The Gilded Ones (Deathless, #1)

The Gilded Ones (2021) is a young adult fantasy novel by Namina Forna. It is a New York Times best seller, and Forna is writing the screenplay for a movie adaptation by Makeready. This guide references the 2021 Delacorte Press publication.

Plot Summary

Deka is the teenage first-person narrator of The Gilded Ones. The story begins in the village of Irfut on the day of the Ritual of Purity. Deka lives with her light-skinned father after her dark-skinned mother has supposedly died of the red pox. Her maternal dark skin makes her an outcast in the mostly-white village. The ritual tests the color of girls’ blood: Gold blood marks women as alaki, who are supposedly demons but are revealed in the end to have divine bloodlines.

As the ritual commences, deathshrieks (supposedly attacking monsters, but actually transmigrated souls of alaki trying to save Deka) appear. Deka is able to control them with her voice, and this act gets her branded as demonic and killed by her childhood crush. Elders and her father take her body to a cellar under the temple and kill her nine times, harvesting her gold blood for money.

A secretive emissary of the emperor appears wearing white gauntlets, which cause Deka to call her White Hands. Other people call her the Lady of the Equus (named for the horse lords she travels with), and her true name is Fatu. She asks Deka to become a soldier for the emperor in order to escape the torture and killings. Deka agrees, and meets another alaki, Britta, who travels with her, White Hands, and the equus to Hemaira. Deka passes out on the journey and survives without eating for weeks while asleep.

In Jor Hall, Deka and Britta are processed and paired with young male recruits called uruni, or protectors of alaki. Deka’s uruni is named Keita. Deka meets other alaki named Belcalis, Adwapa, and Asha on their way to Warthu Bera, the most elite training ground. There, they meet an all-female staff of matrons, assistants, teachers (including Thandiwe and Huon), and elder bloodsisters (including Gazal). They are shuffled around in a military schedule of running, combat training, eating, and cleaning up. During dinner, the group of neophytes meet another alaki named Katya.

After a few weeks of only training with women, the male uruni join the alaki. The young women are afraid to run full out and show their combat state to the uruni. Deka pricks her palm and unites the alaki with the sight of their golden blood. Once she is given a day off from training, Deka looks up a book that lists women who served as Shadows, or spies of the emperor, in the library and discovers her mother’s name, Umu, in it.

While they are cleaning practice weapons one night, deathshrieks come over the walls of Warthu Bera. Katya panics, calls for help, and is killed. Deka commands the deathshrieks to leave and faints. Keita offers to help Deka develop her special powers. However, it is White Hands, recently returned to Warthu Bera, who trains Deka, as well as Britta, Belcalis, Adwapa, and Gazal in private evening sessions by the lake. As the champions of White Hands, this group is given access to real weapons and more aggressive training techniques. Deka has private lessons with White Hands, working on a special martial art for her magical power of commanding deathshrieks.

The alaki and uruni of Warthu Bera are taken out on raids of deathshriek nests in preparation for the large offensive, under the direction of Captain Kelechi. At first, villagers harass the group, but after they successfully eliminate several nests using Deka’s magical powers, they are dubbed the Death Strikers. During raids, Deka and Keita grow closer. Deka also discovers secret temples to the Gilded Ones hidden in deathshriek nests; in one of these, she gains a shapeshifting pet called Ixa.

The raids of the Death Strikers are so successful that they are invited to the palace and meet the emperor. White Hands continues to work with Deka on controlling her special powers, and Deka begins to understand the language of the deathshrieks as well as have her features become more like the deathshrieks when working increasingly difficult magic. This causes her to question what she is and what White Hands’s long-term plan is.

Karmoko Calderis makes armor out of gold blood for Deka. Once Deka realizes her magical voice is starting to affect the alaki, she has Calderis use her blood to make helmets and circlets for all the alaki.

When the day of the offensive with the emperor arrives, White Hands rallies the alaki troops and they ride out into the desert that leads to the mountains. As they near the foothills, deathshrieks attack with rocks and spears. Britta is impaled by a spear and nearly killed, but Deka uses her magical voice to order Britta to live and Gazal (who never wore the pieces of armor made out of Deka’s blood) to get Britta to safety. Then, Deka and Belcalis kill some deathshrieks to avenge Britta.

The next day, they head into the mountains, but when Deka is about to command the deathshrieks, Katya appears as one in the battle. Deka is able to understand Katya and learns that the alaki become deathshrieks after their final death. Then, she commands the deathshrieks to protect Katya, and the emperor orders Deka be killed. Kelechi offers to kill her, but Keita intervenes, pretending to know Deka’s method of final death: dismemberment.

As Keita dismembers Deka, he uses a solution that makes her gold blood appear blue, the color of final death, and sneaks away with her body parts. At a lake in some salt mines, Keita and the severed parts of Deka talk. They are joined by White Hands and deathshrieks. White Hands explains the Gilded Ones are goddesses and Deka is made from their tears, a direct divine descendant able to appear as alaki or deathshriek. After Keita kisses Deka’s still not-completely attached head and leaves, White Hands, a daughter of the Gilded Ones herself, explains that she helped inseminate Umu to create Deka, who is called a Nuru, in order to overthrow the patriarchy by freeing the goddesses.

Once fully healed, Deka returns to the emperor’s campaign and rallies the alaki to fight the men alongside the deathshrieks by again cutting her palm and explaining the blood is divine, not demonic. Deka also asks they spare the uruni and then leaves White Hands to lead the battle while she flies with Katya to the goddess’ temple in the mountains.

The Gilded Ones were imprisoned in the blood of their daughters by male descendants who usurped them. The emperor and other male descendants of the goddesses have some magical powers, but Deka is stronger and defeats the emperor in battle. She frees the goddesses with blood from her palm, and the stage is set for the next book in the trilogy: the battle to free all women everywhere.