Chapter 3
· YEMI ·
The Kept’s open-air temple occupied the low space between the Rock and the military plateau.
The ancient staircase connecting it to the palace amounted to a pilgrimage in itself.
This was a polished ruin, all bleach-bright marble laced with gold veins where the cracks had been.
The walls themselves were the stone of the mountains.
Creeping vines wrapped tall alabaster columns that held up nothing.
The remnants of a shattered stained glass ceiling collected in moss beds along the temple’s edges.
On winter afternoons, their colors danced and refracted up the mountainside and onto the underside of King Rafale’s cloud bridge, which connected the palace and military plateaus overhead.
It was carved from brilliant white stone that legend insisted was the spine of the last great sea dragon found crashed and decaying on the site where they’d built Ixia’s palace.
A single blood orange tree grew twisted from the rocks of an outcropping that dipped over the sea.
It was beneath its branches that Yemi humored the Kept’s midday ritual, inheriting it when her mother could no longer make it down so many stairs.
Once a week at about noon, a paunchy Brother Weaver would trip over the same crack in the marble floor on his way to deliver materials for the rite.
There was oil. Honey. Flowers in the flower seasons, ash in the others.
And always a blood orange offering. They’d become a symbolic alternative to the living blood required long before Yemi’s time.
Cerro doused Yemi’s hands and prayed over the drippings until he broke a sweat. They were prayers for peace, for fish, for acknowledgment of his piety and her own divinity.
Yemi stood in the moss, sprayed by the sea, braided hair whipped by the wind and her hands dripping until the last of the oil met the rocks below.
She sought Nova’s amused face in the thinning crowd of faithful and gave her a bored look.
Their expressions always transformed into politely horrified ones when Weaver presented Yemi with a washing bowl for her hands and the assembled priests proceeded to pass it around, drinking the sweet, perfumy, sometimes ash-laced concoction.
The rite complete, citizens clothed in white each bowed before her as they filed out of the temple and down a shorter, wooded set of mountain stairs back to the city.
Yemi gazed up at the winding mountain staircase, dreading the climb as Nova joined her. Construction of a lift had been started, to the disapproval of some of the priests, who saw it akin to blasphemy, but she had threatened with some profanity to pull out of all ceremonies otherwise.
Yemi groaned. “I’m not needed, right? What if we grabbed lunch in the city instead?”
“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” Cutter grunted behind her.
Shit. Yemi dropped her head. Cutter wasn’t exactly a true believer, but he’d apparently come to every one of these ceremonies since the Bear King’s assassination.
Maybe they provided him with a measure of peace or some semblance of absolution for having failed his king.
Yemi was certain, however, that at least part of it was rooted in wanting to keep an eye on her.
“I’d really like to go into the city. Absorb some local color.”
“You know how vital it is for you to be close to home right now,” he said in a persistent low voice.
“Cutter, it’s just lunch. Honestly, you have the rest of your life to observe me aloft in my gilded cage or on a battlefield someplace. All I’m asking for here is a break long enough to eat a sandwich and maybe have a polite conversation with someone who isn’t in uniform.”
Cutter glanced at Nova as if asking if this was perhaps a game the two of them were playing.
Nova shook her head as if answering. Yemi waited patiently for the captain to give in and realize that there was no real way he could refuse her.
She loved him as she imagined one would love an uncle.
His failure to protect her father wasn’t something she held against him, but it did make him all the more serious when it came to her safety.
Visibly annoyed, he whistled for the usual small cadre to accompany her.
Yemi raised a hand to stay them. “No need for all that.”
“You’re joking,” Cutter scoffed.
“They’re all exhausted, and I don’t want to make this a thing. Nova will be enough. I’ll stick to the Green Zone, and you can promise Mother that Moss will have me back by dinner.”
Cutter appeared to chew the side of his tongue for a moment. “You’ll wait for Moss downstairs to take you into town.”
“Agreed,” Yemi replied.
“She doesn’t step foot outside of the Green Zone,” he growled pointedly at Nova. He couldn’t command the Qorrea, but someone else’s head could roll if things went sideways.
“On my life, General,” Nova nodded.
