The Hausa girl and the wolf king.

CHAPTER 1

The Wolf in My Dream

The wolf was dying, and it kept calling my name.

I don't mean it barked or howled. I mean it looked at me — golden eyes, half-closed, blood matting the grey fur along its ribs — and somewhere behind those eyes a voice said Aisha the way my mother says it when she's about to scold me, low and certain, like she has no doubt I'll answer.

I reached for it. My hand passed through smoke instead of fur. The forest around us wasn't any forest I knew — the trees were too tall, their bark silver instead of brown, and the air smelled of rain that hadn't fallen yet. The wolf's breathing slowed. I remember thinking, with the strange calm dreams give you, if it dies, something in me dies too.

Then my alarm went off, three minutes early, the way it always does when I forget to reset it after Ramadan.

I lay there for a moment with my heart going too fast for a dream that was already fading. My phone said 5:47 a.m. Through the window, the sky over Zangwa was still that flat grey it gets before the muezzin's call, before the compound wakes up, before my mother starts the fire for tea. I sat up, and that's when I saw it.

A mark. On the inside of my left wrist, dark as henna but not henna — a circle with three lines crossing through it at angles that didn't look accidental. It hadn't been there last night. I know that the way you know your own name.

I rubbed at it. It didn't smudge.

"Aisha!" My mother's voice from the kitchen, sharp the way it only gets when something's wrong, not when she's calling me to eat. "Aisha, come."

I pulled my sleeve down without deciding to. Some instinct older than thought told me to hide it before I understood why.

She was standing over the stove when I came in, and when she turned to hand me my cup her eyes went straight to my wrist — to the sleeve I'd pulled down, as if she already knew exactly where to look. Her hand shook. The tea spilled a little onto the counter and she didn't wipe it up.

"What is it, Mama?"

"Nothing." She said it too fast. "Bad dream, that's all. You were talking in your sleep."

"What was I saying?"

"Drink your tea before it's cold."

I have known my mother for twenty-two years. I know when she is closing a door and sliding the bolt across it. I let it go — for now — because arguing with Hajiya Fatima before seven in the morning has never once worked in my favor.

The market was already loud by the time I got there, sellers arranging tomatoes into little red pyramids, a boy dragging a wheelbarrow of pure water sachets, the smell of frying kosai thick enough to taste. I sold fabric two stalls down from my aunt's provisions shop — Ankara mostly, some lace for weddings — and on an ordinary Tuesday I would have spent the morning haggling over yards of cloth and gossiping with Ladi from the stall beside mine.

It was not an ordinary Tuesday.

I felt him before I saw him. That's the only way I can describe it — a change in the air, the way you feel a storm coming before the clouds arrive. I looked up from folding a bolt of blue Ankara and there was a man standing at the edge of the market where the stalls thin out toward the road, not buying anything, not talking to anyone, just watching me with an intensity that made the back of my neck go cold.

He was tall in a way that made the space around him feel smaller. Dark hooded jacket despite the heat. And his eyes — even from thirty feet away, even with the sun in my face — were gold. Not brown-gold. Gold like a coin, like something struck rather than born that color.

I knew him. I don't know how, but the recognition hit me like missing a step in the dark — the same certainty as the dream, the same voice saying my name.

"Ladi." My voice came out strange. "Do you see that man?"

She followed my gaze. "Which man?"

I turned back. The space where he'd been standing held nothing but a boy selling roasted groundnuts and a stray dog asleep in the shade.

"Aisha, you're pale. Sit down."

I didn't sit down. I walked toward the road, toward the exact spot he'd been standing, my heart doing something complicated and fast. There was nothing there. No footprints in the dust, though everything else in the market left a print — nothing except, when I looked down at my own wrist where my sleeve had ridden up, the mark, dark and undeniable, and for one impossible second, warm.

Behind me, closer than a voice traveling through market noise should have been able to reach, someone said my name.

Not Ladi. Not my aunt.

A man's voice, quiet, certain — the voice from the dream.

I turned around, and he was standing three feet away, gold eyes fixed on my face like he'd been waiting his whole life to see it, and the first thing he said to me, before hello, before any introduction at all, was:

"You shouldn't be able to see me yet.