locked, but forces herself to continue forward. The spirits here do not respond well to fear, her mother had whispered once, in those final days before the soldiers came. They smell it like blood in water, but they respect courage even when it trembles.
Her fingers find the leather pouch at her waist, working it open without looking. The ancestral tokens inside feel warm despite the night’s chill: three cowrie shells, a fragment of carved bone, a twist of her grandmother’s hair bound in copper wire. She draws them out, clutches them against her chest where her heart hammers like a trapped bird. The tokens pulse with their own rhythm, slower than her panic, and she tries to match her breathing to their steady beat.
“I am Nkemdirim,” she whispers to the watching dark. “Daughter of Folasade, granddaughter of Moremi, blood of the founding lineage.” The words taste like power and grief. “I come seeking what was stolen. I come seeking what is owed.”
The forest holds its breath. Then. A sound like laughter, or perhaps wind through hollow reeds. The air shifts, and she smells something sharp and green, like crushed leaves and rain-soaked earth. Acceptance, or at least acknowledgment. The grove has heard her. Whether it will help her is another question entirely, one that will be answered in its own time, by its own incomprehensible logic.
The path writhes beneath her feet like something living. A root catches her ankle, she is certain no root was there when she placed her first step, and she stumbles forward, catching herself against rough bark that feels too warm, too aware. Her palm comes away sticky with sap that smells of iron and honey.
The forest is speaking in a language older than words. Each step becomes a question: Do you belong here? Are you worthy of what you seek? She feels the ancestral tokens growing hotter against her skin, responding to something in the trees, in the earth, in the thick air that presses against her like examining hands.
A branch scrapes across her scarification marks and the pain is sharp, immediate, but also clarifying. Her blood recognizes this place even as her conscious mind reels with disorientation. The trees lean closer, their canopy tightening overhead until the darkness becomes absolute. Then, grudgingly, like a fist slowly opening, the path ahead clears.
The grove has made its judgment. She may pass. For now.
The shrine stones rise before her like broken teeth, moss-covered and ancient, arranged in a half-circle that once held fire and blood offerings. She drops to her knees on ground that feels both solid and unstable, as though the earth itself hasn’t decided whether to support or swallow her.
Her fingers shake as she upends the leather pouch. The brass ring strikes stone first: her mother’s marriage token. Then the cowrie shell, its back worn smooth by three generations of thumbs. Finally the bone fragment, carved with symbols she can read but not fully understand.
She arranges them in the pattern memory provides: ring at the apex, shell to the left, bone to the right. A triangle of inheritance. Of claim.
They look so small. So insufficient. Like trying to purchase the sky with three grains of sand.
The forest presses close, watching. She speaks the old words, the fragments her mother whispered during those final days, and her tongue stumbles over syllables that should flow like water. Each mispronunciation feels like a small betrayal. The tokens catch moonlight, throwing shadows across stone, and she wonders if the ancestors can even hear a voice so corrupted by servitude, so thinned by years of speaking the oppressor’s language.
The words fracture as they leave her throat: half-remembered syllables tangling with desperate invention. She names her mother, Obiageli. Her grandmother, Adaeze. The lineage threading backward to Eze Nri himself, founder-blood in her veins. But the invocation crumbles like termite-eaten wood. She begs the ancestors for speed she hasn’t earned, blessing for poison, aid for vengeance when her own worthiness remains unproven. The inadequacy burns worse than any master’s lash.
The grove swallows her whole.
One moment the evening heat presses against her skin, market sounds chattering in the distance. The next, coolness wraps around her like water, and silence falls so complete she hears her own pulse drumming in her ears. The charm burns against her chest through the cloth: not hot, but present, aware, a coiled thing recognizing enemy territory.
Nkemdirim forces herself forward though every instinct screams retreat. The trees here grow wrong, bark twisted into patterns that suggest faces if she looks too long. She doesn’t look. Her mother’s voice echoes across years: The grove remembers everything. It knows who belongs.
Does she belong? She who speaks the old tongue like a child, who carries her lineage like a half-burned scroll?
The path appears beneath her feet without her choosing it: packed earth winding between roots thick as a man’s torso. Offerings rot at the tree bases: kola nuts gone soft, palm wine souring in clay vessels, white cloth stained with rust that might be blood or might be earth. She adds nothing. She has nothing to give except need, and the ancestors have never been impressed by empty hands.
Time moves strangely here. She counts her breaths to anchor herself, one hundred, two hundred, but cannot tell if minutes pass or something longer. The weight of attention intensifies with each step, pressure building behind her eyes. They are watching. The dead, the old powers, the trickster spirits who find amusement in mortal desperation.
A bird calls once, sharp and wrong, from a direction that shouldn’t exist.
Her foot catches on a root and she stumbles, catching herself against rough bark. The charm tumbles free, unwrapping itself as it falls, and she lunges after it with a gasp that tastes of copper and green rot. Her fingers close around knotted cord just before it touches earth.
The clearing opens before her like a mouth.
The ritual stone hunches in the clearing’s center like a sleeping beast, its surface worn mirror-smooth by centuries of supplicant hands. Exactly where her mother described it, down to the crack running east to west like a healed wound.
Nkemdirim’s legs give out. She doesn’t kneel so much as collapse, the charm clutched against her chest still, its knotwork pressing patterns into her palm. When she finally forces herself to unwrap it, the cords resist her fingers, sliding against themselves with serpent logic. The pattern reveals itself in stages: loops within loops, each knot a word in a language of binding, the whole thing singing with hostile purpose.
She holds it at arm’s length. Heat radiates from the charm. Not the clean warmth of cooking fires, but something that makes her teeth ache, that tastes of iron and intention. Protection magic, yes, but protection that knows the difference between servant and enemy, between empty hands and hands that reach to harm.
Kolade’s magic recognizes what she is.
Adisa’s careful timing, his perfect schedule, the narrow window he’d calculated down to the hour: all of it means nothing if this guardian burns her the moment she adds poison to water.
Her fingers tremble as she arranges the tokens, cowrie shells catching what little light penetrates the canopy. Four shells at the cardinal points. Or is it five? The memory wavers. The brass ring settles in the center with a sound like accusation. She lays the bone fragment across it, bridge between the living and those who watch from beyond.
The words come broken. “Ancestors who… who walked before…” Wrong. The verb tense slides away from her grasp. She tries again, substituting common speech where the sacred vocabulary crumbles. “Those who see from the other side, hear your daughter. Or child-of-the-line? Each failed word closes a door between worlds. Her voice cracks on syllables that taste like ash, like half-learned lessons interrupted by screaming.
The silence presses against her eardrums, thick with waiting. Her chest tightens. The cowrie shells remain still: no wind moves them, no sign comes. The charm pulses heat against her palm, almost mocking. She is failing. The ancestors circle but do not descend, and she understands with crushing clarity: they are testing whether she knows their names not as recited words but as lived truth, whether loss has taught her their language better than any ritual her mother might have completed.
The words tear from her throat in the old tongue mixed with her pain no longer recitation but keening, each syllable weighted with the iron taste of memory. Her voice cracks on their names. The air thickens, grows heavy as water. The cowrie shells begin to tremble, then spin, and the grove exhales: a sound like recognition, like forgiveness, like ancestors who have been waiting for truth instead of ceremony.
The tokens pulse against the stone, their amber light spreading like spilled palm oil, pooling in the carved grooves she hadn’t noticed before. Symbols her fingers recognize even if her mind doesn’t. The temperature plummets. Her exhaled breath becomes visible, hanging in the air like smoke from a snuffed lamp.
They come.
Not gradually, but all at once, the way lightning fills a sky. Translucent forms step from behind trees that suddenly seem too thin to hide anything, emerging from shadows that shouldn’t exist in this already-dark place. Her mother first. The tilt of her head. That particular angle of attention she gave when listening to a child’s confession.
Her father materializes beside her mother, his shoulders still broad even in death, still carrying the weight of responsibilities he couldn’t fulfill. Others gather in a half-circle: her grandmother, face finally clear after years of fading memory; her uncle who taught her to identify poisonous plants; cousins whose names she whispers like prayers. Some she recognizes only as sensations. The aunt who smelled of shea butter, the grandfather whose laugh made his whole body shake.
Their faces remain indistinct, features blurred as if seen through water, but their eyes: their eyes are sharp as obsidian blades. Every gaze fixed on her with such concentrated attention that her lungs forget their rhythm. She cannot look away. Cannot breathe. Cannot do anything but receive this recognition, this witnessing.
They see her. Not Nkemdirim the slave, the invisible girl who empties chamber pots and keeps her eyes down. They see Nkemdirim daughter-of-the-founding-line, keeper of names, inheritor of debts both owed and owing.
The weight of their attention is crushing. The relief of their attention is water in drought season.
She gasps, and the sound breaks something open inside her chest.
Her mother’s spirit moves closer, and the temperature drops further still. Nkemdirim’s teeth begin to chatter. She tries to speak, to ask, to beg, to bargain, but her mother’s form passes through the space between them like mist through cloth.
The sensation hits her throat first. Not pain exactly. Pressure. Phantom fingers working at something knotted, something that has been tied wrong her entire life. She feels passages opening in her voice box, chambers unlocking that she didn’t know were closed. Her jaw drops without her permission, her tongue reshaping itself around syllables that have been sleeping in her blood.
The words that emerge are not the ones she planned.
They are older. They taste like iron and honey, like the first rain after harmattan, like her mother’s milk though she has no memory of nursing. Phrases that must have been whispered to her as an infant, before language meant anything, before she could understand their weight. Her mother speaking them into her soft skull, planting them like seeds that would wait years to germinate.
Now they bloom. Now they burn.
The brass ring lifts from the stone without being touched, spinning in the air between them. Power spirals outward from it in visible ripples that make the trees sway though there is no wind. The carved bone piece trembles, then cracks cleanly in half with a sound like breaking pottery. From the fracture seeps a dark smoke that coils upward, taking shape as it rises. Protective symbols, counter-blessings, the exact inversions of Kolade’s charm. They burn themselves into her memory with perfect clarity, each curve and intersection searing itself behind her eyes where she will never lose them. The cowrie shell begins to glow with inner light, warm as a living thing against her palm.
