The deep-throated howl of temple warning horns cut through the air. Feathered clumps were rising from the Oruku Breach, obscured by the miasma. They emerged as winged beasts, ugly as hyenas, diving for their victims with outstretched talons.

“I’ll be fine,” Dayo yelled at us. “Help the commoners.”

We tensed, but kept formation. The order of our priorities, drummed into us by the palace priests, had been clear: Serve the prince, then the empire.

Defending commoners was the job of the Imperial Guard, to whom Sanjeet and Mayazatyl now barked commands. “Fall into cohorts! Man the war machines! Ammunition lines, up!”

Mayazatyl had recently designed the weapons outfitting the temple walls. The sleek cannons were powered by fire, but armed with balls of ice—frozen holy water, stored in chambers deep beneath the temple grounds. The Imperial Guard warriors, burly recruits from all over the empire, formed a chain, passing up ammunition to the warriors manning the cannons. With a crack, the first round ignited, and orbs of splintering ice collided with the flying beasts and hurled six to the ground.

Mayazatyl cheered and warriors roared in response, loading the second round. Then the ammunition line broke as clouds of flies dove for the warriors on the ground. My council tried to escort Dayo to safety, but crowds of screaming courtiers stampeded for the exits, creating a lethal jam. A Djbanti woman cried out in her native language as she was trampled on the ground, causing a Djbanti cannon warrior to turn and look. The cannon misfired, and the ball of ice sailed into a crowd of Nontish emissaries. One fell and did not get up.

“Fool,” screeched a Nontish cannon warrior, seizing the Djbanti warrior by the lapels. “You killed the ambassador!”

“I didn’t mean to,” hyperventilated the other. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Typical of you Djbanti! Lazy head in the clouds, never at your post—”

“Leave my people out of it,” another Djbanti warrior snarled, punching the Nontish man in the jaw.

“No,” Mayazatyl rasped. “No, no. This is not the time …”

“Man your stations,” Sanjeet boomed up at the fisticuffing warriors as they teetered precariously on the wall. “We’re in the middle of a battle! People are dying, you idiots; I said man your—”

Both warriors fell two stories to the ground. Then another swarm of beasts rose from the Breach.

The Imperial Guard warriors broke ranks. Instead of manning the cannons that might have saved us all, the panicked men and women scrambled to protect their own kinspeople. Warriors from Nyamba ignored shrieking wounded Spartians to help Nyamban courtiers. Moreyaoese warriors stepped over a bleeding child from Djabanti, ignoring him to help a woman dressed in Moreyao silks. Oluwani commoners, who had found cramped shelter behind upended chairs and tables, hissed away people from Nontes and Dhyrma seeking refuge. As the cannon fire stopped, the beasts wheeled overhead, and then dove.

I shrieked, adrenaline coursing through my veins as talons scooped up bodies and sunk into backs. Blood soaked through festival robes. I choked back bile, then spotted a small figure crouched beneath a stone table, flower crown drooping over eyes like forlorn moons.

Ye Eun.

“Leave me and find shelter,” Dayo hollered at our council, and then pointed at the mask on his chest. “For Am’s sake, I can’t die, remember? Protect yourselves!”

It was enough to break my trance. Pulling out of formation, I dove across the hellscape of bodies, beasts, and flies to join Ye Eun beneath her table. I pressed an arm around her trembling shoulders, and used the other to brandish my spear.

“It’s all right,” I rasped, trying to shield her from view of the Underworld beasts. “Don’t worry. We’re getting out of here.”

She did not move, limbs turned to stone as she watched a beast rip a man to pieces.

She said, “It’s because of me, isn’t it?”

“No,” I lied, gritting my teeth against the unfairness of it all. “Don’t think that, Ye Eun.”

Her tear-stained, intelligent features fixed slowly on mine. “You’re right,” she whispered. “None of this is my fault. It’s yours.”

My heart missed a beat.

