The Best Girl in Azara

Kossiwa had left the door open for her.

Senamé disliked that more than she would have disliked a locked one. She paused on the threshold, listening to the old dye house. Water should have moved beneath the floor. Instead she heard an immense, held silence, with small workings ticking inside it like insects caught in a jar.

“Your bird stays outside,” Kossiwa called.

Kékéli dug his claws into Senamé’s shoulder.

She touched his foot.

“Find Sètondji if the road changes.”

He resisted, then flew to the roof. Senamé entered alone.

The room smelled of indigo, damp wood and a cold so deep it seemed to have its own taste. Kossiwa stood beside the central vat. Frost had whitened the ends of her braids. Her pearl shone black through the thin cloth over her chest, smooth enough that Senamé could see herself in it from across the room.

“Where is the Python?”

“Where he belongs.”

Senamé moved towards her.

“Alive?”

“Yes.”

“Say that carefully.”

Kossiwa’s expression flickered.

“Alive. I closed the channels around him. He fought me. He should not have.”

Senamé felt the remembered pain of that broken breath. For several seconds she wanted nothing except to put Kossiwa through the nearest wall.

“You hurt him because he would help me.”

“He would always help you.”

“So would I.”

The answer reached Kossiwa badly. She turned away from it, touching the orbe beneath her collar as though checking it remained there.

“You never had anything I needed.”

Senamé looked at the stolen necklace.

Kossiwa struck first.

The floor closed around Senamé’s feet. She jumped sideways, caught the edge of a vat and swung herself onto its rim. A second restraint followed the remembered shape of her movement and missed because she let herself fall badly instead of correcting it.

Her shoulder hit wood. Pain ran down the injured arm. She rolled, seized a broken stool and hurled it.

Kossiwa caught it inside a dark circle. The wood hung motionless inches from her face.

Senamé was already behind it.

She drove her good shoulder into Kossiwa’s chest. They crashed against the vat together. Ice fractured. Kossiwa caught Senamé by the hair; Senamé hooked a leg behind hers, and for a moment the greatest sorceress in Azara and its newest divine embarrassment were trying to throw each other onto a filthy floor.

“Let go of my hair.”

“Let go of my throat.”

“I’m holding your collar.”

Kossiwa slammed her palm against Senamé’s ribs. Cold went through her like a swallowed blade. Senamé stumbled back before the restraint closed, gasping.

The next ring closed at the height of her throat. Senamé threw herself upwards. Rotten roofing broke against her back, and she burst into the evening air with splinters caught in her hair.

Below, the causeway was crowded with carts. She veered towards the hollow before Kossiwa’s next attack could reach them.

Kossiwa followed her through the roof.

Senamé stared. There was nothing beneath the woman’s feet.

“All this time?”

“You were not the only one with something to hide.”

Black light swelled through Kossiwa’s pearl. It curved behind her shoulders, gathered a scaled throat and opened jaws wide enough to swallow the dye house doorway. The serpent’s body continued uncoiling above the hollow. Where its shadow crossed the water, the surface stopped moving.

Senamé felt her own pearl answer.

Warmth poured along her spine. She reached to shape a defence, but the light swept past her hands, rose beside her and turned an enormous head towards the approaching serpent. Rose deepened into gold beneath its jaw; colours shifted along coils she could feel as distinctly as her fingers.

For one bewildered instant she forgot Kossiwa.

Then the black jaws closed around its throat.

Pain crushed the breath from Senamé’s chest. Her serpent scattered into bright fragments, and she fell until the cold water below rushed into focus. She caught herself just above it, shaking.

Kossiwa descended slowly. Blood had begun running from her nose.

“You cannot keep anything whole.”

Senamé drew a breath that hurt all the way down.

The fragments had not vanished. They drifted around her, warm against her skin. She gathered them closer, following their movement through her own pulse, and the bright body formed again. This time she let its coils bend loosely around her.

Kossiwa’s serpent struck through the centre.

Senamé turned with it. Black scales scraped past her shoulder, destroying the light they touched, but the outer coils survived. She drew them around the dark creature’s flank and pulled.

