They froze. The demon dropped back to all fours and joined the others in their eerie sway. Jabari felt spellbound with fear until he shook it off and came to his senses. He ran to join Chibu and they whirled and fought. Then Brigid was there, a tall pale shadow who chopped and swung and stabbed at the Baloto. As they fought together, the lizards disintegrated, and they could not rise up faster than they were killed by four angry Maweel.
They fought for a long time, and then finally, finally the mud demons were gone. The four fighters were covered in sweat and the clinging dust and ashes of the dead Baloto. They stood there, breath heaving, some with hands on their knees. Brigid had just collapsed on the ground. It felt as though they were in a different reality, one where mud demons could come into Maween itself and speak in their voices. This was not right. This was not normal.
“Let’s wash up,” Chibu said finally, walking over to the well. Jabari followed, but as soon as he got near it, one of his senses came clambering awake.
“Stop!” he said.
Chibu looked back at him. “It’s poisoned,” Jabari explained.
Chibu looked from him to the well. “Can any of you cleanse it?”
They shook their heads. Isika could have done it, but she was sitting at Petitions, listening to petty quarrels. Jabari scowled. He had argued with his parents that it wasn’t the best way to use Isika’s gifts, and he knew he was right.
“Okay then,” Chibu said. “Let’s go find a stream. I need to get this lizard breath off me before it turns me crazy.”
After they had found a stream and rolled in it as best as they all could, they sat beside it. Jabari stared off into the distance, in the direction of the desert. How could the Baloto have come so close?
Chibu spoke, his voice wry. “I don’t really know how to make this into a lesson, as it is a first.”
“Not a first,” Jabari said, speaking quietly. Chibu had been away when the Baloto had come the first time. He hadn’t seen how they had terrorized the city, but he had heard, surely, that they had come with the Desert King himself, their greatest enemy. For a moment, remembering, Jabari felt his breath constrict. Surely the Desert King wasn’t here? No, he couldn’t be.
Chibu glanced over at him, his face weary. “No, not a first,” he agreed. “But, kids, something is very wrong.”
That evening, back at the palace, Jabari, Gavi, and Ivy met at the bottom of the stairs. They walked into the banquet hall together for the evening meal.
As they gathered plates and began to fill them, Ivy and Jabari told Gavi what had happened that day. He in turn told them what the elders had shared before they arrived. Aria had fallen in Petitions and then hissed in the voice of a mud demon.
Jabari took a step back. At the same time that Aria had been hissing like a mud demon, the Baloto had risen up out of the ground and spoken with her voice. What was the connection between the two? How could they even be connected like that?
They stared at one another as Ivy told Gavi what the mud demon had said to them out there in the field. Then they took their plates to the corner with the plush cushions to sit with their parents. Jabari could see his own feelings reflected in his parents’ faces. They were deeply disturbed by what had happened with Aria during Petitions.
“The Great Waste is trying to poison Maween itself,” Ivram said, his brow darkening.
Jabari could not help but agree. And he knew that he didn’t even want to tell Isika about the mud demons. He knew how she would take it, how she would blame herself. With a sinking feeling he realized that he would never be able to shield her from things that hurt her. She would always find out and feel the burden for the land she was meant to protect.
Chapter 5
The sky was barely light when Benayeem woke. Through his window, open with a hint of breeze blowing the window cloth, he could see green streaks beginning to shoot out over the mountains, with pink and purple light edging the line of the hills. All around him was the music of the gently waking day, people stirring in their sleep, slowly coming to awareness, looking forward to the morning.
He stretched and smiled at the soothing music. Then he remembered the events of the previous day and frowned. He jumped up and got into his training clothes: soft pants that cinched at the ankles, a short tunic that wouldn’t catch on branches, and his ser wrapped around his head. His tall soft leather boots were last.
