The Devil Wears Gold

CHAPTER SEVEN

— Adaeze's POV —

My rooms are in the eastern wing.

The eastern wing of the Onicha Palace is where the Eze Ogo keep what is private, not hidden, but not displayed. No foreign dignitaries are housed here, no visiting lords, no petitioners. The corridors are quieter than the main palace, the floors swept twice daily by women who move without speaking, and the windows face the inner garden where the oji oma flowers open only after dark and fill the night air with something that smells like grief and sweetness in equal measure.

My apartment is four rooms: a sleeping chamber, a bathing room, a parlour, a dressing room. All of them appointed with the careful abundance of a palace that understands that comfort and captivity can be made indistinguishable if you furnish them the same.

I learn this on the first day and say nothing.

I spend the first day mapping.

The rules come from Mama Ngozi, delivered on the second morning with the gentle authority of a woman who has been managing this wing since before I was born.

The Eze Ugo's chambers are in the northern tower. I will not be expected there. He will not come to the eastern wing except on specific formal occasions, of which Mama Ngozi will always give advance notice. Meals are taken separately. I in my parlour, he wherever the Iron Duke takes his meals, which Mama Ngozi implies is unknowable and perhaps unknowable by design. If I require anything, food, cloth, books, a physician. I ask through her. I do not petition the Duke directly.

I do not petition the Duke directly.

She says it a second time. Gently. The way you repeat a thing to a child that you love and do not fully trust to hear you.

I nod. I thank her. I pour us both tea from the clay pot on the low table between us and wait until she is settled before I ask my first question.

"How many women has he had in these rooms before me?"

Mama Ngozi's cup stops halfway to her mouth. She sets it down with precision.

"None," she says.

I wait.

"The eastern wing has not been occupied in eleven years. Since the Eze Ugo's mother passed." She looks at me steadily. "You are the first woman he has brought to this palace, nwa. In any capacity."

I think about this for a long time after she leaves.

On the third day, I begin to explore.

The palace women warned me about the northern corridor, the one that runs behind the throne room and connects, eventually, to the Duke's tower. They did not say do not go there. They said it with their eyes, the way women warn each other of things that cannot be said plainly, a glance, a slight shift of the body, a meaningful pause in a sentence that is technically about something else entirely.

I go there on the fourth morning, early, before the household fully wakes.

The corridor is exactly as austere as the rest of his architecture. Dark stone, high windows, the serpent crest carved at every junction. No softness anywhere. Nothing that was put here for any reason other than function. I am thinking about what that means, about a man who has stripped his own space of comfort so completely that it cannot be taken from him, when I hear them.

Voices. From a room I cannot see, a chamber set into the corridor's eastern wall, its door not fully closed. Two men, speaking with the low urgency of a conversation that has been going on for a while and has arrived somewhere neither of them expected.

"The Northern Lords are testing you, Ugo." A voice I don't recognise, older, graveled. "Three weeks without tribute. They are watching to see if the marriage has made you..."

A pause.

"Soft." Ezegachi's voice. And I go completely still, because I have not heard it since the ceremony, three words in a throne room, eight syllables, and then nothing and my body responds to it before my mind has a chance to make a decision about how that is supposed to feel. "Say it."

"Soft," the older voice concedes. "They think a wife is a weakness."

Silence. And then Ezegachi says, in a voice so quiet it barely qualifies as sound

"Let them."

More silence. The kind that means something has been settled.

I press my back to the wall and breathe through my nose until I am certain my footsteps will not betray me, and then I walk back the way I came. Quietly. My mother's feet. I do not hurry, because hurrying implies guilt, and I have done nothing that requires guilt.

I have only learned that my husband has permitted his enemies to believe I am his weakness.

I turn that over in my mind all the way back to the eastern wing.

Let them, he said. And I cannot decide if that means he is using me as bait, or if it means something else, something that requires me to rethink the architecture of this marriage entirely.

Mama Ngozi is waiting in my parlour with breakfast and the expression of a woman who knows exactly where I have been.

She pours my tea without comment.

I drink it.

"Mama Ngozi," I say, after a while.

"Nwa."

"Does he know I was there?"

She considers her tea. "He knew before you reached the northern corridor." A pause. "He let you listen."

I set down my cup very carefully and looked at the door and thought, this is not a man who makes mistakes. Which means everything he has allowed me to see, he intended for me to see. Which means I am not exploring this palace. I am being shown it. The question I could not answer, the one that would keep me awake until the oji-oma closed at dawn, was why?