“Old habits, Lady’s Daughter.” Woo In bowed. “Shall we?”

Sanjeet bristled, but I only sighed. I didn’t feel like going anywhere with Woo In, but I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. He was too loyal to The Lady for that. Still, I crossed my arms at him. “Why would you want to help break my curse? Don’t you want Dayo dead?”

“I never wanted anyone dead,” Woo In said. “I just wanted The Lady crowned so she could save the Redemptors. But I have long felt …” He rubbed the bruise on his cheek and shot a furtive glance at Kirah. “More suffering is not the answer. There must be another way to crown The Lady.”

“We could exile Prince Ekundayo instead of killing him,” Kathleen suggested brightly. “Off to some island where he can never threaten The Lady’s claim—”

“Dayo’s not going to an island,” Kirah snapped at her. “Once we find Aiyetoro’s masks, Dayo and Tar can rule together. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

I sputtered with exasperation. “Can we forget about my supposed Ray for a second and focus on protecting Dayo?”

Kirah ignored me, narrowing her eyes at Woo In and Kathleen. “You’re the ones who gave Tarisai that drum. So you have access to Aiyetoro’s possessions. Where do you think the masks are?”

“If we knew where to find Aiyetoro’s masks,” Kathleen replied, “then we would be breaking The Lady out of prison right now, not babysitting you in this backwater savannah. The empress and princess masks are the only remaining proof of The Lady’s right to rule. She has spent decades searching, and has never come closer to finding them.”

“What about the drum?” I asked.

“The Lady stole it from the palace as a child. When she found out that you had erased your memories, she made us deliver the drum to you in Ebujo, hoping your shared lineage with Aiyetoro would awaken your true identity. Clearly,” she added dryly, “it didn’t work.”

“We’ll help you search Bhekina House,” Woo In told me. “The Lady stored most of her records there. She likely has leads on where to look for the masks.”

I frowned. “If she did, wouldn’t she have told you?”

Woo In and Kathleen exchanged an uneasy look.

“The Lady told us what we needed to know for the tasks we were assigned,” Kathleen said at last, her tone defensive. “Not all Raybearers are as naive as your prince, spilling secrets left and right. The Lady likes her privacy.”

The insult to Dayo angered me, but the feeling melted to pity. Kathleen and Woo In had given their lives to my mother, and still she held them at a distance. Where they could not hurt her, I realized. As her brother had, as the world had. I pitied The Lady too.

We turned toward the shimmering red rooftops of Bhekina House. The compound was smaller than I remembered. As a child, the palisade gates had towered over my head, an impossible-to-cross barrier to the whole world.

“Is anyone still living here?” I asked, my lungs constricting.

“The Lady dismissed most of her servants after sending you to the capital,” Kathleen replied. “But some of your tutors were my anointed siblings. They’re traveling to Songland as we speak, hoping to convince Queen Hye Sun’s army to break The Lady out of An-Ileyoba. A few servants still live here to open the gate and look after the chickens. But the compound never needed farmhands.” Kathleen looked unsettled. “The orchard has always cared for itself.”

The perfume of mangoes washed over me as Woo In called a password, and the palisade gates creaked open. A rheumy-eyed guard peered at us, then gasped when he recognized my features.

“She is not here,” he wailed. “The Lady is gone, gone.” Wrinkled, leathery skin covered his arms as he operated the heavy gate crank. I recognized him. The man had guarded the gate when I small. He had been just as old then as he was now. How could such a frail man survive for so long? Then again …

How could an orchard of mangoes bloom year-round with no one to care for them?

“What are you looking at?” Kirah asked me, squinting up at the guard, and I realized that she and Sanjeet could not see or hear him. They could not sense the towering gates, or even smell the ripe orchard yards away.

I shivered, bid them goodbye, and entered the compound with Woo In and Kathleen. When I turned back to wave, Sanjeet and Kirah stared straight through me, looking unnerved, as though I had vanished into thin air.