The words tear from her throat in a voice not entirely her own: syllables older than the town, older than the garrison, older than the chains that bind her people. Each name spoken aloud makes the air crack like lightning, makes the ground beneath her knees shudder. The fountain erupts skyward, its spray catching moonlight, transforming into silver threads that weave themselves into her hair, her clothes, her very breath. She is becoming something more than herself.
The cowrie shell fractures along invisible fault lines, each piece dissolving into powder that rises against gravity’s pull. The dust finds her, seeking, hungry, and brands itself across her skin in geometric precision. Her cheeks burn with cold fire. Her forehead accepts the mark. Her shoulders, already scarred by earthly cruelty, now bear patterns written in ancestral authority. The counter-blessing roots itself beneath her flesh, transforms her into a walking contradiction: enslaved hands now capable of grasping what should remain forbidden. But power demands payment. Her lungs seize, desperate. Copper floods her mouth where teeth have torn through soft tissue, and she understands: the spirits give nothing freely, not even to their own children.
The ancestor voices surge through her: not gentle whispers but a torrent that threatens to split her skull. Images cascade faster than her mind can grasp them: Merchant Elder Ogunleye’s hand heavy on her father’s shoulder, fingers pressing into the embroidered cloth with proprietorial familiarity. Her father’s uncertain smile. The compound gates at dawn, soldiers already inside before anyone could bar them. Ogunleye’s face in profile as he watched her mother dragged across the courtyard, his expression mild as a man observing livestock. His careful collection of land deeds the next morning, rolled parchments tucked under his arm like kindling.
And with the images comes a name. Not the public title he wears like fine cloth, but the true-name spoken in the old tongue, the name his mother whispered at his birth before the world could corrupt it. It burns itself into Nkemdirim’s memory with the force of a brand, each syllable searing: Olúwọlé-Ajíkẹ́-Ọmọ-Ikú. Son-of-Death-Who-Wears-Wealth-Like-Skin.
The spirits’ presence begins to fracture. She feels them scattering like smoke before wind, their communion breaking apart under assault. The leather pouch in her hands grows cold, her mother’s tokens suddenly inert metal and bone.
Around her, the grove transforms. What had been sanctuary becomes battlefield. The ancestor magic that had wrapped her in protection now recoils, pulling back into the earth and ancient trees as if wounded. In its absence, she feels exposed. A small human body kneeling in dirt, her ritual circle of chalk and blood suddenly just marks in the soil.
The military cult’s charms press harder. She can almost see them now. Geometric patterns of hostile intent, bronze-colored and sharp-edged, probing for weakness in the grove’s defenses. Where they touch the boundary, leaves blacken and curl. The old magic and the new grind against each other, and in that friction, the night itself seems to tear.
The military cult’s charms feel like thorns dragging across her skin, though they haven’t touched her yet. Their counter-invocations create a sound that exists somewhere between hearing and feeling. A discordant buzzing that vibrates in her teeth and makes the ancient trees lean away as if flinching. The spiritual temperature plummets. Her next breath emerges as white mist, then the one after, each exhalation visible proof that something fundamental has shifted.
Two forms of sacred power grind against each other like millstones. The ancestor magic, old as the rivers, meets the military cult’s newer workings, brutal, efficient, designed for domination rather than communion. Where they collide, the air itself seems to warp. She can see through it to somewhere else, some other place that shouldn’t be visible. Reality grows thin as worn cloth, dangerous as a blade’s edge.
The trees’ shadows writhe independent of their branches. The ground beneath her knees feels suddenly uncertain, as if the earth might simply decide to open. This is what happens when sacred powers war: the world becomes unstable, and mortals caught between them risk being torn apart.
The bronze ring sears her flesh, the pain sharp enough to ground her even as her spirit threatens to scatter. Through the burn she feels her mother’s presence. The spiritual sight opens wider, unwanted: she perceives the grove transforming around her, paths folding into themselves like origami, trees stepping sideways into positions they didn’t occupy moments before.
Eshu’s laughter ripples through the confusion, soundless but unmistakable. The trickster’s attention feels like being watched by something vast and capricious, a presence that might save her or destroy her on whim alone. The warriors’ footsteps echo from three directions simultaneously now, though they’re coming from only one. She’s been marked. Noticed. The gods know her face now, and that knowledge cuts both ways. Protection and exposure, gift and curse, all braided together like rope that might pull her to safety or hang her.
The words slam into her consciousness her knees buckle, council, copper taste floods her mouth, three more, vision blurs (blood debt) her grandmother’s name surfaces unbidden, the market tree remembers, and suddenly she understands the iroko isn’t desecrated but waiting. Her fingers claw dirt, anchoring fragments into flesh-memory while her body rebels, muscles liquefying as the ancestors withdraw. She’s burning and freezing simultaneously, marked by knowledge she can’t yet decipher.
Through the trees she sees them: five warriors, spear-tips catching torchlight like predator eyes. That chant. That chant. Her mother’s voice drowning beneath those same syllables, her father’s body jerking as they sang. Her hands won’t move. The tokens burn against her palm. They’ll know her bloodline from the ritual arrangement. They’ll know everything. Her body screams run but her legs have forgotten the word.
The warrior chants grow louder, their syllables cutting through the grove’s protective silence like axes through wood. Each word lands with physical weight (Ogun-ni-ire, Ogun-ni-ire) the war god’s name twisted into a weapon against her mother’s gods. Nkemdirim feels the ancestors’ presence thinning around her, their whispered warnings fading to nothing as the military cult’s counter-magic spreads through the sacred space like oil suffocating water.
The air itself changes texture. What had been cool and charged now feels thick, resistant. She tries to draw breath and tastes metal: the same taste that filled her mouth the night they came for her family. Her grandmother’s spirit-form, which had been coalescing before her with urgent gestures, dissolves mid-warning. The last thing Nkemdirim sees in that fading presence is her grandmother’s mouth forming words she cannot hear.
No. Not like this.
The ritual circle she’d so carefully arranged, her mother’s cowrie shells positioned according to the old patterns, the kola nuts blessed with her own blood, the white clay markings on the stones, all of it suddenly looks like exactly what it is. Evidence. Confession. A map leading straight to her true name, her destroyed lineage, her impossible survival.
She can feel them getting closer. The torchlight throws dancing shadows that make the trees look like they’re bending away, recoiling from the military cult’s power. Five warriors, she’d counted. Five against one half-trained girl whose only weapons are kitchen poisons and fragments of prayers. The chanting builds to a crescendo, and she realizes with sick certainty that they’re not just suppressing the ancestor spirits: they’re calling something else. Something that hunts.
Her mother’s tokens burn against her palm like coals, as if the ancestors are trying to tell her one last thing before they’re forced to retreat completely.
The tokens sear her flesh, her mother’s carved bone, her grandmother’s wrapped copper, her great-aunt’s river stone, each one suddenly hot as forge-metal. Blood wells where the edges bite deep, spilling across her lifeline, dripping onto the white clay markings she’d so carefully painted. The stones drink it in with a thirst that terrifies her.
The ancestor spirits don’t just fade. They flee. Her grandmother’s form tears apart like smoke in wind. Her mother’s presence, which had been reaching toward her with such urgency, collapses inward and scatters. Even the smaller spirits, the nameless ones who’d gathered to witness, to remember, pull back into the grove’s deepest shadows where the torchlight cannot reach.
She understands then what the military cult’s magic truly does. It doesn’t just suppress the old powers. It hunts them. Drives them back to wherever spirits go when the world becomes too hostile for their presence.
And she, kneeling in her ritual circle with blood-marked stones and forbidden offerings arranged around her like a confession, has nowhere to run.
Kolade’s voice cuts through the chanting like a blade through cloth: that voice, the one that still visits her in dreams soaked with sweat and screaming. She would know it anywhere, that particular combination of authority and casual cruelty. He’s closer than the others, perhaps twenty paces, moving with the confidence of a man who has never been denied his prey.
The other warriors echo his cult’s protective phrases, their words building a wall of sound that presses against her skin like physical weight. She can feel the old powers retreating further with each syllable, abandoning her to the mundane world where she is just flesh and bone against iron-tipped spears.
Her hands shake as she gathers the tokens back, burning her palms, leaving her marked twice over. Once by blood, once by failure.
The scattered offerings betray everything. Crushed alligator pepper forming her grandmother’s protective sign, white chalk marking the forbidden invocation circle, her mother’s brass anklet still warm against the earth. Each item a confession written in the old language. When Kolade’s torchlight finds these arrangements, he will read her lineage in the patterns like a genealogy carved in stone, will know exactly which family he failed to completely destroy fifteen years ago.
The ancestors’ withdrawal leaves a void that something older rushes to fill. Not the gentle guidance of grandmothers, but the crackling electricity of the crossroads god who delights in overturned hierarchies. She feels Eshu’s attention like heat against her skin.
She speaks the forbidden names, Elegbara, Laroye, Ogo-ogo, not in the trembling whisper of supplication but with the bold cadence of one proposing a wager. Her voice cuts through the grove’s tension like a trader announcing terms at market. The words taste of copper and smoke on her tongue, each syllable a small rebellion against everything she has been taught about approaching the divine.
“I offer no cowries, no kola, no palm wine,” she says, and her mother would have struck her for such audacity. “I bring cunning. I bring rage that has fermented seven years in silence. I bring knowledge of every corner where the powerful hide their secrets.”
Her hands shake but she does not lower them. The leather pouch containing her mother’s tokens grows warm against her chest, as if the ancestors within are trying to warn her or perhaps simply bearing witness to this dangerous bargaining.
“They have made order from our bones,” she continues, and now her voice rises, reckless. “Built their market on our sacred ground. Turned our names into property marks. Let me be the chaos they cannot account for. Let me make their ledgers lie, their guards doubt, their certainties crumble like termite-riddled wood.”
The grove’s darkness seems to lean closer, listening. She thinks of Kolade’s brass armor, the merchant council’s silk robes, the garrison’s neat rows of spears. All that false geometry imposed upon the world’s natural disorder.
“I will turn their own systems against them. Make every transaction a potential betrayal. Plant suspicion where they cultivated trust. I will be the coin that lands on its edge, the path that leads somewhere unexpected, the answer that spawns three new questions.”
Her breath comes hard now, her heart a drum announcing either triumph or doom.
