Chapter 3 #3
“I will have my satisfaction first,” Yemi insisted, still pointing at the ground and eyeing the ever-defiant Dahlia.
The doors opened and Moss entered, his easy demeanor immediately tensing at the scene. He leaned back out of the doors and whistled for what Yemi knew was backup.
“Qorrea,” Moss barked. Three uniformed soldiers had joined him in the doorway, spears and shields at the ready. “The queen requests your presence. Now.”
Yemi’s eyes flickered. This was likely a ploy, something to give her an excuse to leave without any bloodshed. But the dutiful daughter in her edged toward panic at the thought that maybe her mother’s illness had taken a turn.
She looked back at Nova, who was always ready for whatever she decided.
With effort, Yemi swallowed and turned back to Dahlia. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other soon.”
“Do give the queen my best,” Dahlia said with a nod.
Yemi took her time heading to the door, each step heavy as if fighting against a current. What she wanted was the feel of Dahlia’s jaw crushed beneath her boot, ground into a stain on the dark wood floors.
And by the gods, she would have it.
Yemi rode much of the way seething in silence, ignoring Nova’s darting eyes checking on her in the side mirror.
Dahlia Drake.
Ixia was in its eighth consecutive year of peace, one of twelve in the last fifty.
But their enemies had not been vanquished, and likely never would be as long as Mer blood was on the throne.
It was likely they were lying dormant now, biding their time until a new queen, someone less beloved than her dying martyr mother, came to power.
It would be one thing if a bad day and too much drink had inspired a moment of treasonous chatter.
Soldiers got drunk and said and did stupid things all the time.
But she couldn’t shake that image of Dahlia Drake, the calculated expression and her refusal to bow.
The desire for connection she’d expressed earlier had been intended to place her perfectly to stab Yemi in the back.
Yemi scoffed, furious with herself for having humored her and maddened by her own impotence.
The growl in her throat became a long and powerful scream in the back seat of the car.
It was the only way to keep her head from exploding.
Moss let her out inside the front gates, and Nova escorted her to the residence on the eastern side where her mother was supposedly waiting with dinner.
“I need names,” Yemi said quickly as they walked. “Any familiar faces, anyone we saw there with ties to nobility. Anyone we might reasonably expect to be invited to my mother’s Day of Days celebration.”
“Done.”
“Find out if the Drakes are the head of this snake. I want to be sure before I cut it off.”
Nova nodded as they reached the edge of their destination, but the dining room was empty of all except candlelight and a single cloche at Yemi’s seat. An attendant directed them instead to the southern gardens behind the palace.
Whatever Yemi felt about her mother’s compulsory family meals, it was alarming that she would cancel one.
She and Nova marched silently and at a more urgent clip toward the rear of the palace.
They found the queen tending her husband’s poppies, accompanied by two attendants.
Yemi stood frozen in the archway until Nova squeezed her hand.
It was so easy now to assume the worst. Panic had a way of seizing her, and it lingered in the face of any evidence that things were actually fine. For now, at least.
Yemi exhaled through her nose and nodded to Nova that she was alright to be left alone. When Nova departed, Yemi stepped out into the garden and kissed her mother on the cheek.
“There you are,” the queen panted as she turned soil.
“What happened to dinner?”
“Couldn’t eat. You know my appetite these days.”
“You’ve seen Selah about it?”
“Sent for her. I expect her tomorrow. Fine in the meantime, though, trust me. Thing about stone is, it doesn’t require a whole lot of nutrition, does it?” The queen chuckled grimly.
Yemi flinched.
“So, how was it? Your never-ending quest for local color,” the queen began pleasantly enough, her eyes down on the tilling soil.
“Festive,” Yemi said plainly, taking a seat on a stone bench.
“Try again.” The queen’s eyes flicked upward.
Yemi sighed and met her mother’s gaze.
Here we go.
“I had a run-in with the Drakes. Inside the Green Zone. I assume Cutter told you?”
“Of course he told me.”
“Then why are you asking me?”
The queen stabbed her spade into the dirt.
