What kind of treaty would end this tiny story, would snuff the light of her soul, after ten short years? What kind of peace cost a life that had barely begun?

A shadow filled the door, and Ye Eun reclaimed Ae Ri as Woo In stalked heavily into the room, clutching his freshly bandaged side.

“I checked her for wounds, like you said,” Ye Eun reported. “She’s sick, but clean.” Then she turned to leave.

“Wait,” I called out, not ready for Ye Eun to be gone. For so long, I had thought she was dead. It didn’t matter that she hated me; she was alive—gloriously, vindictively alive. When she stopped, I stammered, “What was your emi-ehran in the Underworld? Was it a leopard, like Woo In’s?”

“No,” she said after a pause. “Mine is a phoenix.”

“I’m not surprised.”

The hint of a smile played with her mouth. “I named her Hwanghu,” she said quietly. “Empress.” Then she vanished from the room.

Woo In dropped a bundle of clothes at my feet. “Change into these. The journey will be short.” His half-moon eyes were wan; he had passed a restless night. He was sweating with fever, and it was likely his head pounded as mine did. I felt no pity. The Lady’s bloodied face still glistened in my mind.

Before leaving me he said, “Summon the Ray. You can’t reach your council from this far, but it helps the headache when you try.”

I obeyed him, letting heat build at the base of my neck, and sending an invisible beam of light in what I guessed was Oluwan’s direction. The light faded and grew cold when met with emptiness. But Woo In had been right—the pain, for now, was no longer unbearable.

The garments were made of wax-dyed cloth, seeping with spice-scented memories of Oluwan, where Woo In must have bought them. He had brought boots for me as well, and a cloak—blue like his, cut from warm wool.

I dressed and passed into the house’s main chamber, seeing what I’d missed the night before. Diagrams of beasts and Underworld passages hung around the room, and chalk slates cramped with Songlander script lay abandoned on cushions. A schoolroom. On the longest wall, a map of the continent stretched from end to end, lodestones marked meticulously in each realm.

Woo In and I left the camp on Hyung’s back, and soon crested one of the pine-covered steppes. After an hour, we stopped at a curved crevice in the rock face, tall and narrow, like a cat’s eye. The glistening blue veins that ran throughout Sagimsan seemed to meet here, joining to form lightning bolts across the mountain floor. Energy pulsed through the cold air, and when we dismounted, it hummed through me as well, exploring my body with relentless curiosity. The emi-ehran arched its back, its whiskers on edge.

What kind of place could unnerve a beast who had seen the Underworld?

“Hyung will wait outside,” Woo In said, then bent to pull off his worn leather boots, one by one. “I would advise you do the same,” he said, nodding at my feet.

“Why?”

“It’s a way of showing respect.”

“Until you explain what this is, I’m not going anywhere.”

Woo In shot a tense glance at the crevice opening. “I’m not supposed to show you this place. Its location is known only to the Songlander royal family. But …” He let out a slow breath. “There’s a story hidden deep in the mountain. It explains the Redemptors and Songland’s curse. But it’s spelled, so only certain bloodlines understand. According to the shamans, the Kunleos are one of them. So when The Lady came to Songland sixteen years ago, asking for aid with her coup … I brought her here. She read the story, but wouldn’t tell me what it said. She said it was dangerous. She told me to trust her, and I did.” His face hardened, then softened with desperation. “I need to know what’s in there, Lady’s Daughter. Please, we don’t have much time. The Treaty Renewal is tomorrow night.”

“You’ve never said my name before.” I frowned, feeling strangely awake in that air, as though I’d been sleepwalking for months. “Do you know that? She’s part of me, Woo In, but we aren’t the same person. And we never will be.”

He blinked, processing this, then nodded slowly and reached for my hand. “Please, Tarisai.”

I let his fingers close around mine. Together, we slipped through the crevice, and descended into the heart of Sagimsan mountain.

THERE WAS NO NEED FOR A TORCH. Translucent bolts of blue rock glowed from within the tunnel walls, and we moved as with a current, energy coursing in one direction as we climbed down, down, down.

