Redemptor: Part III

Foreboding seeped into my stomach.

“I wouldn’t have died,” she said calmly, sticking her finger in the wooden carafe of punch and licking it before I could stop her.

As I stared at her, I realized for the first time how similar her disposition was to Dayo’s.

It was hard to tell at first, with his bright-eyed optimism and her sharp political savvy, but whenever Dayo or Ai Ling determined a path to be right, however treacherous, they pursued it with unshakeable tenacity.

Ai Ling’s heart-shaped face blanched.

A piece of braised goat froze on its way to my mouth.

One wrong stroke, one inauspicious word, and I could curse Min Ja with bad luck for the rest of the year.

My energy in each line is as important as the brushstrokes. I paint respect into the dots, lust into the slants, and pure, arduous devotion into the curling flourishes.

So I stopped being a docile sister, and transformed into a future queen.

I had thought, just for a moment, that it was possible to tell the truth. That Min Ja might understand. But now, as my mind raced through its sordid collection of my weakest moments...I knew I was asking the impossible.

Eventually, my shoulders relaxed too, but as my vision slipped into a dream, my will remained lucid.

Nights later, I dreamed Sanjeet.
Not of him, but him directly, appearing in the nebulous ether of our sleeping minds, united across miles through the Ray.

Perhaps, I thought worriedly, he was as fickle as he was empty-headed, and had changed his mind about getting anointed.

He watched me for a moment with that inscrutable, thick-lashed gaze, making my cheeks grow warm in the interim.

“You’ve been empress for two months. Three, if we’re counting since Olugbade’s death. And you’ve yet to truly accomplish anything. You have more potential than all the monarchs put together. So why do you squander it?"

His earnest expression dissipated, replaced by the vapid mask he usually wore.

Adukeh sashayed toward the sleeping dais, where Dayo and I sat cross-legged, awaiting this month’s Rising.

Greed had caused that accident in the mines—and apathy, shown by bystanders like Sanjeet and my council siblings, too jaded to imagine a better tomorrow.

I flashed a terse smile.

The ojiji appeared to me often, as ghosts, but had only assumed corporeal form twice—during the Emperor’s Walk and at Thaddace’s murder.

For the past hour, her fingers had danced across my scalp, sectioning the hair in neat rows and saturating each tuft with soothing aloe water. Now she applied a fragrant pomade, twisting strands together with blurring speed.

Stop looking at me like that.
But she didn’t, continuing to smile at me beatifically as she took her leave, backing out of the room.

All hail Tarisai the Reaper: arbiter of death upon haughty nobles.

“I forgot about that part. I’m sorry, Lady Empress.”
“It’s all right.” I sighed, melting at his dejected expression and ruffling his hair.

They sat a short distance away, sipping tea on a blanket, and occasionally casting dour looks at me and Ji Huan.

“Thank you,” I told him, swallowing my irritation at being patronized.

“Ninth treatise, fifth verse. Mehedi’s writings on humility are truly illuminating, and were my greatest comfort as a budding young ruler. I should have recommended them to you ages ago,” he murmured, whirling around his study and selecting a pile of tomes.

I’ve included Ahwadi the Dune Dweller’s verses on filial piety—due to the complex relationship you had with your mother—and the poetry of Yakov the Wanderer, though I admit his work is elementary.

He seemed to crave a project: a willing vessel for his years of pedantic study.

But at the end of one lesson, when I Ray-spoke as an experiment, Pride is a stumbling block to the young ruler...and Uriyah absentmindedly Ray-spoke back, Rinel the Goatminder, treatise five, verse twenty—I was pleased to hear his voice in my head.

After seeing my fraught memories of The Lady, even Beatrix of Nontes developed a perverse maternal affection for me, allowing for an anointing.

I drifted through each day, a raft on a vast, numb ocean. Only those children’s voices—a constant, bracing wind—egged me on.

“You think I'm frivolous,” the old man accused. “A fop.”

I stood with the portly king of Nyamba in a bustling tailor’s stall, where I perched like a peacock on a rotating pedestal.

They would not let me rest—would never let me be complacent.

They wanted revenge: recompense for the lives already lost—the blood already shed.

“It’s only a headache,” I told Kwasi, smiling wanly.

I liked Kwasi, and wanted to make him happy—so I perused the bolts of fabric, pretending to consider each one.

I pulled it out, revealing a strange ream of black, white, and metallic gold, tiny hand-etched glyphs blocked together in stark patterns.

A song from a harrowing, moonlit night stole into my memory:
Why, you ask? Why?
The Pelican has spoken.