The grim folk, plain and real before him as the sun in the sky.
But the worst of all the kinds of grim folk were the wraiths—wayward spirits trapped between the realm of the living and the dead, with bodies formed of roiling black shadows that coalesced around a bloodred cloud that had once been their hearts. It was the wraiths who scared Malik most of all, and it was the wraiths who surrounded him now as the panic threatened to pull him under.
When he was younger, Malik had just assumed the grim folk were so commonplace that no one spoke of them, the same way no one needed to say the sky was blue. He had even foolishly considered the creatures his friends, listening to their stories and making up his own to entertain them.
But they weren’t his friends, because they weren’t real. Papa and the elders and everyone else in the village had made sure Malik knew that the supernatural was to be respected but not believed, and he still had the scars from the lessons to prove it. The hallucinations were a sign of something fundamentally wrong inside him, and the fact that he was seeing so many at once meant that the illness was getting worse. Malik shuddered, his nails digging tightly into the skin of his forearms.
As the panic grew, the world around Malik faded away, as if he were looking up from the bottom of the ocean and sinking fast. The grim folk had never attacked him before, but he couldn’t stop imagining them ripping through his flesh with their talons, devouring him and his sisters, with nobody for thousands of miles caring what had happened to them.
“Get away from me,” Malik choked out with a sob. “Get away from me, get away from me, get away from me!”
People were staring now at this mad Eshran boy rocking back and forth and shouting at creatures no one else could see. The still rational part of Malik’s mind screamed at him to get up before he made an even bigger fool of himself, but his body was far beyond his control.
And because the Great Mother had decided the day had not been humiliating enough, his tears finally spilled over. At the sight of them, Leila recoiled.
“Wait, don’t—I’ll fix this. Stop crying,” she said. It took Malik a second to realize his older sister had switched to Darajat, which they hadn’t spoken since they’d left Eshra. Zirani was the primary language of the Odjubai, the language of scholars and queens; to speak otherwise here was to label yourself an outsider and an easy target.
Nana had once told Malik that when his mind moved too fast, he should think about his favorite place in the world until he felt better. He took a deep breath and recalled the largest lemon tree on his family’s farm, the citrus scent in the air right before the fruits were ready to harvest. The bark was rough beneath his palms as he passed branch after branch, climbing to a place where the monsters couldn’t reach him.
Leila awkwardly reached a hand toward him, then pulled it back. Malik took several deep breaths, pressing his face into his hands until the world finally returned to a speed he could handle.
The grim folk were creatures of stories and nightmares, his own exhaustion manifesting into hallucinations. They weren’t real. This was real.
And sure enough, when Malik looked up again, they were gone.
Several minutes of silence passed between the siblings before Leila finally spoke.
“Caravan drivers will often offer a spot in their wagons to potential workers. We’ll negotiate for one that will take all three of us. It’s not a perfect solution, but I think it’s our only option.”
Throat too tight to speak, Malik nodded. This was the way it had always been: Malik the little brother who ruined things and Leila the older sister who fixed them. If they managed to find a way out of this situation, he would never go against her advice again. Everything was better for everyone when Malik kept his head down and his mouth shut.
Leila set her mouth in a determined line. “All right, let’s leave before it gets any darker. Come on, Nadia . . . Nadia?”
Both Leila and Malik looked down.
Nadia was gone.
“Abraa! Abraa!” The rhythm of the griot’s djembe was steady as a heartbeat. “Come and gather—a story is about to begin!”
Ice flooded Malik’s veins. His eyes flew from person to person for any sign of the windswept curls and round face he knew so well, his earlier panic magnified a thousandfold in his chest. He’d hate himself forever for losing their papers, but if anything happened to Nadia . . .
A familiar head bobbed through the masses gathered around the baobab tree, cutting off Malik’s morbid thoughts. With a strength he hadn’t known he possessed, Malik shoved his way past the crowd and grabbed his younger sister by the arm.
“Don’t run off like that,” he cried, checking her over for injury. Nadia twisted in his grasp.
“But the griot!” Nadia exclaimed as Leila finally caught up to them. “She said if you solve her riddle, she’ll grant your wish!”
Malik exchanged a sad look with his older sister. Nadia had handled their journey so well, never crying or complaining even once, that they had almost forgotten she was only six years old, still young enough to believe in magic and other lies.
Leila crouched down to cup Nadia’s face in her hands. “That is one wish even a griot can’t grant for us.”
Malik’s heart broke in two as he watched the joy seep from Nadia’s eyes. He forced aside his own fear and panic, even the thoughts of the grim folk slithering around him, and racked his brain for something, anything that could help them out of their situation.
“My siblings, the hour of the comet’s arrival approaches!” cried the griot. “As the old era draws its last breaths and the new era lurks on the horizon, please allow me, the humble Nyeni, to entertain you for a little while longer. Our next tale is the story of the first Solstasia, and it begins on a night not unlike tonight when Bahia Alahari stood on these very sands dreaming of a world free of the pharaoh’s rule . . .”
The yearning was back with a vengeance, pulling at Malik to sit at Nyeni’s feet and drink in her tale. This wasn’t even his people’s history, and yet Malik could have recited by heart the tale of how Bahia Alahari had destroyed the Kennouan Empire, full of all the romance, action, and heartbreak all the best epics had.
However, Malik had never heard the Solstasia tale the way Nyeni told it. The story was her tapestry, and each word added a new thread to the image. When this griot spoke, it was almost as if magic had truly existed, curling through the centuries to gather in their outstretched hands.
“. . . And so, Bahia went to Hyena for aid, for it is known that Hyena always keeps her promises.”
Nyeni curled her hands into claws and stretched her mouth wide to mimic the famed trickster.
“Hyena told Bahia, ‘If you wish to receive my aid, you must first answer this riddle: “My wife and I live in the same house. She visits my room whenever she wishes, but when I enter hers, she is never there. Who am I, and who is my wife?”’ . . . What’s the answer, my siblings? Hyena won’t help you without it.”
The trick to this story was that the riddle changed with each telling. The crowd yelled out a flurry of answers, each more ridiculous than the last.
“A horse and a mule!”
“A mortar and a pestle!”
“Me and my husband!”
Nyeni cackled. “Is there no one among you who can solve this puzzle?”