The drums didn’t stop.
Kofi stood on the dark sand and felt them come down the mountain and into his chest.
Not loud.
Steady.
Many drums, far apart, talking to each other across ravines he couldn’t see.
Every so often, one would go quiet, and another farther off would pick up the same rhythm, as if passing a message hand to hand.
Clementine knelt beside the veve in the wet sand.
She didn’t touch it.
She held one hand an inch above the lines, fingers spread, the way she held her palm over a fever.
“It’s warm,” she whispered.
“The sand?”
“The drawing.”
Yaw stood with his back to them, facing the jungle where the small figure had vanished.
His pistol was out, hanging at his side.
The blue cloth knotted around its grip stirred in the land breeze.
“She wanted us to see her.” He didn’t turn.
“If she wanted to stay hidden, we’d never have seen her.”
“Then she’ll come back,” Kofi said.
“Or she wants us to follow.”
The jungle stayed dark and silent.
The drums rolled on.
Behind them, out in the cove, the Morning Star sat at anchor, her lanterns hooded, a black shape against a sky going purple.
Kofi could just make out Toby’s big silhouette at the rail, watching them.
“We go back aboard tonight,” Kofi said.
“We come ashore at first light, with the children.”
“And if the girl doesn’t come back?”
“Then we follow Auntie.”
Clementine let out a short, shaky laugh.
“God help us.”
Ti Lune was waiting on the sand when the boat grounded at dawn.
She sat cross-legged just above the tide line, right beside the veve, as if she’d been there all night.
Maybe she had.
She was thin and dark and barefoot, wrapped in a length of pale cotton knotted at one shoulder.
Her hair was bound up in a cloth.
She couldn’t have been older than Obi.
She watched them climb out of the boat: Kofi, Yaw, Clementine, Titus, Theo.
Then the three children, Cato and the twins, huddled close.
Her eyes went to the children’s shoulders.
To the dark rings under the skin.
She stood up.
“Ti Lune,” she said, and touched her own chest.
“Kofi.”
“Mwen konnen.” Her voice was small and flat.
Then, in careful, slow English: “I know. Grann know. Grann say, come.”
She turned and walked into the jungle without waiting.
Theo stared after her.
“That’s it? Grann say, come?”
“She’s twelve,” Kofi said.
“What did you expect, a letter?”
“A map would be nice.”
“You’d just say it moved.”
Theo opened his mouth, shut it, and followed.
The trail wasn’t a trail.
It was roots and rocks and a stream bed that turned into a waterfall and then back into a stream.
Ti Lune walked it like a road.
She never looked down.
She never slipped.
Kofi slipped every twenty paces.
The jungle closed over them.
Green, dripping, loud with birds.
Vines thick as a man’s arm hung from the trees.
Orchids grew out of the bark, white and purple.
Every leaf was wet, and every wet leaf brushed Kofi’s face.
They climbed.
After an hour, the trees thinned at the edge of a ridge, and Ti Lune stopped and pointed down.
Kofi looked.
Below them lay the Léogâne plain, flat and gold and endless, stretching away to the sea.
It was cane.
All of it.
Field after field after field, cut into neat squares by roads, broken only by the big stone houses of the planters and the long low sheds of the sugar works.
Smoke rose from the chimneys of a dozen boiling houses.
From this high, the people in the fields looked like ants.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
Nobody spoke.
Cato stood very close to Titus.
The boy was staring at the fields, at the tiny bent figures moving in the rows.
Titus put a hand on his head.
“Don’t look,” he said quietly.
“I want to look.”
Titus didn’t take his hand away.
He didn’t make the boy stop looking either.
Kofi felt something in his chest go tight and hot.
Jamaica had felt like the whole world, once.
Brook’s Reach had felt like the whole world.
He’d spent ninety years believing the world ended at the fence line.
This was just one plain.
On one island.
In one colony.
How many plains were there?
How many islands?
“Kofi.” Yaw’s voice, low, at his elbow.
“Come on. We can’t stand here.”
He turned away.
Yaw walked at the back of the line, where he could watch everyone.
It was habit.
In the yard at Brook’s Reach, the last man in a work gang was the one who saw trouble coming.
The last man had time to shout.
He watched Ti Lune’s pale cloth flicker far ahead through the trees.
He watched Clementine climb slowly, one hand pressed to her chest the whole time, lips moving.
He watched Theo, who had stopped joking an hour ago and now just breathed hard and cursed quietly at every root.
He watched Titus carrying Nell on his back because her legs had given out, and Mingo holding on to Titus’s belt so as not to be separated from his sister.