“I offer partnership, not prayer. Chaos in exchange for chaos. Do we have terms?”
The silence stretches like cloth on a loom, each moment another thread pulled taut. The ancestor spirits recede: she feels their withdrawal as a sudden coolness against her scarred shoulders, as if protective hands have lifted away. They are making space, she realizes, not in rejection but in recognition that what comes now belongs to different laws entirely.
The air itself seems to reorganize around absence and possibility. Not the structured absence of a swept compound or the ordered space between market stalls, but the fertile void where anything might take root. The gap between inhale and exhale. The instant before a knife finds its mark or misses. The crossroads at midnight where a traveler might take any path or all paths or simply vanish into the between-places where tricksters make their homes.
She stands in that suspension, her offer hanging in the darkness like smoke, and understands with sudden clarity that she has already changed by speaking it. The words have made her into something other than what she was. Not quite supplicant, not quite priestess, but a woman proposing partnership with chaos itself.
The laughter arrives like a storm breaking, cascading through the grove from everywhere and nowhere. It spirals through the silk-cotton trees, tumbles across the shrine stones, ripples through the underground spring until the whole forest becomes an instrument played by invisible hands. The sound carries textures: the rattle of cowrie shells, the slap of cards on wood, the knowing chuckle of market women who’ve just made an impossible sale.
Her chest constricts, then expands. The sensation floods through her. Not possession but recognition. She is being measured, weighed, assessed not for worthiness but for potential. For the capacity to improvise, to pivot, to turn disadvantage into unexpected advantage. Her fury matters less than her willingness to let it become something stranger, more dangerous.
The trickster is interested.
The air splits like torn cloth and for one suspended heartbeat she sees him: not one form but many layered transparent as smoke, child and elder, woman and man, beauty and monstrosity braided together, a figure dressed in red and black who exists only in contradiction, whose smile promises everything and guarantees nothing: and when his voice arrives it is simultaneously intimate as breath against her neck and vast as thunder rolling across three rivers: “You would dance with me, small fury? Trade your straight blade for the crooked path?”
The ancestors’ whispers turn sharp with warning, but Eshu’s laughter drowns them like flood water over stone. Her breath catches: to accept means becoming the thing her mother taught her to despise: unpredictable, unbound by honor’s straight lines. But the warriors close in and her people remain chained, and what use is honor to the dead? Her scarred shoulders straighten. Some weapons must be forged from ruin itself.
The warriors’ voices grow louder. She can hear Kolade’s lieutenant barking orders, spreading his men in a search pattern. Her hands tremble as she lifts her mother’s brass ring to catch the moonlight filtering through the canopy. The metal gleams like a promise and a threat. Once she speaks the words, there will be no taking them back, no returning to the simple clarity of blood debt and honor restored.
Her mother’s voice echoes through memory: A woman who walks straight casts a shadow that cannot be questioned. But what shadow does a slave cast? What honor survives the auction block?
The ring grows warm against her palm. Around her, the grove holds its breath. Even the ancestors have gone silent, as if they cannot bear to witness what she is about to become. Or perhaps they are simply waiting, these spirits who survived their own impossible choices, their own transformations.
A branch snaps thirty paces to her left. Torchlight flickers between the trees like hunting eyes.
Nkemdirim closes her fist around the ring until its edges bite into her flesh. The pain centers her. She thinks of the others still bound in the compound, of children who will be sold before they learn their family names, of the merchant who sits in comfort while Kolade’s hands stay bloodied. Straightforward vengeance would feel clean. One spear, one throat, one death to balance the scales. But clean solutions are luxuries the powerless cannot afford.
The trickster’s presence presses against her awareness like heat before lightning strikes. She can feel his amusement, his interest, his hunger for the chaos she might unleash. To accept means becoming unpredictable even to herself. It means learning to smile while sharpening knives, to speak honey while brewing poison, to dance when she wants to rage.
The warriors are close enough now that she can smell the palm oil on their torches.
Her lips part. The choice is already made.
The oath forms on her tongue, words in the old language that taste like copper and smoke: Mo fi ara mi fun ọna kẹkẹ, Eshu, Oluwa orita meta. I give myself to the crooked path, Eshu, Lord of three crossroads. Each syllable reshapes her mouth, her throat, as if the words themselves are carving new channels through which different truths might flow.
She feels his attention turn toward her: not like a predator noticing prey, but like a craftsman examining a tool’s potential. The distinction matters. She is offering herself willingly, trading the straightforward path of the warrior for the trickster’s spiral road. The oath continues, each phrase a small death of who she was: I will smile with hidden teeth. I will speak truths that sound like lies and lies that taste like truth. I will be the spider, not the spear.
Her mother’s ring burns cold now, then hot, then cold again. She is becoming deceiver, manipulator, the patient weaver rather than the righteous blade.
The transformation ripples outward from her center. Not a breaking but a fundamental restructuring. The white-hot coal of her rage doesn’t extinguish; instead it disperses into a thousand smaller embers scattered throughout her body, each one capable of igniting when needed but none consuming her entirely. Her fingers flex differently now, as if learning new gestures. Her jaw loosens. Even her breathing changes, becoming shallower, more adaptable.
She understands with sudden clarity: the warrior’s path was simpler because it was shorter, ending in death. Hers or Kolade’s. But Eshu’s crooked road winds through years of calculated patience, through humiliation swallowed with a smile, through alliances built on half-truths. She must become water finding cracks in stone, not the hammer that shatters itself against walls.
The oath’s weight descends vertebra by vertebra. Each phrase strips away another layer of who she was: the girl who dreamed of honorable combat, of witnesses to her triumph, of her family’s spirits watching her blade find justice. That Nkemdirim dies here. What rises in her place knows patience as intimacy with time, knows deception as another form of truth, knows that the crooked path reaches places the straight road never touches.
The words leave her mouth tasting of copper and palm wine. Reality shivers. The grove multiplies into infinite versions of itself, each path true and false simultaneously. Eshu’s acceptance arrives not as comfort but as vertigo, as if she’s been handed a blade that cuts in directions she cannot name. Power floods her veins like poison and antidote at once, remaking her into something that can slip between what is and what seems.
The brass ring sears her mouth: not the gentle warmth of ancestral blessing but something that tastes of burnt offerings and broken promises. Each syllable of the oath reshapes the air itself. The grove fractures like dropped pottery, but instead of shattering it multiplies, path splitting into path, shadow breeding shadow. A dozen trails spiral outward from where she stands, each one simultaneously real and illusion, each leading somewhere true and nowhere at all.
She feels Eshu’s attention land on her like a hand on her shoulder, intimate, possessive, amused. The trickster god’s laughter doesn’t sound in her ears but reverberates through her skeleton, a vibration that makes her teeth ache and her heart stutter. This is acceptance, but not the kind she imagined when she whispered prayers in the slave quarters. This is a bargain sealed in the currency of chaos, and she has just agreed to terms written in a language she cannot fully read.
Behind her, voices, Kolade’s warriors crashing through undergrowth that should have led them straight to her. But the paths betray them now. She hears their confusion, their growing panic as the grove plays with them, sending them in circles, showing them clearings that weren’t there moments before, leading them toward and away from her in the same breath.
The power settling into her bones feels nothing like she expected. Where ancestor spirits moved through her like cool water, this energy writhes like something alive and hungry. It wants to be used. It wants to trick and transform and turn everything sideways. She can feel possibilities branching off from every choice she might make, each one leading to consequences she cannot predict.
Her mother’s ring cools against her lips, the oath complete. She has stepped off the path of simple revenge into a labyrinth of her own making.
The sensation courses through her: not flooding but threading, weaving itself into muscle and marrow until she cannot tell where her own will ends and Eshu’s gift begins. Her fingers twitch with the urge to trace patterns in the air, to speak words that would twist reality further, to laugh at the beautiful wrongness of what she has become. The ancestor spirits had moved through her like honored guests, respectful, careful. This power inhabits her like a lover or a parasite, impossible to distinguish.
She understands now why the old stories warned against bargaining with crossroads gods. Vengeance had been simple: identify the guilty, plan their deaths, restore balance through blood. Clean. Comprehensible. The kind of justice that could be measured and completed.
But Eshu deals in disruption, not resolution. In questions, not answers. She has not gained a weapon. She has become a door standing open to infinite complications. The straightforward blade of her rage has been bent into a hook, and she cannot see what it will catch or what catching it will cost her.
The warriors’ shouts fracture into bewilderment. She watches Kolade’s men collide in darkness, their torches casting light on silk-cotton trees that have stood for centuries in positions they never occupied before. One soldier swears he sees the path leading east; his brother insists it curves north. Both are correct. Both are deceived.
Her doing. Her unmaking of their certainty.
The grove responds to her presence now, rearranging itself like a puzzle that delights in having no solution. She feels each warrior’s confusion as if their disorientation flows through her own veins. Not painful, but intimate. Disturbing. She has not simply called upon power. She has become its instrument, and instruments do not choose what music plays through them.
The change roots deeper than muscle, deeper than bone. She is threshold now: doorway and destination, truth and its clever shadow. Her blood hums with crossroads logic: every answer contains its opposite, every path splits into three. The ancestors wanted a weapon of righteousness. Eshu has made her something more dangerous: a question that cannot be answered cleanly, vengeance wearing the mask of chaos.
She tests this new sight carefully, watching reality fracture into branching possibilities: three paths where one existed, market routes that fold back on themselves like riddles. The gift lets her slip between what-is and what-could-be, but already she feels it: the trickster’s bargain reshaping her intentions. Righteous fury becomes something slipperier. The woman who destroys Gbadebo may not be the woman who began this hunt.
The forest parts for her like water around a stone, paths revealing themselves in silver-edged clarity while behind her the warriors crash through undergrowth that wasn’t there a moment before. Their torches spin in mad arcs, chasing shadows that multiply and scatter. She hears their confused shouts (“This way!” “No, the tracks lead here!”) as Eshu’s gift folds space into riddles their ordinary eyes cannot solve.
