Page 43 of Children of Blood and Bone

“We don’t know anything!” a young girl cries out. Everyone on the beach freezes.

The girl’s hands are trembling. She shoves them into the sand.

“We can tell you about her brother and father. We can tell you of her skill with a staff. But not a soul in Ilorin knows where she’s gone or why.”

I give Kaea a stern look; she drops the woman like a rag doll. I trudge through the wet sand until I reach the girl.

Her shaking intensifies as I approach, but I can’t tell if it’s her fearor the cold of the night tides licking her knees. All she wears is a soaked nightgown, ripped and frayed around her being.

“What’s your name?”

Standing this close to her, I see how her oak-brown skin stands out against the darker chestnut and mahogany hues of the villagers. Perhaps there’s some nobility in her blood. A father who played in the mud.

When she doesn’t answer, I bend down, keeping my voice low. “The faster you answer, the faster we leave.”

“Yemi,” she chokes out. Her hands grip the sand as she speaks. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know, but only if you leave us alone.”

I nod. A simple concession. Duty or not, I don’t want to see more bodies.

I can’t bear to hear more screams.

I reach down and untie the rope binding her wrists. She flinches at my touch. “Give us the information we need and I promise your people will be safe.”

“Safe?”

Yemi meets my eyes with a hatred that impales me like a sword. Though her mouth never opens, her voice rings in my skull.

“Safe ended a long time ago.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

ZÉLIE

MY EYES ACHEfrom hours of silent tears by the time we halt Nailah to rest. It takes all of five seconds for her and Tzain to pass out on the moss-covered ground, escaping our fractured reality for the safety of sleep.

Amari inspects the ground, shivering in the forest cold. She eventually lays her cloak down and sleeps on top of it, too regal to grace the earth with her bare head. I stare at her, remembering how close I dragged her to the flames.

The memory feels distant now, like someone else held all that hate.

Now only cool anger simmers, anger I shouldn’t bother feeling. I’d bet five hundred silver pieces she won’t last another day.

I wrap myself in my cloak and nestle into Nailah, relishing the sensation of the soft fur against my skin. Through the shadowed leaves, the star-filled sky reignites the magic of Mama Agba’s vision in my mind.

“It’s back,” I whisper to myself. With the insanity of the day, that fact is still hardest to believe. We can reclaim our magic.

We can thrive again.

“Oya…”

I whisper the name of the Goddess of Life and Death, my sister deity who has granted me magic’s gift. As a child, I called to her so oftenyou’d think she slept in my cot, but now that I search for the words of a prayer, I don’t know what to say.

“Bámi s0r0,” I attempt, but it lacks all the conviction and power Mama Agba’s chant had. She believed in her connection to Orúnmila so much she could conjure a premonition. Right now, I just want to believe that someone is up there.

“Ràn mí l3w3,” I pray instead.Help me.Those words feel so much realer, so much more like my own. “Mama Agba says you’ve chosen me. Baba agrees, but I… I’m scared. This is too important. I don’t want to screw it up.”

Saying it out loud makes the fear tangible, a new weight hanging in the air. I couldn’t even protect Baba. How am I supposed to save the maji?

But as the fear breathes, I get the smallest sense of comfort. The idea that Oya could be here, right by my side. Gods only know there’s no way I can get through this without her.

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