Chapter 2
· YEMI ·
Yemi nursed an anxiety headache as she watched the sea knit itself back together in the wake of the Dulce.
Twelve years on and nearly all of her dreams were flashbacks, hyperrealistic relivings of her father’s murder.
He was still everywhere around her, for better or worse.
She couldn’t imagine letting him go. Even now, she sat at her father’s desk, leaned back in his worn leather chair with her feet braced against the wood of the window frame.
The ornate glass panes formed the nation of Ixia’s helm motif, the eight spokes inlaid with streaks of brass like abstract sunrays.
The waters twinkled blue in the morning light, cut by the looming shadows of the royal flotilla bringing up the rear.
In the waters beneath the window, the bald and glistening tattooed heads of local merfolk began to dot the churning waves.
“Did you follow us?” she muttered. It wouldn’t have been an easy or smart thing to do. Their long necks gave way to svelte human torsos with backs and long arms covered in shining patterned skins like a motley school of reef fish. Their dark glass eyes gazed curiously, pointedly, up at her.
Something about those eyes always gave her the uneasy feeling of being too high above the surface of the world and in immediate danger of falling.
A knock at the cabin door startled her back to calm.
“Enter,” she called in her best bored commander’s voice. She turned her head enough to glimpse her guest.
Nova stepped inside and quickly issued a slight bow by way of salute. “There you are,” she said cheerily.
“Where else would I be?” Yemi grunted.
“Well, you weren’t harassing the helmsman, so you could have been anywhere. Made me look bad that I didn’t know for sure.” Her boots clicked against the wood floor as she approached, punctuated by the crunching sound of what revealed itself to be an apple.
“I mean, it’s a ship,” Yemi replied. “A finite area. I was bound to be around somewhere. You have another one of those?”
“That’s what I told the commanders, but I got The Face, so off I went,” Nova said, presenting her with a second apple. “Told me to come get you since we’re almost home.”
“I can see that.” Yemi nodded at the Fanged Coast, a stretch of jagged black rocks jutting nearly a hundred feet out of the seas on the southeastern coast of the continent. They shielded the palace atop the cliffs from naval attack and marked minutes to the city’s docks.
“I told them that, too. What’s this? You holding court?” She waved the apple at the merfolk beneath the window.
“No, they just showed up.” Yemi frowned and bit into her apple. “They do this sometimes, the gather-and-gawk thing. Do you think they know who I am? By sight, I mean.”
“Do I think they went from ship to ship looking in windows until they found you? Doubtful. They have to know of you, though, right?”
Yemi said nothing. For all she knew, they thought her a freak, a finless spectacle on exhibit in her pretty glass window.
Just as well. Men didn’t think much of Mer anymore, either.
“You alright? Did you have the dream again?” Nova’s voice pierced her thoughts.
“I’m fine. Not thrilled to get back to the Rock of course, but…” She shrugged, which was its own end to the sentence. But duty. But Mother needs me. But where else would I go?
Nova’s dark brown eyes warmed like amber in the sunlight as she inspected Yemi for lies. They’d grown up together. It was hard to keep anything from her.
Whatever she noticed, she didn’t pry. “We’ll have Moss take the long way home, then,” she said.
Yemi nodded as the bells rang them into port.
A nice young soldier Yemi recognized as new to the naval fleet rapped on the doorframe, his posture rigid in his bow and eyes downcast nervously lest he mess up any one of the dozen reporting procedures before royalty.
“My Light, we’ve arrived at the ports in Chairre,” he said quickly.
“See, he knew where I was.” Yemi tossed Nova a mocking smirk.
Nova shrugged. “Ship’s a finite area.”
“Thank you, Hadeen, I’ll join you all in a moment.”
“My Shield.” The young soldier clapped his fist over his heart, performed an aggressively clean about-face, and disappeared from the doorway.
“You get up there, too,” she told Nova. “If there’s a hole in Cutter’s formation, I’m the one that has to overhear his cursing you out for it the rest of the day.”
Nova made a show of bowing deeply as she backed away toward the door. “Of course, Your Lugubrious Excellency. Little Wind of the West, My Light, My Dark, My Moon and Stars—”
“Nova.”
“Going, going.”
Alone again, Yemi stood and stretched. She rolled her sleeves back down and donned her storm-gray uniform jacket, then swept dust from the gold brocade hem at her knees.
