One Way Witch

The second book in the She Who Knows trilogy, and a companion to the novel Who Fears Death, this novella continues the first-person story of Najeeba, a woman whose voice has been reduced to a permanent whisper ever since she screamed at the sight of her village burning during a genocidal attack by Nuru militants. In this world, the Okeke and Nuru are two peoples of Old Africa, long divided by hatred codified in a sacred text called the Great Book. Now, in middle age, Najeeba watches her daughter Onyesonwu depart the desert town of Jwahir to confront the Nuru sorcerer-general Daib, who raped Najeeba as part of a campaign of weaponized genetic warfare against the Okeke.

Onyesonwu leaves in the form of the kponyungo, a fiery lizard-like spirit beast a person can become by leaving the physical body behind. Najeeba has kept her own ability to take this form secret from her daughter, having buried it decades earlier. Days before Onyesonwu's departure, Najeeba walks into the desert at night and reawakens the power for the first time in twenty years, becoming the kponyungo atop a sand dune and roaring with a spirit voice she has not used since her physical voice was shattered. She resolves to practice every day.

After Onyesonwu leaves, two women check on Najeeba: the Ada, the town priestess and wife of the sorcerer Aro, and Nana the Wise, a nearly century-old elder and the most powerful woman in Jwahir. Over the following months, Najeeba teaches herself to project her spirit across vast distances, walk among distant people, and locate Onyesonwu. She appears to her daughter once as the kponyungo, and they fly together. She then travels ahead of Onyesonwu, spreading a myth about her daughter so that the people awaiting her will welcome rather than kill her. As Najeeba puts it, "No one is a chosen one without others being chosen, too" (15).

Months later, while drinking beer with the Ada and Nana the Wise, Najeeba feels the moment Onyesonwu changes the world. She feels every stone thrown during her daughter's execution by stoning in a distant city. As Najeeba exhales, a wave of change washes over reality: clothing, jewelry, and physical features shift before her eyes. In this new reality, which Najeeba calls "the Now," Onyesonwu has rewritten the Great Book. Nuru and Okeke coexist peacefully, and no one remembers the hatred. But Najeeba remembers everything, leaving her more alone than ever.

Curiosity draws Najeeba back to her childhood village, Adoro 5, flying west as the kponyungo. There she spots the Cleanser, a mysterious being that periodically takes young people from Adoro villages for one day and returns them changed. The villages have always accepted the Cleanser as a dark blessing, but seeing it through her kponyungo eyes, Najeeba perceives its true, horrifying nature. Back in her body, she understands her new purpose: she must kill the Cleanser. Onyesonwu's sacrifice did not solve this particular evil.

Najeeba approaches Aro, the sorcerer who trained Onyesonwu, and asks to become his student. Both discover they share the burden of remembering the Before. Aro demands her full life story, and she complies, revealing her goal. He agrees to train her. During the annual Rain Fest, Najeeba experiences a rare period of joy, dancing freely and allowing herself physical intimacy for the first time since the death of her second husband, the blacksmith Fadil Ogundimu.

Aro teaches Najeeba the Mystic Points, the foundational framework of sorcery: Uwa (the physical world), Mmuo (the spiritual wilderness), Alusi (spirits and deities), and Okike (the Creator, which cannot be touched). He warns that pregnancy during training could cause her abilities to flare catastrophically. This devastates Najeeba not because of the restriction but because she realizes Onyesonwu's change broke Daib's curse on her womb; for the first time in decades, she can bear children.

For her initiation, Najeeba enters the desert in spirit form and finds a glowing tent where she meets Sola, a pale, bald sorcerer who appears neither Okeke nor Nuru. He throws bones into a fire and announces it is time for her to die. She experiences death through another woman's eyes: a terrifying encounter with an enormous, ever-unfolding white entity whose expressionless face pushes closer until the woman dies of sheer terror. Aro pulls Najeeba back to reality with pipe smoke. She has passed.

Najeeba also meets Dedan Maathai, a glassmaker from the Seven Rivers Kingdom, where Okeke people were enslaved in the Before. Dedan wears an earring of black and blue beads, once the mark of Okeke slaves, though in the Now he finds the style merely familiar. His wife and children left him inexplicably, part of a wave of people abandoning their lives for reasons they cannot name. Najeeba recognizes that trauma leaves residue even when history is rewritten. They become lovers.

Training intensifies over years. Najeeba learns to communicate with masquerades, enormous spiritual entities that teach her stories and grant her tools. She learns to bring the dead back to life, an act that nearly kills her. Sola guides her into the wilderness, where she encounters seven real kponyungo. The largest, Sonnn, reveals it made Najeeba kponyungo when she was fifteen and that Sola once taught Daib. Sonnn leads Najeeba into the kponyungo homeland beneath the desert sands, where she spends what feels like many years mastering her abilities and burning away much of her trauma. After returning, she tells Dedan the full truth about herself and her sorcery, and he accepts it.

Dedan builds a roofless house of colored glass on Jwahir's outskirts that becomes a pilgrimage site. Najeeba learns water gazing, successfully glimpsing both past and future. During one uncontrolled session driven by rage and grief, she witnesses a vision of the ancient past: a winged woman, created through science, who destroyed the planet in despair, turning Earth to desert. The Great Book, Najeeba realizes, was a lie; the catastrophe was caused by all of humanity. The force of this revelation restores her full voice. She screams aloud for the first time in over twenty years.

Years into training, Dedan destroys his glass house with a hammer, shouting about lies and false happiness. As the crowd disperses, Najeeba spots Daib standing alone. She prepares to kill him with a fire juju, but Aro stops her, burning his own hand to restrain hers. He explains that Daib is bound by a sorcerer's atonement, a juju compelling the wrongdoer to seek forgiveness. Alone in the desert, Najeeba confronts Daib. He confesses the hatred remains in his bones. She leaves her body, thrusts her spirit hand into his head, and extracts a living root of hatred, carrying it as the kponyungo into the stratosphere and dropping it into the ocean. She does not forgive him; his atonement is to remember everything. Before parting, Daib reveals that what one sees during initiation is one's own death. Najeeba realizes with horror that the woman she watched die was herself.

Aro assigns Najeeba a rain-summoning juju believed dead for over 500 years, intending it as a lesson in failure. It works catastrophically, flooding Jwahir. Najeeba dives into the floodwaters to rescue a drowning girl and discovers her body is physically changing: webbing grows between her fingers and toes, a form of Eshu, the sorcerous ability to physically shapeshift, which she should not possess.

After seven years, orange butterflies throughout Jwahir signal that Najeeba's apprenticeship is complete. She wakes with one phrase: "One Way Witch" (223). There is only one path forward. She tells Dedan she is going to Adoro 5 to kill the Cleanser. He insists on accompanying her; a masquerade once called Dedan a "bridge," and Aro affirms it is right for Dedan to go, though he does not say why. The novella ends with Najeeba and Dedan preparing to depart, the confrontation left for the trilogy's final volume.