A Place Kept for Her

Kossiwa returned to Abomey with the queen’s convoy four days after the light over Allada.

The stolen cord lay beneath the inner fold of her wrapper. Every step pressed the orbe against her hip. The sensation had become so familiar that she noticed its absence whenever she shifted it to sleep.

She had expected fear to make her careless. Instead everything appeared unusually simple. She knew where the relic was. Everyone else was searching.

Adonon received her before the dust had been brushed from her travel clothes.

The queen mother had already heard about Dossou. She had also heard that Hangbé’s guest had stood between two talismans and emerged with divine blood made visible upon her skin.

“And where is this extraordinary girl?”

“She left.”

Adonon studied Kossiwa over the edge of her fan.

“You stayed.”

There were several answers Kossiwa could have given. Someone had needed to complete the reports. Someone had needed to account for the damage and inventory what could still be moved. Senamé had needed only to suffer beautifully and rise into the sky.

“My duties remained.”

Adonon moved a cushion onto the low seat beside her.

“Then sit. I have use for a woman who understands that.”

Kossiwa sat before she could dislike how much she wanted to.

The queen mother spread three plans across a table. Reception courts, store passages, the gates through which merchants and envoys entered. Several bore seals Kossiwa recognized from the new security checks after the imperial visit.

“My daughter believes refusing a demand ends the matter,” Adonon continued. “Now the merchant who was to keep our supplies moving is dead, and she has brought his killer home in chains. I intend to ensure there is still a palace in which everyone can defend their principles.”

“What do you want secured?”

“These courts. Their entrances. Their communications, if necessary. A restricted delegation may be admitted to discuss terms. I want no repetition of Allada.”

Kossiwa examined the plans. Adonon had authority over her own household and its gates. The queen’s private rooms lay beyond a second boundary.

“You cannot give me the inner courts.”

“I can give you the doors through which people reach them.”

Kossiwa glanced up.

Adonon smiled, almost warmly.

“I thought you would understand the distinction.”

Before Kossiwa left, a servant brought a request from Dèdoun’s mother. The wedding arrangements required clarification. Adonon read the folded sheet and laid it face down.

“Apparently the young man has discovered an opinion.”

The orbe felt abruptly heavy against Kossiwa’s hip.

She had given Dèdoun a working designed to hold a promise. A small closure. A way of keeping a foolish man from damaging everybody around him by changing his mind. He had broken it in front of the court, and again Senamé had been there, waiting on the other side.

“Men discover those when they want something,” Kossiwa observed.

“Then we should make certain they want what is useful.”

Outside, Dèdoun waited with her mother beneath a shaded doorway. Her hair remained faultless. Her eyes had swollen.

“You said he couldn’t withdraw it.”

Kossiwa stopped.

“Lower your voice.”

Dèdoun’s mother caught her daughter above the elbow.

“Look at her when you speak. Crying has achieved quite enough.”

Dèdoun went still beneath the grip. Kossiwa’s pearl contracted so sharply that she almost reached for her chest. For an instant she felt herself being carried against a woman’s ribs, jolted by running. A man shouted behind them. She could not make out the words; her body knew to become silent before her mind could ask why.

The doorway returned. Dèdoun’s mother still held her daughter above the elbow.

Kossiwa wanted to break that grip. She had felt the same sudden violence when a man blocked a passage or reached towards her without asking, and had always called it good judgment. Now a woman had brought it back. She pressed her nails into her palm until she could trust her voice.

“The agreement will be reviewed,” she answered. “You should both be careful what you put in writing.”

She continued down the passage before Dèdoun could ask what that meant.

That evening, Sètondji sent word that anyone who had served the betrothal drink was to be protected from private questioning. Dèdoun’s mother sent a servant to retrieve the cups. He arrived to find them already sealed as evidence.

Kossiwa was no longer in the palace.

She had chosen an abandoned dye house beyond the outer gardens, where the drains emptied into an old branch of the Sillage. Her genette followed her through the broken door and sneezed at the smell. Indigo stained the rims of the vats. One held water dark enough to give a perfect reflection.

Kossiwa laid the stolen orbe beside it.

The method the Python had been forced to give her remained exact in memory. Before leaving Azara for the court, she had returned to his exchange seat and called the pale sitatunga that used to accompany her into the forest. It had leaned into her hand while she completed the offering. When it tried to withdraw, the ring was already closed. Its death had purchased one answer: how to bind a cast skin of Damballa-Whedo, an echo of the primordial power of destruction. She had possessed the method ever since. Only the strength to impose it had been missing.

Tonight she set that memory aside and began.

The genette climbed onto an overturned basket. Kossiwa checked where it was before cutting her palm.