She inspected herself in her father’s silver mirror.
Her mother’s wide eyes, too tired for someone so young.
Full lips. Her father’s chin. A latticework of thin braids pinned in an intricate hive to the back of her head.
The royal ring on her right hand glinted in the sunlight as she adjusted her tie.
Only a few merfolk remained outside the window.
They tended to avoid the harbor and instead watched her from its edge.
One of them, a female with pale orca markings along her neck and back, raised a long arm into the air and held it there as if waving.
But her face was blank. Joyless. It could have meant anything.
The ship halted, and the scuffling of boots overhead ceased while they stared at one another.
She waited until the call of the soldiers to attention rang throughout the metal hull of the ship before she huffed, squared her shoulders, kissed her fingers and touched them to the boots of her father’s portrait and strode from the room.
Yemi felt no kinship with the sea. This was a remarkable thing for an Ixian royal, as the entire nation was devoted to it.
Most of the people had at some point earned their livelihoods from these waters.
The country was dotted with impractically massive monuments to it.
The prayers of the faithful and priests of the Kept were whisked away on its winds.
She was the third generation of a part-Mer line. But to her, it felt like a void.
The air on deck was balmy and damp as if the morning’s dew had decided to linger.
Her ship’s crew and the crews of every vessel in the flotilla stood at attention in neat lines until their sergeants at arms called for parade rest at the sight of her.
Then there was a loud ripple of parted feet, of spears slanted outward and tall shield points slamming into metal floors at their sides.
Yemi made her way down the aisle they’d created for her to where Nova waited alongside Commander Hurand, Brother Lain, and General Cutter, the captain of the queensguard.
Yemi called over the breeze, “My father’s navy remains the swiftest and most disciplined Ixia’s ever seen. Hurand, I expect you’ll relay my thanks to the commanders and see that our crews are well rested and celebrated before any more grueling training commences. Ever forward.”
“Ever forward!” The soldiers chanted their agreement, a resounding bark timed with the sharp tap of their staffs against the deck. She liked seeing the crews happy. Her father had taught her that if treated with love, they would fight for it. It seemed to work. Ixia hadn’t been conquered yet.
She stepped closer to Hurand and lowered her voice. “I also expect your collective discretion concerning yesterday’s events. Any fearmongering about who is suspected of what, and I will hold everyone who was in that room directly responsible.”
“Not a word, My Light,” Hurand agreed.
“My Light,” Cutter said gruffly, pride twinkling in his eyes.
He was a dark-skinned giant of a man, with brown eyes and an assaulting military bearing.
The flecks of silver-white hair in his beard mimicked the blinding, impossible shine of his spear and the metal accents of his uniform.
He’d been her father’s personal guard and best friend, and reminded her very much of him whenever he managed to smile.
He trailed behind her, Nova, and Brother Lain in a neat little procession down the gangplank.
Lord Irin Cerro, high priest of the Kept, stood at its base, his white robes stained in shades of gray from years of spending hours a day holding communion waist-deep in the surf.
He was spindly and copper-skinned, crisp from too much time in the sun.
His forehead crinkled with the effort it took to raise the heavy hood over his brooding eyes and created furrows deep enough to bury a pencil in.
He had a long head but a pinched face like he’d been sucking on lemons his whole life.
“Qorrea,” he said in a singsong voice, bowing a full ninety degrees at the waist as she stood before him.
His page quickly placed a violet pillow on the ground between them, and Cerro took to it on his knees, praying in mumbles at her feet for the miracle of her legs as he did every time she returned to land.
It never ceased to make Yemi uncomfortable. She fidgeted and searched for a visual distraction somewhere over his head until he stood again.
“I trust your journey was a fruitful one. Your presence was missed at the sunrise offerings.”
“Quite. No sign of the Clodion, I’m afraid. Or any of the others, for that matter. I’m hoping Brother Lain will fill you in on certain events.”
“Which events?”
“A lost soul was discovered washed ashore a ways south. We sent him off properly last night,” Lain explained.
“You didn’t bring him home?” Cerro said, hand over his heart in shock and confusion.
“No,” Yemi said flatly. “And when I said Brother Lain would inform you, I meant preferably while I was elsewhere.”
Brother Lain gave her another disapproving stare while Cerro’s deep frown cast shadows over them all.