The morning is slow to come, but when it does, I awake excited about spending time in the gardens. I haven’t rested this well since Grandmother’s vision, when my trouble began. Efiya is gone. My first thought is that she’s in her room, but I don’t find her there. Now that I can move with ease again, I make my way to the first level. I pass the salon where Arti, Oshhe, and Ty sit in high-back chairs, eating their morning meals. Nezi is milling around the porter’s station and Terra is in the gardens. She’s facing a shade tree and counting to ten.
“Where’s Efiya?” I ask. Last night as she slept in my arms, I managed to convince myself that if I keep eyes on her, she’ll stay out of trouble.
Terra startles and sighs when she sees it’s only me. “Hiding in the gardens.” She wipes her hands on her green shift as Efiya ducks from behind a tree. I bite back a curse. My sister’s grown again. Now she looks like a child of ten, with twiggy legs and even wilder hair.
“I have a new game.” Efiya runs across the grass barefoot. “I have a new game.”
Before I can ask what game, Terra taps my shoulder and points to the gate separating the villa from the desert. Two dozen sand-swept faces stare through the wrought-iron bars. Nezi emerges from her porter’s station and tries to shoo them away. That is, until they start to chant my sister’s name, and Nezi smiles. “Efiya . . . ,” I choke, breath trapped in my lungs.
This is my fault. My foolish wishful thinking led my sister to seek out these children. She wasn’t interested in playing with other children until I gave her the idea. I had her undivided attention before then. My broken body and impenetrable mind fascinated her, but like with all toys, my sister has grown bored. Now she’s turned the children of Kefu into ndzumbi.
“Efiya,” I say again, louder this time. “Why are these children here?”
“To play with us, silly!” She beams up at me and bounces on her toes.
Standing impossibly still, Terra pales and looks on the verge of passing out from shock.
“We don’t need them to play.” I wave my arm dismissively, trying and failing to sound unfazed. “Let them go home.”
“They’re here already!” Efiya skips to the courtyard to greet them. A mangy ginger cat that’s come with the children sweeps around Efiya’s ankles. She giggles as she bends down to hug it. The cat tries to slip from her arms, but she scoops it up. With the children on her heels, she walks back into the gardens. My sister has too much power—too much magic and no one to teach her right from wrong. She couldn’t have known this was bad. I bite the inside of my cheek, hoping that I can teach her better.
The children run themselves ragged playing all day. When I tell Efiya that they need to eat, drink, and rest to be well, she frowns and plops down under a tree. The other children sit too. If I’m miserable in the midday heat, they must be too, but they don’t complain. They look upon Efiya like she’s a god and hang on her every word.
Terra runs to the kitchen to get food and drink as I settle on the grass. I have to convince my sister to send the children home after their midday meal. But I’m unable to get a word in as Efiya asks the children endless questions about their lives. Even if she can read minds, she seems to delight in hearing them tell their stories. Soon Terra and Ty return with trays of sliced fruit, almond paste, bread, and pitchers of water. Ty gasps when she sees the children with their blank stares. Unlike Nezi, she doesn’t smile at my sister’s perverse game. Now she sees the truth for the first time. I warned her, but she wouldn’t listen.
Once Ty retreats back to the villa, Terra sits beside me. The nehet tree’s dense leaves cast much-needed shade upon us, and clusters of figs hang fat above our heads. The stray cat’s tail slaps against my hand as he slinks through the throng of children. He’s slept underneath a tree most of the morning, and now he’s stalking a bird foraging near the duck pond.
Efiya makes us all play a game in which she pretends to be the Almighty One of the Kingdom. Her magic sticks to my skin worse than the sweat.
“Boy,” Efiya drawls. “What can you offer to entertain me?”
I don’t like the gleam in her eyes and the sudden shift in her mood. Her attention is on the boy at her feet. He sits on his knees with his hands on his thighs, gazing at her with reverence. Arti is the strongest witchdoctor in all the lands, and even she has to perform rituals to bend people to her will. Efiya needs no such thing. She is magic.
“Anything, Almighty One,” the boy says. “What will please you the most?”
“Almighty One.” The words taste as bitter on my tongue as blood medicine. “Shouldn’t you tell us who will be in your court? Who will be your Vizier? Your Ka-Priestess? Your seers? Your scholars?” I keep rambling to draw her attention, but she only spares me a knowing smile. My stomach sinks to my knees.
Her eyes bear none of the innocence of a child anymore. None of the innocence of the little girl who climbed into bed beside me. They shine with hunger—the mark of her demon blood. She stares at me as she gives the boy her next command. “Cut off your thumb.”
The boy doesn’t hesitate as he picks up a knife from one of the trays.
“No!” I snatch the knife from his grasp. “Children don’t play like that, Efiya.”
“Why not?” She pouts. “They will play whatever way I wish.”
“Let us play!” the children chant together. “Let us play!”
If only I could shake some sense into her. I can’t give up. “Other people are not like you,” I tell her, my voice riddled with false calm. “Our bodies are fragile, and things that wouldn’t hurt you would cause us great harm, or even death. Do you understand what death is? People go away and never come back. You wouldn’t want to hurt your friends, would you?”
“That’s not how death works, silly.” Efiya plucks up blades of grass, then one by one, lets them slip through her fingers. “Do you want me to show you?”
A sharp pain knots in my belly. “Efiya, don’t do this.”
“Why not?” she asks. “Don’t you want to play with me?”
“A good queen doesn’t harm her court,” I croak.
“Good?” She muses over the word, toying with it on her tongue. “Gooood.”
In that moment I truly understand that my sister has no concept of good or bad. It was cruelty and hatred that brought her into the world.
The pain in my belly cuts like a tobachi knife and I double over. “Please, Efiya.”
“No!” She slams her fist against the ground. “I’ve listened enough; I want to play.”
Her magic sends a second wave of pain through my entire body, and I ball up on the grass, unable to move. It isn’t like Arti’s curse that sought to control. This is something different, something that will only go away if Efiya chooses to make it stop. The boy pries the knife from my hand while the other children stare at me, their faces blank. Terra covers her mouth and sobs.
I beg and scream and cry, but my sister doesn’t spare me another glance. The boy squats, spreading his fingers wide on the ground, and does as Efiya asks. He smiles through the tears that run down his cheeks. I bury my face against the grass for the worst of it. She could take away his pain, but that isn’t the point. She wants him to suffer.