Her breath comes easier now, the panic of discovery transforming into something sharper. The trickster’s vision settles over her sight like a second skin, and suddenly she sees not the forest but the market square at noon, sun-bright and crowded. There Gbadebo. His face materializes with terrible precision: round and prosperous, skin oiled and unmarked by labor or violence. Soft hands rest on his considerable belly, hands that have never gripped a weapon or felt the weight of chains. Yet those same hands hold the quill that signs condemnation, that transforms names into inventory, that converts her family’s blood into figures in a ledger.
The vision sharpens. She sees his compound rising on land she knows. Land her grandfather walked as a free man, land he blessed with libations to ensure the market’s prosperity. The irony tastes like ash. Gbadebo built his fortune on stolen ground, his wealth accumulated through transactions that strip souls down to their market value. She sees the ledgers in her mind’s eye, columns of numbers that once were people, profit margins calculated from suffering.
Her mother’s tokens burn hot against her skin where they rest in the leather pouch. They know. The ancestors know. This truth was always there, waiting beneath the obvious target, beneath the warrior’s brass armor and blood-marked spear. Kolade destroys, yes. But Gbadebo decides who will be destroyed.
The understanding crashes through her like the ancestors’ voices at full volume, Kolade is merely the weapon, not the hand that wields it. A spear can be broken, but the warrior who throws it will simply select another from the rack. Her rage, so carefully aimed at the man in brass armor, has been misdirected all this time. Eshu’s laughter ripples through the vision, not mocking but teaching, showing her the true architecture of her captivity.
She sees it now: the council chamber where Gbadebo sits among his peers, discussing her people’s fate over palm wine. The private ceremonies where profits are divided, percentages negotiated, territories claimed. The merchant never touches the chains, never raises the whip, never stands at the auction block. His hands remain soft, his robes unstained. He signs documents in his compound while Kolade’s spear drinks blood in the streets below.
The distance is deliberate. Calculated. Gbadebo has insulated himself with layers of authority and violence, and Kolade is merely the outermost layer. Behind him stand other warriors, other enforcers, all serving the same master.
The spring water runs cold over her scarred hands, carrying away the white ash in pale spirals. Each revelation from Eshu settles into her bones like a new kind of weight. She must become smaller to grow larger. Must bow deeper to rise higher. The trickster god shows her the terrible geometry of it. How Kolade’s compound connects to the merchant quarter, how trusted slaves move between the warrior’s household and the council chambers, carrying messages, serving at private meetings where the real commerce happens.
Her mother’s tokens rest heavy in the leather pouch at her waist. They did not die so she could strike blindly at shadows. Gbadebo’s name burns in her mouth, unspoken. The path to him winds through Kolade’s trust, and trust must be earned with perfect servitude.
The strategy coils in her chest like a serpent: offer Kolade her herb-knowledge, her literacy, her ghost-step through crowds. Make herself indispensable enough to enter the garrison walls, close enough to map Gbadebo’s visits, his rhythms, his unguarded moments. Eshu’s approval thrums through her blood, delighting in this exquisite reversal: serving her father’s killer to reach the man who ordered the blade’s descent, patience sharpened to a ritual edge.
The footsteps resolve into Adisa’s ink-stained silhouette, emerging where warriors should be. His presence fractures her understanding. Why here, why now? The trickster’s laughter crescendos as recognition strikes: Eshu has delivered not obstacle but instrument. The record-keeper who documents Kolade’s movements, who maps Gbadebo’s corruption in hidden script. Her solitary vengeance suddenly multiplies into conspiracy, and she understands the god’s true gift isn’t protection but perfect, devastating timing.
The old words tasted of iron and honey on her tongue, syllables her mother had whispered during the final nursing, sounds Nkemdirim had carried in her chest like swallowed coals for twenty years. Each name she spoke, Ogunlade, Ifetayo, Adebowale, rang through the grove with a clarity that had nothing to do with volume. The founding lineages. The first families who had blessed this crossroads before it became Oja-Titun, before merchants and their bought warriors had rewritten history in blood and bills of sale.
Kolade’s brass armor no longer gleamed. The shadows clung to it like oil, like accusation. His breathing had changed: she heard it catch, restart, catch again. Good. Let him feel what her mother felt when the smoke filled her lungs.
“Moremi Aduke Olabisi,” Nkemdirim intoned, and the name of her mother split the air three times, each repetition deeper than the last, each one pulling something through from the other side of death. “Moremi Aduke Olabisi. Moremi Aduke Olabisi.” The witness was called. The grove received it.
His protective charms began to fail. She watched the realization move across his scarred face: first the heat that made him flinch, then the unnatural cold that followed, then the terrible absence of the military cult’s presence. He was alone here. Truly alone, perhaps for the first time since he’d taken his warrior marks.
The spear rose in his hands, muscle memory overriding the dread that was turning his breath shallow. But the point wavered. His legendary arm, which had never failed, which had ended seventeen men in single combat, trembled like a boy’s.
Because she had moved her shoulder cloth aside.
Because the light was touching her skin.
Because the geometric patterns carved there in her infancy were impossible to mistake, and he had spent one long night two decades ago making certain no one bearing those marks would survive to claim what they meant.
The spear left his hand not in surrender but in rejection: his fingers springing open as though the iron had turned to fire, to serpent, to something his flesh could not bear to hold. It struck the earth point-first between them, quivering, and the sound it made was wrong: not the clean strike of metal on soil but something muted, swallowed, as if the ground itself refused to ring with it.
Nkemdirim watched his face become a scroll of truths he could not unwrite. Denial first: the narrowing of eyes that insisted she was some other girl, some clever forgery. Then recognition bleeding through like poison through cloth, staining everything. His jaw worked. Calculation flickered behind his gaze: distances, angles, the weight of his knife against her bare hands. And finally, settling like ash, fear.
Not of her body. Not of what she might do with that fallen spear.
Fear of the accounting. Of what stood behind her in the spaces between trees, bearing witness with root and memory. Of the spiritual mathematics that were even now balancing his twenty years of service against her mother’s final scream.
She did not reach for his weapon.
The words came from her throat like inheritance: each syllable weighted with the authority her mother had carried, that her grandmother had carried before the merchants decided lineage was less valuable than ledgers. She spoke not in the colonial tongue but in the old language, the one used when oaths bound tighter than rope, when names carried the full weight of all who had borne them.
“You remember now,” she said, and it was not accusation but confirmation. “Your hands remember. The blade remembers. The night remembers itself through you.”
His breathing had gone shallow. The brass armor that made him imposing in daylight seemed suddenly costume, decoration on a man whose substance was draining away with each word she anchored into the charged air between them.
His voice came hoarse, scraped raw: “Which family?”
The question contained multitudes (which compound, which night of fire and screaming) because there had been so many. The admission cracked the air itself. The grove answered with wind through hollow bones, through empty doorways, through the spaces where people had been.
She named them. Father. Mother. Three brothers, each by their full names.
Recognition moved across his face like illness. This one he remembered. The family whose bloodright to the crossroads had threatened everything the merchants were building. His knees bent, not in submission but in the involuntary collapse of a body whose justifications had become transparent even to itself.
Footfalls broke the grove’s held breath, measured, deliberate, wrong for this place. Adisa emerged from twisted paths, satchel pressed against ribs like armor against the watching trees. His fear wore thin over something harder: witness. The papers he withdrew seemed obscene here, ink and colonial script against root-dark earth. Yet Nkemdirim saw Eshu’s pattern complete itself: her blood-claim spoken, Kolade’s weapon fallen, and now these profane sheets that would translate spirit-truth into the merchant council’s only language. Chaos as architecture.
The air pressed inward like water closing over a drowning man’s head. Kolade’s next breath came shallow, insufficient, his chest working against invisible weight. He staggered (warrior’s balance failing him) as the shadows peeled themselves free from bark and root.
They did not rush him. That would have been mercy.
Instead they circled, slow as grief, and Nkemdirim recognized the pattern: the walking of mourners around the newly dead, the spiral dance that honored those denied proper burial. Each shadow carried a density that her newly-opened senses could read: grandmother who’d sung the planting songs, uncle who’d kept the forge fires, the twin children who’d barely learned their names before the raid came. Not attacking. Witnessing. Making him see what he had spent years teaching himself not to know.
The brass amulet at Kolade’s throat began to smoke. He clawed at it, hissing, as the metal grew hot enough to brand. The protective symbols etched into his armor blackened, their geometric precision cracking like drought-starved earth. One by one his charms failed: the leather cord around his wrist snapping, the cowrie shells sewn into his belt splitting open, the iron ring on his thumb turning to rust that stained his skin like old blood.
The military cult had taught him to invoke minor protections, hedge-magic for soldiers who needed to believe their violence served some higher order. But this. This was the accumulated weight of lineages whose names had been deliberately forgotten, whose shrines had been paved over with market stones, whose children had been scattered like seeds into foreign soil. The cult’s borrowed power couldn’t stand against grief this old, this righteous, this patient.
Kolade fell to his knees, and the shadows drew closer, their silence more damning than any accusation his ears could have borne.
Adisa stepped fully into the clearing, his scholar’s frame seeming to gather substance from the charged air. His hands trembled (they always trembled) but he spread the documents across a fallen log with the precision of ritual. Garrison records. Supply manifests. The careful accounting of atrocity.
When he spoke, his voice carried none of its usual careful modulation. It rang. It accused.
“Third moon of the dry season. Patrol assignment: Commander Kolade, twenty warriors, destination,” He read the compound’s name, the syllables Nkemdirim hadn’t heard spoken aloud in six years. “Requisition order, same date: forty sets of chains, iron collars sized for children.” His finger traced down the page. “Payment voucher, signed by Merchant Elder Ogunleye, countersigned by Garrison Commander Kolade. Amount: three plots of river-land, two breeding slaves, elevation to provisional council status pending,” he looked up, ink-stained fingers steady now, “, pending successful elimination of rival lineage claims.”
The words hung in the grove’s thick air like smoke that wouldn’t disperse. Evidence. Testimony. The power of the written word made manifest against the convenient amnesia of oral denials.
The spear fell. Not dropped. It simply ceased to matter. Kolade’s fingers opened and the weapon that had never missed its target struck earth with a sound like judgment.
He had built himself from scars and discipline. Commander. Warrior. The crimson cape, the brass armor etched with protection. All of it costume now, flimsy as market-day theater. Through the grove’s charged air, he saw himself refracted: not through his own eyes, not through his brothers’ admiring glances, but through the unblinking gaze of the dead.
