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“We speak of wraiths in the traditional sense,” Sarla replies.
At their words, everything inside me shrivels. “But wraiths are—”
Sarla inclines their head. “Restless spirits that have some amount of corporeality, just not enough to maintain their form permanently.”
By now, my body is shaking so hard, I’m almost afraid it’ll come apart. I whirl to Mother, desperate again. “But you’re here. You’re alive. Please tell me you’re alive.” My emotions are surging again, a hateful panic sending a lump to my throat. I squeeze her tighter. “You have to be alive, after everything I did to find you. You have to be.”
Mother squeezes me back, places her forehead against mine. “Breathe, Deka, breathe. I’m here, just as I told you. I’m here.”
“But?” I prompt, waiting for the end of the sentence.
I know Mother like the back of my hand. I know her smell, the way her hair springs back if you pull it just so. I know exactly how she shivers after she walks in after seeing the first snow of the season. That’s how I know the moment she’s being evasive. As she is now.
When Mother doesn’t answer, I turn to Sarla, who nods sadly. “Umu is only partly alive. What you see before you is her spirit, which is why she can never leave this place.”
“We could not bring her back in her entirety,” another voice says. This one sounds like the crackling of flames over fresh kindling, like the warmth that envelops you when you first enter your home after a long day.
I turn to find Baduri stirring in the hearth that makes up her throne. “Doing so would disturb the balance. Thus, she is bound to this temple, bound to its hearth. Were she to step one foot out, she would return to the natural order and have to take her rightful place within it.”
A hot-cold sensation washes over me.
The natural order.
“You mean death.” When Baduri doesn’t reply, I turn to Mother. “That’s what they’re saying, isn’t it?” My voice is high-pitched with hysteria.
This is the dire circumstance Lamin warned about, the reason Mother is bound to two gods. She’s already dead. All this time searching for her, and she’s already dead.
My ears are ringing now, my body slick with sweat. I can’t breathe, can’t think.
Mother takes my hand, squeezes it gently. One squeeze, then two, then patterns of two and three, just like when I was a child and needed comforting. “I almost reached Fatu,” she begins quietly, her eyes sad.
“White Hands,” I automatically correct. “She prefers to be called White Hands now.”
“White Hands.” Mother accepts my correction. “I nearly reached her. Myter had come to me a few days after your fifteenth birthday, you see. They and Bala”—distantly, I note that she has called Myter they instead of she, marking them as yandau rather than female, as I have been assuming—“are among the few who can interact with others outside Maiwuri. The few who are allowed to.”
Like Lamin, I acknowledge silently, waving for her to continue.
“They told me the truth of what you were: not alaki, not Nuru, but Angoro—god killer. I knew I couldn’t do anything to help you by myself, so I tried—oh, how I tried—to get to Fatu. White Hands. But I was discovered at the gates of Hemaira. Can you imagine—me, a Shadow, recognized? One of my old sisters remembered my voice. Remembered I had run away from the Warthu Bera years earlier. That was that.” Mother shrugs eloquently.
“Once the high priests discovered I was your mother, they took me to the place where they had hidden your kelai, chained me near it so they could see if and how it reacted to me.”
“That’s where I found her.” Myter’s voice rings across the temple as they float down to stand beside Mother.
They do it so swiftly, I barely have time to swallow the fact that my kelai is in the hands of the Idugu’s priests, and, by extension, the Idugu themselves. No wonder the Gilded Ones had to enact such stealthy methods to consume the bits of it they could.
“But I couldn’t free her,” Myter continues. “She was bound by celestial gold, which I couldn’t break, and because she was in the capital at the time, Bala couldn’t emerge so close to where the Idugu rested and risk corruption.”
I hear none of Myter’s explanations. The only thing I hear is “So she was alive when you found her.”
I level my gaze at Myter, who, to their credit, does not falter. Instead, they raise their chin.
“Yes,” they answer.
“But after you left with her, she became like this.”
“Yes.” Myter has the good sense to be concerned now. They take a cautious step back.
“What did you do?” I ask, rage simmering inside me. I feel it rising, an audible crackle over my skin. “Tell me exactly what you did to Mother.”
