He said nothing. Absolutely nothing. Ugegbe also had her lips sealed. But not for the same reason. After letting out those damning words, she wasn't too sure whether she had life in the physical vessel that was hers or not. Most of her body functions that required voluntary control had completely failed, and there she was, still as a mouse, waiting for the hell she was sure was about to break loose.

After a while, the silence was too unbearable for her to endure. She mustered the strength to shift out of his currently loose grip. "Papa?" She croaked. He still did not utter a single word in reply, and she had to wonder if he'd not heard her. It wasn't impossible. She could barely hear herself over the thundering of her heart.

"Let us go inside." He shifted slowly to his feet as if finding the action onerous. It probably was. The greying of the carpets of hair on his head spoke of his age and the resulting frailness.

Staring up at him, chills ran down Ugegbe's spine. She trembled with what could only be fear. The sun highlighted his features, which she'd never shared; his big, pointed nose had always contrasted her flat, rounded one. With his severely arched, bushy brows, she found him more intimidating at this moment than he had ever been.

Ugegbe felt like a child caught and waiting to be beaten after stealing from the huge pot of soup, souring it in the process. This time, the dread was not behind the act of waiting for her punishment. It was from something far greater. Indeed, her stomach was not exactly bent on settling when her father would not look her in the eye.

"Papa?" She gulped, wrapping her hand around her throat. The soreness from the chokehold was still there. It was almost as if it had increased, that is, if she judged by the invisible grip pinching her windpipe close. "Y-you have not said anything."

"I do not think I have heard you well, Uge." While he spoke, his intent gaze was fixed on the house behind them. Ugegbe also noticed that he was more than a few steps away from her now. When did he move away? "The wind is too loud. It must be the reason why I am hearing something so impossible from my daughter's mouth." He commented, nodding his head, a dull smile waving on his lips.

She could clearly see the pensiveness about her father when he finally brought himself to match her gaze. His eyes were glazed, speaking nothing of his emotions, but he was clearly in deep, serious thought. Ugegbe bit on her lip as worry slammed into her so ferociously that she felt the physical pain. It scared her that she had no inkling of what the only man she trusted thought of the grave situation she'd found herself in. Pushing her hands over her eyes did not give her a single ounce of comfort.

"Let us go inside." He repeated, and she stumbled while trying to hold herself up. She was surprised when her father came to her aid.

"What about him, Papa?" She gestured at the man lying facedown in the sand, clearly unconscious. By his heavy breaths rising the slope of his back, it was easy to tell that he was very much still alive.

"He will stay there until he wakes." Her papa grunted, a current of anger she was not accustomed to stiffening his body and roughening his voice. Ugegbe thought of how the peddler had almost killed her and agreed silently.

Together, they crossed over the wooden plank that had brought the man down and picked up their pace as they entered the house. She only managed to conceal her surprise at her father having the strength to lift such a heavy wood. True, he was healthy now. But that was not always the case. In fact, he was often more ill than he was hale.

He led her to a small bench she was well accustomed to and almost immediately hurtled away. "Nnam, you should know what I have done. I killed... I killed—"

"You must be hungry, my daughter. I shall bring the bush rat I roasted yesterday. I even made some soup with it. It is not your favourite soup, but I remember you do not hate it either."

"Papa..."

"You should be well fed, or you will not have the strength. If you do not have the needed strength, what would you do?"

"Papa..."

"You will be unable to achieve what is required of you. We cannot have that happening. That would be disastrous. We cannot have any of that happening."

"Papa!"

Her loud cry stopped the jittery man, who had since been pacing, in his tracks. He turned to her, and her heart shattered in pieces. The tears she had been holding back trickled down her face when she saw the pained, anguished expression he wore. It creased every plane on his already wrinkled face, and she thought he looked older than she had ever seen him in her entire life. Not even his sicknesses had made him seem this haggard.

She did not know how it was possible, but he'd never been dismayed by the situation he'd been in. He'd accepted his fate with good cheer, focusing on the better days he thought would come and the good ones that he'd seen pass by instead of lamenting over his unfortunate portion.

Never had he shown her himself in distress, and despite how Ugegbe had watched him closely like a hawk, she could never catch him hating life or those around him, specifically those who had treated him in the most wicked way one could imagine. He'd shown regret and anger when she had to become a skate. But she'd never seen him this way. This shattered and stricken. And she hated herself for being the cause for it.

"Do you hate me now, Papa?"

"Hate you?" He regarded her with such surprise that she almost considered her question stupid. "How can I ever hate you? How can I hate the child who is the reason I live? How?" Glassy sheets set over his eyes, but he hurriedly blinked them away, possibly not wanting to worry her.