He padded down the hallway as silently as he could but caught sight of Isika in the kitchen with a tiny cup of hot coffee in her hands. She looked half asleep. He smiled at her, but waved and left, not wanting to be late. He jogged down the hill to the training grounds at the seeker camp and soon found Abbas, the Karee warrior prince. Abbas had been adopted into the Maweel and helped with seeker training because of his skills in foraging and survival.
Abbas looked lively and awake, his dark eyes glinting in his face, his long braid swinging behind him. His music was quick and full of the rhythm of drums. He grinned at Ben.
“Good morning, sleepy head,” he said.
Ben groaned. “I’m not sleepy,” he said, “I’m totally awake.”
“Oh, I can tell,” Abbas said, still grinning. “That’s why your eyes are half open, and your feet are barely leaving the ground as you walk.”
He slung an arm around Benayeem’s shoulders and Ben felt a surge of affection for the man who would most likely be related to him some day, though Ben couldn’t figure out exactly what the definition of that kind of relative was.
Ben’s stepfather, Nirloth, had remarried after Ben’s mother had died. Jerutha, Nirloth’s new wife, became a sort of stepmother, a dear friend, like an older sister, and after Nirloth had died it was Jerutha who helped Isika and Ben find a way out of the Worker village. Now it was clear that Jerutha and Abbas were falling in love.
“Ready to run?” Abbas asked.
“Always,” Ben said.
Ben had changed during the years since he had first come to Maween. He spent half his days running and training now. As he exercised his body, it seemed that his mind grew stronger also. It was easier to ignore the music that flowed from the people and animals around him. He could put it in a room in his mind and close the door easily. He wasn’t startled by the changes in music that leapt out at him from passing strangers. Ben had never realized just how strong the link between his mind and body was, but he was glad for it, as his body grew stronger, his mind grew clearer, and the fear that had seemed to imprison him as a child receded.
They ran a few miles and then went to the grounds for strength training: fighting and sparring, pushups, working on muscles and control as they squatted or held their arms out to the side for long stretches of time. By the time they stopped for lunch, Ben was exhausted. He welcomed the exhaustion. His mind quieted when he was tired because he could barely hear the music around him.
They walked into the eating hall for bowls of spicy curry with flatbread and then took their food out to a low hill, where they sat with some of the other seekers. Abbas sat back with a sigh, stretching his legs out in front of him and tearing off a piece of flatbread to dip in his curry. Ben’s thoughts turned to his sister.
“Something is wrong with Aria,” he told Abbas in a low voice.
Abbas bent his head close, seeming to understand that Ben wouldn’t want to be overheard.
“More wrong than before?” he asked. “She’s been sick for a long time.”
Ben nodded slowly, trying to think of how to explain. He opened his hearing up to see if he could hear her, and was shocked when he found her immediately. She was in the healing tents, though, and he had never heard her from such a distance before. Was training as a seeker also honing his gift? He frowned. Her music was so strange. Parts of it sounded like Aria’s song. Her song was soft and timid, easy to drown out, like a flower, but stronger than people believed her to be. But the new music that wove in and out of Aria’s song was spiky, harsh, and horrifying. Ben’s stomach turned, listening to it. The poison arrow was becom
ing part of her. He turned back to Abbas.
“Something is very, very wrong,” he said.
Abbas’s forehead knit into a frown.
“What is it?” he asked.
“She’s being eaten up by the poison of the arrow,” Ben told Abbas. “I’m having a hard time finding her song because of so much other noise.” He couldn’t keep a hitch from his voice. Aria was trying to fight this alone with no healing in sight. The healers had done all they could and she only grew worse. More than anything in the world, Ben wanted his little sister to be healed. But if Isika couldn’t do it, who could?
“There must be something we can do,” Abbas said. He set his plate to one side and drew up his knees, crossing his arms over them and staring out onto the training grounds.
“It’s so strange,” Ben went on. “As sisters, she and Isika should be strong and powerful, but the arrow is an affliction they can’t remove. It is tormenting one sister while the other sister is powerless to help. And I . . . I am useless.”