He watched Kofi, walking in the middle, head down, jaw set.
Yaw knew that look.
He’d known it since they were boys.
Kofi was carrying something he didn’t know how to put down.
Yaw’s hand drifted to his pistol grip.
His fingers found the blue cloth.
Amara.
He’d thought her name so many times in the last weeks that it didn’t sting anymore.
It just ached.
Like a tooth you keep touching with your tongue.
He thought: she’d have liked this.
The birds.
The waterfalls.
Then he thought: she’d have hated climbing.
Then he almost laughed, and then he didn’t.
Up ahead, Ti Lune stopped dead.
She dropped flat into the ferns.
Everyone froze.
Then Yaw heard it.
Far below them, down the slope, carried on the wind.
Dogs.
They crouched in a ravine, pressed against the wet rock, with ferns up to their chins.
The baying came closer.
Deep, hungry, excited.
Many dogs.
And under the dogs, voices.
Men’s voices, speaking French.
The clink of metal.
The snap of branches.
Ti Lune crawled back down the line to Kofi.
Her eyes were huge.
“Maréchaussée,” she whispered.
“Hunters. They hunt people. People who run.”
Theo went grey.
“The patrols. They’re the patrols. They hang runaways from the trees and leave them there.”
“How many?” Kofi breathed.
Ti Lune held up both hands.
Then both hands again.
Twenty.
Yaw looked at the children.
At Nell, curled against Titus’s chest.
At Cato, gripping Obi’s knotted rope bracelet he’d been given on the ship.
At Mingo, shaking so hard his teeth chattered.
The baying got louder.
Then Nell whimpered.
Her hand went to her shoulder.
Through her fingers, faint and red in the gloom of the ravine, the iron ring began to glow.
“No,” Clementine breathed.
“No, no, not now—”
She fumbled for the pouch.
Her hands shook so badly she nearly spilled it.
She tipped a pinch of Phibba’s leaves into her palm, struck a spark from Titus’s flint, and blew.
The leaves caught.
Smoke curled up, thick and grey and sweet.
“Sae-mora kel ashi,” Clementine whispered.
“Sae-mora kel ashi—”
The glow faded.
Nell went limp, sobbing silently into Titus’s shirt.
The smoke drifted up out of the ravine, over the ferns, into the trees.
Down the slope, the dogs went wild.
“They smell it,” Theo hissed.
“They smell the smoke. They’re coming straight up.”
Yaw looked at the smoke.
At the children.
At Kofi, whose face had gone very still, the way it did when he was running numbers in his head and not liking the answers.
The patrol was below them.
The only way on was up, past Ti Lune, toward the village.
With three children who could barely walk, and dogs that could run.
They wouldn’t make it.
Yaw stood up.
“Yaw,” Kofi snapped.
“Get down.”
“They’re following the smoke. So they’ll follow noise too.” Yaw checked his pistols.
Both loaded.
Both primed.
He looked up at the ridge above the ravine, off to the west, away from the village.
“I go that way. I shoot. I make as much noise as a whole crew. The dogs follow me.”
“No.”
“Kofi.”
“No. You don’t know these mountains. You’ll get lost. They’ll catch you. They’ll hang you from a—”
“Maybe.” Yaw’s voice was calm.
Calmer than he felt.
“But they won’t catch them.”
He nodded toward the children.
Kofi stared at him.
Something moved across his face.
Fear.
Grief.
Anger.
All at once.
“Not today,” Kofi said.
His voice cracked.
“You told Phibba not today.”
Yaw smiled.
It was his old smile, crooked, the chipped tooth showing.
“This isn’t hunting, Kofi. This is opening a door.”
He turned to Ti Lune.
“Where do I meet you?”
She stared at him.
Then she pointed up, past the ravine, to a high, bare ridge far off, where a single enormous tree stood black against the sky.
“The big tree,” she whispered.
“Mapou. Go up. Always up. Grann find you.”
Yaw nodded.
He looked once at Kofi.
Kofi looked back.
Then Yaw scrambled up the side of the ravine, crashed through the ferns, and ran west.
He fired the first shot into the air at the top of the ridge.
The crack echoed off the mountains like a cannon.
Below him, the dogs went insane.
Men shouted in French.
Branches snapped.
The baying swung toward him.
Good.
He ran.
Branches whipped his face.
Roots grabbed his ankles.
His lungs burned.
He fired the second pistol into a tree trunk, and bark exploded, and he kept running, reloading on the move, fingers fumbling powder and ball, the way he’d practiced a thousand times on the Morning Star’s deck.
Blindfolded.
In the dark.
