The mask was warm.
Adaeze lay still in the dark and felt it against her sternum, the ivory pendant, the size of a man's fist, the face of a woman she had never known, and she thought: not again. Because it was always worse when it was warm.
She had been the Iyoba of Benin for twenty-two years. She had worn the pendant mask for all twenty-two of them, through three military campaigns, two succession disputes that did not become crises, one that did, a drought, a flood, and fourteen regular visits from the European merchants at the coast who always wanted more than they said and offered less than they claimed.
In twenty-two years the mask had been warm eleven times.
All eleven times, something had happened.
She sat up. The sleeping chamber was dark and still. Her two attendants breathed softly on their mats across the room. The compound outside was quiet, she could hear the night sounds of Benin City, which were never true silence, just the lower register of a city that never entirely stopped.
Dogs. A distant palm-wine seller's song. The creak of the old iroko tree at her compound's east wall.
She touched the mask with two fingers.
Definitely warm.
"Alright," she said quietly, to no one in particular.
She rose without waking her attendants, she had always been good at this, moving through her own spaces without displacing them, and went through the inner passage to the divination room at the compound's rear.
* * *
The room smelled of old lamp oil and dried palm nuts and the specific dusty scent of a space that was used carefully and not often.
The Opon Ifa divination board sat on its low table in the center, a carved wooden circle worn smooth at the edges where thirty years of Babalawo hands had rested. The sixteen palm nuts were in their clay bowl beside it.
She was not a Babalawo. She knew this.
She also knew the procedure well enough, she had watched it performed, in this room, perhaps two hundred times over twenty-two years. You learned the shape of a thing you saw often enough, even if you had never been taught it formally.
She sat down. She picked up the nuts.
They were heavier than she expected. She had never actually held them before. She spread them on the board the way she had seen it done, checked the pattern against her memory of the patterns she had watched form over the years, and looked at what was there.
She looked at it for a long time.
"Ogbe Meji," she said aloud. She said it quietly, as if testing the words in the empty room.
The first Odu. The one the Babalawo always described as light, as beginnings, as the things that were present when the world was new. Also, and this was the part she had always listened to closely, the Odu of danger from inside the house.
She sat back. The mask was still warm.
"What is it?" she said. Not to the mask, she did not speak to the mask in the way that some women in the palace talked to objects, as if the objects were listening. She spoke to the room, to the situation, to the thing she did not yet have words for. "What is happening in my house?"
The room did not answer. Rooms never did.
She spent the next hour thinking. This was one of the things she was best at, sitting still and thinking through a problem from the beginning, without rushing toward conclusions. The Oba her son was not ill, as far as she knew. Her regiment was at full strength. The Uzama had been quiet for three months, which was either peace or accumulation; with the Uzama it was always one or the other. The Portuguese merchants were in Ouidah, not Benin City. The succession was not an active question; the Oba was forty-one, in good health, with two acknowledged sons.
So what was warm?
She gathered the palm nuts back into their bowl. Then she looked at her hand.
In the lamplight, for just a moment, there was a mark on her palm, not pain, not a wound, a shape, like the impression left by a carved object pressed into soft clay. It was gone before she could study it properly. But in the half-second before it faded she saw enough to know it was not the Ogbe Meji pattern she had just cast.
It was something she had never seen.
She stared at her hand for a long time. The lamp burned steadily. The palm was clear and unmarked.
She went to her writing table.
* * *
Three messages. Three separate pieces of cloth. Three different registers of language, because the same words spoken to three different people meant three different things.
The first was to the Iyase; her military commander, a hard and loyal man named Osaghae who had served three Obas and trusted no one except the woman who paid his soldiers. She wrote to him formally: a request for a review of the palace regiment's readiness schedule. The kind of message a careful Iyoba sent every few months.
Nothing unusual. He would understand anyway.
The second was to Osei, the guild master of the bronze-casters; sixty years old, missing two fingers on his left hand from a casting accident in his youth, possessed of a memory for palace gossip that had made him quietly invaluable for thirty years. She wrote to him as she always wrote: chatting about the quality of recent shipments from the coast, asking after his apprentices, mentioning almost as an afterthought that she had been thinking about a particular casting from years ago, a commission she was trying to trace. Nothing that would alarm anyone who read the letter without knowing her.
The third message was the difficult one. She sat with the blank cloth for a long time.
The woman with the green wrapper lived in a market quarter two streets from the palace wall's eastern gate. Her name was Efua. She was a trader in dried fish and had been a trader in dried fish for thirty years, and she was one of perhaps four people in Benin City who had been reporting to the Iyoba's office since before Adaeze had held it; she had been the previous Iyoba's asset first, passed to Adaeze with the pendant mask and the archive keys and the single written note that said, simply: trust her more than she appears.
Adaeze had trusted her more than she appeared for twenty-two years. She had never been wrong to.
She wrote: I hope the fish season has been good. I am thinking of the market in the old days, before the great rain. If you remember a woman from the north who came to sell cloth around that time, I would love to hear your memory of her.
She folded all three messages and sealed them. She wrote the delivery instructions. She set them on the corner of the writing table where her head attendant would find them at dawn.
Then she did something she had not done in twenty-two years. She tried to take the mask off.
Her hands moved to the cord at the back of her neck. Her fingers found the clasp. She undid it.
The cord went slack.
She reached up to lift the pendant away from her chest.
Her hands stopped.
Not her will. Her hands.
She sat very still, hands raised, the pendant hanging loose on its slack cord. She could feel the weight of it. She could feel it against her sternum, still warm. She told her hands to lift.
Her hands did not lift.
After a long moment she lowered them. She refastened the cord at her neck. The mask settled back against her chest as if it had never moved.
"Fine," she said, quietly, to the carved face she had worn for twenty-two years and studied every day and still did not know.
"Fine."
She went back to bed. She did not sleep for a long time. But she lay still and breathed slowly and when the dawn came she was ready for it, which was all she had ever asked of nights like this.