"Akata Witch", "The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels"

[fiefoe]

Nnedi Okorafor wrote a lively story about young apprentice magicians in Nigeria. A lot of tropes from similar fantasy books can be found here, but also a lot of inventive melding of Africa folklore tradition in the magic setup.

• I could move like a mosquito when I wanted. Not the American ones that buzz in your ear—the Nigerian ones that are silent like the dead.
• Miss Tate looked to the class. “Each of you will come up and Sunny will give you three strikes on the left hand.” She smiled wryly. “Maybe she can beat some of her sense into you.” <> Sunny’s stomach sank as her classmates lined up before her. They all looked so angry. And not the red kind of anger that burns out quickly—but the black kind, the kind that is carried outside of class.
• Sunny covered her face with her hands, but she cringed with each slap of the switch. And then the person would hiss or squeak or gasp or whatever suited his or her pain.
• she had been able to bring a few over from the United States, including her two favorites—Virginia Hamilton’s Her Stories and The Witches by Roald Dahl.
• The head was black, the wool on its face a deeper black. It looked like one of her mother’s wigs. She felt another wave of nausea. Even worse, its eyes were glassy and dry. Its mouth was open, its pink-purple tongue lolling out to the side. Its yellow teeth would never chew grass again; its mouth would never be warmed by its breath. <> This couldn’t be a “sleeping antelope sheep.”
• Then she returned to the kitchen, cleaned up the mess, and spent the next hour cooking up a spicy red stew with chicken and bits of sheep brain for her parents and brothers. Full bellies meant heavy sleep.
• she was yanked through the keyhole. The sensation was itchy and a little painful.
• Instead, they took the strangest vehicle Sunny had ever seen. It looked like a combination of a large semitruck, a mammy wagon, and a bus. Chichi called the colorfully decorated thing a “funky train,” and they caught it on the main street.
• It looked like a red grasshopper the size of her hand.
  “It’s a ghost hopper,” Orlu whispered. “They’re harmless.”
  “You sure?” she asked. Then she blinked, realizing something. “I saw one of those at my house!”
  “You could do a lot worse. Some people would love to have those instead of what they have.”
  “There are more, aren’t there?” she said. “More creatures I can see now?” A tiny bronze chittim fell into her lap. She picked it up and smiled.
• “Yes, I strongly doubt you’ll find an ebett’s head in your local Lamb market,” Anatov said. “An ebett is an albino sheep that can sleep so deeply it gradually becomes invisible. Its spirit goes to the spirit world until it wakes.
• “Lesson one,” Anatov said. “And this is for all of you. Learn how to learn. Read between the lines. Know what to take and what to discard. Sunny, we don’t teach as the Lambs do. Books will be part of your learning but experience is important, too.
• “Your name reflects the sun, like the color of your skin, no?” He grinned. “An ugly, sickly color for a child of pure Nigerian blood. Everything about you is ‘wrong’—your eyes, your hair, your skin. Otherworldly.”
• “Yes. Certain attributes tend to yield certain talents. Very, very tall people tend to have the ability to predict the future through the stars. Very, very short people tend to make plants grow. Those with bad skin usually know and understand the weather. Abilities are things people are able to do without the use of a juju knife, powders, or other ingredients like the head of an ebett. They just come naturally.
• “It’s just an insect specter,” Orlu said as he touched the sting with his knife. He made a popping sound with his lips. “They’re the result of insects people smash. Most angry spirits come from deaths by acts of cruelty. If the insect is angry or a vengeful type, it’ll return as one of these.”
• When they arrived at Anatov’s, he was playing one of Fela Kuti’s half hour-long songs. Sunny loved Fela. This was one of the few things she and her father had in common.
• “Who’s Udide?” Sunny asked.
  “The supreme artist,” Chichi said. “A giant spider that lives underground. She’s the most creative creature on earth. She wrote an actual book of shadows? Na-wao, nice find!
• “Leo Frobenius: Atlantis Middleman or Sellout?” she said. “My mother was just telling me about how Atlantis is located off Victoria Island, near Lagos. Of course the Lambs think it’s anywhere but off the coast of the ‘Dark Continent.’ Frobenius was a Leopard man from Germany. He almost let the secret out to the Lambs. The man was so in love with Atlantis that he lost his allegiance. Wanted to tell the world what he knew.”
• “Next time, I’ll have you brought right to this office and flogged thirty times and then thrown in the dirtiest, dampest, oldest room in the library basement, where you’ll stay for a week with nothing but watered garri to eat. You hear me?”
• “Women who become Nimm priestesses are chosen at birth. Their intelligence is tested before their mother even gets a chance to hold them. If they pass, they’re ‘sold’ to Nimm, a female spirit who lives in the wilderness.”
  “Like Osu people?” she asked, horrified. These were Igbo people sold as slaves to an Igbo deity.
  “Sort of. Nimm women aren’t outcasts like the Osu,” he said. “Nimm women all have ‘Nimm’ as a last name, and they’re never allowed to marry. And they reject wealth.”