A mercenary. A blade for hire who’d mistaken his leash for a chain of office.
The three parallel scars on each cheek burned. Not marks of brotherhood. Brand marks. Ownership.
The voices sharpened into testimony. A child’s cry for mama. An elder’s prayer severed mid-word by iron. Flames devouring a family shrine while men laughed over palm wine, dividing what they’d stolen.
Kolade’s knees struck earth. His victims lived here now, woven into root and shadow. Eternal witnesses. The grove had kept their final breaths, and now exhaled them back at him: accusation that would never fade.
The warrior’s collapse was a harvest three years ripening. Nkemdirim tasted Eshu’s laughter in the back of her throat. Bitter kola and honey mixed. Three truths converged like rivers: ancestors breathing testimony through bark and leaf, Adisa’s ink-stained evidence clutched against his chest, and Kolade’s face cracking open as understanding flooded in. He’d been weapon, not wielder. Slave calling himself master.
The words came not from her mouth but through it. Nkemdirim felt them rise from the earth beneath her feet, pulled up through root and bone. Her mother’s voice layered beneath her own. Her grandmother’s beneath that. A chorus of the erased, speaking through the only throat still drawing breath.
“On the night of the new moon, three seasons past, in the upper room of the cloth merchant’s compound, Elder Gbadebo said these words. Kolade’s eyes found hers across the small clearing. Something animal moved behind his gaze. Recognition. Fear.
“‘The old lineages still whisper claims to the river landing; we must erase the memory before the memory erases our profits.’”
The grove exhaled. Leaves shivered though no wind moved. Kolade’s hand, which had been sliding toward his spear, stopped. Froze mid-reach like a man turned to wood. Because those words, those exact words, had been spoken in a room locked and guarded. A room where only five men gathered. Four merchants and one warrior commander who thought himself their equal.
Nkemdirim watched understanding carve new lines into his face. The trickster’s gift was precision. Not just knowledge of the conspiracy, but the intimate texture of it. The specific words. The casual cruelty of men discussing murder as business strategy.
“No one,” Kolade’s voice came out rusted. He swallowed, tried again. “No one else was present.”
“Eshu was present.” Nkemdirim took one step forward. The forest floor solid beneath her bare feet. “Eshu is always present when lies are traded. When oaths are broken. When blood is sold for coin.” Another step. “The trickster hears what powerful men think no one hears. And he remembers.”
Adisa’s breathing had gone shallow beside her. Even he hadn’t known she would speak this. That she could speak this.
“Elder Funmilayo provided the falsified debt records.” Each name dropped like a stone into still water. Nkemdirim’s voice carried the weight of testimony, of witness. “She made my father’s signature appear on loans he never took, interest that doubled in darkness while we slept.”
Kolade’s chest rose and fell. Rose and fell. The rhythm breaking.
“Elder Taiwo supplied the garrison with extra rations for the night raid. Smoked fish and palm wine. So it would not appear in official requisitions. So Adisa’s careful records would show nothing unusual.”
The record-keeper’s sharp intake of breath. He was already calculating, remembering. Checking the testimony against his documented absences.
“Elder Ogunleye offered his compound as the holding place.” Her voice dropped lower, intimate with horror. “For the captured. Before they were processed as ‘legitimate war prisoners.’”
Kolade’s breathing had gone ragged. Animal sounds trapped in a human throat. Because he remembered. The extra rations that had seemed like unexpected fortune. The unusual orders that had felt wrong but came with official seals. Delivering bound bodies, her mother, her aunts, her young brother, to Ogunleye’s courtyard and being told not to record their names.
Not to remember them as people.
His face, the face that had commanded fifty men, that had stared down armed resistance without flinching, began to break. Not quickly. Not cleanly. Pride cracked like sun-baked clay, each fissure spreading slow and inevitable. The three parallel scars on each cheek seemed to deepen, shadows pooling in the marks of brotherhood that suddenly meant nothing. His jaw clenched so hard Nkemdirim could hear teeth grinding, and his fingers shook against the spear shaft like wind-rattled leaves.
“They told me…” The voice that emerged was not his. Could not be his. Hoarse, scraped raw, the sound of a man drowning in air. “They said your family harbored enemies of the town. That the old lineages plotted to overthrow legitimate trade agreements.”
Adisa watched a man’s entire understanding of himself begin to collapse.
Nkemdirim moved forward, each step deliberate, her mother’s tokens burning hot against her ribs through worn leather. “You believed yourself a warrior serving order.” Her voice cut clean as ritual blade. “But Eshu reveals truth. You were merchant’s dog, dressed in brass and ceremony so you would savage whoever threatened their coin.”
The words found their mark. Kolade flinched, struck deeper than any spear could reach. He had always held himself separate from the merchants, always insisted his military brotherhood transcended their commerce, always convinced himself his violence served honor rather than profit.
The warrior’s fingers uncurled from iron-tipped wood. His gaze found Nkemdirim’s, and she saw behind his eyes. The children’s faces, the elders’ blood, all the necessary violence that had been merely greed wearing honor’s mask. “I killed…” The words scraped out. “Children. Elders who could not run.” His voice fractured. “I called it warrior’s duty.”
The ancestors shrieked their grief. Adisa’s fingers whitened on his records, recognizing this breaking as sharper than any death.
The spear shaft settled into Kolade’s palm with the familiarity of a lover’s hand. For one suspended breath, the grove became a held inhalation: leaves ceased their rustling, the spirits paused their keening, even the shadows seemed to freeze mid-reach.
Then Adisa moved.
Not with a warrior’s grace, but with the awkward courage of a man whose weapons had always been words. His thin frame interposed itself between iron point and Nkemdirim’s throat. The leather satchel swung wide, and papers erupted into the charged air like startled egrets, white against the green darkness.
Nkemdirim felt it then. The trickster god’s laughter vibrated in her marrow, not cruel but delighted, showing her what she had been too focused on vengeance to see clearly.
The documents drifted on air that should not move. One twisted, spiraling down to land face-up at Kolade’s feet. Even in the grove’s dimness, the council’s wax seal caught what little light penetrated: red as fresh blood, pressed with Gbadebo’s personal mark.
Another paper settled against a root. Then another. A trail of evidence, each sheet a thread in the noose the merchant elders had been braiding all along.
Nkemdirim’s fingers closed on one mid-flight. The paper crackled between her calloused palms as she held it up, angling it so the warrior could read the careful script that documented raids conducted three days beyond the treaty line, where colonial authorities had explicitly forbidden incursion. Dates. Locations. Numbers of captives. All signed with Gbadebo’s flourish, countersigned by two other council members.
Not orders to Kolade. Evidence against him.
She saw the moment comprehension pierced through. His scarred face shifted, muscles slackening as the architecture of his certainty began its collapse.
Nkemdirim’s hand moved with deliberate precision, plucking another document from its descent. This one bore the garrison’s own seal, forged, she realized, studying the slightly uneven wax. Her mother’s voice whispered through her memory: The snake that will bite you hides in the grass you trust.
“They made you their weapon,” she said, each word measured, shaped by the grove’s amplifying presence. “Now they sharpen you for their own throats to avoid.” She stepped closer, the paper extended like an offering. “Every raid you led thinking you served order: you served Gbadebo’s purse. Every treaty you believed protected the town: he violated for profit.”
The spirits pressed nearer, their attention focused not on vengeance now but on this pivot point, this moment where the blade might turn in the hand.
“The colonial authorities demand a name,” Nkemdirim continued, her voice dropping to something almost intimate. “The council has already given them yours. Your loyalty bought you nothing but a noose woven from your own obedience.”
She let the silence settle, heavy with implication.
Adisa’s voice emerged from behind her shoulder, no longer trembling but carrying the authority of one who has kept accounts of every transgression. “They’ve been preparing your execution for months, Commander.” He moved forward, letting papers fall from his satchel in a deliberate cascade. “You’ve become too expensive to protect, too knowledgeable to trust.”
The documents settled around Kolade’s feet like fallen leaves. Patrol schedules bearing forged signatures, supply manifests showing discrepancies, letters between council members discussing his usefulness as a scapegoat.
“The colonial authorities are asking questions about raids that bear your name but filled Gbadebo’s warehouses.” Adisa’s ink-stained fingers arranged the papers with practiced care, creating a mosaic of betrayal written in official ink, sealed with official stamps, damning in their bureaucratic precision.
The ancestor spirits ceased their howling. In the sudden quiet, Nkemdirim felt her mother’s tokens burn against her hip. Bone and copper, memory and claim. She watched Kolade’s face, saw something crack behind the warrior’s mask. Her voice came steady, carrying the weight of graves and futures both: “Will you die as their blade, forgotten and blamed, or stand as witness to the truth that condemns them?”
The spear left his hand: not hurled but released, a shedding. It struck earth beside the shrine stones, quivering there like a question made iron. Kolade’s warrior mask shattered into something rawer: a man seeing the shape of his own expendability. His gaze moved from documents to Adisa’s trembling hands to Nkemdirim’s scars, finally settling on the stones where his answer would be weighed against generations of blood.
The spear’s impact sends tremors through her feet, through the earth itself, as if the ground recognizes the weight of what has been offered. Kolade’s knee meets soil that has drunk the libations of her ancestors, and Nkemdirim watches his warrior’s spine bend. Not broken but deliberately yielded, the way a master swordsmith folds metal to strengthen it or ruins it entirely.
His voice, when it comes, carries none of the parade-ground bark she has heard echoing through market squares. These words emerge shaped by ritual cadence, the formal grammar of oaths that cannot be unmade without consequence. “I swear by this iron that has tasted blood, by this ground that holds the bones of the wronged, to speak truth against Gbadebo and the council who gave the orders my spear executed.” His scarred hands spread flat against the earth, fingers pressing into mud. “I will testify before whatever justice you construct from the ruins of my honor. I choose to face those I have wronged rather than die conveniently silent while the merchants who bought my violence sleep safely in their compounds.”
The words settle into the grove like stones into water, and Nkemdirim feels the ancestors’ response before she sees it: that cold light blooming from the shrine markers, neither acceptance nor rejection but acknowledgment. A bargain has been spoken where bargains carry weight.
Her mother’s voice surfaces from memory: A warrior’s oath is only as strong as his fear of breaking it.
