They buried Mama Ireti beside Dupe.
The graveyard behind the Ifatedo compound grew crowded—fresh mounds of earth, white stones, broken pots. The rain had returned by the time they lowered her wrapped body in, a fine drizzle that plastered white cloth to the curve of her back.
Baba himself intoned the burial words.
His voice cracked only once.
"She was the root our branches grew from," he said. "May her wisdom soak into this ground, to feed us from below."
Ifabola stood with Fẹ́mi and her mother, cold seeping through her wet wrapper.
Her palm had been bandaged with herbs and cloth; the burn throbbed dully. She could still feel, somewhere deep inside, the echo of the thing she had grabbed—a vast, amused irritation, like a crocodile annoyed by a stubborn ant.
She tried not to think about it.
When the grave was filled and the last wails faded, the house retreated into itself.
The elders argued in low voices.
"We cannot keep losing our oldest," one said. "Who will hold the lines when the rest of us stumble?"
"Perhaps we should send for help from the hill shrines," another suggested. "Your wife's people, Baba. Their ways are strange but strong."
"Would they come?" a third scoffed. "To risk their own necks for our village's mess?"
Baba listened, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
That night, he took Ifabola and Fẹ́mi into a room she had never entered.
The library.
It was not large—only a narrow space lined with shelves of carved wood. But each shelf bowed under the weight of bundles of palm‑leaf manuscripts, stacks of folded cloth inscribed with chalk, small clay tablets etched with symbols.
The air smelled of dust, ink and old oil.
"Ifa holds much in spoken word," Baba said. "But not everything was left to tongues. Some lessons were hidden in leaf and clay, for days when speech might be twisted."
He lit a lamp and gestured to one shelf nearly at the top.
"Those," he said, "are stories of bargains. Good and bad."
Fẹ́mi fetched a bundle down.
The three of them sat cross‑legged on the floor as Baba carefully unrolled old palm leaves, their edges browned with age.
He began to read.
Some tales were familiar: kings who promised cattle to the river and prospered, only to have their sons punished when they forgot to pay. Hunters who begged for unerring arrows and were given, instead, eyes that saw too much.
Others were new to Ifabola.
One caught her breath.
It told of a boy prince, no older than she, who had been sickly from birth. Afraid his son would die before inheriting the throne, the king went to a secret shrine built by his own grandfather—one that even the official priests had forgotten.
There, a faceless statue waited.
The king promised anything—gold, blood, worship—if only his son might live forever.
The hunger behind the statue agreed.
The boy's sickness ceased. His body grew strong. But his shadow lengthened each year, stretching where it should not, whispering where no one else spoke. People near him began to waste away; their years seemed to flow into him like water into a deep, dark well.
The priests rebelled.
They tried to break the bargain.
They failed.
In the end, the boy's own mother smothered him in his sleep, unable to bear watching him drink the life from all he touched.
But the name the king had invoked did not die.
It crawled along the bloodlines, seeking others who might whisper it again.
Baba's voice fell silent on the last leaf.
The lamp's flame flickered.
"That statue," Ifabola whispered. "That name. It's the same, isn't it?"
Baba nodded slowly.
"Some letters of it are scratched out here," he said, tapping a blank patch on the leaf. "Whoever copied this was wise enough not to write it fully."
He hesitated.
"My old altar," he added quietly, "bore curves much like these."
They sat in silence for a moment.
"Can we find where that first shrine stood?" Fẹ́mi asked. "If we destroy its roots, maybe the tree will stop growing in our time."
Baba's gaze sharpened.
"That thought has gnawed at me since the first night," he admitted. "The story says the shrine lay 'where three rivers part and the red stones remember blood.' That could be many places. But there is an old city to the east—Òkìtì—long abandoned. Its ground is red with iron. Three small streams meet near its walls."
He rubbed his beard.
"If the first bargain was struck with kings," he murmured, "perhaps their ghosts still linger there. And perhaps the hunger has a deeper anchor we can cut."
"You can't go alone," Ifabola blurted. "It wants you. It will be waiting."
"I am aware," he said dryly.
"Let me come," she said.
"Absolutely not," he and Fẹ́mi said together.
She glared.
"I already carry a piece of it," she said, lifting her bandaged hand. "If it wants to pull something, it will tug me whether I sit here or walk there. At least if I'm with you—"
"Enough," Baba said, not unkindly. "You are brave. Foolishly so. But you are also five. If I die, someone must remain to carry what I know. That is you and your brother."
He turned to Fẹ́mi.
"If the queen‑mother allows, I will go east," he said. "Ogunremi will insist on sending his men to watch me. Good. Let them. While I am gone, you will hold this house with the elders. And you—" he looked back at Ifabola "—will keep your feet in your body and your hand out of doors that are not meant for children yet. Understood?"
She wanted to argue.
Instead she bit down on her tongue, tasting blood, and nodded.
He squeezed her shoulder.
"Good," he said. "We have enough wars without fighting inside our own walls."
At the river's dream‑edge, Kike walked with Dupe.
The older woman had a calabash balanced on her head and a lazy swagger in her step, as if this were just another trip to fetch water.
"Are we dead?" Kike asked, for perhaps the tenth time.
Dupe snorted. "Do you feel dead?"
Kike considered.
"My feet are wet but not cold," she said. "I'm not hungry. 'Fabo shouts at me a lot."
"Then you are not dead," Dupe declared. "You are simply…waiting."
"For what?"
"For your sister to stop doubting herself," Dupe said. "And for your father to stop carrying stones he should have dropped years ago. In the meantime, we walk. It keeps the river from thinking you are a rock."
Kike giggled.
"Tell me a story," she demanded.
Dupe sighed theatrically.
"You think I came to the halfway river to rest?" she grumbled. "Even here, small mouths yank stories from my throat." But her eyes softened.
She launched into a tale about a trickster tortoise who tried to steal fire from the thunder god and ended up with a cracked shell for his trouble.
As she spoke, something large and hungry watched from the far bank.
It was not yet allowed to cross.
But it was patient.
Very patient.