• You can always tell a man’s nature by his voice, a woman’s nature is more in the eyes. Anyway, there’s your knife. It picked you fair and square.
• “In nineteen ninety-one, they made Abuja the capital of Nigeria instead of Lagos. Now the scholars of Zuma Ajasco think that Abuja should also become the Leopard central headquarters of West Africa instead of Leopard Knocks,” Anatov said. “Bullsh—nonsense. Leopard Knocks has been Leopard Knocks for over a millennium. To move it would dislocate all that we hold dear.”
• The idea of what is appropriate and respectable differs amongst scholars. The people are like people anywhere, but the scholars are the leaders. If they are rotten, things can go very wrong.
• People used juju to light their cigarettes, push baby carriages, and block out cigarette smoke (she needed to learn that one).
• “Why didn’t they stop it?” Sasha asked.
  “Because life doesn’t work that way,” Anatov said. “When things get bad, they don’t stop until you stop the badness—or die.”
• Sunny watched, openmouthed, as the central tree lifted up on its roots and slowly rotated to the loud music. Beneath the tree, students danced.
• What is it with Leopard People and competition? But Sunny wasn’t one to talk. Only two hours ago, she’d been high on adrenaline herself.
• Even before becoming a Leopard Person, Sunny knew about masquerades. They were supposedly spirits of the dead, or just spirits in general who for various reasons came to the physical world through termite mounds. During weddings, birth celebrations, funerals, and festivals, people dressed as them and pretended to be them. That was the key word, pretend . But in the Leopard world, they were real.
• The first thing Sunny did when she woke up was look at her cabinet. Her wasp artist, whom she’d decided to name Della (after the famous sculptor she’d read about on the Internet named Luca della Robbia), had built a mud sculpture of the mermaid deity Mami Wata. As always, the wasp stood on top of its creation waiting for her response.

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India Holton's delightful nonsense was pretty much what I needed to go through holiday cooking sessions.