The courtyard, manor, huts, and fruit trees of Bhekina House were eerily still. The heat of Melu’s enchantment seeped through every wax-coated leaf, every brick and cobblestone. How could I not have noticed, before, how the walls hummed quietly with power? This place had once seemed so ordinary. Then again … it had been all I’d known.

I remembered Melu’s words about Bhekina House: The magic of that place is not easy on one’s mind. I pitied my former tutors and servants. No wonder they had been so stiff and paranoid. It was a mercy they had not gone mad.

We passed through the manor’s smooth plaster halls, searching for clues about Aiyetoro. “This house felt like a prison,” I murmured, “but it’s still beautiful. I wonder why The Lady didn’t stay here.”

Woo In was quiet for a moment. “She did,” he said.

Kathleen shot him a warning look, and I shook my head.

“She would vanish for months,” I countered. “I would lie awake at night, wondering where she was. Wondering—” I swallowed. “Why she never missed me as much as I missed her.”

Kathleen nudged Woo In, scowling, but he pushed her away. “She deserves to know,” he told her, and turned back to me. “The Lady watched you to the point of obsession. She did leave a few times, to anoint more council members. But she always came straight back. She took notes on your first steps. Your first words. Your progress in all your lessons.”

I snorted. “A few times?” Woo In’s adoration of The Lady must have mottled his memories. I had been lucky to see my mother more than once a year.

Woo In winced. “I … did not always agree with The Lady’s methods regarding your upbringing,” he muttered. “But I’m sure she wanted the best for you. For all of us.”

My forehead wrinkled with doubt.

“Come,” he said. “There is something you should see.” We climbed a staircase carved into the plaster, and my heart pounded with recognition. Before us hung the thick, embroidered door flaps of my old study.

“I can’t go in there,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because—” I bit my lip. Because in that room, I hadn’t been one of Aritsar’s anointed. I hadn’t been the wuraola who commanded tutsu, or even the friend in whom Sanjeet and Kirah put their trust.

In that room, I had been an ehru. The Lady had been all I knew of love, and I would have killed for her. I had always been her puppet, even before she bound me with a wish.

“I tried to scrub them off, you know,” Woo In said then.

“What?”

“The maps,” he explained. “After I escaped the Underworld, I covered my skin with clay. Dressed in layers up to my chin. But I was always checking under my clothes. Fearing that the lines had grown. Hoping that they had faded. I checked so often, it became easier just to dress like this.” He gestured to his bare, pattern-covered chest. “I saw my past in the mirror every day. I grew accustomed to it. And then—” He drew aside the heavy door flaps. “I stopped being afraid.”

I hesitated, then passed into the dim room. The smell of musty scrolls washed over me. Dust motes twinkled in sharp slats of light, which fell from boarded-up windows. My tutors had shut them so I would not hear the songs of other children. I could still feel the splinters in my hands, the arms gripping my waist, restraining me as I tried to rip the boards away.

“The Lady and the emperor have more in common than they think,” I murmured. “They’re both terrified by stories they can’t control.”

Kathleen sniffed. “The Lady only wants what’s best. For all of us.”

My old stepping stool lay on its side beneath a window, covered in spiderwebs. Just like when I was little, the long, high study table was piled with books and censored history papers. From its pedestal, the carving of The Lady still watched over the study, its onyx eyes gleaming. Woo In picked up the carving, blowing dust from the wooden crevices.

“Stop,” I stammered. “Be careful with that.”

He smiled and handed me the heavy bust. “Notice anything unusual?”

I squinted at the shapely face, so cold, and so like my own. I had studied beside the carving every day, and noticed nothing different about it now. Except—I held it to my ear and gasped quietly. “It hums,” I said. “Like the walls, and the orchard. I think it’s enchanted.”

Woo In took the carving back. “I’m guessing the servants didn’t let you touch it.”

“How did you know?”

He hesitated. “Because you would have taken its memories. You would have seen.” He beckoned, and I followed him to a narrow corridor I remembered as the entrance to the servants’ wing.

That place is very haunted, the servants had told me. Ghosts live there. Bad spirits, who take little girls away.