Knowing that she couldn’t be discovered teaching a boy the secrets of magic, she did just enough to stoke his interest in the mystic arts, securing all the things he would need to teach himself when he was old enough. He was his mother’s son, clever and curious, so she knew he would prevail so long as he asked himself the right questions. All he needed was a push in the right direction.
And so, when it was time to give him this push, her last gift to him, the agony that would open his eyes to the greatest secrets of Red magic, when it was time to give her life to the cause, she did not hesitate. His victory would be hers. What would have been a mother’s betrayal would become the greatest gift she could ever give him, the crown he would wear on her behalf.
The Maidservant sees how, on the night Musalodi would have died beneath his mother’s blade, it was she who bled instead, victorious in the knowledge that her son would complete her life’s work.
The Maidservant sees it all.
She sees how he killed his own mother.
They appear standing side by side in a stone hut lit by luminous vines, a construct of a memory he’s buried so deep it surfaces only in his nightmares. In front of them a beautiful woman gives a much-younger version of the boy a choice in the form of a witchwood blade.
Next to the Maidservant, the older boy watches his younger self shake his head with force. “No, Ama. Please. I can’t.”
In the background, two younger boys are huddled together in a corner, identical twins, it seems. By the way they are leaning against each other and the threads of drool hanging from their mouths, the Maidservant can tell that they have both been bewitched into insensate stupors. A large feline shadow looms over them, its teeth bared in menace. It growls, making the walls shudder.
“Do you love me, my sweet?”
“You know I do, Ama.”
“That is why you must do it. This isn’t just for you. I am sick, you see. I’m in so much pain. I need you to help me stop the pain.”
“But you can be healed!”
“I can’t. It’s too late. But Salo, if you don’t help me, my sickness, my pain, it will make Mukuni kill and eat your brothers. You don’t want that, do you?”
The shadow growls again, and the boy starts to cry.
“Take the knife. Use it many times—that’s important, Salo. Many times, or Mukuni will do it. You must not stop until he leaves. Do you understand? Please. Help me. Stop the pain.”
In front of them, the younger version of the boy the Maidservant came to kill cries in a pool of his mother’s blood while his insensible younger brothers watch with glazed eyes. Their father is the one who finds them like this.
“I killed her,” the older boy says while he watches his father pry the witchwood blade from his younger hands. Later, the man will conceal the truth of what transpired here to protect his children. “I remember now.”
The Maidservant sees how the trauma of the memory comes to overshadow the memory itself, so much so that it blurs and becomes an indistinct but painful wound in his soul, a wound that will never heal. It comes to haunt and define every minute of his life, and she sees how his agony draws him to all things magic, fueling his quest to understand his mother’s actions.
She sees how his memory of slaughtering the person he loved most becomes a deeply crippling fear of violence and confrontation, leading him to shirk the warrior’s path and become an outcast among his tribespeople. She sees how he wilts under their jeers, how he finds refuge in the study of magic, how the thing his mother tortured him for becomes his obsession, and how, altogether, these were the secrets that led him to his power. A power he still doesn’t understand.
“I killed her,” the boy says again, and the Maidservant wants to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that he wasn’t given a choice, just like she wasn’t given a choice, but the memories shift before she can open her mouth, and they prove her wrong.
She did have a choice.
She sees herself.
On the day she attacked his kraal, a dark vortex of mindless hate. She feels the boy’s confusion as he heard the first screams, then his fear when he spotted the Seal in the skies, then his shock when he witnessed her fell spirits slaughter his people. She feels his devastation at the senselessness of it, that such cruelty could come to them unprovoked.
She sees Monti. The young boy he wished were his brother. He saw a lot of himself in the boy and secretly entertained notions of teaching him everything he knew about magic. She feels the heartrending loss of him, the debilitating guilt of failing to protect him, the hatred of his murderer, and all of it echoes the things she felt on that rainy night as she lay by her hut’s threshold with her belly sliced open, back when she went by another name.
She sees all this, and it is a damning, inescapable mirror showing her a truth she has known for some time but refused to acknowledge: That she long ago became the very thing she set out to destroy. That she is no different from the men who slaughtered Urura.
That in fact, she is worse.
She sees this, truly sees it, and it breaks her.
But she is not alone in her visions. In the fleeting moment during which she sees his life, the boy sees hers too.
Her love for Urura, her devouring hatred when she was violently taken away from her. He sees her journey to the Anchorite’s hut, her lessons in the mystic arts, her brief second chance with Akanwa, and her eventual fall into darkness when she murdered her mentor and cursed herself with a compulsion that would bind her to her enemy.
He sees how she lost herself to killing for the Dark Sun, how each kill became easier and weighed less on her soul, until she could burn down entire villages without a second thought. He sees how her quest for freedom from the curse made her hungry for power, how she convinced herself that the only way she could find this freedom was if she gave herself entirely to the underworld. He sees how she lost herself to it, all of her crimes, all of her atrocities, all the blood she spilled and the suffering she wrought.
He sees her down to her rotten core.
This is who I am.
I am evil.
I am irredeemable.
I am lost.
I am unworthy of Urura’s love.
The thought is a scream echoing into the deepest fissures of her blackened soul. It is a wave that swells and roils inside her until she is drowning. She thinks it will consume her, choke her, dash her against the jagged edges of her guilt, but then another wave crests over the first, foreign and intrusive like a burst of sunlight in a universe that has never known a star. It says: You don’t have to be.
The Maidservant screams. She harnesses all her will, all her strength, and with the entire stream of magic she can summon, she pushes against the portal in her mind and severs the connection to it.
She feels the boy’s mind wrenching free of hers, and then she’s back in the glade, lying on the forest floor not far from him. Her limbs trembling with grief, she crawls away, trying to escape his merciful words. She climbs to her feet, and there is a moment in which she looks down at him and he looks up at her, and where she saw hate and fear not long ago, she sees confusion, pity, and even mercy.
You don’t have to be.
The words torture her with their hopefulness; they sting and burn her because she knows she doesn’t deserve hope. How could she, after all she has done?