About this story
A stranger nursed at the mission tells of the ghost kings, dead rulers of a walled land who wait for a white queen. You cross Zululand as the Inkosazana into a city of graves where every life is a tree. Forty chapters carry the vision to the tree at dawn and the burning of the kings.
How it opens
Drought had hardened the upland where your family buried another infant without flowers.
Reverend John DoveYour brother is beyond suffering, Rachel; faith must look past this grave.
After the burial, you returned to your mother feverish in the wagon tent, too ill to have attended.
Janet DoveDo not ask a mother to praise the road that has taken another child.
Reverend John DoveNatal still needs the work for which we left the settled colony.
Choose
Grief is not disbelief merely because it refuses your chosen words.
A mission cannot be holy if every warning about the family is dismissed.