She studies Kolade’s bowed head, the vulnerable curve of his neck where a blade could so easily find the great vessels. He has placed himself beneath her judgment, yes: but warriors are trained in a hundred forms of deception, and the man who burned her family’s compound understands strategy, understands how to position pieces on a board she is only beginning to see clearly.
The shrine stones pulse with cold light as the ancestors receive his oath, and Nkemdirim feels their whispers sharp as thorns against her consciousness, this blade has tasted your blood, child, do not let it rest against your throat, warnings that spiral through her mind like smoke, each voice a grandmother or uncle who learned too late that warriors understand survival better than honor, that the man who calculated the angles of attack on her family’s compound now calculates new angles, new positions on a board whose rules she is only beginning to read.
Yet Adisa shifts his weight, and she catches the minute movement of his ink-stained fingers: a scholar’s gesture of consideration. His eyes meet hers with that careful intelligence that has kept him breathing in the garrison’s shadow, and she understands what he sees. They cannot forge this weapon elsewhere. The ancestors whisper warnings, yes, but Eshu’s presence crackles through the grove like lightning seeking earth, and she tastes it: opportunity sharp as palm wine, chaos that can be aimed.
Nkemdirim speaks the words of acceptance in the old tongue, each syllable weighted with ancestral witness, the air thickening as the binding takes hold. But her voice does not soften. She adds her own condition, and watches understanding drain the color from Kolade’s scarred face. He will face judgment not from her blade alone but from every family he helped destroy, from the community he betrayed. Only after Gbadebo and the council have fallen (only then) will his fate be determined by those he wronged.
His jaw tightens. The warrior’s pride wars with something newer, rawer. He agrees.
She has given him not mercy but something harder to bear: the obligation to live with his crimes visible, stripped of justification. To become the testimony that condemns his former masters. To exist in that excruciating space between monster and ally, neither forgiven nor destroyed, useful only in his unmaking.
Adisa’s fingers move across the documents like a diviner reading patterns in kola nuts. Each patrol schedule aligns with a raid date. Each supply manifest documents theft legitimized as law. The correspondence, Gbadebo’s own hand commanding what Kolade’s spear executed. They map power’s architecture: which elders hunger for Gbadebo’s position, which warriors whisper doubts, which market day draws the largest crowd for testimony that will shatter carefully maintained lies.
The grove’s shadows lean inward, listening. Nkemdirim’s hand finds her mother’s tokens: warm now, alive with ancestral presence. This is Eshu’s true gift: not destruction but transformation. She will make them destroy each other. Kolade’s guilt becomes testimony. Adisa’s records become indictment. Her spiritual authority becomes legitimacy. Chaos woven through power’s fabric until it tears from within. Longer than a blade’s work. More dangerous. But offering what assassination never could. The system itself, remade.
The grove releases them in stages, each departure timed to the rhythm of deception they must now master.
First Adisa, whose documentation must reach safe hiding before suspicion falls. The forest spits him out near the eastern edge where the cloth merchants store their dyes, a location that explains his presence should anyone question. He clutches his satchel close, feeling the weight of copied patrol schedules, requisition orders bearing Kolade’s seal, the careful notations he’s made about which warriors participated in which raids. Evidence that could hang a dozen men. Or free a hundred. His fingers shake as he walks, trying to match the casual stride of a clerk running evening errands, though his heart hammers against his ribs like something trying to escape.
Then Kolade, who must return to the garrison and begin the careful performance of a commander shaken by spiritual encounter but still in command. The paths straighten for him, almost mocking in their clarity, as if Eshu himself is laughing at the warrior who thought iron could cut through everything. He emerges at the garrison’s western approach, where his absence might be explained as an inspection of the perimeter defenses. His brass armor catches the dying light, but the crimson cape seems darker now, weighted with something beyond fabric. Each step toward his compound feels like walking into a trap of his own making, yet he walks it anyway, because the alternative was worse than any death.
Finally Nkemdirim, who walks the longest path back. The grove holds her closest, whispers instructions in her grandmother’s voice, her mother’s cadence, the layered speech of women whose names were deliberately forgotten. She learns the routes that will serve her in nights to come: which trees mark safe passage, where the earth remembers old boundaries that still hold power.
At the garrison, Kolade’s warriors read the change in their commander through the language of scars and bearing: he stands differently now, weight shifted forward like a man expecting the ground to give way beneath him, carries his spear with less certainty but more purpose, as if the weapon has become question rather than answer. When he dismisses them with orders to resume normal patrols, his voice holds an edge they’ve never heard before, not anger but something closer to shame, and the most perceptive among them exchange glances that ask questions no one dares speak aloud.
The younger warriors disperse quickly, grateful to escape the strange tension. But the older ones linger in the courtyard, pretending to check their equipment while watching their commander retreat to his quarters. They’ve followed Kolade through raids that left villages smoking, stood beside him during executions that required no trial. They know the weight of blood. What unsettles them now is seeing that weight finally register on shoulders that had carried it with such ease.
One veteran spits into the dust, makes a sign against evil, and walks away shaking his head.
The compound’s sleeping quarters smell of bodies pressed too close, of fear-sweat and exhaustion. Nkemdirim lies on her mat in the darkness, listening to the breathing of twenty other women who share this space. Her fingers trace the leather pouch at her throat: her mother’s tokens warm against her skin, or perhaps that’s Eshu’s presence, trickster heat that doesn’t burn but transforms.
She doesn’t sleep. But for once, her wakefulness isn’t the helpless fury of a caged animal. Instead, her mind moves like a weaver’s shuttle, threading connections: Merchant Olabode who proposed the land seizure. Elder Funmilayo who seconded it. The record-keeper before Adisa who documented the “legal” transfer. Warriors who carried torches. Neighbors who turned away.
Each name a knot in the net she’s beginning to see. Not targets for her blade, but pressure points in a structure that can be made to collapse inward.
Meanwhile, Nkemdirim moves through the market with new eyes, no longer just surviving but mapping. She notes which merchants grow nervous when enslaved people linger too long near their stalls, which ones keep secondary ledgers, who whispers urgently when garrison officers approach. She collects not weapons but knowledge: the more dangerous arsenal. Each observation she shares with Adisa through coded gestures at the water well, their conspiracy growing precise as surgery.
Kolade moved through the garrison compound like a man cataloging his own sins. Each warrior he summoned (Taiwo with the scarred knuckles, Babatunde who still limped from an old spear wound) received the same unsettling courtesy: privacy, direct questions, silence that demanded truth rather than platitudes. He asked about the night raids, the merchant names attached to each order, who paid the bonuses for captured families. His voice carried no authority now, only the weight of a man constructing his own indictment, brick by careful brick.
The morning air hung thick with smoke and anticipation as Adisa stepped forward, his ink-stained fingers trembling only slightly as he unrolled the first document. His voice, trained for record-keeping’s monotone precision, now carried a different quality: each word weighted with the authority of evidence that could not be dismissed as rumor or grievance.
“Third moon of the dry season, two years past,” he read, his eyes fixed on the parchment though Nkemdirim knew he had memorized every syllable. “Order from Elder Ogunleye to Commander Kolade: ‘The Ijesa villages show resistance to trade agreements. Make an example. Quotas must be met before the coastal ships depart.’”
A ripple moved through the crowd: not quite sound, not quite movement, but the collective intake of breath from hundreds who had suspected but never known. Nkemdirim felt it pass through her like wind through grass, her newly awakened senses reading the shift in the town’s spiritual temperature. The ancestors pressed close, their whispers a chorus of vindication.
Elder Ogunleye rose, his elaborate wrapper suddenly looking less like status and more like costume. “These documents are forgeries,”
“With your seal,” Adisa interrupted, and the audacity of a record-keeper speaking over an elder sent another shock through the assembly. He held up the parchment, tilting it so morning light caught the wax impression. “Your seal, your hand. I watched you write half of these myself.”
Kolade remained still as stone, but Nkemdirim saw what others might miss: the slight loosening of his shoulders, the way his grip on his spear had shifted from weapon-ready to ceremonial. He had been their instrument of violence, yes, but instruments could be turned. The merchants had taught him that power came from knowing when to strike.
They had not taught him that knowledge itself could be the sharpest blade.
Kolade’s voice rolled across the square, but stripped of its usual command-bark that sent soldiers scrambling. Instead, he spoke with the deliberate cadence of a man reading from memory’s ledger, each syllable a nail driven into the merchants’ carefully constructed authority.
“The Ijesa villages. Seventeen families taken, though only twelve appeared in the official count.” His eyes remained fixed on the council platform, his scarred face revealing nothing while Elder Ogunleye’s jaw worked soundlessly. “The Ekiti settlement. You told me they had attacked a trade caravan. There was no caravan.”
Another elder half-rose, indigo robes billowing. “This is, you dare,”
“The Owo raid.” Kolade continued as though no one had spoken, and the crowd’s collective attention was a physical weight now, pressing down on the platform. “Elder Taiwo’s exact words: ‘The colonial authorities need not know the full numbers. Our percentage comes from the difference.’”
Taiwo’s face drained of color. Around the square, Nkemdirim felt the shift. Not just in the crowd’s mood, but deeper, where the ancestors kept their accounts. The warrior had become witness. The weapon had learned to speak.
Adisa’s fingers fumbled with the leather satchel’s clasp, then steadied. He drew out the first document like a priest revealing sacred text. The paper trembled (or perhaps his hands did) but when he spoke, his voice carried across the square with unexpected authority.
“Third moon of last year’s dry season. Ijesa raid. Official manifest: twelve captives. Actual count from Elder Ogunleye’s private ledger,” He paused, letting the silence sharpen. “Twenty-nine.”
The crowd’s murmur rose like wind through leaves. Adisa unfolded another sheet, then another, his voice growing stronger with each revelation. Dates. Villages. Numbers that didn’t match. Payments split in ratios that told their own story. The elders’ protests became incoherent sputtering, their denials crumbling against the methodical precision of their own greed, documented in their own hand.
The ancestors pressed close, Nkemdirim felt them like heat against her back, like breath on her neck. Her mother’s tokens burned through cloth and skin. Across the churning crowd, Kolade’s gaze found hers, held it. Recognition flickered there, not of her face but of something deeper: the understanding that he’d become a blade in hands he couldn’t see, wielded by powers that predated his brass armor and crimson authority.
