Her Own Heart

Senamé reached the middle of the courtyard with one sandal missing.

She had no idea where she had lost it. The thought offended her absurdly: she was about to die, and someone would have to explain why she had done it improperly dressed. Then the queen’s light struck her, the sword’s cutting pressure reached her from the other side, and there was no room left for anything except pain.

Through the glare, Tassi’s mouth opened. Kpénahi twisted the hilt between both hands. They had seen her too late.

Senamé knew exactly what was coming. She understood the returns of the mirror, the terrible edge with which the sword parted one thing from another. She had already looked for a way to turn either working aside. There wasn’t one she could survive.

She went on reaching for them.

The grey bead burned against her chest. For an instant its surface became transparent, and the two advancing forces bent towards it with such violence that she rose off the ground. Her arms were dragged wide. Scales locked together along her wrists; the stiffness climbed towards her elbows, trapping her inside a body that was trying to close against everything she had chosen to let in.

Someone called her name. She wanted to shout back that she was still here. That these two grown women could stop behaving like absolute fools now, please, before she had to die about it.

Her heart missed a beat.

Beneath it, something answered.

She knew that slower pulse. She had felt its first uncertain movement against Sètondji’s chest when she kissed him, before the promises, before the dreadful morning when his mouth had taken him away from her. Now it pressed against her breastbone with a roughness that made her gasp. Something was forming where nothing had ever been smooth enough, finished enough, good enough to show the women of Azara.

It hurt. She had expected, at the very least, that getting a pearl would feel like being congratulated.

The next pulse forced warmth between the scales. Her fingers loosened. The light pouring into the orbe reached the new opening beneath her heart, and Senamé felt the courtyard through it: Kpénahi’s planted feet, Tassi’s breath caught behind her teeth, the trembling surface of Kpo’s protection. All of them terribly close. All of them alive.

She could close now. She could push it away.

Instead she opened her hands.

The force entered her.

Pink broke through the white glare. It ran up her arms, filled her open mouth and lifted her hair from her neck. Above Allada, a column of rose light climbed beyond the protection, bright enough to leave its shape behind the eyes of everyone who looked up. Roof tiles rattled. Pigeons burst from the audience pavilion. Under the falling dust, the queen’s mirror went dark.

Senamé dropped.

Kpénahi caught her before she struck the paving. Her forearm pressed against the wound she had made earlier, and Senamé screamed into her shoulder.

For a moment Kpénahi held her tighter, as though holding were something she could still do correctly.

“Put me down.”

The warrior sank to her knees.

“Senamé, let me—”

“You’re hurting me.”

That reached her. She lowered Senamé onto the hot stone and withdrew her hands.

Across the courtyard, Tassi stood with the mirror hanging at her side. The royal pearls had settled against her skin. Both women had stopped fighting, but Senamé’s body had not received the news. Every movement near her arrived too sharply: a guard stepping over fallen timber, cloth brushing a wall, the wet catch in Afiwa’s breathing. Pink current snapped between her fingers and the paving.

Kpo opened a way through the barrier.

Afiwa came first, almost falling beside her. She pulled a strip of cloth from her belt and could not make her shaking hands fold it.

“Here.” Senamé touched the uninjured side of her arm. “Hold it here. You know how.”

Afiwa nodded too many times, then pressed the cloth into place.

Tassi took a step towards them. Senamé flinched so violently that the current cracked against the queen’s bare ankle.

Tassi stopped.

“I won’t come closer.”

Senamé wanted to tell her that she hadn’t meant to do it. She wanted to ask why she had needed to. Her throat would produce neither question.

A curl drifted across her face. She caught it with her good hand and stared. The tight coil had opened a little, still springing back when she stretched it, but longer now, fuller. Rose deepened into violet along its length, then warmed through copper and gold. Beside it, blue shone from the shadow of another curl. The colours continued even where her hand blocked the sun.

Her hand was different too.

The skin had darkened, rich and lustrous beneath the dust. When she turned her wrist, an iridescent gleam moved under it. Fine scales crowded the back of her hand and disappeared beneath the torn sleeve.

“Kékéli.”

He squeezed past Afiwa, still wearing his child’s body. At the sight of her face, his lips parted.

“What?” She caught his wrist before he could look away. “What else?”

Tassi brought the mirror herself and knelt beyond arm’s reach. She turned its face towards Senamé without speaking.