“You are back before dinner,” he hissed at Yemi as she and Nova made their way to the stairs.
Yemi smiled to keep from laughing. “On my life, General.”
The city was in the middle of a transformation, somewhere between its idyllic sea-sainted past and a dented metal future.
The Butterfly Wars had seen the country advance its technology quickly, according to her mother.
There were living grandparents older than the electrical grid, and parents still older than the telephone system.
Power and telephone lines ran in ribbons along the facades of buildings, gathering at towering poles at the ends of cross streets.
Electric cars had halved the number of hand-crank amblers walking vehicles and the horse-drawn carriages that preceded them, making for considerably less shit in the roads but an underdeveloped sense of traffic patterns.
As such, the going was slow, and Moss made conversation as they waited a few feet at a time for pedestrians to clear the way.
The sun was high, and bright linen awnings extended over where reading and gardening happened on active rooftops.
Small children on sidewalks picked at their own noses or their mothers’ braids while slung on their backs.
Food scents wafted in through the window from restaurants and the home hearths on the floors above them.
Bright banners were suspended over the street, marking the queen’s upcoming Day of Days celebration.
Passersby were beginning to take notice of the royal sigil on the car doors, and occasionally one would double-take before quickly giving them a wide berth.
“Moss, do you mind if we walk from here? We’re like a rock in a river. At this rate, I’ll never find a sandwich, much less have time to eat it.”
“Oh, I see, you want Cutter to kill us all,” said Nova.
“Who’s Cutter killing? Shit, not me,” Moss chuckled. “I’ve still got a bag of tricks that young man wouldn’t know nothing about.”
“Oh, relax, precious, no one’s killing anyone unless I order it,” Yemi told Nova.
“Yeah, you say that, but…” Nova muttered.
“Go on ahead, I’ll find you. Be safe about it, though,” Moss said.
“Thank you.” Yemi sighed relief and reached her hand over his shoulder. He kissed her ring and gave her fingers a little shake.
“Anytime, My Light.” He winked.
“Stay on this street. I’ll send word to let you know where we end up,” Nova told him before getting out to open Yemi’s door.
Liberated, Yemi took a deep breath of the juniper-and-eucalyptus air, and they both moved into the city with the flow of traffic on the narrow sidewalks.
She wore no crown, only her collare and the ring she hid with her hands clasped behind her back.
Many here knew her face and—perhaps more importantly—Nova’s.
As they took notice, they’d remove themselves from her path with as deep a bow as they could manage in the crowd.
Yemi made compulsory eye contact with this or that citizen and gave them an absent nod, barely registering the responses of “My Light” or “My Shield.” As Ixian royalty, she was their Light, as it was her they followed in dark places.
She was their Shield because she was as much their protector as they were hers.
She was a dozen other titles owed to tales of antiquity and distributed to monarchs just because.
But she was only ever Yemaya, Yemi, to a few.
“So what is this about?” Nova asked. She walked casually beside Yemi, but her eyes were piercing and focused, scanning for threats on the active street.
“You know what it’s about,” Yemi replied quietly. Misgivings about royal duty weren’t meant for civilian ears. “I just need a little space. A moment of feeling like a person before I’m a crown—and a target.”
“You’re both those things now.”
“Not only those things. You know what I mean.”
Nova gave her an apologetic look and put up her hands. “Sorry, it was meant to be funny. I know you’re bored. And… seeing the queen that way can’t be easy for you, either. I get it.”
“But?” Yemi prompted.
“But once you ascend, who’s going to tell you not to do what you want? You won’t have to stay in a cage.”
“I will if I can’t trust my country beyond a few city blocks.”
Nova said nothing. Yemi assumed it was because they both knew the same truth.
The Green Zone was the two-mile radius beyond the Rock that was considered completely safe space for the royals.
Every building was marked with a swipe of green paint near the roof line and a small iron bear statue placed beside painted front doors or in balcony gardens as symbols of allegiance to Her Royal Animus.
The military and their families resided here, and anyone else who lived, worked, or opened a business here underwent an aggressive vetting process for the permit to do so.
Anyone in the Green Zone had pledged public loyalty to the Crown.
Even a block beyond it, things were a little less certain.