Moon Witch, Spider King

Emini’s palace has become a place of lost memory—the King Sister doesn’t remember Commander Olu, for example—and Sogolon suspects the Aesi is the cause. She plots her escape.

One morning, Sogolon wakes to an overpowering stench. Outside the window, she sees the rotting body of the headwoman impaled on a stake. Sogolon sees something red in her hand—a key tied to a red ribbon. At the mention of it, Emini flees the room in fear. The key, Sogolon is told, is a death marker. It has come for the King Sister and anyone in her service. One night, as Sogolon prepares to escape, figures in white robes burst into her room, bind her, and take both her and Emini from the palace. They throw them in a pool and scrub their bodies. They drag them back to the palace and dress them in white robes—white, “the color of nothing” (210). Emini struggles, but when the white robes threaten to cut out her tongue, she submits.

Having banished his sister to a nunnery, Kwash Moki refuses to visit her. Forced into submission, Sogolon and Emini both must defer to the king’s sons, who mock them cruelly. They hunt Sogolon for sport until Keme defends her. He offers her a dagger for protection, but she refuses his help, calling him a coward for serving the king. She wants to escape, but he claims it’s out of his hands. A powerful wind suddenly lifts him off the ground and holds him in the air. She gains control of it, bringing him gently back. “Don’t touch me witch” (217), he barks at her. That night, Keme leaves a gift on her windowsill—the dagger, its blade hidden inside an ivory handle.

The next morning, Sogolon and Emini are ordered into a caravan that will take them to Mantha, an ancient mountain fortress. Along the road, they pass hordes of bodies, all impaled, rotting in the sun. Sogolon asks again about Commander Olu—rumor has it that he was Emini’s lover—but she still has no memory of him. Sogolon suspects the Aesi has erased Olu and Jeleza from Emini’s memory. She quizzes Emini about past events, but Emini’s memories are vague. Later, the caravan stops, and one of the white robes—the “divine sisters”—orders Emini and Sogolon to bathe. Emini claims she’s menstruating, which makes her “impure.”

The caravan presses forward, and Emini beckons to Sogolon to show her a secret. She begins to disrobe, and Sogolon realizes that the long fabric wrapped around the King Sister’s torso is actually a scroll, a parchment covered in numbers, runes, and drawings of an imagined city. Sogolon asks what it all means, and Emini replies: “The future. A future. A dream. I don’t know” (226).

The caravan stops for the night. When everyone is asleep, Sogolon slips out of the wagon and flees into a forest. Running in the darkness, she stumbles and falls into nothingness, but the air keeps her afloat until it drops her to the ground, unharmed. She has no destination, and she fears wild animals may be stalking her. At dawn, she finds her way back to the caravan.

She wakes up to flames and smoke, a fire consuming the wagon. She tries to escape and trips over the burnt body of Emini. At the front of the wagon sits the Sangomin she saw in the palace, the boy of light and fire. A wind whips up, flings the boy into the air, and drops him to the ground. With each attack, Sogolon’s wind beats the boy back, eventually slamming him repeatedly to the ground until he dies. Just then, another creature pounces on her, strangling her. She finds the dagger hidden in her sleeve and stabs the creature through the throat. The Sangomin and the white robes battle, but the sisters are on the losing end. Sogolon can do nothing but run. She tumbles down a hillside into an open field, where the spider-child, in pursuit, seizes her and drags her back to the others. They try to kill her, but the wind comes to her defense once again, shielding her and flinging her attackers away. At last, her rage gets the better of her, and her power erupts in a massive burst.

Sogolon awakens, buried alive. She claws her way up until she emerges from a hole, choking on dirt. She stands at the bottom of a vast crater, and at the surface, she sees the caravan, the bodies of the divine sisters, and the Sangomin, all dead and mutilated. She collapses, awakening again at dusk. She wraps herself in a dead sister’s cloak for warmth. As she wanders the devastated landscape, she realizes that all this power—the wind, the “mighty thing” that created the crater—came from her. After a few days of gathering the few supplies she can, she sets off.

With no clear idea where to go, she climbs through the mountains. Her power helps her when she needs it, but it is still out of her control. As she wanders, lost in the mountains, she tries to understand and master the power. Eventually, she finds snow—and some ancient ruins—where she decides to rest for a while. During the night, she is attacked by a wild animal, but her power blows the beast to pieces. The next morning, she hears riders—a contingent of soldiers from Fasisi. She surmises they are searching for any survivors of the caravan, witnesses to link the murder of the King Sister to the king. Sogolon tries to hide, but a soldier finds her and drags her to his commanding officer—Keme—but he doesn’t remember her. Having come across the decimated ruins of the caravan, Sogolon appears to be the only eyewitness. She denies knowing anything, but the soldiers are suspicious of her because she survived alone in the wilderness unscathed, and Keme orders her to be taken back to Fasisi.