Ugegbe wrapped her arms around herself, at a loss for words. She wanted the ground to open up so she would jump into it and escape from this awful reality she was in. All she wanted was for this day to never have happened. For this sorrow she'd brought her father to disappear with her in an instant. If only it was so easy, wouldn't she be gone by now? Anything, she just wanted anything that could extricate her from the mess she'd gotten caught in.

"Maybe, you should hate me, Papa." She found her voice at long last. "Maybe, you should not love your daughter anymore because she is a murderer." Her voice cracked at the venomous word. "I killed him, Papa. I killed him. I am a murderer. I took a man's life. Do I even—"

"What did he do? The man you killed, what did he do?" For the first time, he asked the questions that she should let him know the answers to. The questions anyone else would have asked long before. Except he wasn't exactly on the right path to doing so. His inquiry was about what the dead man had done and not who was killed or even, as another example, how he was so.

Ugegbe paused to collect her scrambled thoughts. She would answer each question as they came. "He tried..." she attempted to swallow, but it was tough to do so as her throat was as dried as the skin of a snake left under the sun for days.

The chills that were dispelled after she escaped from the prince's deathly grasp descended on her once more, and she suddenly did not feel up to speaking of what had happened. She could not tell why, but she blamed herself for ever catching his attention.

If she wasn't the way she was, maybe he wouldn't have noticed that she existed. It made her feel dirty that he touched her the way he did. Now that she could recollect all that had happened, she felt completely weighed down mentally and physically.

"Did he try to hurt you?"

"He tried...to take me by force." She shuddered as soon as the words were out.

"What!" His voice thundered through the small room. "He tried to do what?" His anger could have brought the roof down on their heads, which was not much of an impossibility as the walls of this house were weak from age. "Who was he!" He shouted again. Ugegbe knew the yelling was too much for him as he immediately broke into a disturbing fit of coughs.

"I will go and get you water. Wait, Papa." She stood up and ran to the right end of the room, where she knew clean water was kept in a calabash.

True to her memory, the fat calabash with its wooden lid was on the ground next to a smaller one. She poured in a tiny amount of water in the kekere clay plate and then rinsed out whatever could have gotten into it. Insects were usually culprits caught in empty bowls. It was the reason why many calabashes were shut as tightly as was possible. No one needed the same fly that had buzzed around open feces in the village dead in the same water they were to drink.

"Here, Nna. Drink." She knelt, holding the water to his lips. He lapped at the water hungrily, downing every drop of liquid present. Guilt crushed her from the inside for being absent from her father's side for so long. She'd been unable to do the things daughters should do for their fathers.

Sighing deeply, she held back the tears rearing with newfound momentum. Her free hand found her father's, and she held onto it as if it were her last chance at life, the rope thrown to a man about to be carried away by the powerful currents of a river.

His long, washed wrapper that reached his ankles was familiar to her touch and eyes. Since he'd taken the calabash from her, both her hands were unburdened. She clasped them over his knee and laid her head on them.

When she felt his hand softly patting her braids, she sobbed bitterly into his wrapper. The emotions choking her up poured out in salty waters. She tried to stop herself once, but it was like the tears were unending. Unyielding. For the first time in all her life, she wailed like a newborn baby. Or, more aptly, a woman who had just lost her child.

Her shoulders heaved as she wept at her father's feet. She had slumped entirely to the floor and was resting against his cracked, brown legs. Never had she cried this much in the memories she had of herself. But today, she cried out her heart.

"Nwa m nwanyị. Ada m, Uge." He called out to her after a while had passed by since the beginning of her cries. Now she was snivelling, indicating the end of her teary bouts. Even if she was still in tears, him calling her his daughter would have put a stop to it all. "Gwa m, kedu onye ọ bụ?"

She knew who it was, of course. His face indeed was etched into the planes of her mind. She was scared it would never disappear. Then again, she thought that she would likely hate if that happened more than if it did. She needed the scar of her action to remain. Or else, she would be someone less than a human. An unfeeling monster.

"It was the crown prince."

"Chai!" He vociferated, agony ululating in his words. "O gbuela m. O gbuela m!"

"Papa, please. He has not killed you. Nothing will kill you." She pleaded, reaching for him. "Biko nu. Biko, Nna. This is not your fault."

"Gịnị kpatara anyị?" Why us? "Gịnị ka anyị mere? What did we do? How have our actions wronged the gods to the extent that they allowed this sort of evil to knock on our door? Without any warning! Is it something I have done? Has their favour departed from this family once again? What did I do in my past life to invite such ill-luck to my household?"

"You have done nothing to cause this. Nothing at all, Papa." She assured him, now even more dejected than she'd been before. She did not want him to blame himself for something he had no hand in. It would break her if he did. This was not his burden to carry. It was hers.