“You were supposed to stop it.” Her bottom lip trembled, then hardened. “The Redemptors believed in you. You were supposed to change everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s no such thing as heroes, is there?” The girl spoke tonelessly to herself. She watched the teeming battleground, all at once, looking four times her years: innocence lost in the space of a breath. “Outcasts only have ourselves.”

Then she wrenched my arm off her shoulders and sprinted from beneath the table.

“Don’t—” I grabbed for her and missed, heart pounding with dread. “No. No. Ye Eun—”

But she had already cleared the length of the chamber, standing over the yawning blue mouth. The force of the miasma blew her hair around her face as she balled her small hands into fists. She looked back only once—a reproachful stare that shook my bones—before closing her eyes and stepping over the ledge.

The temple went quiet. A cry echoed across the stone, and I would later realize it was mine. The abiku beasts had vanished. The debt was satiated.

Afternoon light shone on the limestone with terrible serenity, and over tiles strewed with corpses. I crossed the chamber, moving as though through water to the Breach’s edge, deaf to the yells of my council siblings.

My chest racked with sobs as I crumpled in a pile of petals. Ye Eun’s lily-of-the-valley crown remained at the lip of the Breach. The buds, barely opened, lay soiled in pieces.

SIX MONTHS PASSED.

The freedom of Yorua Keep paralyzed me at first. The old fortress, located on a perennially sunny cliff at the coastal tip of Oluwan, had no trials or testmakers. No drums to make us dance from prayers to meals to lessons. No painted facades, hiding eyes that watched our every failing. Strangely, I missed those eyes. In the weeks after the disaster at Ebujo, freedom had lost its romance for my council.

We crept through the airy, salt-scented halls of Yorua Keep in a whispering huddle, ghosts of our own castle. Shyly, we asked for schedules from our new servants: peasants from the village below our cliff, along with a chef and steward from the palace.

“When should we report to dinner?” Dayo asked the head steward.

The man blinked in confusion. “Your council … reports … to no one, Your Imperial Highness. Meals are at the times you schedule them to be.”

And so week by week, the ghosts of Ebujo began to fade, making way for the numbing addiction of running our own household. Our council reserved mornings for prayer and meditation, and then trained on the beach, conducting drills on sand shaded by palm trees. We bathed in the sea and returned to lunches of roasted fish and palm wine. Then we scattered to our favorite crannies of the keep—always in pairs, to stave off council sickness. We studied for hours, anxious to practice the imperial roles we would someday fill.

Ai Ling and Umansa usually took to the fortress turrets. She yelled diplomacy speeches at the clouds while he wove tapestries on his loom, charting prophetic constellations that only his sightless eyes could see. In the courtyard far below, Kameron kept a caterwauling menagerie, treating beasts for rare diseases as Mayazatyl drew diagrams for weapons and defense towers in the dirt beside him. Thérèse tended her sprawling orchard while Theo plucked chords on his zither, coaxing her plants to grow with griot stories and love poems. Emeronya and Zathulu sealed themselves in one of the keep’s dusty studies, murmuring over scrying glasses and essays by budding Imperial Academy scholars.

I spent most of my days on a shady balcony with Kirah, fretting over my court cases, while she scowled at her theology scrolls. To my disappointment, Sanjeet was often called away, and Dayo joined him, leaving the keep to lead the Imperial Guard on its peace campaigns. When Dayo was home, he had the formidable task of learning all our disciplines. He shadowed us for hours, taking voracious notes during the day and informing his father of his progress with long, formal letters at night. I began to wonder if he ever truly slept. Then again, none of us slept well after Ebujo.

Our favorite distraction came once a month, when peddlers were permitted in the heavily guarded keep courtyard. A glut of luxuries—embroidered wrappers, jewel-studded bangles, roasted kola nuts, and pots of flavored cream—were spread before us in a maze of stalls and blankets. The miniature market was for council members only, and musicians and tumblers entertained us as we shopped and made sizable dents in our generous imperial allowance.