Summary

Esi – Esi is kept in the dungeons below the Castle with so many other women that they can all barely move, covered in their own waste and starving. She manages a bit of mental escape as a friend tells her a story, but her mind soon moves back into memory of how she came to be there.

Esi was the beautiful daughter of an important man in her village, a wise and powerful warrior. She was treated with love and tenderness of her mother Maame and with pride by her father, and eventually learned that her mother was chosen by her father to be his wife in spite of her having had a troubled history, about which no-one will tell her. Eventually, and upon her father’s insistence, Esi’s mother took a young female prisoner into the family home to be a...