The air thickened with whispers. The girl swallowed hard, but folded the gele over her shoulder and removed a curved beating stick from her wrapper folds. She clicked with her tongue and yelled the invocation of storytellers: I have three b-bells in my mouth, I do not t-tell a lie! Then she cradled the gourd in her arm, and struck.

The girl’s music filled the bedchamber, reverberating from the lofty ceiling. Her stutter weakened as her song progressed, until it fell away all together. Hours could have passed, and I would not have felt them.

Adukeh sang first of my anointing: the day of the Children’s Palace fire. She trilled to portray the screams of terrified candidates, and thrummed her fingers on the gourd, imitating the crackle of flames as I pulled Dayo to safety.

She pounded the drum on both sides, painting the din and chaos of the crowd as I revoked Thaddace’s Unity Edict in every language.

She rocked, groaned, and chanted, reenacting my ride from Sagimsan, my body broken and stained with blood, the crack of the Imperial Hall doors bursting open as I ordered the Treaty to stop. Then at last, she finished—beating stick falling to her side, hips swaying to a stop.

No one was laughing now.

The courtiers stood agape, as though in a trance, and Adukeh knelt on the carpet, offering up her drum to me with both shaking hands. She said again, “I do not t-tell a lie.”

My first impulse was to kneel with her. I wanted to clutch this girl to my chest, to steal every day of terror and abuse she’d ever had, hurling the memories into oblivion. The years in that mine had . . . done something to her—something unspeakable, and I would have known it even without the bruised marks on her forehead.

Adukeh sang with a skill too familiar with grief. For this child, evil was not the monster of a cookfire tale, but an intimate, constant friend.

But I did not hold her. Instead I kept my face solemn, and wordlessly unclasped a gleaming coral necklace from my throat. “Rise, Adukeh,” I said, placing the necklace over her head, “akorin to the Empress Redemptor.”

The girl froze, eyes wide as moons . . . and then she flashed a grin so radiant, it could have rivaled the power of my obabirin mask. A rush as heady as honeywine filled my head, nearly toppling me with relief.

I had helped someone as empress. I had fixed something—changed a life for the better. Self-doubt had itched on my shoulders, a mantle so constant, I hadn’t noticed until it lifted. I savored the brief euphoria, immediately craving more. If I helped more people, fixed more problems, maybe the ojiji would be appeased. That’s what they wanted, wasn’t it? And what else was an empress for?

“Take the imperial griot to be fitted for her wardrobe,” I said, smirking at Adebimpe. “She’ll be staying here, in the Imperial Suite. Oh, and”—I glanced down at Adukeh and winked—“make sure she gets a proper case for that drum.”