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Alaki in general are a brutal race, and the Firstborn are even more so. Worse, White Hands, Melanis, and Sayuri are the three remaining war queens, the first daughters born to the Gilded Ones. Given how long most of them have lived, things like life and death are trivial matters to them.
“Indeed.” White Hands, who has made her way up the path, Braima and Masaima at her side, answers. She nods to Sayuri in a companionable greeting as she expands: “Gutted me like a fish the first death, then broke my back the second—a most painful death, I assure you. We made peace after the third—a strangling, I believe it was.”
Sayuri barely blinks at this mention of her savagery. “I decided she’d paid enough for her crimes to warrant a truce. For now.”
“For now?” I gape. You’d think three almost-deaths would be enough punishment.
“Fifty years,” says Sayuri. “That’s how long I was caged in the Warthu Bera.”
“A death for every year, quite a fair price for my betrayal.” White Hands nods sagely. “If we win this war—”
“When we win this war,” I manage to correct through my astonishment.
White Hands inclines her head. “When we win this war, Sayuri will take what is her due. Meaning, the other forty-seven deaths,” she explains, when it’s apparent I don’t understand what she’s saying.
I glance between the pair. “You two are the strangest sisters I’ve ever met.”
White Hands humphs. “Have you met Melanis?”
“Recently, as it happens,” I retort. “She was strange too.”
“All Firstborn are like this. Half of us are always wanting to kill the other half,” Sayuri says with a wise nod. She taps her lower lip. “Family: it is a complicated matter, is it not?”
Suddenly, my head is hurting.
“Don’t worry, Quiet One,” Masaima whispers in my ear as his brother nods, “this is how it always is when they’re together.”
I return my attention to White Hands. “So what now? What’s our next move?”
It’s not the Bloom, that much is certain. White Hands would have told me immediately if the spies there had noticed anything.
My old mentor smiles thinly. “Now we plan. The aviax, human, and equus generals, Sayuri, Thandiwe, and I will combine battle strategies so we can disseminate them across Otera. Even if you were to take your kelai back today, we’d still have to deal with all the priests and followers and such for both pantheons.”
“ ‘Today?’ ” I frown at this strange bit of phrasing. Usually, White Hands would say “in the next day or two,” or something to that effect.
My old mentor continues as if she didn’t hear me. “Peace won’t come just because you end the gods. And we have to prepare for what happens if you fail. Besides, you have something else to do or, rather, somewhere else to go.”
My eyes widen, nervousness rushing through me. “My kelai? Your spies have already located it?”
“Sayuri’s spies have,” White Hands corrects dourly, which of course explains why she didn’t give me the news immediately. She does have her petty moments. “Turns out, they’re even faster than mine, unbelievable as it may seem.” As Sayuri sniffs, offended by this assessment, White Hands nods down to me. “Gather the others. You have to get moving now. I’ll brief you before you leave.”
I nod, a thousand emotions churning inside me as I turn away. Fear, doubt—hope. What if my kelai isn’t where the spies say it is? Worse, what if it is? That would mean today could be the day I leave my friends, my family.
Today could be the day everything changes. No wonder White Hands used that specific word.
But again, what if it isn’t? What if this is some sort of trap? My worries are circling now—round and round they go.
“Deka, enough.” When I turn, White Hands has walked up to me, her head shaking in disapproval. “I can hear your thoughts scurrying.”
“I just…,” I begin. “I know I must do my duty, but…”
White Hands nods. “Peace is never easy, Deka. Especially not for the ones who broker it.”
I nod. Then I still, gathering my courage. “White Hands…,” I begin slowly, finally saying the words I’ve been holding back all this while. The words I didn’t want to say until this very moment, when I have to. “The goddesses have imprisoned Anok. Trapped her in the mountain under Abeya. Okot feared they would consume her, which is why he tried to make a deal with me.”
When I glance up at her, her gaze is as stoic as ever. I frown. “You knew.”
She nods. “Even when she was imprisoned all those centuries, Mother spoke to me. She whispered in my dreams, in the wind…. But now she is silent.”
