Chapter 1 #2
The top of the rise gave way to cooler wind and a view of the entire leeward side of the island.
Much of it was covered in long, soft grasses and tall, thin trees.
Yemi snapped the pictures that would help her piece together its topography later.
It was a shame the excursion was so brief.
She wouldn’t get all of it. Each click of the shutter felt like a successfully passed moment.
It was an earned breath, a bookmark in some page of her life she could return to when times inevitably got worse.
She found herself delaying going home whenever she could now, because those times promised to find her soon.
She’d been fortunate to stave them off this long.
She sighed and scanned the island for anything remarkable she may have missed, when she caught sight of the bubbling sea beyond the tops of a cluster of trees near the opposite end. She squinted and made out what appeared to be a wide spot of thrashing white among the waves.
“Come up here,” she told Nova. “West, between those trees and the mountain. What is that?”
It took Nova a moment to find the spot, but after some time, she shrugged. “Something spawning?”
Yemi adjusted her camera lens as best she could and was able to make out broad tail fins before a trio of ostensibly human heads attached to mottled human torsos appeared. They seemed to be talking. With any luck, it wasn’t about the Ixian fleet.
“No. Mer,” she said grimly.
“That’s… not ideal.” Nova frowned. “Hell of a coincidence, though. Do we notify the commanders?”
“No. If that rumor about the body has spread through the ranks already, they’ll be looking to hunt. We can’t fight an ocean.” She stowed her camera and hopped down from her perch. “We’ll say nothing and hope they’re minding their business. But we should leave before anyone notices them.”
“What if they strike first? And the body was to lure ships here?” Nova asked as they headed down the hill.
“Then I did my best. But that’d solve your boredom problem.”
“Heh.” Nova smirked. “You’re not wrong.”
The proper send-off for any Ixian was a burial at sea.
A priest from the Kept cleaned the body of the deceased.
They wrapped it in muslin soaked with cloying, aromatic oils and adorned it with bright floral wreaths meant to ward off the ocean’s predators and let its Old Gods—from whom the Mer were allegedly descended—know this was someone returning home.
They set the nameless remains afloat on a small raft made of driftwood from on board the Dulce Periculum just after sunset. It was the dead king’s ship, jewel of the fleet, and Yemi would sail on no other while her father’s ghost lived here.
Brother Lain, robed in white, uttered his prayers to the wind over the port beam while soldiers stood in silent, reverent rows on every deck of the flotilla.
He poured anointing oil through Yemi’s open hands into an abalone shell and mingled it with seawater before tossing it overboard after the body.
“From the seas we came,” the collected masses echoed after him in a somber monotone. “And to the seas we return.”
A young page by the name of Aidin presented Yemi with a white rag to clean her hands while the assembled soldiers were dismissed to their evenings.
Lain was a relatively young priest and much less of a zealot than many of the others keeping residence at the palace.
He was tall and lean, with a prominent brow and kind eyes framed by wire eyeglasses.
And he was funny. He’d been charged as Yemi’s head tutor most of her life as well, and that job required a certain amount of wit and patience, neither of which he seemed to possess in the performance of his duties.
So when Yemi jokingly (half jokingly, anyway) remarked that maybe he could go easy on the oil next time, he didn’t stop the rambling prayer that would continue until the body was out of sight.
He did, however, cut his eyes at her in the familiar way that suggested the prayer was also a curse and that she should leave him alone before it bore fruit.
She took the hint and returned the rag to the page before heading to the captain’s quarters with Nova close on her heels as guardians tended to be.
Sun-draught sails were stored, and the engines powered by the sunlight they drank were ordered ready as anchors retracted as they prepared for home.
There was a lurching sound and the creaking of warming metal as they got underway.
“This has to be what a bee’s ass smells like,” Yemi groaned, holding her hands as far from her body as possible.
“So do I get you alone now? In the dark, away from prying eyes,” Nova mused, maddeningly close to Yemi’s ear.
“Calm down,” Yemi replied behind a grin. “I still have my briefing. I need you to find me resistible for at least another hour.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, gorgeous. I’m mostly looking forward to a nap and a shower.”
Yemi stopped to look at her, unsure if she was joking.
“What? I said mostly. And I did call you gorgeous.”