“Because I’m trying to have a conversation with my daughter—one where she doesn’t blow up halfway into it.
These threats are as much a matter of state as they are personal, and you need to get some kind of control over yourself if you’re going to handle them appropriately.
Journalists catch you bloodying noses in a soldier bar, and we’re back in a fight for public opinion.
” Her tone never shifted from that affected tranquility, the peace she’d been advised to embody so as not to aggravate her condition.
Yemi scoffed. “Right. Are you having a conversation with your daughter or grooming your Qorrea?”
“Damn it, both!” the queen snapped, slamming a stone-plated hand into the bench.
The silence that followed was thick as she visibly tried to regain her calm.
“On my life, Yemaya, I’m not trying to pick a fight with you, but these people are your subjects, not insects you can put down at your displeasure.
You have a responsibility to them as much as they are obliged to love you.
That is the only way this works for us. The less I have to remind you of that, the more time I can spend on the mundanities of how your day was. ”
Yemi threw up her hands. “What do you consider appropriate handling, then? Because as I stood there, listening to them berate and betray you, our family, our country, I couldn’t come up with anything my queen might deem ‘appropriate’ that would also satisfy me.
Dahlia Drake stood alone against me and refused to take the knee—stared me in my face and kept her ground while I was collected like some child who’d wandered where she didn’t belong. ”
“And hers is the only face you remember.”
“Of course.”
“She’s smart.”
“What?” Yemi blinked.
Her mother sighed. “Help me up. Finish this, if you could. Seedlings are there.”
Yemi, in her rage and confusion, was tempted to refuse.
If Dahlia was smart, was she somehow stupid?
Instead of asking, though, she helped her mother get seated on the bench and took her place on her knees in the dirt.
Since the monarchy had been relocated from the northern coast, every royal had added to the palace gardens.
The Bear King had his poppies; the queen was more of an arborist. And since he was no longer here, she felt his garden was her responsibility.
“While you focused on her, a dozen more forgettable people she’s rallied to her cause took the knee before you and, in doing so, hid their faces,” said the queen.
“She drew your ire so that the men she might send later to do her bidding could do so with some degree of anonymity. Her father was there?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Interesting. It is something he’d have taught her.”
“I don’t understand,” Yemi replied, burying the last of the roots. “You know the Drakes as a threat and still had them here for lunch?”
“I have a healthy suspicion of everyone.” The queen smiled. “That’s it, that’s enough. Come.”
She rose with the help of a heavy black staff gifted to her by the former king of the allied nation Muris to the north.
Her right foot and most of its leg were all but solid black stone, but somehow her poise, despite the weight, made her seem taller.
The damage was slowed by an intervention of magic, though there were few witches in Ixia now.
The pride with which the nation had once credited its evolution to its gods and their magic had been turned to fear when Arielle conceived.
The royal armorers, the witches, any souls touched by the gods’ gifts were banished, lest the Obé tap them to do her bidding.
It had never been clear why Selah was allowed to remain, but she alone was responsible for mitigating the slow creep of the Bear Queen’s curse and had kept her alive and mostly flesh for the past eight years.
Yemi took her other arm as they strode toward the queen’s quarters. The hallways were still lit by firelight, whipping in the breeze behind metal screens.
“I’ve always told you that the things we’ve been through aren’t all about our blood,” said the queen.
“When my mother came into the picture here, her union to your grandfather disrupted the order of things. Marriages form alliances, build wealth, amass resources. These things were all in play before they fell in love. The Drake family was one of those promised certain things, certain powers they didn’t get when your grandfather took an unexpected bride.
They’ve had no new opening, either, since we can have children.
I wouldn’t put it past them to be stoking the fires against us to create one for themselves. ”
The royal guard opened the heavy oak doors to the queen’s apartment and shut them again behind them.
Yemi knew from her earliest lessons about the history of the kingdom the sacrifices made to make this life work.
Her grandmother, a Qorrea for the Mer, had bested a sea witch in a deal that saw her made human to capture the affections of a man she’d—for all intents and purposes—obsessed over.
