We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Scorpion Queen by Mina Fears, an Uprooted-meets-Children-of-Blood-and-Bone young adult fantasy—available now from Flatiron Books. You can also listen to the audiobook version of the excerpt, read by Sandra Okuboyejo.
Deep within the imperial palace at Timbuktu, Amie has suffered a devastating loss. Once the daughter of a prosperous salt merchant Amie’s life was cruelly overturned in a matter of months. At sixteen, Amie now finds herself disinherited, framed for a scandalous crime, and forced to serve Princess Mariama of Mali. Her father, Emperor Sulyeman, has created a series of impossible trials for his daughter’s suitors. When they fail, he publicly boils them alive, littering Mariama’s path to marriage with ninety-nine corpses.
At first, Amie’s life at court is drudgery—the chores are difficult, the servants despise her, and Princess Mariama is prone to mood swings—but the more she learns about the princess’s circumstances, the closer the two girls become. Amie and her intended, Kader, plan to escape Timbuktu and make a new life far away from the shadow of death that has fallen upon the emperor’s court, but she finds herself increasingly drawn to the princess in ways she doesn’t understand.
When a mysterious discovery forces her hand, she must choose between fleeing with the boy she loves or helping the princess to end the trials forever. Amie will need to draw on all of her strength and courage to make the perilous journey through the desert to seek the aid of an exiled god in a final, desperate attempt to take charge of her own destiny.
IMPERIAL MALI
1359
One
A girl of my age was to be like the dawn. Blooming and bright, at sixteen I was supposed to be at a beginning, looking with hopeful impatience toward my future—marriage and motherhood and the warmth of a home.
But not me.
Ruined, my parents told me, again and again. So young, and your life is already over.
When my father and mother said I was ruined, I knew that what they really meant was polluted, or poisoned. I was a disappointment through and through—a sickly animal that must be cast out for the sake of the herd, a dead branch to be pruned.
In their desperation to be rid of me, they sent me away to work in the emperor’s court, and my very first day in the palace was an execution day. I couldn’t help but see it as a bad omen, further proof of my parents’ conviction that I was a blight who would always sour her surroundings. That day I was busy, with many tasks to distract me from my dark thoughts. I had spent the morning in the palace with the other servants, preparing the emperor’s daughter, Mariama Keita, for the day’s events by plaiting her hair into a dozen waist-length braids, darkening her lips with red ochre, and tracing her eyelids with kohl.
Upon the princess’s cheeks and forehead, we dabbed small quantities of date oil.
“For the improvement of Her Highness’s skin,” explained Penda, another chambermaid. Then we dressed her in a wrapper of indigo brocade and fastened a series of carnelian bracelets around her wrists.
You are going to be different here, I reminded myself as we worked. Braver. Bolder. The sort of person willing to bend the rules to get what she wants.
All my life, I had obediently done whatever my parents asked of me, hoping to one day make them proud. For all of my sixteen years, I had been timid and compliant and eager to please. But that had never earned me my parents’ love. I was never their favored daughter—that privilege had always belonged to my older sister, Haddy.
I couldn’t deny the prickles of envy that accompanied growing up alongside a sibling who moved so easily through life, her good looks and quick wits never failing to make our parents shine with pride. Although Haddy was more outspoken and less obedient than a daughter should be, her natural charm endeared her to them far more than my obedience ever had. But hidden beneath the surface of my sister’s charm was a duplicitous streak, a talent for deceit.
She could lie better than anyone I knew.
And it was one of her falsehoods that had been my undoing, that plucked me from the comfort of our parents’ house.
In my old life, I’d had a maid of my own to dress me and bathe me. Now I tried my best not to think of it as a degradation and to ignore the flashes of humiliation that passed through me as I worked. Just last month, I was Aminata Aqit, the youngest daughter of one of the most successful salt merchants in the empire. I had been poised to marry into nobility—to a boy I loved. But that was all over now, and every task I performed that morning felt like a punishment.
A serving girl should always maintain a pleasant expression for the benefit of her employer, but I felt myself scowling with indignation instead. Luckily Princess Mariama was far too distraught to take notice. Slow, silent tears slid down her face as we draped her wrapper and pinned up her braids with gold-and-ivory hair ornaments, revealing the slender curve of her neck. Penda held the princess’s hand in comfort until she ceased her weeping.