The elder’s fingers grasp at nothing as iron blocks flesh, and the crack of spear shaft against reaching arm splits the morning like thunder. Kolade’s face shows no emotion, but his body has chosen. Planted between the documents and those who would destroy them. Around them the marketplace inhales as one, holding the breath before chaos, before the careful order of things shatters into the truth Adisa’s voice continues to speak.
The first elder’s hand closes on empty air as Kolade’s spear forces him back, and in that frozen moment the crowd sees the merchant’s face contort from authority to panic. The transformation from master to accused happening in a single breath while Adisa’s voice cuts through the square, reading aloud the dates and prices of children sold beyond the legal boundaries.
Three more elders surge forward together, attempting to overwhelm through numbers what they cannot reclaim through status. But Kolade moves like water, his spear becoming a barrier that redirects rather than pierces, turning their momentum against them. Each strike of wood against grasping hands sounds like judgment. The brass armor catches morning light, throwing fragments of gold across faces twisted with disbelief.
“You dare?” The eldest merchant’s voice cracks on the words. “We made you. Gave you rank, land, authority. Kolade’s response comes quiet, but it carries.”Made me the blade while you counted profits.”
From the crowd’s edge, Nkemdirim watches the warrior’s shoulders. Still squared, still proud, but carrying weight differently now. Not the confidence of power, but the burden of choice. Her fingers brush the leather pouch at her waist, feeling the warmth of her mother’s tokens through the hide. The ancestors whisper approval in the wind that stirs the iroko leaves overhead.
Adisa turns another page, his voice never faltering though his hands tremble. Names. Villages. The careful accounting of destruction rendered in his precise script. Each word another stone in the wall rising between the merchants and their escape.
One elder drops to his knees, hands raised in supplication toward Kolade. “Please. We can negotiate. Whatever you want,”
“I want nothing you can offer.” The spear tip lowers, points toward the documents. “Your words condemn you better than mine ever could.”
The kneeling man’s eyes dart sideways, calculating. His weight shifts. Nkemdirim sees it before he moves. The desperate lunge not toward freedom but toward the papers, toward silence through destruction.
The desperate elder’s body launches toward the documents, fingers clawed for paper and erasure. But Kolade’s spear moves faster: not to kill, but to pin. The iron tip drives through elaborate sleeve into wooden platform, nailing the man’s arm in place. His scream cuts across the square.
“The words are already spoken,” Kolade says. “Already heard.”
The merchant writhes, trapped like an insect on display. Blood seeps through expensive cloth, staining the geometric patterns dark. Around him, his fellow council members freeze, their own escape calculations suddenly recalibrated by the sight of their colleague’s pinned flesh.
Nkemdirim’s breath catches. She’d expected violence, had prepared herself for the red work of vengeance. But this. This is something else. Kolade choosing precision over slaughter, making them live with exposure rather than granting the mercy of a quick death. The warrior who’d burned her childhood home now demonstrating a restraint that somehow cuts deeper than any blade.
Adisa’s voice rises again, steady despite the blood spreading across his carefully copied pages. Another name. Another village. The accounting continues while the pinned elder’s whimpers provide counterpoint.
The gold weights scatter across packed earth like seeds that will never grow. Ivory tokens roll between feet that refuse to step forward and claim them. One elder’s voice cracks as he calls out amounts, doubling his offer, tripling it, his mathematics of desperation growing more frantic with each ignored bid.
But the crowd has learned a new economy today. They’ve watched words weigh heavier than gold, watched truth pin flesh more effectively than spears. The market women whose scales have measured kola nuts and salt for decades now measure something else entirely: the distance between what was owed and what might finally be paid.
The coins lie untouched. Even the street children, who would normally scramble for dropped cowries, stand still.
Kolade’s spear tip moves like a scribe’s stylus, pointing accusation at each merchant elder. His parade-ground voice has found courthouse measure. Adisa shadows him, ledger pages rustling like dry leaves, his scholar’s finger tracking down columns of dates and names and prices paid in human cargo. The warrior provides the weight of consequence; the record-keeper provides the architecture of proof. Together they construct something the old council built their wealth by preventing: accountability that cannot be purchased, buried, or burned.
The warrior’s grip (calloused from spear-shaft and sword-hilt, marked by decades of violence executed without question) tightens on silk-clad arms that once gestured casually toward destruction. His face, a geography of battle scars and ritual marks, shifts through expressions like clouds across sun: bitter recognition, perhaps shame’s first stirring, maybe comprehension that authority divorced from justice is merely organized cruelty. The gathered crowd reads this transformation, their collective breath changing rhythm from fear’s shallow panting to something deeper, purposeful.
The forest released her as morning light split the darkness, each step down the slope deliberate, transformed. The tokens, her mother’s tokens, grandmother’s before that, back through generations whose names she now remembered with crystalline clarity, rested against her collarbone where they caught dawn’s first rays. No longer hidden in the leather pouch pressed against her heart. No longer secret.
Adisa saw her before she fully emerged from the tree line. He’d been pacing, wearing a path in the damp earth, documents pressed against his chest like armor. His body moved before his mind caught up: three steps toward her, relief flooding his features, mouth opening to speak words of gratitude or reproach.
Then he stopped.
Something in the way she moved. Something in the quality of her gaze that made his educated mind reach for words like inhabited or multiplied before settling on the inadequate changed. The air around her seemed denser, as though she’d brought the grove’s weight with her, as though the ancestors who’d spoken to her in vision still whispered at her shoulders.
He stepped back. Caught himself. Stepped forward again, fighting the instinct.
“You. He swallowed, tried again.”I thought you wouldn’t return.”
“I almost didn’t.” Her voice carried new harmonics, or perhaps he was simply hearing what had always been there. “They showed me everything, Adisa. Everything we’ve been seeing wrong.”
His fingers tightened on the papers, ink-stained and trembling. “What did they. She moved closer, and this time he held his ground though his body wanted to retreat from whatever now looked out through her eyes.”He’s not the head. He’s the blade. And the hand that holds him has already decided when to let him fall.”
She kept her voice low, though something in her wanted to shout it across the waking town. “The merchants have already written his ending, Adisa. While Kolade thinks he serves them, they’ve prepared documents, official testimonies, falsified records, naming him alone as the architect of the raids. The ones that took children from protected villages. The ones that violated even the colonial governor’s treaties.”
His breath caught. The papers against his chest suddenly felt heavier, burning.
“They’ll let him believe he’s untouchable until the moment they need a sacrifice. When the colonial authorities finally investigate, when the complaints grow too loud to ignore, they’ll present Commander Kolade as a rogue element. A military man drunk on power, acting without authorization.” Her eyes held his, and he saw the terrible beauty of it. The precision of the trap. “Your copies, the ones you’ve been hiding. They prove the council authorized everything. Signed everything. Profited from everything.”
His hands shook so badly the papers rustled like leaves. “I was just… I only wanted to remember. To witness.”
“You were building the mechanism of their downfall. The ancestors knew. They’ve been guiding your ink.”
The streets know them now. Not as individuals but as a movement, a current flowing against the established order. The blacksmith walks with his hammer loose at his belt, each step ringing against cobblestones like a declaration. The cloth merchant’s daughter has wrapped herself in mourning indigo, the color of truth-telling. The old warrior’s limp becomes rhythm, a drum-beat of witness.
They converge at crossroads, split at corners, each carrying sealed packets that smell of ink and accusation. Nkemdirim feels the ancestors walking beside them, invisible hands steadying theirs. When a garrison soldier passes, she doesn’t lower her eyes. He looks away first, though he doesn’t understand why.
The tokens at her throat catch the first light. Her mother’s voice whispers: This is how empires crack. From the inside, along fault lines they created themselves.
The dawn breaks red as blood-promise. Adisa’s ink-stained fingers tremble as he presses the final seal: the colonial administrator’s copy delivered by a child who cannot read what she carries. The originals Nkemdirim places herself at Kolade’s threshold, her mother’s tokens burning cold against her chest. In the barracks, purchased whispers spread like fever: Your commander is already dead, his name written in ledgers bound for the coast.
The shadow tastes of indigo and old smoke. Nkemdirim’s lips shape syllables her grandmother sang while pounding yam, words that mean unravel and see clearly and the rope knows it is not the tree. Kolade’s brass armor catches morning light as he stops mid-stride, documents crackling in his grip. His warriors’ spear-butts strike earth in rhythm. Not obedience but question. The threads shimmer as they part: loyalty from betrayal, soldier from weapon, man from the story others wrote across his skin.
The warriors form a half-circle around him, breath misting in air that smells of weapon oil and uncertainty. Kolade holds the documents where firelight can reach them, and his voice comes out stripped of the parade-ground authority he has wielded like a second spear.
“The merchant council kept two sets of records.” Each word costs him something. “The official ledgers show raids sanctioned under colonial treaty: retribution against villages harboring fugitives, legal seizures of contraband.” He lets that settle, watches comprehension begin its slow crawl across weathered faces. “The private ledgers show what we actually did. Villages that paid their taxes. Children taken from compounds that had committed no crime. Numbers that exceed any authorization.”
Ogunlade, his second, shifts weight from foot to foot. The scarification on his cheeks catches shadow. “We followed orders.”
“Orders they documented as unauthorized.” Kolade’s fingers tighten on the papers until they crumple. “Insurance. For when the colonial administrators start asking questions about missing trade partners, about villages that no longer send tribute.” He meets each man’s eyes in turn. “They built a cage from our obedience. Lined it with our names in their private ink.”
The silence stretches, broken only by fire-crackle and the distant shriek of a night bird. Then Adewale, youngest of the spear-brothers, speaks what they are all thinking: “We are the evidence they plan to burn.”
Kolade sees it move through them: the recognition that they are not warriors but weapons, not men but tools already marked for disposal. The rage that kindles in their eyes reflects his own, but underneath it something more dangerous: the first stirrings of choice. Of seeing the rope that binds them and understanding it was never the tree.
“We dismantle what we built,” he says. “Every camp. Every chain. And Adisa documents it all.”