The deal, by design, withheld the ability to have human children.
That feat took a separate agreement with a more foreign, perhaps more sinister magic.
And her grandmother had greeted it with the childlike abandon that inevitably cursed them all.
The room was tall, with a coffered ceiling painted like shallow water on white sand. The light curtains were drawn but thin enough to still see the sunset through them. A family portrait hung over the large fireplace. Yemi’s eyes were only ever drawn to her father.
She helped her mother undress before a gilded full-length mirror, gingerly removing the jewelry, the layers of lace gown and gauze underthings, the pins that kept her locs braided together in the vine down her back.
The stone skin had spread across much of her upper back and wrapped around her waist. It was cracked from movement, but smooth as fresh magma.
“Dahlia Drake may have inherited their war the way you have inherited ours,” her mother sighed. “I’m happy for the certainty, though. Now we can handle them the way they need to be handled.”
“And what way is that?” Yemi said quietly, angling herself away from the mirror so her mother didn’t catch the sadness in her eyes, the tremor in her hands as she stuck pins in their cushion.
“For now, we keep our enemies close. The Drakes are attending my Day of Days festivities, and I’d prefer to know that they’re there and not elsewhere. And we find out who the rest of them are. See if Nova remembers any of them. She’s got a good head for faces.”
“Already have her on it. We were whispering about it in the hallway in case you were going to be difficult. Also looking into how high this goes. It would be bold of them to incite treason without an army, so they’ve either got foreign backing or they’re siphoning off our own.”
“My girl. Now I am supposed to impress upon you the danger your impulsive actions pose not only to yourself, but to your guard.” Her mother gave her a serious look in the mirror.
“Consider me impressed upon,” Yemi muttered.
“Nova would never complain, but—”
“Yes, she would.”
“But you owe it to her to be more careful with her life, Yemi. She should not have been alone protecting you.”
“To be fair, we were in the Green Zone.”
“And what? You expected to conscript drunk, off-duty soldiers into a bar fight at your command?” Her mother cocked an eyebrow.
The smile playing about her lips suggested she at least found it amusing, but Yemi knew she was right.
She took the queen’s hands, running fingers gently along the parts that were still flesh.
“I’ll apologize to Nova. And to Cutter for the extra gray in his beard,” she promised.
“Thank you.” Her mother took her hand and led her to the bed.
The sunny comforter peeled back to reveal layers of soft, juniper-scented sheets in shades of purple.
On their best days, Yemi would lie with her until she fell asleep and then creep back to her own quarters.
On their worst, she’d take her meals alone in the kitchen and listen to her mother’s screams of agony echoing through the halls.
“And now, I want you to tell me about your weekend. Something innocent. I haven’t heard a new story about the sea since your father.”
Yemi laid her head on her shoulder and let her mother pluck her own pins from her braids. “I saw them again. The Mer. They come right up to Father’s ship and watch me through his cabin window. I think one of them waved? Stuck their hand up in the air like this when we put into port.”
“Hmm,” her mother hummed, intrigued, the vibration in her chest soothing as Yemi lay on it. “Did you wave back?”
“No,” Yemi replied, suddenly embarrassed about it. “Duty called.”
“You should, in the future. If, after all this, the opportunity presents itself, you should get to know them. It’s one of my life’s regrets that I never did.
My mother told me all these wonderful stories, so I tried when I was small.
Went out on the ships looking for them. But I guess the hurt was still fresh, and we were still being shunned. Maybe you’ll do better.”
Yemi tried to imagine her mother as a small girl peering over the edges of boats into her reflection in the ocean waters, looking for whatever hid itself from her beneath the waves.
Imagined her without the weight of a crown, more beloved for her sweetness, her curiosity, than as a fierce protector of the realm. A child, not a Bear Queen.
Yemi idly traced her fingers along the cracks of her mother’s skin. “Your, uh… new coat’s coming in nicely,” she murmured, for want of something to say.
The queen cackled, a rich, loud sound Yemi hadn’t realized she missed.
Her mother kissed her forehead. “Your animus is going to be an asshole.”