For a moment Senamé did not recognize the woman inside it.

Her hair floated around her in a great, restless cloud, the familiar abundance of it opening into broader curls. Pink ran through the mass like heat through embers, catching gold at the edges. Small scales traced her cheekbones and climbed around her eyes to her temples. The eyes themselves were white with light.

She blinked. The woman blinked.

“Make it stop.”

No one moved quickly enough.

“My eyes. I can’t—”

Her breath shortened. A branching current leapt from her shoulder, and the nearest guard stumbled back. She saw him do it. She saw the clerk behind him press himself against the wall. Kpénahi was staring at her with an expression worse than anger, because Senamé had no idea how to fight it.

She pulled her torn collar higher. There was nothing there she could cover that would make them look at her normally.

The mirror changed.

Beneath the reflection of her clothes, behind the breastbone, a pearl pulsed. Its uneven surface held hollows and ridges, rough nacre gathered around a living warmth. With each beat, rose light entered the surrounding body and returned.

Senamé pressed her palm to her chest. The grey bead lay outside it, small and dull on its cord.

“That one is yours,” Kpo told her.

The legendary animal had resumed her human shape. Silver threaded her black gele; ash marked the hem of her wrapper. She crouched with a care that made Senamé feel younger than she could bear.

“Then what have I been wearing?”

“The orbe. The third talisman.”

Senamé looked at Tassi.

The queen did not lower her eyes.

“I suspected. I could not be certain.”

“You were certain enough to want me nearby.”

Tassi’s mouth tightened. “Yes.”

The answer left Senamé colder than an excuse would have done.

Kpo touched the mirror’s rim. “These three were made to work together. The sword cannot destroy the orbe. Nor can the mirror. When their forces reached the third, they were received instead.”

“By me.” Senamé’s voice was barely there.

“Through what you opened.”

She stared down at her hands. She remembered the two attacks coming for her, the certainty of what they would do. Nobody had told her there was a rule that might save her. There had only been the choice, and then the unbearable need to keep choosing it.

“The talisman did not make your pearl,” Kpo continued. “That had already begun.”

Across the courtyard, Kossiwa pressed both hands against her own chest. Air entered her in short, soundless pulls. She kept trying to draw a full breath and failing. Senamé turned towards her, hoping absurdly for one familiar expression, even irritation.

Kossiwa looked at the shining place beneath Senamé’s hand.

Then she turned away.

“What is happening to me?”

Kpo watched a pink thread pass from Senamé’s thumb to the stone and vanish into it.

“The power that makes a road between things. Between rain and river. Between the earth and what grows from it. You have heard his name all your life.”

Senamé remembered the first time the Panther had smelled her. That old serpent.

“Aido-Hwedo.”

Kpo inclined her head.

The name belonged to the coloured span after rain, to stories of a world held together by something too vast to see whole. It did not belong beside the word father. A father should have been someone whose face she could imagine being angry with.

“Because of the necklace?”

“Because you are his daughter.”

The current around Senamé flared. Afiwa’s fingers slipped against the bandage, and Senamé caught the sound she made before she could swallow it.

Fear.

Even Afiwa.

Senamé drew her knees towards her, trying to make less of herself. She had wanted an explanation. She had not wanted to become something her oldest friend needed courage to touch.

“Before anyone bows,” she whispered, “I want to know how long you’ve known.”

“I recognized his presence,” Kpo answered. “I did not know what form it would take in you.”

“And nobody thought I might like to know?”

Tassi reached forward, remembered her promise and stopped. Senamé watched the hand remain suspended between them.

Sètondji stepped past it.

“Senamé.”

He knelt where she could see him. His collar had torn during the fighting. Beneath his left collarbone, dark strokes contracted against the beat of his heart.

She had seen the beginning of that mark before. Now she could hear it: a returning instruction, tightening every time he tried to move beyond it.

“Your chest.”

“I know.” His voice broke on the second word. “I have been trying to tell you.”

The line climbed towards his throat.

Senamé listened through the noise inside her. The working was keeping an agreement intact, feeding his resistance back into the words that had bound him. It caught on his breath whenever he prepared to apologize, to soften what he meant, to make refusal hurt nobody.

“Don’t explain it,” she managed. “You keep asking it to let you explain.”

His gaze stayed on hers.

“Say what you want.”

Behind him, a clerk had begun recording the queen’s orders. Sètondji turned just enough to make sure the man could hear.

