rose in my heart, like a chain being reeled in. The world seemed made of cages. Walking gave me something to do instead of think about chained marriages and forbidding mage Houses and a voice commanding me to come now. We strode through a grassy landscape, skirting thickets of flowering bushes. Tiny translucent unicorns flitted between the blooms, wings flashing like thinnest glass.
Bee ventured closer. “How pretty!”
They coalesced into a swarm and stung at her. Stumbling away, she batted at the cloud as a haze of scintillant wings engulfed her. I swept my sword back and forth through them until they scattered to settle on the bushes, snorting, with teeth bared.
“Ah!” she said, pressing a hand to her face. “They attacked me!”
Fati said, “Let me see your chin.”
After a pause, Bee lowered her hand. Several bumps swelled redly, but otherwise she appeared unharmed. “Nasty creatures!”
A few took to the air, and I brandished my sword, and they retreated.
“Stay beside me,” said Fati.
We walked on. In places, the ground bottomed into swales, thick with white-barked aspens, their round leaves flashing like mirrors. Butterflies and dragonflies winked where pools of water had given birth to thickets of reeds and flowering lilies. Overhead, a pair of crows paced us.
“Do all the dead bide in the spirit world?” I asked. “Could I really find my parents?”
Fati had a long stride. “See this grass around us? You might say it comes from a seed, but a seed alone is nothing. It needs water and soil, and it needs the desire to grow. Without these, no grass can become grass. No thing is only one thing unchanging. Right now I walk in the body in which I walked on the other side. This form remains mine only until the tide of the spirit world reaches me. Then I will change, as all things change. So I cannot know what form your parents have taken, or how they have changed.”
“Vai said that those who are caught in the tide of a dragon’s dream never come back.”
“How can you come back if you have not departed?” A smile softened her mouth. “Vai is a very clever and a very obedient and a very hard-working boy, but I am sorry to tell you, Cat, that he does not know everything he thinks he does.”
Bee laughed.
I said, “But if all the dead people come here after they die, then where are they all?”
“A fish sees the eagle only as a shadow within the water, but the eagle sees the fish for what it is.”
I scratched my bruised chin. “You’re saying we can’t look at things here in the spirit world and assume that what we think we see means what we think we see is what we think it is.”
“Cat, that made no sense at all,” said Bee.
“It made perfect sense! Think of the headmaster! We think we see a man, but maybe he’s the eagle and we’re the fish who only see the eagle’s shadow. Grandmother, do you know anything about dragons?”
“I know a story, a long story. I am no djelimuso to tell it with the proper introductory remarks and blessings. It is the story about how my ancestors the Koumbi Mande came north across the desert out of the Mali Empire to escape the salt plague. So it happens, after many trials, the remnant reached the city of Qart Hadast and did not know where to go next.”
Bee looked at me, and we didn’t mention that Qart Hadast was the city the Barahal family had originally come from, the city the Romans called Carthage.
“The mansa’s sister Kolonkan was a powerful sorceress. She stood on the shore of the sea with one foot on the sand and one in the water. She saw beneath the waves smoking mountains which the Romans call Vulcan’s Peaks. In the very fire of one of those peaks, a female dragon had coiled in its nest and laid its eggs, and now she slept. Into the creature’s dreams, Kolonkan walked. ‘Maa, please advise me,’ called Kolonkan. ‘Where shall my people go?’ The serpent answered, ‘One of the daughters you will bear will serve me, and your people will go north, to the ice.’”
“How can a dragon nest in a volcano?” Bee said. “Wouldn’t the molten fire destroy eggs?”
“My apologies, Grandmother,” I said hastily, poking Bee. “We are listening.”
“Mmm.” Fati was clearly a woman not accustomed to being interrupted. “The tale goes on. That is the only mention I know of a creature the Romans would call a dragon or serpent.”
We walked a while in silence. Grass swished along our legs. Insects buzzed sleepily without massing in a swarm to afflict us. The cursed crows floated above. A jumble of shapes like boulders came into view on the horizon.
“Grandmother,” I asked at length. “Do you know who my sire is?”
She looked me up and down. “Why would I know that?”
“You can’t tell somehow, because you’re an ancestor now?”
She chuckled. “I have no such power. I am newly born into this place. I know nothing more than what I knew before. I would tell you if I knew. A child ought to know its sire. For if you do not know what ropes hold you, then you might as well be a tethered goat. So it seems you and your cousin have undertaken a journey to discover the heart of your own selves.”
“I would like to know what it means to walk the dreams of dragons,” said Bee with a look a mule might give its handler. “Did this sorceress Kolonkan’s daughter walk the dreams of dragons? Is that what the story meant?”
“Mmm. This is knowledge that is not mine.”
“Not yours to share? Or you just don’t know?”
“Bee!” I said in an undertone, pinching her arm. “It’s rude to interrupt an elder.”
“I’m the one fated to be dismembered and my head thrown into a well! I assure you, Aunt, I do not mean to be rude.”
“Mmm, yes, you are drenched in nyama.”
“What is that? Energy? Heat? Light? Magic?”
“It is the foundation stone. It is a thread. It is that which can be shaped. A potter molds nyama like clay. A blacksmith forges nyama into steel. A hunter must know how to protect himself from the dangerous nyama released when he kills an animal, by adding it to his own. Cold mages manipulate nyama. How any of them do this I do not know, for I do not know their secrets.”
“Cat told me she once met a djeli who called nyama the handle of power. Is that like an axe handle? If you can grip it, then you can wield the axe’s blade?”
“I would not say so. But those who can shape nyama can shape and change the world.”
Bee nodded. “With the right connections to power and a strong will, you can shape and change the world! Like Camjiata did, and means to again.”
“Bee!” I whispered, “we’re supposed to listen to elders, not interrupt them!”
“How are we supposed to learn if we don’t ask questions?” cried Bee.
“We are here,” said Fati.
Slump-shouldered sandstone towers rose before us, marking the four corners of a walled town. The eroded walls looked much as a seashore castle built of sand looks after a wave runs over it: melting ruins soon to be obliterated. No dogs barked. No wagons rolled or voices called. Not even the wind moaned. If anything lived in the dusty, deserted ruins, I could not hear it.
A road as black and slick as obsidian speared away from the half-collapsed main gate. As straight as a Roman military road, it cut through uninhabited countryside toward distant hills. A shadow raced toward us from those hills.
“The tide comes,” said Fati. “Get up on the road, for it is warded ground. Hurry.”
I grabbed Bee’s hand and ran, even though I was suddenly sure that the instant I touched the pavement something terrible and irrevocable would happen. Yet I had to get there. Perhaps that desire was part of the compulsion that had driven me to the well.
“Aunt, hurry!” called Bee over her shoulder.
“Onto warded ground I cannot cross,” said Fati. “You must go forward alone. This is your journey. My path is different.”
The knife of darkness cut over us just as we stumbled up onto the road. Bee flung her arms around me. Fati stood in daylight, surrounded by grass. With me in shadow and her in the bright, I could see clearly how my
