The festival's garlands wilted. The heady scent of blossoms and palm wine soured into the mundane smells of dust and sun-baked mud. The thunder of celebratory drums faded, replaced by the familiar, grim rhythms of training and the low, constant hum of political tension. The Custom had carved a canyon through Nawi's spirit, and into that emptiness rushed a cold, clear dread. The arguments in the council were no longer abstract; they were about perpetuating the ritualized horror she had just enacted.
The debate over Abeokuta intensified. General Gbehanzin, his pride stung by the Viceroy's cautious approval of the palm oil exploration, became more strident, more volatile. He brought maps to the council, jabbing a thick finger at the formidable-looking fortress city.
"Every day we delay, they grow stronger!" he thundered, his voice echoing in the now-familiar chamber. The lamplight gleamed off the sweat on his brow. "They mock us! They call us 'the women-led kingdom'! They say our strength is a myth! We must answer this insult with fire and steel!"
Nawi watched him, her senses heightened by Afi's tutelage. She no longer saw just a blustering general; she saw a man whose entire identity was tied to a version of Dahomey that was being challenged. She saw the fear behind the bravado—fear of obsolescence, fear of a future where his kind of strength was no longer paramount.
Commander Nanika's rebuttals were, as ever, cool and pragmatic. She spoke of cost-benefit analyses, of the reports from her scouts about the Egba's improved fortifications and their stockpiles of European rifles. But her words felt thin to Nawi, a sterile argument against the visceral, bloody reality Nawi had just participated in. The palm oil future Nanika envisioned felt like a distant dream, while the slave-taking present was a waking nightmare.
A few days after the Customs, Afi came for Nawi again. The air in the palace was heavy with the threat of rain, the sky a lid of bruised grey cloud. The scent of ozone and damp earth promised a coming storm.
"The General has brought a… visual aid to today's council," Afi said, her tone laced with a rare edge of distaste. "He believes it will sway the Viceroy. You will find it… instructive."
When they entered the council chamber, the reason for Afi's tone was immediately apparent. Standing between two guards in the center of the room, before the great ebony table, was a man.
He was a prisoner, but unlike the broken souls from the Custom, this man was unbowed. His hands were bound behind his back, and he wore the tattered remnants of an Egba warrior's tunic, stained with old blood and dirt. He had been beaten; one eye was swollen shut, and a crusted cut split his lip. But he stood tall, his shoulders thrown back, his single good eye scanning the faces of the powerful men and women arrayed before him with a look of pure, undiluted contempt.
He smelled of the road, of dried sweat, of blood, and of something else—an unbroken pride that was a tangible force in the room.
"This," General Gbehanzin announced with a theatrical flourish, "is a snake from the nest of Abeokuta. Captured on a scouting mission near our borders. He can tell you of their 'strength.' Go on, dog. Tell the Viceroy how your people tremble behind their walls."
The Viceroy leaned forward, his expression curious. "What is your name, warrior?"
The man was silent for a long moment, his gaze fixed on the Viceroy. The only sound was the sputter of an oil lamp and the distant rumble of thunder. When he spoke, his voice was raspy from thirst, but it was clear and carried a resonant depth that commanded attention.
"I am Adewale, son of Babatunde, of the Egba people. And I do not speak for the trembling. I speak for the defiant."
Gbehanzin snorted. "Defiant? You are in chains."
Adewale's good eye swiveled to the General, and the contempt in it was so potent it seemed to physically strike the man. "Chains hold the body. They do not hold the spirit. My people have faced the Oyo Empire. We have faced famine and disease. We have built a city on a rock with our own hands. You think your chains frighten us? You are just another storm. We have weathered storms before."
Nawi felt a jolt, a recognition so profound it was like a physical blow. Chains hold the body. They do not hold the spirit. It was the same defiant fire she had seen in the eyes of the first executed prisoner. It was the same fire that had once burned in her own. This man, Adewale, was not a symbol or a resource. He was a mirror.
"Your city is an affront to the power of Dahomey," Gbehanzin sneered, recovering his composure. "It will be rubble by the next rains."