Abbas sat back as quickly as if Ben had landed one of the sparring punches Abbas had so successfully blocked. He stared at Ben.
“Sisters . . . Ben, there is a prophecy among my people, I remember it only vaguely, like a dim memory I cannot quite grasp. There is something . . . there are sisters in the prophecy,” he said, “sisters and a wound that will not heal, and a journey and a sister . . . I can’t remember.” He frowned and tapped his forehead. “No, I can’t remember. Do you know anyone in Azariyah who might know the history and folklore of other tribes, other people?”
Ben wrapped a piece of flatbread around another bite of curry, thinking hard. He shoved the food in his mouth and chewed, staring at his plate, which was still half full. Then it came to him.
“Of course!” he said. “I know the perfect person.”
He found Olumi in the library during the sleepy afternoon. He came straight from the morning’s training, still dusty and sweaty, so he walked into the library carefully, holding his hands out in front of him so he wouldn’t accidentally touch any books. Still, Olumi rushed forward with a look of disgust, his long graying locks brushing the ground. He was only about as tall as Ben’s shoulder, with the longest hair Ben had ever seen on a person, tiny, dark-framed glasses perched on his head, and skin like black silk.
“You know better, son of Amani,” he creaked. Ben tried to gauge again just how old the librarian was. He was either forty or one hundred—Ben couldn’t tell.
Olumi reached behind his desk and pulled out a large duster, brushing it at Ben’s shoulders and and face. Ben coughed and laughed.
“Stop, Uncle!” he said. “I won’t touch anything!”
Olumi didn’t stop. “No, Benayeem,” he said. “If you will show up at the library covered in filth like a rat that fell from the roof of a barn, you will be dusted.”
Ben snorted with laughter again, and Olumi finally put the duster down, frowning up at him, with his arms crossed.
Ben held his hands up. “I have not come to look at a book. I will not touch anything in your library. I have a question.”
“Yes?” Olumi asked, still glaring.
“I was talking to Abbas, the Karee prince, about Isika and Aria,” he said. “Well, my question . . .”
“Spit it out, Benayeem,” Olumi growled.
Ben took a breath. “Do you know anything about a Karee prophecy regarding two sisters?”
Olumi stared at Ben. And then slowly, so slowly that Ben could see it, it was as though something seem to wake up inside Olumi, whose music had become as old and sleepy as the books around him. The music coming from him changed, growing louder and quicker. Awareness sparked in his eyes and then his face and he gave a little jump before he said, “Of course I know a prophecy, son of Amani. I only wonder that I didn’t think of it before.”
Chapter 6
Isika was in the pottery workshop at the wheel, throwing new vases for the banquet hall. She was on the last of ten when Ben burst through the door, disturbing the quiet. The workshop was too quiet these days in fact, without Jabari. Isika knew Tomas missed Jabari as well, though he would never admit it. Thankfully, Jabari did come to visit every so often, breezing into the large room with tea or snacks for them, often in the last part of the day, when Tomas and Isika were finishing up and everyone else had gone home.
And sometimes Jabari came to help Isika when she worked on the giant storage pots that could fit a man inside of them but usually held rice or water.
It was understandable that she looked up expecting to see Jabari, and she told herself that her heart hadn’t sunk a bit when she realized that the guest was only her brother. She sighed. He was in a state, panting and looking around wildly, obsessed with some idea or thought, she supposed.
Tomas looked over at her with one eyebrow raised.
“Are you finished?” he asked.
“This is the last one.”
“All right now. Put them in the drying room, wash up, and then go with your brother because he seems ready to explode.” Tomas shook his head, a scowl on his face, but Isika knew it was a fake scowl that was really a smile.
“Help me carry these to the drying room,” Isika said to her brother as he walked to where she sat at the wheel. “And then we can walk to the market tree and talk there.”
Ben nodded and took one of the trays, letting out an oomph as he realized how heavy it was.
“What?” she teased him. “What about all those arm exercises you’ve been doing?”
“You could have warned me,” he muttered, walking over to the drying room.
