CHAPTER ONE
— Adaeze's POV —
I have learned to count the sounds of this house the way other girls count their blessings.
The creak of the third stair, Uncle Tunde's step, always heavy, always late. The rattle of the kitchen gate when Mama Efua locks it at nightfall. The particular silence that falls over the compound when something bad has already been decided and only I don't know it yet.
Tonight, the silence is of the third kind.
I know it the moment I open my eyes. The mosquito net hangs still above me. No wind. No crickets. Even the compound dogs have gone quiet, as if the night itself is holding its breath, waiting to see what I will do.
I lie there for three heartbeats. Four. Five.
Then I get up.
The corridor outside my room is dark, but I know this darkness. I was raised in it. Three years in my uncle's house have taught me where every shadow falls, which floorboard sings under pressure, which corners belong to the household spirits and should not be disturbed after midnight. My mother used to say I had her feet light, knowing, made for moving through the world without disturbing it.
Nne, I think. I'm sorry.
I press myself to the wall outside the parlour door and I listen.
Uncle Tunde's voice first. Low and satisfied, the way it only gets when he has won something.
"The bride price is settled. Thirty heads of cattle, the Owerri land, and the timber rights my brother was fool enough to put in the girl's name. All of it, returned to where it belongs."
A pause. The clink of palm wine cups.
Then a voice I don't recognize, older, thicker, a man who has learned to speak as though every word costs him nothing because he can afford to spend them all.
"And the girl herself? She is acceptable?"
"More than acceptable." Uncle Tunde's chair scrapes against the floor. I imagine him leaning forward, the way he does when he's selling something he knows is damaged. "She is quiet. Obedient. Her mother's looks and none of her mother's stubbornness. Chief, I promise you she will not trouble you."
I stop breathing.
Chief. Chief Emeka Eze. The name moves through me like cold water. A man I have seen twice once at the Eze in council, once at a funeral where he sat in the front row and watched the body with the expression of a man confirming an appointment. He is sixty-one years old. He has four wives. Three of them, the compound women whisper, did not survive their fifth year in his house.
I press my hand flat against the wall.
The plaster is cool. Steady. I concentrate on that.
"When?" the Chief asks.
"The new moon. Six days."
Six days.
Six days and I will be loaded into a convoy like timber, like cattle, like the land my father left me that Uncle Tunde has already spent. Six days and whatever small, invisible life I have managed to build inside the cracks of this house will be handed over to a man who watches bodies at funerals the way other men watch dancers at festivals with assessment, with appetite, with the certainty that he will have what he wants.
I push off the wall.
I go back to my room.
I sit on the edge of my mat and I stare at my hands my mother's hands, my father always said. Long fingered, careful, made for healing.
Ndo, I think. I'm sorry to both of them, the ones buried in red earth who trusted this family with the only thing they had left. I'm sorry.
But I am not going to Chief Eze's house.
I have nothing. Let me be honest about that, because the story deserves honesty even if my life has not always gotten it.
I have the wrapper I am wearing, dark indigo, old, the hem repaired three times with thread that doesn't quite match. I have the small pouch my mother sewed into the lining of my best blouse before she died, the one with the two iron coins and the folded piece of paper with her handwriting on it that I have never been able to open. I have my feet, my mother's feet, light and knowing.
I have the knowledge that the compound gate is left unlocked on the nights Uncle Tunde entertains, because his guests arrive late and leave later and the gateman, old Chukwu, falls asleep by the tenth hour without fail.
These are the things I have.
It is enough.
I move through the compound like water. Low, quiet, finding the path of least resistance. Past the kitchen. Past the boy's quarters where the household help sleep in rows. Past the udara tree my cousin Chisom and I used to climb as children, before she was married off to Enugu and stopped writing. Past the shrine in the corner where my uncle pours libation every morning, past it quickly, without looking, because the ancestors who live there are his ancestors now, not mine. My father's people are buried far from here.
I reach the gate.
Old Chukwu is asleep against the post, his wrapper pulled up to his chin, his breathing deep and even as a sleeping child's.
Daalụ, I think at him. Thank you for nothing and everything.
I ease the gate open.
The road swallows me.
The night outside the compound walls is a different world entirely. Wider, darker, smelling of rain wet earth and the wood smoke of distant fires. The road to the eastern road is unpaved, red laterite that turns to mud in rainy season and dust in dry, and my feet know it the way they know the boards of my own room.
I don't have a plan beyond this road. I have an aunt my father's sister in Onitsha, three day's walk or one lorry ride away. She does not know I am coming. She may not want me. But she is not Uncle Tunde, and she is not Chief Eze, and right now that is the only qualification I require.
I walk fast. The bush presses close on either side, dense and alive, clicking and humming with a thousand small lives that care nothing for mine. An owl calls somewhere above me twice, then silence. My mother would have said that was a warning.
I walk faster.
The moon is thin tonight, a sliver of itself, barely generous with its light. But I can see the road. I can see enough.
I can see the man lying in the middle of it.
I stop.
He is enormous even crumpled as he is against the laterite, one arm flung wide, the other curled beneath him, I can see the breadth of his shoulders, the sheer size of him, like something that was built rather than born. He is dressed in dark cloth, military or ceremonial, I cannot tell which, and across his face even now, even fallen, he wears a mask. Black as obsidian. Carved with a serpent that coils from jaw to brow.
He is bleeding. The dark cloth is darker at his side, wet and spreading.
I should keep walking.
But, I have never in my life been able to walk past a thing that was bleeding.
