She was right. Years after her death, and in the strictest secrecy, Salo began to wander through the Carving’s magical grove in search of arcane knowledge. Each visit was an immense risk, and he came close to dying on one occasion, but the Carving ultimately honed his aptitude for ciphers until it cut sharper than a razor, until he could finally read that damned journal and understand why the scripts inside had been so important to his mother—so important that she would betray him in a most profound way.
He did not anticipate everything else the Carving would teach him. He got the answers he wanted, to be sure, exciting, horrifying answers, but the Carving also opened his eyes to the greater world of magic, forever stoking his interest in talismans, mind stones, cosmic shards, and spell theory. And once he’d gotten a taste of that world, once he’d seen through that veil, there was no turning back. He became like an addict, a starved prisoner of magic, taking what little he could find wherever he could find it, and still it would never be enough.
Looking back now, more than half a decade later, as he rides to the chief’s kraal alongside Niko’s stallion, he can’t help but wonder how much simpler his life would be had he never set foot into that hut in the first place. Surely he wouldn’t be quite so miserable.
“Nursing a bloodsucking tronic creature back to life,” Niko says just as the lake appears in the northeast. “Sometimes I think you want people to hate you.” He looks over at Salo from his warmount. “Is that it? Do you like the way people look at you?”
Salo tightens his grip on the gelding’s reins. Monti, sitting in front of him and holding on to the saddle’s pommel, says nothing. “Of course I don’t like it. Why would you think that?”
“Then help me out here. I’m trying to understand.”
The suns have moved past their meridians in the skies, with Isiniso, the whiter sun, hanging slightly lower in the west than Ishungu, its smaller, yellower companion. Their combined light cuts through the low smattering of clouds and strikes the lake so that its waters dance like liquid opals. A few reed rowboats loiter just offshore, carrying silhouettes with straw hats and fishing nets. The chief’s enormous herds of uroko and domesticated antelope are a sea of humps and dark muscle in the foreground, grazing along the lakeside. Salo shudders to think what the man himself will do once he finds out what Niko now knows.
“I found the imbulu bleeding out by a brook,” he says. “Someone had hit it repeatedly in the head with a rock, I think. But they’d left it alive so it could suffer.” Anger stirs inside him. “Nothing deserves that.”
They enter a narrow road cutting through a field of millet near ripe for the New Year’s harvest. Niko says nothing for a full minute, the silence between them filled by the pitter-patter of hooves on gravel. Then: “I agree with you.”
Surprised, Salo tries to read his face, but Niko is staring at the road ahead. “You do?”
“Yes,” Niko says. “But Salo, you can’t do this again. Maybe your creature wasn’t a threat, like you said, but many people have lost livestock to others just like it. You’d only be making enemies by consorting with one. Understand?”
“I guess,” Salo says, realizing just now that he never really considered how his clanspeople might have legitimate objections to what he was doing. But should a whole species be condemned for the actions of a few? “Will you tell on me, then?”
“Maybe not,” Niko says, “but on one condition.”
“Extortion, is it? And here I thought the great Aneniko was beyond reproach.”
Niko smiles a particularly wicked smile. “What can I say? I see a rare opportunity; I take it. From tomorrow morning onward, you’ll come to the glade and train with the Ajaha. And then early next year, you’ll enter the bull pen and earn your steel. Those are my terms.”
Monti starts laughing, and Salo groans. “Oh, come on. You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t see what the problem is. Most boys get weeded out before the bull pen, but you were right there. You were so close. If you hadn’t run, you’d be donning the red right now.”
“Maybe I don’t want to don the red.”
“You’re the son of a chief. You can’t be tinkering with machines and flirting with magic all your life. It’s not worthy of a man of your station.”
What if it’s me who’s unworthy of my station? Salo almost says. What then?
“We also need more rangers,” Niko goes on. “There are whispers of unusually powerful warlords sweeping across Umadiland. If true, it’s only a matter of time before they start testing our borders. We’ll need all the help we can get.”
“There are five hundred rangers in Khaya-Siningwe alone,” Salo objects. “I’d hardly make a difference.”
“You are the chief’s firstborn. It’s important that you be one of us. And you will be one of us, starting tomorrow. Take it or leave it.”
Salo sighs. “Fine. I’ll come to your precious glade if it’ll buy your silence. Even though I’d rather scrub myself with sandpaper.”
“It’s about damned time.” Another smile breaks on Niko’s face, and he spurs his stallion a little faster. “Your aba will be pleased.”
Salo doubts that quite a lot, but he keeps his opinion to himself.
The chief’s kraal is the largest and most important village in Khaya-Siningwe, sprouting out of a plateau west of the lake. From below the plateau, only its drystone outer walls and conical guard towers are visible, the face of a stronghold as formidable as it is ancient. Behind this face is a vibrant network of compounds—clusters of drystone buildings with reed thatching and a common open space between them. Gravel roads connect these clusters to each other, snaking through gardens and landscaped woodlands. A great circular enclosure at the heart of the kraal houses the chief’s herds of livestock.
The quaggas trot toward the plateau across grassy plains, millet and sorghum fields, and musuku groves. Soon they ascend the plateau along a wide road and see the kraal’s main gates ahead of them.
As they arrive, Salo’s eyes wander up the watchtower rising near the gates. Perched at the top on an overhanging beam is a giant metal sculpture of a leopard with a mane of metal spines flaring out of his neck like a crown.
Mukuni the Conqueror, the Siningwe clan totem.
The totem is inanimate, but every time Salo looks up at him, he can almost imagine the large cat snarling down in distaste.
He looks away with a shudder, urging the gelding to a stop by the gatehouse.
Mujioseri and Masiburai—Jio and Sibu to everyone in the kraal and Salo’s younger half brothers by two years—are among the four rangers on sentry duty today. They pause their game of matje to watch as Salo and Monti dismount the gelding, barely concealed sneers stretching their lips.
Salo and his brothers all inherited VaSiningwe’s big ears, light complexion, and prominent tooth gap. All three wear little copper hoops on their left ears as a mark of their parentage. But the twins are shorter and brawnier. They didn’t run when it was their turn in the bull pen, and they don’t need enchanted spectacles just to see because she never—
Don’t go there, Salo. Don’t think about that.