When the princess crossed over to the windows to watch the crowds of spectators gathering in the market below, Jeneba, the third chambermaid, rolled her eyes. “After ninety-eight executions, it’s a wonder that she still weeps at all,” she whispered, her neat dark braids catching a golden triangle of late morning sunlight.
Even with her permanent smirk, Jeneba was a striking girl, with wide-set eyes, full lips, and a small and pointed chin. If she had been highborn, she might have had several eager suitors of her own. But she was only a servant, just like all the others. Just like me.
“Jen, for shame!” Penda gasped. “What if she hears you?”
Both girls turned to me expectantly, perhaps thinking I would join in their game of gently ridiculing the princess. I had met her personal attendants only that morning, but it was already clear that there was a pecking order among them. Irreverent Jeneba was the leader, while Penda, her sweet-natured friend, followed in her footsteps. An earlier me would have joked along with Jeneba, submitting to her authority just as I had always bent to the will of my parents. But I was determined to leave that person behind, and so I said nothing.
Then came a messenger to announce that it was noon, time for the three of us to escort the princess to the market square for the execution.
Upon his only daughter’s thirteenth birthday, Emperor Suleyman had issued a decree that any prince or nobleman who could pass his Trials would be permitted to marry her—while all who failed were killed. The emperor had distributed his terms to every corner of the empire in hundreds of identical scrolls:
Venture into the desert for three nights with three of my best horsemen. On the third evening, you shall come across a grove of date palms with bark as blue as a summer sky. Split the largest tree with an ax, and you will see that its wood is dark red, like blood. Return to my palace, present me with three planks of this wood, and I will permit you to wed my daughter. But if you fail this first Trial, if my horsemen bring you back to the palace empty-handed, you must attempt a second Trial—a bath in boiling water. The suitor who leaves the bath with air still in his lungs and blood still in his veins may marry the princess.
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The Scorpion Queen
The Trials seemed impossible. But that had not prevented suitors from far across the empire, even distant cities such as Mopti or Niani or Yoff by the sea, from traveling to the emperor’s palace to try to win his daughter’s hand.
All had failed. Of course they had.
To my knowledge, trees of sky-blue bark and bloodred wood did not exist. And even if such a specimen could be found within the vastness of the northern desert, I doubted a nobleman would be the first to discover it. My father always said that while Mali’s noblemen were skilled in diplomacy and military strategy, in drawing elegant calligraphy and mapping the stars, their desert survival skills were often lacking.
It was the merchant class that knew how to carve careful paths through the Sahara on camels laden with salt, gold, kola nuts, and richly woven fabrics. Merchants knew to travel only at night, when the desert was cool and more easily navigable, but the noble suitors always set off on their journeys in the stifling heat of midmorning, doggedly determined and sweating. So when each man inevitably failed his first Trial, never finding that elusive blue grove in the dunes, the emperor’s men would force him back into the city to be boiled to death before a crowd of spectators.
As a handmaiden to the emperor’s daughter, it was now my responsibility to accompany her onto the executioner’s platform, along with the rest of the imperial procession: the emperor, his advisers, and his three surviving wives.
I was dreading it. I had been compelled to attend executions before—and hated every moment of it—and I couldn’t think of anything worse than being on the platform while it happened. All morning the sky had been clear, but now the day was growing overcast. Thin white clouds gathered over the city, weakening our shadows as we climbed the steep stairs to the suitor’s kettle. Morbid, but the name did fit: it was a white clay kettle the size of a man, and it sat upon a white stone platform high above the market square. Although I had witnessed many suitors die within it, I had never before been so close.
I had always been grateful to stand at the edge of the crowd with my mother and father and Haddy—a wave of bitterness swept through me—where the dense throngs of people had created a living barrier separating us from the slaughter. In those moments, I used to struggle with feelings of revulsion and unease that lingered long after the execution had passed. It always felt strange to walk back home toward the merchants’ district with my parents and their friends, who would converse gaily among themselves and seem altogether unmoved by the events that had horrified me. I could never understand their indifference.
I forced myself to continue up the stairs. When we finally reached the platform, I looked out and wondered if I would glimpse my family in the crowd. At this height, I could see the flat white rooftops of Timbuktu scattered below me like rice upon a dark table. I turned my gaze to the river, bright as molten metal in the partial sunlight, with trading canoes flitting across it like moths. I could almost hear the fishermen’s oars slapping its waters.