Isika smiled and cut the last vase off her wheel. She placed it on the second tray and picked it up with a slight oomph herself. Five wet clay vases was heavy, but she had grown strong wedging clay and running and exercising when she found the time. Queens needed to be strong, and she was going to be a queen.
Isika washed up quickly and grabbed a shawl against the chilly air of the evening. The nights had been growing cooler and last night Uncle Dawit had even lit the living room fire. They walked side by side to the market tree. Isika needed it. She was glad that Ben had burst in when he had. Going back and forth from Petitions to the workshop was wearing her out.
When they reached the tree, she leaned her whole body against it, arms reaching out side to side. She felt its life song creep into her muscles, soothing them, calming the aches, bringing restoration to her body. The tree hummed beneath her, and when she closed her eyes she saw lights tingling in its branches. When she felt that she could stand up straight again, she opened her eyes and turned so her back was against the wide tree. Ben sat on the ground not far away, eyes closed. He was probably listening to the changes in her music as the tree gave her its own song.
“What is it that you want to tell me, brother?” she asked, and his eyes flew open.
“Do you know who Olumi is?” he asked.
“The librarian?”
Ben nodded.
“Of course. Well, I’ve met him once or twice,” Isika said. “I’ve gone for books that Ivram asked me to study. He hasn’t talked to me much. He sort of glares from the shadows. He gave me a book called The Nature and Magic of Caring for Books.”
Ben grinned. “Yes, that’s Olumi. Well, he wants to see the two of us together.”
“Right now?” Isika leaned her head against the tree. “Can it wait?”
“Today I was training with Abbas,” Ben said, “and he told me of a Karee prophecy that might help us find healing for Aria. Olumi knows the prophecy, but he wants to tell us together.”
Isika stared at him. A prophecy that would help them know how to heal Aria? What did prophecy have to do with Aria?
“All right,” she said. She left the tree, feeling its warm buzz let her go as she lost contact with its bark. “If we must. But brother, honestly. Have you ever heard of bathing?”
* * *
They reached the palace and Isika nodded at the guards as they walked through the front doors
and to the stairs that led to the upper floors and the palace library. Jabari sat midway up the stairs, chin in hand, apparently lost in thought, because they got all the way to him before he noticed Isika and Ben. He looked startled when he saw them.
“Jabari,” Isika said, “I’ve never been able to sneak up on you. You must be far away.”
Jabari looked flustered, but after a moment, smiled and seemed to recover himself. “Just thinking about a conversation yesterday,” he said. “But you two are walking on soft feet. Why are you sneaking around the palace?”
Isika startled to bristle, then saw the teasing light in his eyes.
“You're so funny,” she said in a dry voice, then continued. “We’re going to see Olumi in the library to hear a prophecy that may help Aria.”
Jabari stared up at them with his mouth open. “You’re . . . Olumi . . . Hm. Never mind.” He slapped his hands to his legs suddenly, then jumped up. “That sounds interesting,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come along. If that’s okay.”
“Of course it’s okay,” Ben said, so the three of them kept walking upstairs, and soon they were at library doors. Olumi swung the doors wide open as they arrived, and peering in, Isika saw a space she had not noticed before at the back of the room on the left. She looked at Ben. He also looked confused.
“Keeper of the books,” Jabari said, bowing his head low. “Thank you for welcoming us.”
“Stand up straight, son of Andar,” Olumi said, brushing his hair behind him. “I don’t recall inviting you.” Then he sighed and gazed up at the ceiling. After a moment, he shook his head. “I suppose it is good that you are here.”
They took off their shoes and Olumi led the way over to the new area that still puzzled Isika. Olumi had pushed some of the towering piles of books back to form a seating area that was several cushions deep. Olumi walked across it to find a place to sit, so Isika followed. It was like walking on a bouncy stack of pillows, and she nearly tipped over but righted herself and found a place to sit, sinking into the cushions. She looked at Jabari with wide eyes and he grinned back at her.
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