Yet I could not help but notice how women and men mostly moved in separate groups. Here women never walked anywhere alone, even though in Expedition women had felt free to come and go as they wished. Nor did people laugh and talk with the same friendly clamor with which folk had in Expedition. Voices stayed hushed and dampened. Maybe that was the prince’s newly harsh reign, but perhaps it had always been this way and we had just never noticed.

It was strange to think we were only passing through the city where we had grown up, on our way to somewhere else.

“Amadou Barry saw you on the street, and the djeli saw me at the law offices,” I said. “Nothing to be done about that now. Since the academy is on the way home, we may as well go there first and hope we find the headmaster before anyone comes looking for us.”

15

After a long walk we made our way up Academy Hill past the temple dedicated to the Blessed Tanit. Her gates always stood open. Bee and Rory ducked into the temple to stay out of sight while I wrapped the shadows around me and crept into the academy compound past the servant standing at the gate.

The entry hall lay empty, not a single pupil scurrying late to class under the frieze with its princely white yam, winter wheat, towering maize, and other carvings of plants. Another arch led me into the glass-roofed central courtyard. No one was about. Rain pattered an erratic drumbeat on the glass roof. Although it was early spring, a scent like summer kissed my lips, the smell of the spirit world sensed through the water in the ancient sacrificial well at the center of a paved labyrinth. The blood of sacrifices offered generations ago stung at my nostrils. A year and almost three months ago, Bee and I had fallen through the well into the spirit world. I paused now in the quiet courtyard, looking toward the well, which was covered by an iron grate. My blood would open a path from here into the spirit world, but how would I find Vai in all that vast and changing landscape?

Bee was right: The headmaster knew more than he had ever let on. We had to talk to him.