We stopped in the mouth of a round stone chamber. The ceiling glittered with paintings of pelicans, halos radiating from their lifted wings. The floor was painted with the same symbol from the Oluwan Imperial Library, and from Aiyetoro’s drum: two overlapping suns, bordered by a circle of linking hands.

My breath floundered. It was like the air had disappeared, and I inhaled nothing now but pure blue energy, thrumming through my temples. At the other end of the chamber, thousands of bright glyphs covered the wall.

“The heart of Sagimsan,” Woo In explained. “Every blue vein you’ve seen in the mountain finds its source in this room. I can’t read that wall. But you can.”

“How?” I crept toward the wall, squinting at script so complex, it made my eyes cross. “I don’t understand.” But the words began to murmur, whispers that wrapped around me in a seductive lullaby. My hand rose, as though possessed, and I pressed my fingers to the wall.

The script jumbled in dizzying patterns—and then it shot from the wall in a beam. I gasped as the glyphs covered my body, clinging to my skin like running water. I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, the symbols had vanished … and instead, four words glowed on the wall.

WELCOME HEIR OF WURAOLA

“Focus,” I heard Woo In yell, as though from a great distance. “Listen.”

His voice grew mute as another filled my ears: a deep, lovely roar, like the voice of a fathomless ocean. It was not old or young, neither male nor female. But I knew, without seeing its face, that this power could unmake me with a single word.

Tarisai.

I fell trembling to the ground.

Do not fear me.

“Shouldn’t I?” I whispered, my back against the cold floor. “You’re …” My breath caught while I tried to wrap my mind around the impossible. But I knew it in my bones. “You’re the Storyteller.”

A considering pause.

I am a memory of the Storyteller, it replied. Confined to rock, for when I am needed. You have ears. Will you open them?

I nodded dumbly.

Then you shall hear, Heir of Wuraola.

The chamber fell away. Part of me knew I still lay within the energy-charged mountain, my body still as death as Woo In hovered, anxiously waving a hand in front of my open, unseeing eyes. But the other part of me hurled through a sea of images, smells, voices. I soared over a patchwork of realms: cities rising, falling, evolving as though I were riding on time itself.

Several thousand moons ago, the ocean-voice said, a brother and sister, both warriors, watched their homeland being torn to pieces. Monsters rose from the deep, and contagions spread their fingers, and island turned on island. Enoba was brave, but Wuraola was wise. She saw how division weakened humans against the abiku. When she told Enoba, he enslaved an alagbato, demanding the power to unite twelve realms.

I was back in the Swana savannah. I watched from above like a star, as a broad-backed warrior approached a dewy-faced alagbato: Melu, five hundred years younger. The immortal slept peacefully by his pool, shimmering wings tucked around his smooth, long limbs. With catlike dexterity, the warrior snapped an emerald cuff onto the alagbato’s arm.

Familiarity chilled my spine. Through this story, I realized, The Lady had learned how to enslave Melu.

For Enoba’s first wish, he asked the alagbato to grow land across the oceans, uniting the islands so they could be ruled as one. The alagbato-turned-ehru said, “It is done—” and for miles, earth covered the waters. Enoba was satisfied, and crossed his new continent with a formidable army. But lands so vast could not be conquered by Enoba’s spear alone, and so Wuraola used her words to win the hearts and minds of the people.

Still, the brother and sister were unsure of victory against the abiku. Enoba returned to the ehru, and asked his second boon: the power to rule an empire for eternity. For this gift, the ehru climbed to the heavens and stole two rays from the blazing sun.

“No man escapes old age,” warned the ehru. “But for every heart moved by your Ray, one facet of death’s blade may not touch you. Your heirs shall be even more powerful, for they shall possess one immunity at birth. Take this Ray, and give the other to your sister and equal, for no being was made to rule alone.”

But Enoba, seeing the nations his spear had won, said, “I have no equal,” and devoured both Rays himself.

Melu’s savannah vanished, and again, time whirled past me in a blur of color: forests razed, villages born, cities rising, rulers crowned.