The Price of an Open Gate

Senamé reached Abomey on the fifth evening after leaving the Python. They alternated between walking and flight, Senamé carrying Afiwa through the air with her magic until the strain forced them both back onto the road. Flying while injured cost more than she had been willing to admit. By the last village she had stopped pretending otherwise.

The city recognized her before the guards did.

A child pointed at her hair. His mother pulled his hand down, then looked twice herself. By the time Senamé reached the outer gate, three people had bowed and a fourth had asked whether touching her sleeve would help his wife conceive.

“Ask your wife what would help,” she snapped, and immediately regretted how frightened he looked.

Afiwa nudged her.

“You could start charging.”

“For what?”

“Disappointing them. You’re doing it very professionally.”

Senamé laughed despite herself. Then she saw the imperial horses beyond the gate.

Six stood under the awning where visiting merchants usually unloaded cloth. Their harness bore the elephant emblem. A groom was washing road dust from one animal’s legs while two men argued over a list of permitted weapons.

Senamé stopped laughing.

Inside, the palace had acquired a new stillness. No one was forbidden to speak. People merely waited until they had turned a corner.

Yétundé found them outside the guest court, carrying folded linen. She pressed the bundle into Senamé’s arms and kept walking.

“Your rooms are being cleaned.”

Senamé followed. “By whom?”

“That is the question.”

They turned into a service yard where washerwomen were slapping cloth against stone. The noise gave them cover.

“Adonon admitted negotiators through her own gate,” Yétundé murmured. “Olúṣọlá came with them. The queen ordered him out. He says the queen mother’s invitation protects him until talks are concluded.”

“Then conclude them.”

“The eastern gate has imperial soldiers outside it. More arrived this morning. They call that protection too.”

Senamé looked towards the palace roof. Somewhere beneath it Tassi was trying to feed a kingdom without yielding the people in it, and her mother had invited the collector back to discuss what they were worth.

She wanted, badly, to keep disliking Tassi without needing to help her.

“And my necklace?”

“They searched the convoy. They searched the servants twice. Your friend’s security marks remain untouched, apparently.”

“Kossiwa’s?”

Yétundé nodded.

Afiwa’s face sharpened. “Where is she?”

“Inspecting another gate. She has been given a great many.”

Sètondji found them before they left the yard. He carried no flowers, no poem, none of the beautiful things Senamé had spent the journey trying not to imagine. He carried her sandal, newly strapped.

She stared at it.

“You kept that?” Senamé asked.

“You were walking badly.”

“I was dying.”

“I noticed.”

The answer quieted them both. He looked at her bandage, her hair, the scales that remained near her eyes. His gaze returned to her face without snagging anywhere.

Senamé accepted the sandal. Her fingers brushed his, and the second heartbeat moved low in her chest.

“We need to talk.”

“Yes.”

“About a great many things.”

“I’m beginning with the ones I should have handled myself. ‘I have ended the engagement’ is now in the record. Adonon wanted ‘postponed.’ I made the clerk read it back to her and she sucked her teeth,” Sètondji said.

“The drink is being examined,” Sètondji continued. “Dèdoun’s mother is no longer permitted to question her servants.”

“And Dèdoun?”

“Will answer for what she did. So will whoever supplied her.”

He glanced at Yétundé before continuing.

“I will not let them punish the girl who carried the cup instead.”

Yétundé folded a loose corner of linen into place.

Senamé knew then that this was not merely something he had thought to say because she was listening.

“Take me to Tassi.”

The queen stood over a map with two officers and a grain accountant. She looked up when Senamé entered, and for an instant everything royal left her face.

She did not approach.

“How is your arm?” Tassi asked.

“Attached.”

“May my healer see it?”

“After we speak.”

Tassi dismissed the officers. The accountant remained until the queen assured him she understood exactly how many days his figures represented.

Senamé waited until the door closed.

“You said you would keep it safe.”

“I failed.”

“Everyone is getting very good at admitting things after they happen.”

Tassi accepted that with a small movement of her head. On the table lay Dossou’s supply agreement, the seal broken and the delivery dates crossed through.