Because it calmed his nerves.
They weren’t calm now.
He fired again.
Downhill, into the leaves, nowhere near anyone.
Pure noise.
The dogs howled closer.
He burst out of the trees onto a stretch of open rock, a bare saddle between two peaks, and stopped.
Four paths met there.
One came up from the plain below.
One ran along the ridge east.
One ran along the ridge west.
And one climbed up, steep and narrow, toward the high peaks where the mist hung.
A crossroads.
In the very center, where the four paths met, an old man sat on a rock.
Yaw nearly shot him.
The old man didn’t move.
He was small and bent, dressed in a ragged coat far too big for him and a battered straw hat with a torn brim.
He leaned on a crooked wooden cane.
A pipe hung from his mouth, unlit.
At his feet sat a thin, yellow dog with one ear that flopped, watching Yaw with calm brown eyes.
The baying of the patrol’s dogs rose behind Yaw in the trees.
The old man took the pipe out of his mouth.
“You in a hurry, boy,” he said.
His voice was cracked and dry and amused.
“There are men behind me.”
“Mm. I hear them.”
“Which way?” Yaw’s voice was ragged.
“Which way do they not follow?”
The old man looked at him for a long moment.
His eyes were very dark and very old.
Older than the mountains, Yaw thought, though he didn’t know why.
“You opened a door back there,” the old man said.
“For those little ones. Why?”
“Because they needed one.”
“Mm.” The old man nodded slowly, as if that was the right answer to a question Yaw didn’t know he’d been asked.
He lifted his crooked cane and pointed it up the steep narrow path toward the mist.
“That way. Them dogs, they don’t climb so good.”
Yaw ran for it.
At the foot of the steep path, he looked back.
The rock in the middle of the crossroads was empty.
No old man.
No yellow dog.
Just the flat grey stone and the four paths meeting, and the mist coming down.
The first of the patrol’s hounds burst out of the trees onto the saddle, big and brindled, froth on its jaws.
It reached the center of the crossroads.
And stopped.
It stood there, sniffing the rock, whining.
It turned in a circle.
It looked up the steep path toward Yaw.
It looked at the other three paths.
Then it lay down on the stone and put its head on its paws.
The other dogs came out of the trees and did the same.
One after another.
They reached the crossroads, sniffed, whined, and lay down.
The French hunters came crashing after them, shouting, kicking at the dogs, cursing.
The dogs wouldn’t move.
Yaw climbed into the mist with his heart hammering so hard he could hear it in his ears.
Kofi didn’t breathe right for two hours.
They climbed without Yaw.
Ti Lune led them straight up through the jungle while the gunshots faded west.
Every shot made Kofi flinch.
Every silence between shots was worse.
Then the shots stopped altogether.
Nobody said anything.
Titus kept climbing with Nell on his back.
Clementine kept her hand pressed to her chest.
Theo kept his eyes on his feet.
Kofi kept seeing Yaw’s face.
That crooked smile.
This isn’t hunting, Kofi.
This is opening a door.
He’d said that to Phibba.
Not today.
And Kofi had let him go.
In his first life, Yaw had lived to be an old man.
Kofi had buried him.
At least Kofi had been there to bury him.
What if this life was different?
What if this was the day?
“Kofi.”
Theo’s voice.
Soft.
“He’s the best shot any of us have ever seen. He’s the fastest man I know. He climbed a mast drunk in the dark and shot a sea queen off a rail.” Theo tried to smile.
“He’ll make it.”
Kofi didn’t answer.
The trees opened.
The village hung on the side of the mountain like a bird’s nest.
Houses of woven branches and mud, roofed with thick grey thatch, clung to narrow terraces cut into the slope.
Gardens climbed above and below them: yams, plantains, beans, peppers, rows of cassava.
Smoke rose from cook fires.
Chickens scratched in the dirt.
Goats stood on the roofs.
People looked up as they came out of the trees.
Men and women and children.
Watchful.
Some with hoes in their hands.
Some with machetes.
A few with old muskets.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody moved to stop them either.
At the heart of the village, on the flattest ground, stood a wide open-sided building.
Its thatched roof rested on carved wooden posts.
In the very center, rising up through the roof, stood a single thick post, painted in bands of red and white and black, with patterns carved into it: snakes, stars, crosses, suns.
Behind it, on the slope above, rose a tree.
It was the biggest tree Kofi had ever seen.
Its trunk was wider than the Morning Star’s deck.
Its roots spread out across the hill like the fingers of a giant hand.
Its branches reached so high and wide they shaded half the village.
Ribbons hung from them.
Bottles.
