Something She Could Give Back

Kossiwa tried to close the path around their joined hands.

Senamé let it narrow until the pressure ground their bones together. She had spent years snatching back whatever she offered when she thought rejection was coming. This time she held on.

“Look at your pearl.”

Kossiwa pulled against her.

“Let me go.”

“Look.”

The black surface had become almost transparent at its centre. Something inside was being drawn towards the vat. Each new closure pulled another fine thread from it.

Kossiwa stared.

“You said the boundary was mine.”

The reflection turned its face towards her.

“You are keeping it.”

“You said—”

“What did you think that meant?”

The genette leapt from the shelf. A ring caught it before it reached the floor.

Kossiwa made a sound Senamé had never heard from her. She released Senamé’s hand and flung both palms towards the trapped animal.

The ring did not answer.

For the first time since the contract, a closure had formed without her permission.

Outside, something struck the bank. A stone fragment flew through the doorway. Senamé ducked, felt the larger working shudder, and saw a strip of sky where the roof had begun to lift.

“You can’t hold all of it,” she gasped. “Choose.”

Kossiwa looked from the animal to the orbe.

Senamé knew exactly what that choice would cost her. She had watched the girl earn everything she was given until earning became the only way she knew to keep anything.

“If I give it back,” Kossiwa whispered, “they will still choose you.”

Senamé’s chest hurt.

“Some will.”

Kossiwa recoiled more sharply than if she had lied.

“I can’t promise they won’t. I can’t give you my life to make yours fair.” Senamé held out her hand again. “But I am here. And I’m asking you to come out.”

The genette struggled inside the ring. Its small, frantic claws found no purchase.

Kossiwa tore the necklace from her throat.

For an instant her fist remained closed around it. Then she put it in Senamé’s hand.

The familiar accord entered Senamé with such force that she nearly fell. Every captured structure became audible at once: doors, water, the Python’s broken resistance, the immense pull beneath the hollow. She wanted to seize them all. The new pearl leapt towards them, eager, terrible.

She forced herself to choose one.

The ring around the genette.

Senamé heard where it repeated, opened a gap between the repetitions and let Kossiwa pull the animal free. The sorceress gathered it to her chest, sobbing without tears, her frozen hands unable to smooth its fur.

“The palace,” Senamé urged. “Release it.”

Kossiwa looked at the dark lines beneath her skin.

“Help me find the first one.”

Together they loosened the oldest seal. A return ceased, then another. Far away, bells changed their pattern. Senamé felt air move through a passage that had been closed and heard the distant, enormous release of Kpo’s breath.

The vat cracked from rim to floor.

Black water rose through the ice without melting it. The reflection had no need of Kossiwa’s face now. A long, hollow head lifted into the room, carrying a skin of stillness around nothing Senamé could see.

The mue had taken the power Kossiwa poured into her seals and gathered it into a body of its own. Now it was tearing those seals apart to free itself. It had her strength to spend, everything she had committed to keeping others trapped. Even that much could bring the causeway down on the people crossing it.

Senamé grabbed Kossiwa around the waist and opened the shortest path she could bear, from the broken doorway to the dry bank outside. They tumbled through it together. The effort drove a fresh line of scales up Senamé’s neck.

Behind them, the dye house folded inward.

The sound was small. That was the worst part. No explosion, no satisfying crash. Walls, vats and roof drew together as though an unseen hand had pulled the centre from a piece of cloth. The dark shape above them continued to rise.

Across the hollow, Kpo broke through the released palace gate. People scattered before her enormous body. She stopped at the causeway, ears flat, watching the thing above the dye house.

For the first time Senamé saw the Panther hesitate.

Kossiwa clutched the genette against her.

“It isn’t him,” she whispered. “It isn’t all of him.”

Senamé watched the hollow coil unfold over the water.

“That is a dreadful attempt at reassurance.”

She hauled Kossiwa farther up the bank as the first imperial horn answered the city’s bells.

* * *

Tassi reached the causeway with Kpénahi and a line of defenders. Above the eastern roofs, smoke had begun to spread.

Tassi turned towards the eastern trees and called the Elephant. Gold brightened along her pearls. Beyond the last houses, an immense trunk rose through the smoke, and the gold plates across his shoulders caught the failing light. He came towards her until the queen pointed past the gate. “The siege line,” she called. “Keep them away from the people on this road.” He answered with a cry Senamé felt through the soles of her feet, then charged the imperial engines.

Kpo lowered her head close to the queen. Whatever passed between them took only a moment. Tassi’s face hardened; then she turned towards Senamé, taking in Kossiwa beside her and the grey cord back around her throat.

“Can it be stopped?”

Senamé looked at the hollow shape. Its lower coils remained caught in the network beneath the hollow. Every road Kossiwa had closed had become part of its body. The returning water shook where it tried to move.

“Yes. But not while it has everything to hold on to.”

An arrow struck the causeway rail. A soldier cried out near the gate.

Tassi looked towards the city, then the western road, then the people still trapped between them.

“Tell me what you need.”

Senamé almost answered: more time, a healed arm, another girl, someone who had not spent most of her life trying to be allowed out of a village.

Instead she pointed at the hollow.

“The mirror here. The sword at the channel. And I need you to keep that road open.”

Tassi handed the mirror to Sètondji.

“You heard her.”