Asanda's voice echoed in the abandoned hallway as Anathi dragged her back. She clawed at the walls until her fingertips burned and tried to dig her heels in, but Anathi was a force unturnable, pulling her lightly by the arm down the wrong way.

"Ma needs us! Let go!"

Khaya tried to dash past them, but a hand whipped out, bunched a third of his loin skirt in a black fist, and threw him five steps back. He crashed into Ndoda just as the elder brother rounded the corner.

"Enough," he said, pushing Khaya aside. "Bound of Third Hill, let my sister go and let us pass."

"Ma's command overrides yours." 

Asanda stopped squirming focused on keeping Anathi from crushing her foot with each step. There was a weight and density to the arm that held her, the force of a mountain squeezed into a twelve-year-old's frame.

"Shit."

"What was the command?" Khaya rammed his shoulder into Anathi's face. He may as well have thrown himself against the side of the manse. This time, she grabbed him and didn't let go.

"She can't hold all three of us," Asanda said. "Ndoda, go!"

Asanda watched him dart around them, but then her vision blurred as she was hurled against the corridor wall. She hit it hard enough to buckle, just before Khaya smacked into it. In the same fluid motion Anathi had hurled them in, she scooped Ndoda's ankles off the floor and sent him tumbling. By the time Asanda staggered to her feet, Anathi was striding towards her again. 

"I've just broken in my old bruises," Khaya said, his shortspear in hand. 

Asanda pulled him back, blinking away the nebula crawling at the edge of her vision as she stumbled forward. And still Anathi came, stone limbs moving in the perfect imitation of flesh. 

What did Ma tell you?

"Level," Asanda said, and the skewed plane tilted between flesh and spirit balanced. 

The world washed itself in a colour she had no name for as one world bled into the other. Straddling the ancestral veil so soon after her last attempt might have fatally broken all but twelve known minds in the world. Not considering herself one of them, Asanda took care to tighten the seam that bound her essence together. Her mind survived but her knees buckled again.

Anathi caught her, and Asanda pressed her fingers against the hardened clay of her belly, roughly where Anathi's liver would be, and pushed.

"Don't let her--" Ndoda cried out, but he disappeared, as did the distant echo of Dumani's voice, the ache in her back, the pressure of stone-solid hands against her ribs. 

The whole world turned pure black, but without the vastness of the space between stars or the cold of a river's depth at midnight. It was an intimate darkness closer tp a shroud across the back of her shoulders, one sown through with veins of pulsing warmth. When she thought of Anathi's clay shell, the last thing she expected was the swell of life churning under it. Then again, Asanda was so removed from the physical world that she struggled to think what clay might even feel like between her fingers. In these depths, she wondered how only a moment (a year? decade?) ago there had been a moment where her biggest concern was backache.

Get out, the darkness said. Trouble here, to the holding cells with you.

Asanda pushed past the urge to fall asleep, to just let go and obey. She felt around the void of Anathi's spirit, careful not to disturb things that were not hers to touch.

Clumsy. Stop. 

Wonder, curiosity, headiness, joy, terror struck her all at once as she felt Anathi's annoyance brush against her. It was a sensation she forced herself to forget, because she would go back into the physical world and tear her hair out for years trying to fit its description into the tiny, awkward frame of human words.

Here is what you want. Take it so you will trust me.

Something in the shadows packed over shadows cracked. No, ripped, fluttered. And then there she was, standing taller than Asanda, or so it felt in this place with no physical forms. Her skin felt brown and sun-rich, her shoulders curving the darkness around her frame. Her face was familiar, though younger than Asanda had ever seen her. They looked the same age in fact, though the woman before her had such a hardened look about her that Asanda half-expected to feel a burning aura as they walked towards each other. Instead, there was a lacking around her. 

When Asanda was close enough to know that she should have smelled iron and dust and sweat souring on leather, she stopped. Her mother walked the final three steps to her, and bowed so her eyes could burn through Asanda's.

"Listen to me carefully," Nomvula said. "If Dumani cuts me, kill me. Kill me at all costs. Above this, I put only one instruction: keep my blood safe."

We must go.

And like a moth shrugged off a giant's shoulder, Asanda fluttered as she was hurled back into the physical plane. She slammed into her own body and sucked in a great breath as Anathi caught her.

