The Devil Wears Gold

CHAPTER FIVE

— Eze Ugo's POV —

I am told she arrives at the third hour.

I am not there to see it. I am in the war room with my generals, reviewing the territorial maps of the Northern border, which requires my attention in the way that all things require my attention completely, without remainder. I have not built what I have built by halving myself.

But I know the moment she enters the Onicha Palace.

I know it because every person in this palace has spent three days preparing for the arrival of the Iron Duke's bride, and the moment the convoy passes the outer gate the energy of the building shifts. I can feel it through the walls, through the floor, through the particular change in the air that large buildings have when something significant has entered them. I was trained to notice such things at sixteen. Twenty years of practice has made the noticing involuntary.

She is here.

I excuse myself from the war room at the fourth hour. My generals are accustomed to my exits. I do not explain them. I rarely explain anything. Explanation implies that permission was ever a possibility.

The upper gallery runs the full length of the Onicha Palace's entrance hall, screened by carved iroko panels that allow a man to look down without being seen looking down. It was built for security. My father used it to assess visitors before receiving them.

I use it now.

She is standing in the entrance hall below me with Chief Lady Adaku and the palace steward and three of her uncle's people who will be sent home within the hour. She is wearing a wrapper the colour of the night sky , dark indigo, simply draped, with no coral, no gold thread, none of the decorative language of a woman arriving to claim a position. She looks like a woman who dressed in what she had and refused to apologize for it.

The other women present, the palace wives, the titled ladies who have arranged themselves along the hall with the casual precision of women who know exactly how they are being looked at are watching her making assessment. I can see the conclusions forming on their faces.

They are drawing the wrong ones.

I know her immediately. I knew her name before the envoy returned from her uncle's compound. I knew it within six hours of waking in my own physician's care with the wound in my side already moving toward healed in a way that Dibia Osondu called unprecedented and then, after examining me for a long hour, called something else entirely, in a voice I had not heard from him before.

Destined, he said. Chi-tied. Bound.

I told him to be precise and useful or be silent.

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, whoever touched you in that road has marked you at the level of your chi. The healing you experienced is hers. And it will not be fully complete until she is near you.

I told him that was not a medical explanation.

He said, Eze Ugo, I have been your physician for twelve years. Trust me when I tell you that what happened to you on that road was not medicine.

I had not trusted him and I had not dismissed him and I had set my intelligence network to finding her within the hour. It took four.

Adaeze Obi. Daughter of Lord Emeka Obi, a scholar lord, well regarded, deceased three years. Mother, Chidinma Obi, a healer of some sort, also deceased. Ward of her maternal uncle, Lord Babatunde Obi, a minor lord with extensive debts and an appointment, I had learned with particular interest, he would be presenting his ward Adaeze to Chief Emeka Eze at the new moon.

That appointment no longer exists. I made certain of it.

Queen Moremi, when I came to her with the proposal, had looked at me across the length of her private receiving room with the expression she reserves for situations she has been anticipating far longer than the other party realises. She agreed within three minutes. She had conditions, she always has conditions but none of them were unreasonable, and some of them confirmed what Osondu had told me in ways I chose not to examine too closely.

The point is, she is here.

The woman who knelt in the dirt beside me and pressed her hands to my wound and poured something into me that I have no honest vocabulary for, she is standing thirty feet below me in my entrance hall, wearing her plain dark wrapper and looking at no one, which means she is watching everyone.

Sharp, I think. She noticed where every person in that hall stood within the first thirty seconds of entering it. She did not look at the painted walls or the brass panels or the carved ceiling that foreign dignitaries stop and stare at. She looked at the people.

Her hands are clasped in front of her. Still.

I look at those hands and something happens in my chest that I decline to name.

Those hands were on my body. Those hands. I remember this with a clarity that has nothing to do with physical sensation and everything to do with the chí level knowledge that Osondu described, the level below thought, below decision, below everything I have spent twenty years building. Those hands found me dying and decided, for reasons I do not yet know, that I should live.

A choice with consequences.

Mine, primarily.

The palace steward is speaking to her now. Explaining the schedule, the protocols, the geography of a place she will need to navigate. She listens with her whole body — I can see it from here, the quality of her attention, the way she processes information the way an intelligent person processes it: not by showing that they are taking it in, but by asking, at the exact right moment, the one question that proves they have already synthesised everything else.

She asks it. I cannot hear the words from this distance, but I see the steward pause, and then recalibrate, and then answer more carefully than he had been planning to.

Something that might, under other circumstances, be called amusement moves through me.

My wound aches. Less than it did this morning, less than it has since the road and that is because she is closer. Osondu was precise about that. Proximity helps. Proximity heals.

Proximity is going to be a profound complication, I think.

She looks up.

Not at the gallery, she cannot see the gallery, the iroko screens are too dense, I am entirely invisible to her. But she looks up in the general direction of it with those wide, watchful eyes, as if she has felt something, as if the hair on her arms has risen, as if the chi bond Osondu described has an awareness of its own that operates independent of sight.

I do not move.

I watch her look for me and not find me.

I watch her lower her gaze and return to the steward's briefing with the composure of a woman who has learned to look unsurprised.

She is extraordinary. She is also, as of three days from now, my wife. And she is in my palace, and she is real, and the wound in my side is a half healed fact of what her hands did to me, and I need to make several decisions that I have been delaying since Osondu used the word destined in my presence.

I make them now, here, in the gallery, looking down at the top of her gele and the set of her shoulders and the careful stillness of my mother's hands.

She is not a political arrangement.

She is not a medical curiosity.

She is not an obligation I will discharge at a civilised distance.

She is....

She looks up again. Same direction. More certain this time.

I take one step back from the screen.

Mine, I thought. And then, because I have always been honest with myself even when I am honest with no one else: God help her. God help us both.