Fiction: Esai stumbles across an ancient secret that threatens to dismantle her college to the bones

Roman poets often wrote about half-bird, half-woman things that lured sailors to the altar of their deaths. Things that sang till the skulls on their island looked like precious ivory art. Dangerous, irresistible huntresses, dressed to kill. To me, it was the rumour that came closest to imitating a siren’s song in real life. To be seduced by a rumour was to listen to this very song on loop.

You could tempt the world with a sensual secret. With the soft, feral striptease of a scandal. All it took was Henry’s calculated lies to behead Anne Boleyn. Word of mouth that turned teenage girls into Salem witches. A single grapevine that led to the boiling of Jahanara’s lover. I thought about her hiding her beloved until her father, Shah Jahan, heard of their affair. I thought about her waiting in her palace seconds before, soaked in perfume, ready to kiss ghazals out of the man’s throat. I wondered if any of it was real, or simply good storytelling; an illicit romance built from thin air to ruin a princess’s reputation in a time when reputations could be so easily ruined.

But it was in the forest that I first discovered a rumour...

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