“I will not marry Dèdoun.”

The mark pulled tight. He bent over his own fist, breath caught, the muscles in his neck standing out. Senamé reached towards him and stopped. She could feel where to force an opening. She could also feel how easily, in this state, she might tear through more than the charm.

He looked up before she could decide.

“Whatever has been promised in my name, I refuse it.”

Blood welled beneath one of the dark strokes. The closed line broke, recoiled and lay still.

Sètondji dragged air into his lungs. He was shaking. The clerk had stopped writing, and Tassi ordered him, quietly, to continue.

“Senamé.” He waited until she met his eyes again. “I love you. I should have told you when saying it would only have cost me an uncomfortable conversation.”

She had imagined those words so often that she ought to have known what to do with them. She ought to have laughed, seized his beautiful face, said something outrageous enough to make him blush.

Instead she began to cry.

“I don’t know what I look like.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes.” He held out his hand, leaving the last small distance to her. “And I am still here.”

She took it.

The rough pearl beat harder, then settled into a slower rhythm. The current against his fingers softened. For the first time since she had entered the light, Senamé drew a breath that reached the bottom of her lungs. Colour returned to the centre of her eyes. Her hair lowered around her shoulders, still bright, still changed.

She was glad. Somewhere beneath the exhaustion and the hurt, she was glad enough to ache.

It did not make the courtyard bearable.

Kpo rose and approached Kpénahi. The warrior glanced once at Senamé, then let the legendary animal take the wrapped sword from her hands.

Tassi called the captain.

“Kpénahi remains under guard. No one strikes her. No one questions her until I give leave.”

Senamé pulled away from Sètondji.

“And Azara?”

“Her act will be answered for by her. I will not send soldiers after the children of your refuge.”

“Put that in the record too.”

Tassi looked at the clerk. His reed resumed moving.

Kpénahi stood. Without the sword, without the forward drive of her anger, she looked suddenly exhausted. Senamé wanted her to say something that would return the last hour to a place where it could be undone.

“I should never have called you that.”

Senamé swallowed.

“No. You shouldn’t.”

When the guards led her towards the pavilion, she went without resistance.

Afiwa secured the bandage and tucked its end under with her teeth. Her hands were steadier now.

“I’m going to Azara. Loló needs to hear this from someone who was here.”

“Tell her I need answers.” Senamé looked down at the grey bead. “Proper ones.”

She untied the necklace. The absence of its weight should have frightened her. Instead she heard her own pearl beating beneath the skin, continuous and unmistakable.

Tassi watched her place the orbe in the open mirror case.

“Keep it safe until I ask for it. It is not a gift.”

“I understand.”

Senamé stood with Sètondji’s help. Her injured arm throbbed. One foot was bare. There was a dead man under a cloth a few paces away, and she could not remain here while everybody decided what she had become.

“I need to leave.”

Sètondji’s hand tightened for an instant, then opened.

She stepped away. Air gathered beneath her feet with no borrowed pattern for her to follow. Her pearl answered the space above the walls, and the ground fell gently out of reach.

Afiwa looked up, tears drying on her face.

“We belong to the earth,” she murmured. “Women born in Azara don’t fly.”

Senamé heard her. She had spent her life being the exception no one wanted to explain.

Kékéli rose after her without changing shape, his little feet leaving the paving. He caught her good hand above the roofline. Together they passed beyond Kpo’s opening in the barrier, and the pink light faded into the afternoon.

Below, everyone followed them with their eyes.

Kossiwa did not.

She approached the case, ostensibly to fold back the cloth that had caught beneath its lid. Her hand passed over the orbe. The cord disappeared into the crease of her wrapper, and she closed the case with its empty inner fold still shaped around what it should have held.

When she straightened, her breathing had steadied.

Sètondji remained beneath the place where Senamé had vanished. Behind him, Tassi spoke to Kpo, her voice low enough that he almost missed it.

“She is wielding Creation magic. We may have a greater problem on our hands.”

He turned.

“Tassi. She is not a problem.”

The queen looked at him. He had contradicted her before; he had always taken care to leave her a graceful way around it.

This time he let the words stand.

“She is a daughter of this kingdom. She needs to be cared for and loved now more than ever.” His chest hurt with every breath. “Whatever you intend to ask of her, let that come first.”

Tassi said nothing.