“His partners have withdrawn the credit. Two coastal suppliers will still sell, but they require payment before loading. I have pledged my own store of gold. It buys part of what we need.”

“Why tell me?”

“Because I will not pretend his death had no consequences. And because I will not ask you to become the replacement for what we lost.”

Senamé looked up sharply.

Tassi met her gaze.

“Sètondji was quite clear with me.”

For a moment Senamé could not think what to say. She turned the edge of the map between two fingers instead.

“Where is Kpénahi?”

“Under guard. Alive. You may see her.”

“And her mother’s petitions. She needs to read them.”

Tassi took a packet from beneath the supply agreement and handed it to her.

“These are the copies we have. The rest are being brought from the archives.”

Senamé tucked them beneath her good arm.

At the threshold, a guard tried to admit Olúṣọlá. Tassi refused. The collector’s voice reached them through the door, patient enough to make Senamé’s teeth ache.

“Your mother and I have already agreed on the framework.”

The queen opened the door herself.

“Then send my mother your invoice.”

Olúṣọlá’s smile survived the answer. He inclined his head towards Senamé, taking in the colour of her hair with naked interest, and withdrew.

As he passed the doorway, a line beneath the lintel brightened.

Senamé heard it close.

She caught the door before it shut and pressed her hand against the frame. A working lay inside the wood: familiar precision, every return exact. Kossiwa’s structure. Beyond it ran something colder and vastly older.

Tassi watched her expression change.

“What?”

“Who can open this?”

“My guard.”

Senamé turned to the man. “Try.”

He touched the mark with his authorized token. The door moved. When Senamé attempted the same motion without it, the wood resisted her with a force that ran deeper into the surrounding wall.

“It keeps intruders out,” he offered.

She looked at Tassi standing inside.

“It keeps whoever holds the token in charge.”

The queen reached for the frame. Fire gathered against her fingers, then stopped spreading at the line.

Someone had built a palace inside her palace and neglected to give her the keys.

* * *

Kpénahi received the copies standing beside a shuttered window. The room had a sleeping mat, a water jar and two guards outside. Senamé had never seen so much space around the woman without a weapon occupying some of it.

She laid the papers on the mat.

“Your mother’s petitions. The queen has ordered the rest brought from the archives.”

Kpénahi knelt to read. At the first familiar name her thumb stopped against the page.

Senamé stayed by the door.

“They wrote that she came back after being told not to,” Kpénahi murmured.

“Yes.”

“She told me she had gone to buy thread.”

The room became difficult to stand in.

Kpénahi smoothed the paper with a tenderness Senamé had last seen her use on a frightened child’s hair.

“I used to ask why she never brought any.”

Senamé sat down. The anger she had carried here remained, but it had to make room for something else.

“Killing him didn’t give her an answer.”

“I know.”

“It almost took mine away.”

Kpénahi looked at her injured arm.

“I know that too.”

For a while they listened to the guards changing places outside.

“When you can leave this room,” Senamé continued, “you will help me get her name said properly. Not as the troublesome woman in a ledger. As your mother.”

Kpénahi bowed her head over the petition. Senamé did not ask whether that meant yes.

She found Kossiwa at the western service court, fastening a new seal above a gate.

The genette sat on a basket beside her. It watched Senamé approach and climbed down at once, stopping just short of her feet. Kossiwa turned before it reached her.

“You should have stayed in Azara until your arm healed.”

“Give me my necklace.”

Kossiwa’s fingers remained against the seal.

“People are frightened. The queen’s guards cannot agree which orders to follow. Your departure did not help.”

Senamé stepped closer.

“You can lecture me after you give it back.”

For a moment the courtyard remained full of ordinary sounds: a cart beyond the wall, a woman calling for her missing boy, leaves scraping across the roof. Then Kossiwa drew the grey bead from beneath her collar.

Senamé had expected the sight. It still hurt.

“You have your own pearl now,” Kossiwa observed. “You made certain everyone saw it.”

“I was trying not to die.”

“Yes. And look what it earned you.”

Senamé caught her wrist.

