Chapter 6

The forest did not care that Ekaladerhan had died.

It offered no opening for the son of an Ogiso. Branches struck his face. Wet roots turned beneath his feet. Thorns found the strip of formal cloth he had used around his shoulder and pulled until the knot slipped loose again.

He stopped beneath a tree and tried to retie it with one hand.

The other hand had begun to shake.

“Press above it,” the Senior Executioner had said.

The advice returned in the man’s voice, practical and almost kind. That offended Ekaladerhan more than the blade. A person should not be allowed to send you into darkness and remain useful inside your head.

He trapped one end of the cloth against the tree with his back, dragged the other around his chest and pulled. Pain opened beneath his shoulder. His knees softened. For several breaths he leaned against the bark and watched rainwater carry thin red lines down his ribs.

Animal blood still dried along his cheek.

He wiped it away and smelled the iron on his hand. There was no way to know where the false blood ended and his began. The court would not need to know. It would receive a blade, cloth, fastening and cord. Four objects agreeing because three frightened men had arranged them close together.

His father would ask whether the order had been completed.

Perhaps he would ask how.

Ekaladerhan tried to imagine Owodo demanding the body. The picture would not hold. Every time his father approached the empty place on the record floor, the king inside him found a procedural reason to stop.

He pushed away from the tree.

West.

The executioners had repeated it as though direction could become mercy if spoken firmly enough.

He walked until the darkness changed colour. Not dawn yet—only black thinning into the grey that allowed one danger to separate from another. He learned that pain had distances. The wound at his shoulder was close and bright. The blow behind his ear lived farther away, a slow pressure moving through his skull. Hunger was still beyond both. Thirst surrounded them.

Once, he heard a signal from the east and turned before remembering he was the man it announced dead.

The movement dropped him to one knee.

Mud entered the cut on his palm where the rope had rubbed through skin. He stared at his hand. It looked borrowed: trembling fingers, earth packed beneath the nails, blood drying in the creases. The hand had settled grain disputes, opened royal stores and pointed workers toward blocked drains. It had made rooms quiet merely by lifting.

Here it could not persuade his body to rise.

He laughed once. The sound frightened something small into the leaves.

“When you sit where I sit,” his father had told him, “you will discover how brave you were beside it.”

Ekaladerhan put his palm against the earth and stood.

“When you sit where I sit,” he said aloud, because anger could carry what blood could not.

There was no throne to answer.

By morning the rain had stopped, but water continued falling from the canopy in fat, delayed drops. The forest smelled washed without becoming clean. Rot sweetened the air beneath living leaves. Insects worked everywhere, invisible and confident.

He began to hear water.

At first he distrusted it. The sound might have been blood moving inside his damaged ear. He turned his head. The water remained.

He followed it downhill.

The stream was narrow and clear enough to reveal pale stones at the bottom. A leaf travelled across its surface, caught in a small turning current, escaped and continued. No mud. No smell. Nothing dead floating near the bank.

The Senior had said not to drink from still water.

This moved.

Ekaladerhan knelt too quickly and almost fell face-first into it. He caught himself on both hands. The injured shoulder answered with white pain that emptied the forest of sound.

Then sound returned all at once.

He lowered his mouth to the stream.

The first swallow hurt his teeth. The second reached his stomach and made his whole body demand more. He drank without lifting his head, one hand sinking into soft earth at the edge. Water ran over his lips and into his nose. He coughed, swallowed the cough, drank again.

“You already drank it,” a child said.

Ekaladerhan turned.

A girl stood between two trees. Eleven, perhaps. Thin without looking starved. A small carrying cord crossed her chest, and fresh-cut marks darkened the wood in her hand. She watched him with the grave disappointment of someone who had arrived too late to prevent stupidity.

He wiped his mouth. “I will not hurt you.”

“You already drank it.”

“Was I not supposed to?”

“Not that water.”

He looked at the stream. “It is moving.”

“So are you.”

Before he could ask her name, she disappeared behind the trees.

He waited for laughter. None came.

The water remained clear.

His stomach tightened.

At first it was only a warning, a small hard turn beneath the ribs. Then the stream seemed to lean sideways. Ekaladerhan placed one hand on the ground until it steadied.

He needed to leave before the girl returned with adults. That thought survived for perhaps twenty steps.

Heat rose through him despite the wet cloth against his body. His mouth filled with saliva. He bent beside a tree and vomited the water in three violent contractions. Nothing solid came with it. His empty stomach kept trying.

When it stopped, he remained folded over, forehead against bark.

The tree was cool. He loved it for that and hated himself for needing love from wood.

He saw Ometo threading a needle.

Not a memory at first. She sat somehow on the other side of the tree, repairing the garment he had torn at the drainage stone. Her eyes remained on the cloth.

“That is skin,” he told her.

“Then stop putting your skin where cloth should be.”

He tried to smile. His lips felt too large.

“You sent me wearing it.”

Ometo pulled the thread through. “You left wearing it.”

“Did you know?”

The needle paused.

He waited for the answer until he realized he was alone.

The forest had begun to breathe with his mother’s rhythm.