"Did I not do enough by sacrificing to them every festival day on your behalf? I never missed a day, ezigbo m. Not once. Mba, it is not me. It could never be me. I could not make such a mistake when it came to you. So, why is this happening?"

"I do not know. I know not why this is happening, Nnam. I am sorry. I am so sorry."

"It was not your fault!" His announcement surprised her enormously. She'd not expected him to be completely on her side. "I will never back up a man who could conceive so wicked an act in his mind. This might have been planned."

"How do you mean Papa?"

"Who is to say that this is not the will of our ancestors? We cannot tell whether this was the chance for that vermin to have been served his plate of judgement by the gods."

"That might be wishful thinking, Papa." Ugegbe cast her eyes to the ground, feeling worse than ever. She wasn't sure she wanted her father to attempt to justify her heinous crime. It hollowed her out even more.

"Then wishful thinking it shall be. Beasts do not deserve to live among men. Especially those who cannot overcome their disgusting nature. No man of Osisi is allowed to hurt a woman that way. No man!" His voice rose with each declaration he made. "According to the customs of our land, any man who does that must be subject to banishment, never return to the soil on which he was born."

"I know," she toyed with the shredded pieces of her spoilt dress as her hands were bent on fidgeting. "I do know that, Papa." The traditions of the village were no foreign inscriptions to her. It was crystal clear the angle from which her father was approaching the heavy matter.

The only problem was the conditions of the rule were not quite met. Though the prince had intended to claim her virtue, he had not succeeded. So, murdering him would, without doubt, be viewed as completely unwarranted from the peering glass of an outsider.

Furthermore, the crown prince was who he was: royalty. If she'd been violated by him, there would have been a corner through which the men in power would cut through, so the prince was acquitted of such a crime. He'd been destined to become the next monarch, after all. Ugegbe was destined to become no one. And though it hurt her to think of it, she could never rival royalty. She was merely a slave. One who had not yet paid her debts.

"I will not let them take you away from me, Uge. Not after your mother." His firm resolve could have worn down a mountain. He did not say the word, but the air was charged from the language of his body. Ugegbe shuddered as she glimpsed a past image of her father, the "Tiger of the Ring" people had known in his younger days. "You are all that I have left, my dearest daughter. I do not want to lose you."

"Neither do I, Papa." She vociferated with sadness painting her mood blue.

"I will not lose you, Uge. So we must flee before they come!"

༄༄༄

"Papa, will he be back any time soon?" Ugegbe asked as she sailed about the room, gathering all the necessities that would be of invaluable use on the journey that awaited.

She'd gone to check on the dealer but realised he was nowhere to be found promptly. "Do you mean Aro?" Her father shifted up an eyebrow in questioning.

"Is that his name? I did not know. I only thought of him as the trader."

"Yes. It is what he was named by his parents. He does not like to introduce himself by the appellation, so I would not have expected you to know what it was. I know because we both grew up together as children."

"What was he like as a youngling, Papa? Was he any different from he is now?" She raised her head from over her sack to stare up at her father, who was ransacking through the only box she knew him to still possess after they'd sold most of their belongings to try to offset their debts. It was brown, once made from the finest leather and wood, but was now a skeleton of its beautiful self.

"He was..." he held back for a second, enclosing in his palms a comb created from the bones of a dead animal. "He was same as he is today. Rude. Shrewd. Entitled." He swayed his head from left to right as if pitying the subject whom they were speaking of. "I thought he changed. But I was wrong. He is still very much the wicked person he was eons ago."

"How...how did you get involved with him, Papa?"

"He came to me for help. His daughter is almost two decades from her birth, yet she has not seen her cycle once." He breathed heavily through his nose. "I tried to assure him that this was of no matter. That he did not need to worry, as a considerable number of women had the cycle visit quite later into their adulthood. Ten and seven years gone by was no reason to panic. It was not common, but still, it was not enough to raise the alarm."

Ugegbe nodded, aware of this as her knowledge from training as a medicine woman served her well. Periods did not always come early for a woman. Sometimes, though fairly rare, they came just before the woman participated in her twentieth village festival.

In fact, she liked to think that they came later so they would last longer into the woman's period of complete maturity; she would so bear children for more years to come than those who started earlier. But it was just speculations on her part. It made sense that what that came late would leave later than that which came early.

"So what happened after, Papa?" She peeked at him to see that he was swiftly working and putting together a bag for himself as well. It gave her strength to hurry with hers, knowing that her father would be with her. She would not be alone on this journey, even though it resulted solely from her actions.

"I made him a concoction of leaves to help with fertility. And I warned him, very seriously, I might add, to not give her more than twice in a week—had to be on the first day of the week and the other on the third day—and no more than once in a day. I admonished, almost begged, him to pay heed to my words. There would be serious consequences if he did otherwise. I warned, and he promised to listen."