Blood touched the water. She closed the first ring around its spreading colour, then the second around the reflection of her face. The orbe answered the structure, making legible what her own pearl could hold but not yet reach.

Cold spread beneath her knees.

In the vat, the reflected woman stopped breathing a moment before Kossiwa did. Something long moved behind her shoulders, too large for the room and too shallow to exist anywhere except the black surface.

“You have called a cast skin,” it told her. “Why do you speak as though you have caught what shed it?”

Kossiwa steadied the knife between her fingers.

“Because you are what answered.”

The reflection smiled with her mouth.

She completed the third ring. Water became a sheet of ice beneath her bleeding hand. The pressure inside it pushed back hard enough to crack the nearest vat.

“Your name,” she demanded.

“You know whose name you used.”

“Your terms.”

The ice cleared. Beneath it, a coil turned through depths that had not been present a moment before.

“What you preserve must have somewhere to remain,” the reflection said.

“Within the boundary I set,” Kossiwa replied.

“And what keeps that boundary?”

“I do.”

Cold closed around her heart. Kossiwa gasped and nearly broke the outer circle with her heel. Her genette leapt down, then retreated from the frost crawling across the floor.

She understood the price. Each closure would remain attached to her. She could command the captured power, but the burden of keeping it would enter her body. Beneath the ice, the last open channel disappeared. Kossiwa felt the water strike against the place where it had been.

This was how the creature would give her what she wanted. It could destroy a passage, break a spell, cut off whatever allowed someone to escape. She would choose what remained.

Her palm had begun to go numb. She loosened the smallest ring, and warmth returned painfully to her fingers. Even her own body required ways through.

She held that opening clear and tightened the others.

“Accepted.”

The thing beneath the ice moved closer.

“What do you want kept?”

Senamé’s face rose in memory, luminous above the ruined courtyard. Kossiwa remembered Sètondji reaching for her, Afiwa crying beside her, the queen waiting to be allowed near her. Even Kpénahi, whom she had defied, had caught her before she touched the ground.

Then Senamé had flown away from all of them.

“She leaves, and they still keep a place for her.”

Beneath the ice, the reflected mouth moved.

“Adonon kept a place for you.”

“Because she needs her gates secured.”

“And when they are?”

Kossiwa pressed her bleeding palm harder against the frozen surface. She knew how to make herself necessary. There was always another task, another failure to correct before anyone noticed whose hands had repaired it.

“Everything leaves.”

The coil beneath her reflection tightened.

“You know how to close a gate.”

For a moment she imagined doing exactly that: keeping the place Adonon had offered, preventing anyone from arriving to take it from her. Then she saw Senamé rising over the walls.

“She would find another way.”

“Who would show her?”

Kossiwa looked towards the drain.

The Python knew passages no guard could watch. The Crocodile carried news through water. Kpo would recognize Senamé wherever she tried to hide.

Kossiwa could stop. She could take her hand from the ice, return the orbe and let them decide what she deserved.

Instead she drew the first channel towards her.

“Then I begin with the ones who would help her.”

She looked towards the drain. Water moved through it, carrying a few fallen leaves towards the forest.

“The Python would answer her.”

“Would he answer you?”

Kossiwa remembered the warm stone, the title given without examination, the refusal to tell her anything that mattered.

“He has before.”

The ice widened beneath her hand. In its surface she could see every ring she had drawn, held inside a greater curve she had not made.

She reached to correct it.

The reflected hand moved first.

Kossiwa withdrew hers, breathing hard, and tightened the smallest ring until the two hands matched again.

On the basket, her genette began to cry.

The following night, Kossiwa followed the water beneath the dye house with the orbe. She did not need to travel its length. The linked channels carried the Python’s working, and she had memorized the place where his water entered the exchange seat.

She touched it through the reflection.

Far below the northern forest, a great head rose from its coil.

“Kossiwa.” His voice travelled back through the held water. “Release that.”

She closed a second ring around the first.

The Python struck the boundary. One vat shattered beside her; a jet of water cut her cheek. Kossiwa staggered and heard the mue laugh beneath the ice.

“He is stronger than you,” it observed. “Use what you called.”

She did. The reflected power passed through the channel, closing it around the enormous body at the other end. Kossiwa felt the struggle travel through her wrists. For a moment she could see him, scales torn against an edge that should not have been capable of holding him, his old scar drawn tight across his brow.

“Enough,” he breathed.

She left him room to breathe. She closed every way by which his strength could travel beyond the chamber.

When she withdrew her hands, she had frost beneath three fingernails and blood in her mouth. The genette would not come when she called it.

She told herself that the Python was alive. She repeated it until she could stand.