Above her, Kossiwa lurched sideways.

For the first time, Senamé saw effort break the composure of her face. Both women were breathing through open mouths now. Both pearls shone through their clothes.

The black serpent twisted towards the causeway.

Senamé followed its gaze. A child stood beside an overturned basket, watching them.

She drove her whole weight into the bright coils.

The collision turned both serpents back towards the dye house. Kossiwa lost height; Senamé plunged after the stolen necklace flashing against her chest. Their magic tangled above the rafters, then broke as they fell through the hole in the roof.

Senamé struck the sloping heap of thatch and rolled onto the floor. Across from her, Kossiwa caught a vat to keep herself standing. The last black scales withdrew into her pearl; pink sparks settled over Senamé’s hands.

The orbe still hung around Kossiwa’s neck.

Outside, drums sounded from the eastern road.

Both women heard them.

“Open the gates,” Senamé urged. “They are here.”

“They will not get through my seals.”

“The people inside can’t get out either.”

“Then they should remain where they are protected.”

Senamé stared at her. She could hear Loló explaining why the scouts had to return before anyone opened the boundary.

Kossiwa gathered another working. Senamé caught the movement at its beginning and let her own pearl open a narrow way through the space beside it. The cold passed her shoulder and struck the wall.

Kossiwa looked sharply at the unborrowed shape.

Senamé had not moved far. It had still cost her less than the leap.

“You don’t know that one,” she breathed.

“I can learn.”

The next closure followed her more quickly. Senamé misjudged it and lost the skin across her knuckles to the rim of a vat. She backed away, looking for the connection between Kossiwa’s pearl and the larger ring beneath the ice.

The orbe made the relation clear. It was doing for Kossiwa what it had once done for her: helping a foreign structure become something her own power could use.

But the foreign structure was growing.

“It’s taking more than you agreed.”

“I know what I agreed.”

“Then why can’t you breathe?”

Kossiwa’s hand went involuntarily to her chest. The black pearl pulsed against it, too slowly.

In the frozen vat, the reflection opened its eyes.

“She wants you to give it back,” it murmured. “And when you have, what will she need you for?”

Senamé felt something twist inside her. That question had lived in her own mouth for years.

She took one step towards Kossiwa and stopped before it could become another attack.

“Loló told me about your mother.”

Kossiwa went still.

“Don’t.”

“She reached the boundary.”

The cold around the room deepened.

“I said don’t.”

“They waited. Your mother was alive when she reached them, and they waited for the scouts.”

Kossiwa hit her hard enough to send her into the doorway.

Senamé struck the frame and fell to one knee. Outside, the hollow lay under the last pale light of the afternoon. People were still crossing the causeway. The army’s drums had become distinct enough to hear the space between the beats.

Kossiwa stood over her.

“You don’t get to use her.”

“No.” Senamé spat blood onto the earth. “I don’t.”

She forced herself upright.

“But they don’t get to keep that from you anymore.”

Kossiwa’s face had changed. The practiced control remained, but underneath it something younger was trying to understand a sentence without surviving it first.

“They found me,” she whispered.

“Your pearl kept you alive,” Senamé said.

“They found me.”

“Yes.”

“She had already—”

Her breath stopped.

Senamé took another step. Kossiwa did not strike her.

“I don’t know what you remember. I know they should have told you.”

For a moment there was only the noise of men shouting on the road and the faint scrape of the genette trying to climb down from a shelf.

Then the reflection spoke.

“And she wants you to open the door again.”

Kossiwa’s eyes lifted to Senamé.

The working beneath them closed.

The dye house, the hollow, every route leading out of it tightened towards one point. Senamé felt the captive structures of her old spells gather in the orbe and turn against her, beautiful and exact and known.

She could not overpower them. She knew what every one of them could do.

So she watched Kossiwa instead.

The sorceress’s knees had begun to buckle. Her hands were darkening with cold. In the vat, the reflected serpent grew wider with every restraint she completed.

Kossiwa had made a prison that required her to remain inside it.

Senamé opened a narrow path between the two of them and reached through.

She took Kossiwa’s hand.