We must go, echoed a titan's words.

"No," Asanda said, cupping Anathi's jaw to preserve the link. "I've seen you, and you've seen me. If you want to protect us, all of us, you start by saving Ma."

A person would have hesitated for however long it took to weigh life and death. Anathi leapt up and disappeared into the ceiling. 

Asanda sprinted through the hallway, her brothers on either side. They followed the noise of cheering Inner Plainers, the beat of club on hide, and over it all, the rasp of Dumani's battle voice spilling into the corridor.

"Who is this Queen?" 

They turned into the final hallway. Khaya flung the study door open and barrelled through, Asanda in tow.

"Who is this women who tries to stand in the shadow of an Inner Plainer?"

The citruswood floors were cold against Asanda's bare feet, but soon they were slapping against the heated tiles of the patio as a wall of bodies blocked her off from the lawn.

"If you farmers learn anything here, learn that respect is ours to take if we want it!"

A cheer swelled from the Inner Plainers on the patio as Asanda shoved through them.

"Grain is ours to take!"

Another cheer, so loud it scrambled her hearing.

"And if need be--"

Asanda broke free of Dumani's guards and dug a heel in before she flew over the edge of the patio. His eyes were bright and wide, the glass spear in his hand a whorl of spectral mist, tipped in red.

"--blood is ours to take."

Three details caught Asanda's eye at once, and her focus split to take in each with the attention deserved. Her heart beat once, and her mind became three.

The Hundred Hill citizens that ringed the lawn all wore the same blank expression, and despite their Queen laid on her back with Dumani circling her, they said nothing, did nothing. All their eyes, even those of the guards, followed the General as he boasted.

The air was changing here. Still raw from her encounter with Anathi's spirit, Asanda felt the storm swelling at the base of her skull. Somewhere behind her ear, under her tongue, crawling across her scalp. a voice spoke. Be still. It was a weak glamour, and she broke it with only a third of her focus.

The blood on her mother's cheek should have dried if Dumani had been boasting as long as she figured. It was only the tiniest prick, barely enough for a bead to form, but it flowed in a thin stream that had started pooling in her ear. 

Asanda's heart beat again, and her mind became one.

"Drop the spear!" she yelled. "General, get inside, now!"

Somehow, Dumani picked out her voice over his guards' war chants. He stepped over her mother and smiled at her.

"What is it about you Spear women," he said, "and cutting your cheeks? Are your tongues that sharp?"

A stir of her mouth shoulder dragged Asanda's gaze over Dumani's shoulder. Nomvula's eyes opened, then, slowly, she rose to her feet, the cut on her cheek dripping scarlet jewels onto the lawn. She straightened, and when she blinked, every Hundred Hiller on the lawn shut their eyes.

"No!" Asanda made to leap off the lawn but Ndoda grabbed her and yanked her back.

Dumani followed their gaze, turned, and laughed in Nomvula's face. She was a head shorter than him, and he soaked in that fact, sauntering towards him.

"You disappointed me, Queen. You fought fairly."

When Nomvula looked up at him, her eyes were reflectionless.

"I think I'll keep this," he said, twirling the glass--

Nomvula knocked the spear out of his hand with a fist that flew too quick for human movement. There was a nasty crack but ebony haft was still intact when the fireglass tip bit into the earth. Dumani howled as he cradled a hand with three crooked fingers.

Asanda wavered in Ndoda's arms, mouth slackened. Anathi, where are you?

Her mother grabbed Dumani's shoulder and held him there as he tried to jerk away. He shrugged and yanked and kicked at her legs. His heel glanced off her knee, just as she pulled her free hand back in a fist. Her four fingers straightened, turned horizontal

"Spears." Ndoda breathed. "Spears no." 

His arms went slack. Asanda rocked as her mother's hand split between Dumani's ribs with a splintering sound, knuckle deep. The General's cry was horror pushed through a reed, so twisted and sharp even the guards stilled in shock.

For a moment it was only that scream in the yard, then Nomvula put a second hand in the whole seeping blood out of the General's chest. She braced herself as one braced to rip fabric, then the Sunspear tore his ribcage in two.