“You’re relieved of duty, then. Not like there’s an entire armada out here who can do your job or anything.”
Nova chuckled in a vaguely naughty way. “If by job, you mean—”
“I don’t. Go to bed!” Yemi said quickly, despite her laugh.
“As you wish. Come knock when you’re done.”
She continued up the stairs alone to where a soldier opened the door for her. The collected commanders and their assisting staff stood and bowed as she entered.
“As you were,” she said lazily.
Once the door was shut, the room was stifling with the scents of tobacco and hearth and of bergamot someone was wearing poorly.
“Who’s overdone the cologne? Less of it, please. We’re in tight quarters. A window, someone.” Yemaya frowned as she took her seat. Chuckles and mutterings of “Yes, My Light” fluttered about the room.
A window was opened and the commanders joined her around a large, square table covered in overlapping maps secured by brass weights and a grid of leather straps. Commander Hurand presented her with a leather portfolio stacked with training results from every vessel.
“Performance and inventory,” he started.
He was a jovial man. His fingers were thick, and one of them was missing from his left hand as he pointed out line items on the documents she held.
“Twenty-eight new cannon, salt bombs all maintained and operational. New pyrogel looks promising. We’ll be seeking other applications for it.
There’s an inquiry into a riflery contingent—”
“No,” Yemaya snapped. “We’ve been over this.
Who’s made the inquiry, Commander? You? Inquiries don’t just get made.
Someone makes them, and I’d hate for it to be the same someone who’s been told at least a hundred times that we are not a nation of gunners and will not be at any point in the foreseeable future. ”
Hurand cleared his throat to the small smiles and snickers of the others. “I’ll… relay that to the inquiring party, My Light.”
“Excellent. What else?” she asked, flicking through the other pages for anything remarkable.
The room went silent and somewhat more tense as eyes went to Commander Nasrin, an older brown woman with a severe silver bun and an interesting backstory for the trio of slash marks slanting upward on the side of her face. Yemaya liked that she spoke plainly.
“The divers returned no sign of wreckage,” said Nasrin.
“That makes the sixth Ixian ship to vanish completely just this year. The five merchant vessels and now the Clodion. We’d previously considered expatriation, people seeking their fortunes elsewhere given the…
prolonged state of things in our home. But we’ve got a body now, almost verifiably one of our own.
This has become a situation. It’s time to consider more malicious alternatives. ”
There it is, Yemaya thought, closing the brief. She sat back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap, wanting to at least be comfortable for the onslaught of passive aggression.
“Such as?” she prodded.
“The obvious thought is that Kespia’s making a play. An angle into a new war. Our navy is superior. If they target it in a tenuous peacetime, that goes a long way toward leveling the future battlefield.”
“Hmm.” Yemaya nodded. “Stealing the ships would explain why there’s never any wreckage.”
“Yes, My Light,” said Nasrin.
Yemaya studied the maps on the table and the small brass pyramids that marked the places of last contact with the missing vessels.
“But these target zones are farther from their shores than they are from ours. Do we think it’s practical for Kespia to come all this way to capture a few hundred bolts of silk or a ton of iron ore? ”
“The iron, perhaps. For their armory.” Nasrin shrugged, the movement in itself an admission that the idea was far-fetched. That there was another option, perhaps more absurd, that she believed could be the case…
“There is another possibility,” Commander Mackey chimed in from across the table. He was older, squat, and bald, and was likely the bergamot offender to mask his penchant for dark liquors. His eyes were small but deathly serious, and he appeared to regret having spoken up at all.
Yemaya almost smiled. “Well, speak. No one’s raising hands.”
He gulped visibly. “The body. The way it was drowned, mangled, chewed up. Historically, it isn’t unheard of for the Mer to lure sailors to the depths…”
The groans and “For gods’ sakes” resounded in the little room.
“What would the Mer want with half a dozen ships?” an incredulous someone asked.
“Be still. Let him speak,” Yemaya demanded quietly.
“There are circumstances!” Mackey insisted. “The—the fish in the bay at Chairre. The catch has been dwindling for years. The waters fishmongers have to mine are now increasingly distant and more treacherous than they were before the Butterf—”
He choked to a stop and Yemaya felt the heat of anger rise from beneath her collare.
“Go on,” she insisted.