Cold struck through her fingers. A dark ring tightened beneath Kossiwa’s skin, and the working over the gate answered it. Senamé let go before the restraint could close around her hand.

“What did you do?”

“Something that works,” Kossiwa replied.

“For whom?”

“For the people who will still be here when you decide you need to leave again.”

The words landed close enough to make Senamé hesitate. Kossiwa noticed.

“You get frightened, you fly away. You get hurt, someone runs after you. Have you thought what would happen if everyone behaved like that?”

Senamé’s palm ached where the cold had touched it. Behind Kossiwa, the service gate shuddered under a knock from outside.

“Open it.”

“There is another entrance.”

“Then you won’t mind.”

Kossiwa moved between her and the mark.

Senamé could have kept talking. She would think about that later. In the moment she saw the orbe against Kossiwa’s chest, heard a second urgent knock, and reached for the speed that had carried her across Allada.

Her pearl found the remembered movement. For two strides she had it.

On the third, the pattern locked.

She fell hard enough to tear the bandage loose. Frost spread beneath her palm in the shape of the very working she had used to move.

Kossiwa crouched beyond her reach.

“I know that one.”

Senamé rolled as a restraint closed over the place her throat had been. Pink lightning gathered instinctively in her good hand. She recognized the collector’s architecture beneath the seal and struck at the point where its authority returned to its source.

The bolt stopped in midair.

For a terrible instant it hung between them, beautiful and useless, branching rose light enclosed in a thin black curve.

The orbe had held the accord of that technique. Kossiwa had it now.

Senamé tried another. The air tightened around her. Another, and the pressure climbed her legs. Each familiar structure gave Kossiwa something else to catch.

The gate behind them rattled again.

“There’s a child outside,” Senamé gasped.

“There is another entrance.”

“Then let him use this one!”

She threw herself at the seal with her own pearl, without a borrowed shape. The gate opened a hand’s width. A small brown hand appeared through it.

Kossiwa recoiled as if struck. The larger working beneath hers drew tight.

Senamé felt scales lock across her ribs. She could no longer straighten her fingers. Too much force had entered too many closed paths, and her body was taking the strain of keeping them open.

Kossiwa stared at the child’s hand, then at Senamé.

For a heartbeat something in her expression gave way.

She opened the gate. A servant dragged the boy through from outside and fled with him towards the kitchens.

Senamé tried to follow. Her legs would not move.

“Leave the orbe,” Kossiwa whispered. “Go back where you belong.”

The cold reached Senamé’s jaw.

Afiwa hit her from the side.

They struck the ground together beyond the inner line. Afiwa hooked an arm beneath her shoulders and ran, dragging Senamé’s feet across the paving until she could get her upright. Kékéli tore out of the shadow above the gate, wings beating against Kossiwa’s face.

For a moment he was an unmistakable bird in the royal palace.

Senamé had no breath left to care.

They escaped through the laundry yard. Behind them, Kossiwa’s command stopped halfway through a word. She was bent over the basket, one hand against her heart, unable to draw enough air to finish it.

The genette rubbed against her ankle. She did not feel it.

At the servants’ gate, Sètondji took Senamé’s weight while Afiwa opened the way. He looked at her rigid hands and the scales climbing her throat, and she saw the effort it cost him to keep his face steady.

“Don’t,” she begged.

“What?”

“Look like that.”

He pressed his forehead briefly against hers.

“Then help me. Tell me where you need to go.”

The Python. He would know how to loosen this. He would answer her.

Senamé reached for the quiet connection she had felt beside his water. Nothing came. She tried again, pushing through the pain, and caught something at last.

A breath dragged over a broken rhythm. Water that could not move. The immense weight of a body held where it had fallen.

Pain entered her so suddenly that she cried out.

The connection vanished.

Kossiwa had thought of him first.

Senamé bent over Sètondji’s arm, unable to speak. Inside the palace a bell began ringing; another answered it from the eastern gate.

Afiwa looked from her to the rising alarm. Fear had made her motionless at Allada. This time her whole body shook, but she tightened her hold.

“You can be angry with me when you can stand. We’re leaving.”