He bent to retrieve Senamé’s lost sandal from beneath a fallen shutter. One strap had burned through. He brushed the dust from it and carried it inside.

By nightfall Senamé had learned that possessing her own magic did not mean knowing how to land.

She came down in a field beyond a village, stumbled through a row of beans and stopped against a tree with enough force to shake fruit into the grass. Kékéli landed beside her with insulting precision. Her arm had begun bleeding through the bandage again.

For a while she stood with her forehead against the bark. The day had left her somewhere behind herself. She could remember Sètondji saying he loved her, but every attempt to stay with that memory brought her back to the sound Dossou made when the blade reached him.

Kékéli put a hand against her back.

“You can sit down.”

“I know.”

“You keep not doing it.”

She slid down the trunk. Beyond the field, women were calling children home. Someone argued over a borrowed cooking pot. The ordinary irritation of their voices undid her more completely than the silence in Allada had done.

She began crying, one hand over her mouth, and became furious when she could not stop.

Kékéli settled beside her. He did not repeat anything.

They slept under the tree until a woman came to inspect her damaged beans. Senamé offered a gold hair ornament in payment. The woman weighed it in her palm, looked at the blood stiffening Senamé’s sleeve and tucked the ornament away.

“Can you walk?”

Her dye yard lay behind the house. Lengths of blue cloth hung between poles, their lower edges stirring against one another. The vats gave off a sour, leafy warmth. Under an awning, three women worked with hands stained dark around the nails. One stopped wringing a length of cloth when Senamé entered. Her gaze lingered on the coloured curls, then dropped to the bandage.

“Bring the clean water.”

Nobody asked Senamé to explain herself before giving her somewhere to sit.

The woman cut away the old dressing while her companions discussed a delivery that had failed to arrive. The northern carriers wanted payment in advance now. A merchant who had accepted promises for years had sent his runner back with an empty cart.

Senamé listened, holding her arm over the wash water. She could still hear Tassi asking who would feed the kingdom. Here, the answer involved a woman counting coins into the fold of her wrapper and deciding which purchase could wait.

Kékéli was given food and immediately became agreeable.

When the fresh bandage was tied, Senamé noticed one of the drying poles leaning under its load. She went to steady it. A pink current snapped between her fingers and the wet wood.

Every woman in the yard looked up.

Senamé withdrew her hand.

“I can usually be more helpful than this.”

“Then help me fold.”

The dyer placed the dry end of a cloth in her good hand and took the other herself. They brought the edges together. Blue filled Senamé’s vision, smelling of sun and the work of unfamiliar hands.

For a little while, nobody needed anything else from her.

Before she left, the woman wrapped food for them both. She watched Senamé rise uncertainly above the yard, then pointed beyond the roofs.

“The path goes there too. And it won’t drop you in my beans.”

Senamé’s laugh startled her. She was still smiling when the drying cloths disappeared beneath the trees.

It took another day, with rests she resented and needed, to reach the forest beneath Azara. Afiwa had arrived before her. Two women waited at the lower boundary; neither made the old joke about the state of her patrol clothes.

One looked at her hair, then at the scales near her temples.

“Nan Loló has prepared a room.”

“I already have a room.”

“For your examination.”

Senamé's good hand closed over the lambi at her throat.

“Then she can examine her patience. I’m going to wash.”

She walked between them before either could decide whether the new version of her could still be ordered to stop.

Loló came to her own room that evening carrying ointment, clean bandages and no reading stones. Senamé allowed her to treat the arm. For several minutes they listened to water dripping from Senamé’s freshly washed hair onto the floor.

“Afiwa told you?”

“Enough.”

“Then tell me something I don’t know.”

Loló’s fingers paused against the bandage.

“Your mother never believed a refuge should require people to disappear from the world.”

Senamé watched her tie the knot.

“That isn’t what you taught us.”

“No,” Loló said.

“Did you know who my father was?”

“I knew who she said he was.”

It was the careful distinction of someone who had lived for years inside it. Senamé pulled her arm away as soon as the knot was finished.

“And when I failed the readings?”

Loló set the ointment down.

“I believed you needed a way to live among us before anyone gave you a reason to think yourself outside our laws.”

“So you gave me a reason to think I was broken.”

The older woman looked at her then, without the small smile that usually made correction easier to swallow.

“Yes.”

Senamé had prepared herself for denial. The admission offered nothing she could push against, and for a moment she hated Loló for that too.