• nor whether it had been pearls or stars in her hair, nor even how deeply winter dreamed in her lovely eyes. He held only a general impression of “beauty so rare and face so fair”—and implacability so terrifying in such a young woman.
• and various priceless (which is to say purloined) goods,
• “Italian,” Cecilia said, disappointment withering each syllable.
  “You need to be a bit older before you can attract a proper assassin, my dear,” Miss Darlington advised from the interior.
• We shall fly the house down this afternoon. It will be a chance to give Pleasance a refresher course on the flight incantation’s last stanza. Her vowels are still too flat. Approaching the ground with one’s front door at a thirty-degree angle is rather more excitement than one likes for an afternoon.
• he had said, smiling in a lithe, melting way that reminded Lady Armitage of her second husband before the slow-acting poison began bloating his tongue
• That was back in the good old days, down at the docks and along the golden shores, when the Wisteria Society still met regularly to discuss knitting patterns and the latest explosives catalog.
• Clearly, however, her brilliant mind overpowered the ancient flight incantation. Last month, she’d bunny hopped the house into the Avon River and had to replace all her carpets; this week she’d aimed for Chesterfield Street and ended up on a rooftop instead. Alas, the perils of genius. A town house was simply too light; no doubt some castle or cathedral would better contain the forces of her great intellect.
• This one didn’t slouch or put up his feet. This one held himself like a cocked weapon.
• the aggravating man went on, strolling beside her. “After all, our souls are made of the same thing, yours and mine.”
  She shifted the parasol once more so as to stare at him, aghast. “Are you paraphrasing Wuthering Heights?”
  “Are you reading Wuthering Heights?” he retorted with a smirk.
• “What bracelet?” he asked, all innocence. Cecilia pursed her lips and held out her hand, and he grinned as he laid the loop of gold and pearl in her gloved palm.
  “Thank you,” she said. “Please do pass on my compliments to Lady Armitage.”
  She turned to depart, but he took a large step alongside, and it was clear he would stop her if necessary. So she paused and looked at him impatiently.
  “My fountain pen, if you don’t mind,” he said.
  Cecilia sighed. She tipped the pen out of her sleeve, handed it over.
• this had become so codified over the years that, by the time Cecilia entered, there was a complex system of promotions, demotions, demolitions, and tests to navigate before one was even allowed a biscuit from the tea table.
• “We have only three laws in our Society, Cecilia. No killing civilians. Pour the tea before the milk. And no stealing each other’s houses. Anyone breaking those laws is cast out—literally, and in most cases from a very significant height.”
  “So who might it be?”
  She already knew the likely answer. Maliciously acquiring houses was a theme of Wuthering Heights, after all.
• “Constantinopla Brown, ma’am.”
  Miss Darlington frowned in the severe manner that indicated she was feeling pleasantly surprised. “Not Anne Brown’s granddaughter?”
• She was dressed in a voluminous black gown, with a black lace cape about her shoulders secured by a brooch of skull and crossbones. Her head was glazed with thin black hair and featured round pallid eyes, thin pallid lips, and a nose so pallid that it seemed more like an insinuation of a nose than actual nasal cavities. If Death had a governess, she would look like this woman.
• “Oply’s ever so gifted. With her excellent grades and just a touch of blackmail, she graduated three months early from Mrs. Higglestone’s School of Music and Martial Arts.”
  “School,” Miss Darlington said, her tone the verbal equivalent of cold, unsugared tea. “How modern of you.”
  Miss Brown smiled.
  Miss Darlington smiled.
  Constantinopla edged away.
• You have come outside without coat or shawl. You might catch a chill. I consider it my duty to warm you with a frisson of fear.”
• And yet, I cannot feel too apologetic for imprisoning your soft hand, or wanting to rave about your peerless eyes—”
  “Really, sir!” Cecilia was entirely shocked. “You misquote Keats in the most appalling fashion.
• It occurred to Cecilia that, if Captain Lightbourne turned out not to be a double-crossing henchman of her father, but merely an innocent assassin after all, she could hire him to bash Jane Fairweather to death with that little book of battle poems.
• They had been introduced a few years ago while tunneling out of a Turkish prison and were known to be the happiest married couple in the Society, to the regret of many who felt fine-boned, black-haired Essie would be particularly suited to an elegant suit of widow’s weeds.
  “‘The guests are met, the feast is set,’” Lysander welcomed them, eliciting a smile from Cecilia. The other ladies stared blankly, not being acquainted with Samuel Coleridge’s most famous poem. Lysander winked at Cecilia (for he dimly remembered being Lysander the Lout beneath the polish of marriage, fatherhood, and routine villainy).
• “why don’t you see if the teahouse has a library? I’m sure you will find the chitchat of old ladies tedious—it will be all about firming lotions and bulletproof eyeglasses and the best guns to use when you have arthritis.
• “Bother,” Cecilia muttered. It appeared that she’d have no chance of getting to the Chanters House library anytime soon.
• “The ring I want is in Collingwood & Co. I’ve cased the joint and marked the display; it should be easy enough for you to get it.
• “How did he even succeed in capturing them?” Cecilia asked, still staring at the moon as if it was a great white house she could hijack and fly to her aunt’s rescue.
• Her wits looked at each other blankly, then shrugged and wandered off again, leaving Cecilia alone. The bed was shimmering so prettily in the light.
• The mix of immorality and manners practiced by not only Lady Armitage but all the Wisteria Society had long ago confounded her ability to think critically, requiring her to take constant refuge in dissociation.
• “Nonsense. Pneumonia is only for young ladies whose aunts wish to repress them so that they never become independent and leave said aunts alone.”
• “Arithmetic,” the captain had scoffed. “What nonsense! I won’t allow it. You need to live your life like wild poetry!” ***
• “You are,” he said, pressing a hand against his breast, “as lovely as I ever dreamed, as dew bright and morning soft, with buds of womanhood unfurling in your eyes.”
  “What?” Cecilia said.
  “You are a melody in form, a promise made real by the—”
  “Who are you?” she asked. Her abruptness sliced through his effusions and left him silent, mouth agape. She watched as he regathered his superciliousness and slid it over his thin, jutting face. He was all gloss, from his slicked-back hair to his large, polished teeth; and yet, Cecilia noticed a scab of fear deep inside his gaze.
• Jane scowled, for there was no comeback to silence, and recollected too late that Cecilia had, after all, been educated by Miss Darlington. No one bested that grand lady in the deadly martial art of polite conversation.
• “Cecilia!” Miss Darlington snapped, and immediately Cecilia’s shoulders straightened, her chin lifted, and her knife hand moved to a more refined angle.
• The idea of dying in Northangerland Abbey distressed her. Here, she would need to get in a very long line of ghosts, wights, and strange-glimpses-of-something-white before being allowed any haunting opportunity.
• She took the spyglass from a nearby shelf and held it to her eye. The world was a vast black emptiness, echoing like the mordant spaces between soul-wrought words . . . <> Ned leaned across and removed the lens cap, and poetry became science again.
• She’d wondered sometimes what it would be like to fly without the protection of a house—a witch, boundless; a dream of herself. Now she suspected it would feel like this, here in his arms, under his gorgeous smile.
• “Are you ever going to return my heart?” he asked softly.
  She shrugged. “Maybe for a ransom.
• “What, another one?” Cecilia shook her head. “It seems that lately a lady cannot go a day about her peaceful felonious business without being harassed by secret service agents.”
  Jacobsen stared openmouthed at her for a moment, then shook his wits back into order. “I am Sergeant Jacobsen, employed by Colonel Williams to spy on Major Candent, who has been spying on Captain Morvath,” he said, then paused while they worked this through.
• “So it was a matter of love at first sight?” Miss Darlington surmised. “How romantic. I am always suspicious of love earned by familiarity—it shows a lack of imagination.
• —A BECHDEL TEST CONVERSATION—ALAS, BACK TO MEN AGAIN
• It was Ned she wanted, here in these last moments—Ned like a mystery, a flare of magic, a horizon.
• She turned to stare at him. “You stole a library?”
  “Well, I made the arrangements, but Pleasance did the labor. As soon as you left for the banquet tonight, she flew to Gloucestershire in an outhouse and back again at top speed in order to arrive in time.”
  “She did that for me?” Cecilia was deeply touched. And excited to think of this first theft from Aunt Darlington—her housemaid. “But won’t Pucklechurch seek justice?”