Prologue

“Liar! Liar!”

“Whore!”

“Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!”

The crowd’s words battered her as she tried to wake from what had to be a nightmare. But the moon-cooled earth beneath her knees was real. She had watched this ritual before and never imagined herself at the blade’s edge. From the crowd, an execution had looked like ceremony. From the block, it was only terror.

“We bring before you a liar, a whore, and she is not even one of us; she is a slave! What shall we do with her?” The Executioner raised his machete in the air.

“Kill her! Kill her!” The crowd echoed.

The Little Girl tried to speak, but the gag held a heated stone against her tongue. Only a whimper escaped. Her eyes pleaded with a crowd that had already decided not to read them.

“Whore!” a man screamed from the crowd before throwing a rock that connected with her forehead, causing her head to jerk backwards.

By then she was too frail to fight. Her body was weak, her spirit broken. She felt both numb and heavy at the same time. Her hearing deafened with a buzzing sound and her vision blurred to complete obscurity as the Executioner read the charges against her for the first time. Before he could finish, the crowd went wild cheering even harder for her head. Then as he was about to swing, she raised her head for one last time. In that moment she experienced a glimpse of clarity. At first she could only see the hate-filled eyes and hear the bloodthirsty screams. Then a strange silence greeted her ears, and rather than looking at them, she was looking past them.

Some faces were familiar. The tomato seller who always saved the firmest fruit for her. The raft paddler who once carried her across the river for free. The palm-wine tapper who called every child his own. Familiarity had not made them merciful. It had only made their cruelty intimate. In the Old King’s court, nobody from the square had heard her case. Here, nobody asked to. Her mother used to say that miserable people sometimes borrowed relief from another person’s pain. The Little Girl had never understood. Now she understood with her neck against wood.

No one had come to hear the truth. They had come for the instant in which another person’s ruin might make their own lives feel bearable. Before the blade fell, she found one little boy in the crowd who was not cheering. When their eyes met, he lowered his head. Fear, weakness, shame—she would never know which.

Then the machete came down.

Her head struck the earth with a soft, final thud. For one suspended breath, even the crowd fell silent. Then the village roared.