The first camp reveals itself through absence: no bird calls, no insect hum, just the wrongness that clings to places where suffering has soaked into soil. Three days into the forest, and the clearing opens like a wound that never healed.
Iron chains still bolted to trees, rust-brown with more than weather. Fire pits choked with bones too small, too many. Kolade’s voice comes out flat: “Burn it all.”
Two warriors stumble to the undergrowth, retching. The sounds they make are animal, helpless.
Adisa moves through the space with his writing implements, and his hands shake so badly the first sketch smears. He steadies himself against a tree and begins again. Page after page fills with careful documentation: the layout of cages built low, built small. Dimensions that speak their purpose without mercy. He sketches the iron collars sized for children’s necks, counts the shackle-bolts, measures the distance between restraint points.
His fingers leave ink-stains on everything he touches, black marks that look like accusation, like evidence, like the beginning of testimony that cannot be unwritten.
The truth moves like water finding cracks in stone. In the servants’ quarters behind the great houses, voices drop to whispers that carry more weight than shouts. At the wells where women gather at dawn, the story passes through the careful language of proverbs and parables. The blacksmiths’ hammers beat out rhythms that spell names, dates, crimes witnessed.
The lower merchants (those who sold cloth and kola nuts, not flesh) begin to understand their proximity to atrocity. They had told themselves the screams from the auction block were someone else’s sin. Now Kolade’s penance names them all.
In the compounds where farmers store yams and palm oil, men who had looked away discover they cannot anymore. The commander’s transformation demands their own reckoning.
She moves through the transformed spaces with her mother’s pouch against her hip, finding them in their working places. The blacksmith’s hammer pauses mid-strike when she speaks Ogun’s praise-name. The midwife’s hands still over her mortar of bitter herbs. The drummer’s fingers tap acknowledgment against his thigh. Not soldiers but scribes of a different kind. Those who will carry this moment forward in metal, in medicine, in rhythm, in the dangerous work of memory.
The seventh day arrives heavy with heat and possibility. She walks through the market crowd, her mother’s tokens warm against her palm. At the iroko’s roots, she kneels. The invocation rises from her throat in the old tongue, clear and deliberate. Around her, breath catches. Bodies still. The garrison warriors continue their patrol, spears angled outward now, a perimeter of unexpected protection. An old woman shuffles forward, places a cowrie shell beside the tokens. Then another. Another. The tree remembers its purpose.
Adisa chooses a compound near the market’s eastern edge, where the morning light falls cleanest through the acacia branches. The council grants him the space with elaborate ceremony: the same men whose signatures he forged, whose theft he documented in careful script, now proclaiming the importance of proper record-keeping for the town’s prosperity. He accepts their hypocrisy with a scholar’s patience. Power, he has learned, cares less about truth than about which truths become visible.
The first students arrive before dawn: three children whose mothers were freed when the merchant Ogunlade’s holdings were redistributed. They sit on woven mats, fingers tracing symbols in sand. He teaches them their names first: not the names given by masters, but the names their grandmothers whispered. Each letter becomes a small reclamation.
Within a moon cycle, others come. A woman who sells palm oil. Two young men from the docks. An elder who wants to read the missionary texts himself, to know what words are actually written there. Adisa turns no one away. He teaches the colonial script because it opens doors, but he teaches the old symbols too: the ones that carry meaning in their shapes, that connect sound to story to spirit.
His ink-stained fingers move across bark-paper, demonstrating how a single mark can preserve what memory might lose. How documentation transforms whisper into evidence, rumor into record. The children learn quickly, hungry for this power that was kept from their parents.
At night, he copies everything into bound volumes, testimonies, genealogies, the careful accounting of who took what from whom. He stores them in three separate locations, wrapped in oiled cloth. Insurance against forgetting. Against the revision he knows will come when those with power decide the official story needs smoothing.
Literacy spreads like water finding cracks in stone. What was once a tool of control becomes something else entirely: a weapon, yes, but also a garden where memory grows wild and ungovernable.
Nkemdirim walks the market at midday now, when the sun burns brightest and the crowds press thickest. No pass dangles from her neck. No master’s mark brands her shoulder. The indigo cloth she wears is finer now, but she chose simplicity: the elaborate textiles offered by grateful families felt wrong, like forgetting too quickly.
Children call her by name. Some call her priestess, though she rejects the title. The ancestors speak through her, yes, but she is still learning their language, still stumbling over the grammar of visions. She mediates disputes at the iroko tree, reads omens in palm nuts, performs cleansings for those haunted by what they survived or what they did to survive.
The pouch at her waist holds her mother’s tokens still, but also new things: a cowrie shell from the woman who taught her to read currents, a snippet of Adisa’s first copied testimony, a brass bead Kolade left at the shrine: not offered to her, never to her, but to the ancestors whose forgiveness he seeks in increments so small they might take lifetimes to accumulate into anything resembling redemption.
The merchant council, exposed and diminished but not destroyed, adapts with the cunning that made them wealthy. They redirect trade networks toward legitimate commerce, their ledgers now scrutinized by Adisa’s meticulous hand. Former slaves negotiate contracts as free laborers: the words still taste strange, freedom measured in copper weights and written terms rather than simply existing as breath should exist.
The power balance has shifted enough that exploitation requires subtlety now, and subtlety creates spaces. Spaces where resistance can organize in compound courtyards. Where plans form over shared meals. Where the next generation learns to read both script and intention, preparing for whatever comes next. Because something always comes, and the vigilant survive what the complacent cannot imagine.
The role chafes like new cloth against sunburned skin. Each morning she wakes uncertain whether she serves the ancestors or they serve the town’s need for legitimacy. The merchants bow now, but their eyes calculate: how to contain her, commodify her, turn spiritual authority into another resource they can trade. She feels herself becoming symbol when she needs to remain woman, weapon, witness.
The first emissary arrives from Ibadan: a woman elder whose scarification marks mirror Nkemdirim’s own. They speak beneath the iroko tree while Adisa records every word, and Nkemdirim chooses instruction over myth, revealing the documents that unmade Kolade’s power. By week’s end, three more delegations come. Each conversation plants seeds that might blossom into revolution or burn her as cautionary tale.
Nkemdirim stands at the edge of the market square as dawn breaks, watching merchants arrange their wares with new wariness, Kolade’s public disgrace has shattered the old certainties, and in the careful distance people now maintain from the garrison soldiers, she sees the first cracks in a system that seemed eternal just weeks ago.
The cloth merchant who once averted his eyes now meets her gaze, holds it for a heartbeat longer than necessary. A woman selling palm oil touches her shoulder as she passes, fingers pressing briefly where the scarification marks lie hidden beneath indigo cloth. These small gestures accumulate like raindrops before a storm. The ancestors whisper approval in the morning breeze.
She moves through the awakening market with different weight now. Not the invisible shuffle of the enslaved, but not yet the stride of the free. Something between: a woman whose name is being remembered, whose lineage is being spoken again in compounds where the old stories survived. The leather pouch at her hip holds her mother’s tokens, and yesterday a stranger pressed a cowrie shell into her palm, whispering a name she hadn’t heard since childhood. Her grandmother’s name.
At the iroko tree’s base, someone has left fresh kola nuts. An offering, though to which power she cannot say: the ancestors who never left, or to her, their living instrument. The garrison soldiers cluster near their compound now, no longer patrolling with the same arrogant sprawl. They watch the crowd with new calculation, as if only now realizing how badly they are outnumbered.
Adisa will arrive soon with his satchel and his careful eyes, ready to record whatever truth this day brings. The delegations keep coming, each one carrying questions she must answer with precision. Revolution or cautionary tale. The difference lies in what she says next, and how many are willing to listen. The market fills with voices, and she tastes possibility on her tongue like honey mixed with bitter herbs.
The haggling begins as the sun climbs higher, voices rising in practiced argument. A yam seller protests inflated prices while the farmer counters with complaints of drought. Their words overlap, interrupt, circle back. The ancient dance of the marketplace.
Nkemdirim pauses mid-step, head tilting as recognition floods through her. This rhythm. She knows this rhythm. Her mother’s voice surfaces from memory, leading the women in evening prayers, their responses weaving between her calls like thread through cloth. Offer and answer. Challenge and resolution. The space between where truth lives.
Her smile comes unbidden, sharp with understanding. Commerce and prayer speak the same language here. Both are exchanges, transformations of one thing into another. Value shifting hands like spirit moving between worlds. The trickster god must love this place, where every transaction contains the possibility of reversal, where the clever can turn loss into gain with the right words.
She watches a woman trade salt for cloth, their hands meeting over the goods, sealing more than a simple bargain. In every exchange, a small ritual. In every negotiation, a prayer for fair measure. The market itself is a kind of shrine.
The kola nuts scatter like divination shells, rolling across packed earth in patterns that speak of chance and intention. Nkemdirim drops to her knees, the merchant’s daughter beside her, their hands working quickly to gather the spilled goods. The girl’s fingers brush hers deliberately, pressing a nut into her palm with extra pressure.
“My father breathes free air because of you,” the whisper barely carries over the market noise.
Nkemdirim’s chest tightens. She hadn’t considered this: that liberation creates its own currency, that freed men tell their daughters stories, that gratitude binds as surely as blood. Around them, other faces watch with knowing eyes. A water-seller. A cloth-dyer. A blacksmith’s apprentice. Each one connected to someone Adisa’s careful forgeries released from bondage.
They’ve built something her ancestors would recognize. Not a conspiracy, but a kinship network woven from debt and honor.
The ledger’s pages rustle in the wind: or perhaps by invisible fingers. Adisa’s quill pauses mid-notation, his eyes finding hers across the crowded space between them. His nod is barely perceptible, a scholar’s acknowledgment of a theorem proven. The documents sleep in their hiding place like seeds waiting for rain, and when the colonial emissary comes seeking explanations for a garrison commander’s sudden disgrace, those seeds will sprout into questions the merchant council cannot answer without condemning themselves.
The laughter ripples through haggling voices, through the slap of cloth against wood, through children’s cries and the ring of cowrie shells exchanging hands. Neither blessing nor mockery, both, always both with Eshu. Her fingers close around her mother’s tokens, warm as living flesh. The trickster taught her: chaos is the seed of transformation, and revenge that serves only rage dies with the avenger. But justice wearing chaos’s mask? That lives forever.