Small bundles of cloth tied with thread.
“Mapou,” Ti Lune said quietly.
The silk-cotton tree.
“Grann’s tree.”
And under it, beneath the lowest branches, stood a woman.
She was tall.
Taller than Kofi.
And so thin her dark skin seemed stretched over bone.
She leaned on a long staff carved with twisting shapes, and wore a faded white dress and a white head wrap.
Her face was a map of lines.
One of her eyes was clouded, milky white.
The other was sharp as a blade, and it was looking straight at Kofi.
She came down the slope toward them.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Her staff struck the dirt with each step.
She stopped in front of Kofi.
She looked at him for a long time.
At his face.
His hands.
His chest.
“Pitit mwen.” Her voice was low and slow, with a lilt of French in it, like each word was being weighed on a scale.
“You carry the grave on you.”
Kofi’s mouth went dry.
“You walk into the water once already.” Her good eye narrowed.
“Non?”
Kofi said nothing.
He couldn’t.
Behind him, Theo made a small confused sound.
Titus shifted.
Clementine had gone very still.
Grann Rose held his gaze a moment longer.
Then, just as slowly, she turned away from him, as if she’d seen enough, and looked at the children.
Her face changed.
She knelt.
It took her a long time.
Her knees cracked.
She reached out one long, bony hand and touched Nell’s shoulder, where the iron ring lay dark under the skin.
The old woman’s hand trembled.
“Bondye,” she whispered.
“They put it in the children now.”
“Phibba sent us.” Kofi found his voice.
He pulled the gris-gris bag from his shirt and held it out.
“She said you might know how to break them.”
Grann Rose took the bag.
She turned it over in her fingers.
Sniffed it.
A small smile cracked her face.
“Phibba. That old smoke-eater still alive?” She tucked the bag away.
“Wi. Mwen konnen. I know how.”
Relief hit Kofi so hard his knees almost buckled.
“But nothing from the lwa is free, pitit.” Grann Rose rose slowly to her feet, leaning on her staff.
“To break a chain, somebody must pay for it. Somebody must know what it is to die.” Her good eye came back to Kofi.
“And come back.”
She lifted the staff and pointed it up the slope, past the mapou tree.
Kofi followed it.
Through the trees, on a bare shoulder of the mountain, stood rows of rough stones and wooden markers, half swallowed by grass.
A graveyard.
At its head stood a tall black wooden cross, weathered and old, draped with a purple cloth.
“Tonight,” Grann Rose said, “one of you sits with the dead. At the Baron’s cross. Alone. Until the sun comes.” She let the staff fall.
“If the dead let him come back down in the morning, I break the chains.”
“And if they don’t?”
She shrugged.
Slow.
Unbothered.
“Then they keep him.”
Nobody spoke.
“Kofi.”
The voice came from behind him.
Hoarse.
Out of breath.
He spun around.
Yaw stood at the edge of the village, just coming out of the trees.
His clothes were torn.
His face was scratched raw.
Mud covered him to the knees.
He was swaying on his feet.
He was alive.
Kofi didn’t remember crossing the ground between them.
He only remembered grabbing Yaw by both shoulders, hard enough to hurt, and Yaw grabbing him back.
“You fool,” Kofi said.
His voice broke.
“You absolute fool.”
“The dogs lay down.” Yaw’s eyes were wide and strange.
“Kofi. At a crossroads. There was an old man with a dog, and he pointed the way, and then he was gone, and the dogs just lay down.”
Behind them, Grann Rose had gone very quiet.
She was looking at Yaw now.
At the blue cloth on his pistol.
At the mud on his boots.
“An old man,” she said softly.
“With a cane. And a yellow dog.”
Yaw turned.
“You know him?”
A long, slow smile spread across the old woman’s face.
“Everybody know him, pitit. Not everybody meet him.”
She said nothing more.
Kofi was still holding Yaw’s shoulders when he felt the eyes on him.
He looked past Yaw, toward the open-sided temple with its painted post.
Two women had stepped out from between the carved pillars.
They were dressed like everyone else in the village, in plain cotton, their hair wrapped in dark cloth, their skin dark.
One was taller, with a restless way of standing, her weight on the balls of her feet.
The other was smaller and very still, watching.
The taller one wore a cutlass at her hip.
Kofi’s eyes went to the hilt.
Etched into the metal, catching the late sun, was a black rooster.
The same one he’d seen for a heartbeat in the torchlight of a Nassau alley, before two hooded strangers dropped off a roof, saved his crew, and vanished.
The taller woman met his eyes.
She didn’t look away.
She looked like someone who’d been waiting for him.