Then I looked east, toward the universities. Scholars hurried down the main promenade, hugging pale scrolls to their chests. From my vantage point upon the platform, they all looked so small, like ants. Was Kader among them? I finally permitted myself to think of him, something I had been trying to avoid of late. The same questions had plagued me every day of our monthlong separation: Does he miss me? Is he thinking of me? Have I been forgotten?
Next to me, Princess Mariama, who had climbed the stairs nervously with her soft, fragile gaze darting around her, bowed gracefully to the emperor. “Good afternoon, Father,” she said smoothly.
The words seemed to change her. She was no longer the sensitive girl of seventeen whose tears had flowed easily in her own chamber; she had transformed into something flat and flinty and devoid of feeling. Now she was the emperor’s daughter I was accustomed to seeing at feasts and festivals and other public appearances, the girl whose cold, practiced composure never faltered.
Emperor Suleyman smiled distractedly in return. “Mariama, you look well.”
The princess straightened and beckoned for me to join her at the edge of the platform. I obeyed and passed even closer by the water-filled kettle and the condemned man who stood inside it. I wish I could say I remembered his name, but the princess had so many suitors that they blurred together in my mind. Mariama was the richest prospective bride in the empire—perhaps in the entire world—and so it was only natural that many suitors desired her hand. But they rarely mentioned her father’s gold before their dying moments. They preferred to speak of true love.
“Princess,” said the suitor to Mariama, his voice unsteady, “your eyes are like pools of dark water, and your skin shines like polished gold in the midday sun. You are the loveliest creature I have ever seen.”
I heard Mariama make a choked sound, something like a sob. For one brief moment, her mask of regal indifference slipped, and she looked as though she might burst into tears before the entire imperial court and an audience of market-going commoners. Just as quickly, she was all serenity again, her true self pushed down deep.
I marked her rigid posture, her quick and shallow breathing. Standing beside me on the platform, the princess looked equal parts graceful and miserable. People had to say she was beautiful because she was the emperor’s daughter, but I suspected they would have said the same even if she were a nobody. Mariama’s was a quiet beauty: her full lips guarded a narrow mouth, her dark skin was smooth as still water, and her cheekbones were high and wide, like the face of the moon. I felt a jump in my throat when her eyes, very briefly, met mine. The contact lasted only a few short moments and then she returned her gaze to the crowd, which rippled with murmurs and insults and rude little jokes, as it always did. The more I watched her, the more I pitied her. She never asked for this, I thought.
“Please, Your Imperial Majesty, if you have any kindness in your heart, any generosity, you will pardon me,” pleaded the suitor, turning from Mariama to her father. The water he stood in made a low sloshing sound with his movement. “Let me go and I promise I will leave the city at once. I will relinquish all of my belongings to your treasury. I will give you my land, my weapons, my gold—only please do not let me die.”
I cringed at the crowd’s bursts of laughter. Emperor Suleyman chuckled along with them, his gaze pitiless. His eyes were as flat as if they had been carved into stone.
I hated it when the suitors begged for their lives.
Not for the first time, I felt a surge of anger as I contemplated why we allowed the emperor to do this to so many young men. Of course, I knew I should never criticize the Trials aloud. Songhai merchant families were supposed to be imperial loyalists, and mine was no exception. Ever since the late emperor Musa had peacefully annexed our city, Mali’s emperors had protected our trading boats and caravans from thieves. In return, we paid our taxes on time and never spoke ill of the emperor’s decisions. And Mali’s noblemen were often willing to marry commoner girls like myself, provided we brought with us a sizable dowry. My parents had already secured such a match for my sister. She was now called Lady Hadiza and lived with her Malinke husband in an opulent house in the nobles’ quarter, enjoying frequent visits to the palace for festivals and feasts.
Envy and frustration gnawed at me. I, too, was meant to have wedded into the nobility. I should be married by now, a noblewoman instead of an unwed servant. I should have been my parents’ pride instead of their shame.
Haddy had ruined my one chance at happiness, and I would never forgive her for as long as I lived.
A sharp slapping sound interrupted my thoughts. I looked up to watch the emperor bring his hands together high above his head and clap ten times. At this signal, a foot soldier lit the kerosene-soaked planks beneath the kettle, which promptly erupted into flames.
I looked away as my body broke out in a thick sweat, the delicate skin of my face smarting from the heat.
I longed to be anywhere else.
I focused my attention instead on the wisps of steam rising above the kettle and over the market. The gentle noon wind lifted the smoke toward the tall white arches of the imperial palace. As the pained cries of Mariama’s suitor grew louder, I pretended that I was floating away over the city. I hovered like a hawk above it all, climbing through the sky until I reached the kingdom of Nyori, god of the clouds.
