Osawe saw the footprint on the morning of his seventeenth birthday, which he did not celebrate because slaves did not have birthdays and because Osawe had never seen the point of commemorating the passage of time when time passed whether you noticed it or not.
He was on patrol a routine sweep of the estate's northern boundary, the three-kilometer stretch where the cleared farmland met the deep forest. Iyamu's scout unit ran this route twice weekly, checking for beast sign, monitoring the tree line for unusual activity, maintaining the trip-wires and alarm stakes that served as the compound's early-warning system.
It was supposed to be routine. It was not.
The footprint was in the soft earth at the forest's edge, where a drainage channel had created a strip of mud. A boot print. Not a soldier's boot Benin military boots had a distinctive tread pattern that Osawe could identify in his sleep. Not a farmer's sandal. Not a beast.
A foreign boot. Narrow-soled, hard-heeled, with a tread pattern that Osawe had never seen in any Benin-manufactured footwear.
He crouched beside it. Didn't touch it. His training Iyamu's training, two years of fieldcraft drilled into him with the precision of a woman who had been tracking threats since before Osawe was born had made certain responses automatic. Observe. Don't contaminate. Assess.
The print was fresh. Made within the last twelve hours the edges were sharp, unweathered by sun or wind. The depth suggested a man of medium build, approximately seventy kilograms, moving at a walking pace. A single print the others had been placed on harder ground or swept. This one was a mistake. A single footfall on soft mud that the owner hadn't noticed or hadn't had time to correct.
Osawe's mind the calculating, pattern-matching mind that Esigie had recognized in a kitchen seven years ago processed the implications in three seconds.
A foreign operative. On foot. Within three kilometers of the estate. Conducting surveillance of the compound's boundary. Careful enough to erase most of his tracks but human enough to miss one.
The Sarahan intelligence network that had placed a spy in a Benin jail cell with a poison tooth had placed a scout at the edge of the Count's estate.
* * *
I reported to Iyamu within the hour. She looked at my sketch of the boot print I'd drawn it in the mud beside the original, preserving scale and detail and her face went the color of ash.
'You're sure?' she said.
'The tread pattern doesn't match any Benin manufacture. The boot shape is consistent with Sarahan cavalry issue I've seen diagrams in the military intelligence briefings that come through the scouts' signal posts.'
She looked at me. Iyamu had sharp eyes scouts' eyes, the kind that saw what other people walked over. She'd been training me for two years and she knew what I was capable of. She also knew what I was a slave. An asset without rank, without authority, without the standing to make official reports.
'I'll take this to Aruan,' she said. 'Your name stays out of it.'
'Understood.'
'Osawe.'
'Ma'am.'
'Good eye.'
Two words. From Iyamu, they were a commendation.
I went back to the barracks and told Esigie that night. He was quiet for a long time the deep quiet, the processing quiet, the quiet that meant the archive was integrating new data at maximum speed and the Arbiter was running projections.
'How close?' he asked.
'Three kilometers from the wall.'
'How long ago?'
'Twelve hours, maybe less.'
'They're mapping the estate.'
'Yes.'
Silence. The barracks hummed with the distant sound of Aighon snoring three bunks away.
'The war isn't coming,' Esigie said. His voice was flat. Not afraid analytical. The voice of a man reading data and not liking what it said. 'The war is here. The fighting hasn't started, but the war is already being fought. Intelligence. Positioning. Asset mapping. By the time the first soldier crosses the border, they'll know everything our troop dispositions, our supply lines, our defensive positions, the Count's health, the strength of his army.'
He looked at me. His dark eyes were steady. The eyes of a man who had been preparing for something without knowing what, and who now, with a single boot print in the mud, could see the shape of it.
'We need to be ready,' he said.
'We're not.'
'No. But we will be. We don't have a choice.'