"But he did not mind your instructions, am I right, Papa?"

"Yes, my dear. You are right." He shook his head vigorously, distaste dulling his eyes as if saying that he had never seen such foolishness displayed in his life. "He administered the herbal concoction to her thrice in one day. His wife confessed this to me when I visited after. By then, his daughter was sick. Now, he blames me for her ailing."

"That is none of your faults, however. He caused so for himself, putting his daughter in danger."

"Indeed. This I said, but he returned with a knife and began to threaten me."

"What an awful man!" Her hands clenched around her bag as she counted the many times her father had been treated less than a human since they'd lost their wealth when the calamity was not of his doing. It was almost as if they'd been duped of their rights to be human along with their crops and money. It just wasn't fair.

"As he is." Her father grunted, tying the last bag with a string. Ugegbe noted that he finished with his packing quite fast but paid no more mind to it as she would anything else as she knew her father to be practical and concluded that he would prefer lighter packages for the travel.

Moments later, after she had stuffed the last wrapper in its place, the little group was ready to leave. "We must hasten, or we will not be able to leave. Go with me through the back, nwam." He urged, leading the way.

With her heart in her throat, Ugegbe joined him as they slipped out of the house, hurrying for the closure of the trees that would serve as good coverage before they reached the path that led out of Osisi. 

The plan was simple. They would head East for refuge. Her father had mentioned that it was the kingdom where the one who should have become king a hundred years ago had fled to when his brothers turned against him. 

Though the monarch had silenced most who knew the true story of how he had wrongfully stolen the throne from his half-sibling, a few villagers had been aware of what he had done. They knew that Ikemba never killed a man or cursed the gods, which were the charges on which he was banished. 

Ugegbe's grandfather was a great storyteller, so he knew virtually all the tales worth being told. Her father had learnt about the village they were heading for through the words of his mouth. Zoro, it was called.

As they neared the end of the trees and their glorious canopies, Ugegbe grew more and more apprehensive. Something was wrong; she knew it. But she had no clue what it was. She only knew. 

Maybe it was the reality that her father was slowly hunching over. His back curved more and more in exertion. He was barely keeping up with her swift pace. "Papa?" Worry sucked the strength out of her voice as she watched her papa tremble, immersed in a sea of sweat.

"You must go without me, Uge." The words she dreaded were delivered with a forceful blow.

"No!"

"I am telling you to. I will only slow you down. You need to reach Zoro by the end of tomorrow, or they will catch up with you. By then, they would have searched the entire village."

"No!" She shrieked, adamant as she was not ready to leave him behind. She had been away from him for years, and now he wanted her to embark on another journey without him?"

"You must!" His voice was firm though she heard the break in between his words.

"I cannot do this. No!" She sobbed bitterly, her tears blinding her sight. "Please, Papa. Do not force me to do this. I will stay back with you. It is my sin and mistake. Not yours. Please."

"But this is my choice, my child. My decision."

"Please," she wasn't sure what to do. To cry, run, scream or shake the stubborn man standing resolute in front of her. "Go with me. I do not want to lose you, Papa. Who knows what they will do to you in my absence? What if they hurt you because they cannot find me? How will I live with myself if that happens? Please, come with me." 

Her knees were on the ground as she pleaded, desperate to convince him to change his mind. Yet, as she did so, she knew it was impossible. No one changed her father's mind when it was made up.

"The king made me a promise that he will never hurt a hair on my head, and neither would I any on his head. We swore before the gods. I believe he will not hurt me because of that. The gods keep people to their oaths. Though you no longer believe in them as you told me, I do, and I am certain they will protect me. I will not go with you." He asserted, his face grim with determination.

"But what if he breaks his vow and the gods do not send him a repercussion. What will happen then, Nnam?" She blubbered through her weeping. 

"That will not happen, my dearest one. We do not need to consider an option that will not come to pass." He helped her to her feet and, with his tough yet gentle hands, dried her tears. 

"I have lived long, Uge. You are young and the last of my kin. I cannot let you lose your chance of getting away all because of an old man." His smile was sad, while Ugegbe could not bring herself to crack anything in semblance to a smile. Her lips felt like they'd been sealed shut, tightened to never reflect happiness.

It baffled her how her father had the utmost and complete trust in the gods. She no longer bothered with any deity. Not God or the gods of her land. They probably wanted nothing to do with her after murdering a man either way. 

"You should go, ezigbo m." He handed her the bag she'd been carrying but had dropped on the ground when he'd announced he would not be journeying with her.

"But..."

"Leave. Now!"
•
A/N: I know this update is incredibly late, but I've been really down lately. Hope you all enjoy reading, though. Cheers, lovelies!