Outside, a baby began crying. A woman answered from somewhere down the path, promising she was coming. Loló turned towards the sound with an old, involuntary movement.

Senamé remembered Kossiwa tightening her wrapper in Allada.

“Tassi asked what happened to the women who couldn’t reach us.”

“Many things.”

“Has one ever reached the boundary and still not been let in?”

Loló folded the unused bandage. Her hands had become very precise.

Senamé leaned forward.

“Who?”

“A woman carrying a child. We found signs of pursuit on the lower road. Opening the passage without knowing who followed could have exposed everyone inside.”

“How long did you wait?”

Loló did not answer immediately.

“How long?”

“Until the scouts returned.”

Senamé looked at the narrow fold of cloth between her hands.

“Was she still alive?”

“No.”

The crying outside stopped. In the sudden quiet, Senamé felt the rough pearl press against her breastbone.

“The child was,” Loló continued. “Inside a closed working. Nothing entered it. Rain ran around it. The insects could not reach her. She had made it herself.”

“Kossiwa.”

Loló closed her eyes.

Senamé thought of the black pearl, flawless enough to reflect everyone looking at it. Of Kossiwa’s contempt whenever somebody wanted too much, moved too freely, trusted a door that had not been checked twice.

“Does she know?”

“She knows she was brought here,” Loló replied.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“No.”

Senamé rose too quickly. Her injured arm pulled, but she barely felt it.

“You let her spend her whole life trying to become someone you would have opened the door for.”

Loló flinched.

Senamé had never seen her do that. The sight did not satisfy her.

“I raised her,” Loló answered. “I loved her.”

“Then she should hear this from you.”

“She should.”

Loló reached for the bowl, but Senamé took it first. She needed something to do with her hands that would not become an accusation.

“Tomorrow I’m going to the Python. When I come back, I want the account of my mother. The whole account. With your part in it.”

Loló stood.

“I will have it ready.”

At the door, she turned towards Senamé’s changed face and almost said something else. Senamé waited until she decided against it.

The next morning, the Python received her without calling her princess.

She appreciated the restraint enough to leave his fruit untouched.

“You could have told me.”

“Yes.”

“I’m beginning to dislike that answer.”

His enormous head rested at the edge of the terrace. Behind him, water climbed through the chamber, carrying the river he had brought from Kush.

Senamé lowered herself onto the warm stone. Her body felt heavy here, welcome in a way she had not expected. She told him what had happened in Allada. He listened without interrupting, even when she reached the part where she had stepped between the attacks.

“Your mother had a similar objection,” he observed when she finished.

“To being burned alive?”

“To choosing which people were to be abandoned.”

She looked at him.

This time he did not make her work for the next sentence.

“After the first women entered Azara, others remained beyond the closed road. Ablawa wanted ways back to them. Ways through which news could pass, and help, and those who still needed shelter. The women she had saved were frightened of anything that might follow.”

“So they made her the danger.”

“She was dangerous to the arrangement they had made.”

Senamé ran a finger along the stone. She could hear the hidden waterways now, faintly, where before she had heard only the completeness of the Python’s magic. They joined other waters beyond the chamber.

“And my father?”

“He gave her the orbe. What you have called copying was its gift of accord. Your understanding was always your own.”

She touched the place where the necklace used to rest.

“Without it, I can hardly do anything properly.”

“You arrived,” the Python said.

“Very badly.”

“An old distinction, but a useful one.”

Her mouth moved before she could prevent it. The smile hurt less today.

He lowered his gaze to the shell against her chest.

“That is how she called them. She could open a road. She could not decide who would walk it.”

Senamé lifted the lambi. She had worn it for so long that the curve had become the shape her hand expected when it needed reassurance.

“And where is she now?”

“I cannot give you her whereabouts.”

Her fingers tightened.

“Cannot, or won’t?”

“Cannot.”

She searched his face. There was no amusement in it.

The watch signal reached them through the roots. A moment later Afiwa came down the stair, too fast for the last turn, one hand catching the wall.

“A rider from Allada reached the southern post. The queen sent him before she left for Abomey.”

Senamé stood.

“Kpénahi?”

“Alive. Under guard.” Afiwa held out a folded message. “It’s your necklace.”

The queen’s seal had been pressed hard enough to crack the wax.

The case was empty. The orbe was gone.