Adewale actually smiled then, a grim, terrible sight with his split lip. "You may break your army on our walls, General. Many have tried. Your women soldiers, your male warriors… they will feed the earth at the base of our fortifications. And for every one of us who falls, two more will rise. We fight for our homes. For our children. What do you fight for? For the vanity of a king? For the pleasure of traders from across the sea?"
His words, spoken with a simple, unwavering conviction, hung in the air, stripping away the rhetoric of glory and destiny. He made the proposed war sound not like a glorious conquest, but like a futile, bloody, stupid mistake.
Commander Nanika saw the danger. "The warrior's spirit is commendable," she interjected, her voice cutting through the silence. "But spirit does not stop a cannonball. Our intelligence suggests their powder is low, their unity fractured."
Adewale turned his gaze to her. He seemed to size her up, this woman who held power equal to the bellowing general. "You are the one they call the Lioness," he said, his tone shifting from contempt to a strange, analytical respect. "Your reputation for strategy reaches even our walls. So you must know, then, the truth. You know that a cornered animal is the most dangerous. You know that a people fighting for their very existence will dig their graves with the bones of their enemies before they surrender. You are not planning a battle, Commander. You are planning a massacre. And the blood will be as much yours as ours."
He looked back at the Viceroy. "You can send your armies. You can spend the wealth of your kingdom. You can pile the bodies of your young men and women to the sky. And when you are done, if you succeed, you will have a city of ghosts, a mountain of debt, and the enduring hatred of every Egba man, woman, and child who draws breath. Is that the victory you seek?"
The chamber was utterly silent. The logic of the warrior was unassailable. He had taken Gbehanzin's argument for glory and revealed the skull beneath the skin. He had taken Nanika's pragmatic calculus and shown her the incalculable variable of human will.
Nawi could not tear her eyes from him. She saw the intelligence in his face, the courage in his posture. He was everything the Mino claimed to be: brave, loyal, defiant, strategic. He was not a monster. He was a leader. A protector. He was what her father had tried to be.
The image of the boy from the Custom, of Binta, of her mother, all swirled together with the face of this Egba warrior. They were all the same. They were people. Homes. Lives. The war Gbehanzin wanted was not a war against a faceless enemy; it was a war against a thousand Adewales, a thousand Ketis, a thousand families who loved their homes as fiercely as she had loved hers.
The black-and-white world was not just cracked; it was inverted. The enemy had a face, a name, and a cause as just, in its own context, as her own desire for vengeance.
General Gbehanzin, sensing the shift in the room's atmosphere, grew livid. "He speaks pretty words! He is buying time for his people! He is a spy! He should be executed as an example!"
"He is a prisoner of war," Nanika countered sharply, her tone final. "And he has given us more valuable intelligence in five minutes than your scouts have in five months. He has shown us the spirit of the enemy. That is worth more than all your maps."
The Viceroy finally spoke, his voice weary. "The warrior will be taken to the holding cells. He will be treated with the respect due his rank." He waved a hand, and the guards led Adewale away. The Egba warrior did not look back, his pride intact to the last.
As the doors closed behind him, the council descended into a chaotic, hushed argument. But Nawi heard none of it.
She sat on her stool, the cold from the stone floor seeping up into her bones. The face of Adewale was burned into her mind. His words echoed her own deepest, most secret thoughts.
What do you fight for?
The question was a abyss. She had fought for revenge. But now, revenge felt small and petty. To destroy Dahomey would be to become the very thing she hated—a destroyer of homes, a killer of people like Adewale, like her father.
But to do nothing was to be complicit in the machine that crushed them.
Afi's words came back to her: "You can let it drive you to a futile, glorious death… or you can use the heat of that anger to temper your mind into a weapon."
Adewale had wielded the weapon of truth. He had walked into the heart of his enemy's power and spoken it without flinching. He had shown her that the most powerful rebellion was not blind violence, but unwavering truth.
The enemy's face was no longer the face of a Dahomey soldier. The enemy was the system. The Custom. The greed. The unthinking tradition. And it was a enemy that wore the same uniform she did. The path was no longer about choosing a side in a war, but about challenging the very idea of the war itself. And as the first crack of thunder finally split the sky outside, Nawi knew, with a terrifying and absolute certainty, that her war had just begun, and it was a war she would have to fight from the inside.