He walked away from the tree because remaining beside it would make the vision return, and some part of him feared what she might say next.

His feet stopped lifting properly. Leaves gathered against his toes. Once he stepped over a low root and discovered, after falling, that his body had not stepped at all.

He lay on his back.

High above, branches divided the sky into small pieces. The palace had taught him to read courtyards: which wall held afternoon heat, where rain collected, how footsteps carried through timber passages. He could not read this roof. Every leaf seemed placed without permission. Every opening moved.

The last time fever had put him on his back, he had been eight years old.

He remembered the ceiling of Ometo’s room, smoke-darkened above the lamp. Women had moved in and out carrying water. Somebody kept replacing a wet cloth on his chest. He had called for his father once, quietly, because even then he understood that an heir was not supposed to need a king in the ordinary way.

Owodo came after midnight.

He dismissed everyone except Ometo, then sat beside the sleeping mat without speaking. Ekaladerhan pretended to remain asleep. His father placed two fingers against his throat and counted. When the count displeased him, he began again, slower, as if the child’s blood might obey a more careful king.

Ometo had watched from the other side.

“You are frightening him,” she said.

“He is asleep.”

“He is your son. He knows when you are afraid.”

Owodo withdrew his fingers.

Ekaladerhan opened his eyes then, not because the fever permitted it but because his father needed to be caught caring. Owodo looked away first. He asked whether the healer had changed the broth. He asked how much water the boy had kept down. He asked every question except the one his hand had already asked at the throat.

Before leaving, he retied the cloth on Ekaladerhan’s chest. The knot was too tight. Ometo loosened it after the door closed.

For years Ekaladerhan had remembered only that his father came.

On the forest floor, he remembered that his father also left.

The memory did not become false because another part of it returned. That was the cruelty. Owodo had loved him. Owodo had sent him through the refuse gate. Both facts lay beside each other, refusing the kindness of cancellation.

He wondered whether the executioners had known the water would poison him. Perhaps “do not drink from still water” had been another sentence with a space inside it. Perhaps they had spared the blade and sent thirst to complete the work.

No. The Senior had told him where to press the wound. He had torn away the formal cloth so Ekaladerhan could move.

Mercy and murder could occupy the same hand. His father had proved that before the executioners did.

He rolled onto his side and forced himself upright.

The girl was watching again.

This time a man stood beside her.

The man carried a spear without ceremony. It was a tool maintained by use, the shaft dark where his palm knew it. He looked first at Ekaladerhan’s hands, then the wound, then the direction behind him.

“If you are following me,” Ekaladerhan said, “you are doing it badly.”

The girl looked at the man. “He speaks like that even when he is dying.”

“Then he has practised.”

Ekaladerhan tried to stand straighter.

The ground snapped around his ankle.

A cord pulled tight. His foot flew upward and the rest of him dropped. At the same moment a sharpened stake swung from the leaves and passed close enough for displaced air to touch his face.

He hung partly twisted, one shoulder against the ground, the trapped leg dragged toward a bent sapling. Pain drove a sound out of him before pride could stop it.

The man lowered his spear point.

“If you were meat,” he said, “we would be disappointed.”

“He drank from the bitter stream,” the girl said.

“Then we may not have to kill him.”

Ekaladerhan tried to reach the cord. His fingers found nothing useful.

“Who are you?”

“The man asking questions.”

“You have not asked one.”

“I am waiting to see whether you survive the answer you drank.”

The girl’s eyes moved to the cloth beneath Ekaladerhan’s shoulder. Animal blood had dried almost black across the better repair. His own blood remained wet beneath it.

She stepped closer.

“Somebody tried to kill him,” she said.

“Many people arrive looking that way.”

“Somebody also tried to save him.”

The man looked at the bad knot Ekaladerhan had tied around the wound.

“Not the same person.”

Ekaladerhan wanted to correct him. He wanted to say there had been three men and every hand had crossed the others: one bringing blood, one moving the blade, one striking him down, all three making room where his father had left it. He wanted to explain that the neat division between killer and saviour belonged to people who had never received mercy from frightened men.

His tongue would not shape the first word.

The man cut the snare.

Ekaladerhan hit the ground fully. The sky broke into white pieces.

Hands turned him. The girl’s small fingers came near his neck, feeling for something. He tried to tell her not to touch the fastening hidden beneath the blood. Ometo had repaired it. The court had another. Both could not be true in the same world, and he was suddenly terrified that this child would choose the wrong one and make it permanent.

“Name?” the man asked.

Ekaladerhan heard his father’s voice answering from the western gate.

Royal-household business.

He heard the ceremonial signal announcing a death. He heard Ometo saying he was still too clean. He heard three executioners repeat an order until the hesitation disappeared.

His name rose inside him.

It had once opened gates.

Now it might bring the palace through them.

“A man,” he managed.

The girl frowned. “That is not a name.”

“It has to be enough.”

The man studied him for one more breath.

Then he looked toward the hidden settlement and made a decision Ekaladerhan could not hear.

The last thing the dead prince saw was a stranger deciding whether death had jurisdiction there.