Chapters (102)
Awa’s stomach howled at Green Elder jumba jabba.
“Every choice you make could be wrong,” he continued. “Forgiveness replenishes your heart spirit.” He reminded her of Yari, playing conflicting truths against each other.
“I’m too faint to think.” Her belly was touching her backbone. There were no scraps from Tembe’s cook pots until the end of a festival day. Perhaps she could scrounge something to eat in the grove above.
No one owns the trees
The poison master sang Yari’s favorite song as the mare high-stepped through strangle vines creeping across the Empire Road.
They belong to themselves
Or maybe to the bees
No one owns the dew
Another’s heartbeat
The rays of a setting sun
Drifting through the leaves
“People belong to themselves too.” Awa shivered in the cold drizzle. “Does that stop thief-lords from selling anyone? Nonsense we sing for stupid children.”
“My children are dust, scattered on the wind.” He drew Awa into his warmth and pulled his cloak around her shoulders too. “So I sing for my haint children, growing old in the shadows.”
No one owns our hearts
We can give love away
Or share it in our arts
No one owns my soul
Your tears of joy
The rays of a rising sun
As the new day starts
No one owns the trees
We belong to ourselves
Or maybe to the bees
Another miracle. Awa felt sorry for a monster, for treading on his wounds. She ached with the pain of ghost children loved and lost. “You must tell me how you called a miracle to save us,” she said. “And how we have traveled so far. It’s a thirty-day ride from Holy City to the foothills of the Eidhou mountain range, even on a warhorse.”
“Forty-day ride, and if I must tell you,” he said, “I’ll tell, when you’re stronger.”
Awa sat up on her own. “I’m strong enough for any story.”
“You need much heart spirit for the Iyalawo language of miracles.”
Awa felt dizzy again, remembering the opposite shore shimmering like a mirage. The poison master must have folded the distance from the Narrows Bridge to the Foothills Bridge. “You conjured a wise-woman passageway.” Awa had never believed the tales of conjure women folding space and bending time and light to hide their comings and goings. But there was no other explanation. “I would love to see such a wonder. Why would Tembe share Iyalawo secrets with you?”
“Not Tembe. Another.”
“Who?”
Someone battered at the seals around his heart. Awa felt this and flinched. He exhaled a cold breath and mumbled in a dead language as Fannie trotted uphill past tree stumps and rotting roots.