The suitor’s screams lasted four minutes, perhaps five—and then stopped. The crowd grew bored soon after, chatting idly among themselves as his corpse boiled. It was all so terrible that I had sometimes successfully convinced my parents to let me stay home from it entirely. I did not know how Mariama had borne it so many times over.
The smell wafting over from the kettle was truly awful, but when I pinched my nose to keep from vomiting, Jeneba shoved me. “That’s not the way,” she whispered, her lovely face taunting.
The old me would have apologized and dropped her hands obligingly to her sides—but she was a tiresomely obedient girl. So I shoved Jeneba right back. Not hard enough to cause injury, but with just enough force to show her that I would not tolerate bullies.
Jeneba gasped just as my nostrils filled with a scent like leather tanning over a flame. It flooded my senses with the metallic stench of coagulated blood. My stomach lurched and I plugged my nose again. I tried to distract myself from my nausea by scanning the crowd for faces I recognized. I tensed when I noticed a group of merchant-caste girls I had known since infancy, huddled together at the front of the crowd.
And then I spotted my mother. She was standing with my father in the crowd. For a brief moment, we locked eyes, and I felt a painful, familiar rush of abandonment when she looked away, gazing pointedly in the opposite direction.
My father did not avert his gaze. His cold, precise stare pierced my skin as only he could. Father could take the measure of me and find me wanting without saying a single word. While Haddy and I were growing up, he had told us often that he’d have preferred sons over daughters. He’d said that if we had to have been born girls, we should at least do him the courtesy of being marriageable—skilled in languages, pleasing in appearance, and competent at the loom and other womanly arts. Haddy was always the better student in these endeavors. She was also the family beauty. We both were short and slight, with tightly coiled black hair and deep bronze complexions— but everyone remarked that Haddy’s features were more harmonious than mine, her figure comelier. The skin of her face was always smooth and clear, whereas my cheeks and forehead were often dotted with pimples that my mother treated with tonics of sour milk.
My own father is ashamed of me, I thought as I watched him. I was never good enough for him, and now that I have fallen, he wishes I were not his daughter at all. I turned away, my throat prickling with self-loathing, when something else caught my eye. A group of nobles in blue were standing together at the center of the audience. The lords restlessly gripped the hilts of their daggers and the ladies fidgeted with their necklaces of heavy gold.
And Haddy was among them.
She looked guiltily up at me, a silent plea on her pursed lips. I had not seen my sister in more than a month, and my hands curled into fists at my sides as I noticed the amber glimmer of our mother’s wedding beads at her neck. Anger rose like bile in my throat. I would never enjoy the grand wedding I had dreamed of ever since I was a little girl. Haddy had stolen that from me, too. She was the reason Kader and I could not be together, why I was now serving in a dangerous imperial court instead of married to the kind and thoughtful boy I loved.
Watching Haddy now in the crowd, I could hardly believe that there was once a time when the two of us were the best of friends. As children, we had done everything together, from splashing in the rice paddies along the riverbank, to searching for jinn in abandoned houses, to braiding acacia flowers into each other’s hair.
Bitter tears sprang to my eyes. I wiped them away with the back of my hand—just as Haddy’s husband wrapped an arm about her waist. I felt a twinge of satisfaction when she flinched. It gratified me to remember that my sister was miserable, too.
I looked away and passed my eyes over the crowd until, finally, I spotted Kader.
The sound and heat of the fire and rumblings of the crowd all fell away. I heard nothing, felt nothing, save for the pounding of my heart and my own rapid breathing. There was my love, standing so close to the platform that he must have elbowed his way to the front of the crowd so he could look upon my face.
The sight of him made me feel lightheaded. He was my only friend in the entire world. We had been apart for just a month, but he already looked different. He was taller, all flat planes and sharp angles, with new creases in his forehead that made him look older. For one dreadful moment, I wondered if he was still on my side. What if his father had managed to turn him against me?
Then—
“I love you,” he mouthed.
Relief flooded my senses as I whispered back, “I love you.”
Kader believed me. He still cared about me, a month after we’d been torn apart. Although his face remained drawn, his eyes tragic, he smiled up at me and pointed across the river. Our love story was not over, as I had feared.
Perhaps it was only just beginning.
Excerpted from The Scorpion Queen. Copyright ©2025 by Mina Fears. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.