Chapter 4 #5
“I’m headed back downstairs. Go with her,” Cutter told Nova as if Yemi weren’t standing right there. “See if you can keep her out of trouble.”
Nova nodded, hiding a wry grin, and followed Yemi toward the west wing.
“You’re very good about accepting Cutter’s impossible missions,” Yemi told her.
“You know Illowé said the same thing? Only from her it’s definitely an insult, whereas yours only sounds kind of like one,” Nova replied.
Yemi laughed. Illowé was Nova’s twin and had a strong bohemian streak that predisposed her to a life of travel. They hadn’t seen her in person in years. “And how is our sister, the wandering artist?”
“Insufferable, mostly.”
“So the same as always.”
“Doubly so. She’s expecting.”
“No!” Yemi gasped. “With the… oh, who is it, the blacksmith?”
“Blacksmith was too much of a homebody. This one’s a master cartographer,” Nova said with a flourish.
“Suits her. Did they marry? Is she at least coming home for that or has she completely expatriated?”
“I guarantee she still wants the extravagant ceremony that comes with being friends with the queen.”
“She’d better. It’s basically one of two perks,” said Yemi.
The Rock’s library was the single most complete repository of the eastern world’s recorded history.
Millions of volumes spanned four stories of towering slate shelves climbing walls curved to mimic scallop shells.
The stacks were maintained by the Kept, but it had been her mother who had opened the library to the civilian journalists and academics, who were scattered at long tables, largely content to ignore her as she tried to speed by Brother Lain without his noticing.
“Ah!” said a familiar voice.
Shit, Yemi thought. The royal press secretary, Luc Derring, had joined Brother Lain at a middle table where they pored over what was clearly a copy of the day’s newspaper.
The two of them stood and bowed, though each clearly had a bone to pick with her.
“Mx. Derring, afternoon,” Yemi sighed, halting reluctantly.
“I heard about the incident with Dahlia,” Luc announced, waving the paper at her.
“Hardly special, is it? You hearing about things.”
“Do you realize how early I had to wake up this morning to strike it from the papers? Convince them to lead with this charming nothing photo instead of the ‘Qorrea Stumbles on Rebel Cell in Green Zone’ story? Favors are owed now. The looks I got for not even knowing you were going into town…” Luc complained.
“It was a spontaneous excursion into town for a beer, not an attack on your office. And if it makes you feel better, the beer was swill,” Yemi assured them.
“There’s your story,” Nova chimed in. “ ‘All the Queen’s Men Imbibe Backwash, Plot Treason at Local Tavern.’ ”
“I heard we’re rounding up soldiers suspected of dissention,” said Brother Lain, somewhat more distressed than Luc. Around them, the leafing of pages quieted for more ideal eavesdropping.
“Oh gods, don’t call it ‘rounding up.’ You make it sound sinister.” Yemi rolled her eyes. “We’re questioning soldiers who were witnessed in the little traitor huddle for any threats to the peace.”
“Traitor huddle sounds a lot less worrisome,” Luc said, gathering their locs at the crown of their head as if they’d worked themself into a sweat.
“Witnessed by whom?” Brother Lain insisted.
Nova whistled from behind her and waved. She was somehow further above reproach than Yemi as far as Lain was concerned, so he squinted his disapproval rather than start in on a lecture about the rights of Men.
“See? All perfectly aboveboard. Nobody’s going Mad Tyrant.”
“In the future…” Luc continued as Yemi moved away.
“Something about making your job easier, yes, I understand,” she called back.
“You earned that,” Nova prodded.
“I appreciate your support,” Yemi replied. They came to a door in a secluded alcove overlooking the military’s training plateau.
“So I can either hang around here and be distracting—wink, wink—or I can go back to assist Cutter. Latter’s probably the only way you’ll get any updates, former’s guaranteed to be more fun.”
“I have plenty of work. I’ll see you at dinner.”
Nova nodded, perhaps disappointed but not surprised. “My Light,” she said, bowing as she backed away. Yemi watched her stride across the library, whistling, boots clicking, hips in their light switch as she dodged the tables.
Yemi pulled an ornate copper key from her pocket and had barely stuck it in its lock when Brother Lain walked over.
“One last word, My Light.”
“Oh, much more than one, I’m sure,” she sighed.
The priest appeared to be choosing his words carefully, lips tightened, fingers pressed into a steeple so hard his nails went white. “About this mess with the Drakes. I understand your internal conflict.”
Yemi laughed slightly and leaned against the door. She was in no mood for a sermon. “The Kept. The Divine Promise of connection between the world of Men and their gods, and now also mind readers?”
“Enough!” he hissed. “Stop the performance. I have not been impressed with your cleverness for years, having borne the brunt of it. This is serious.”
Yemi chewed her tongue to keep from responding. She hated her compulsion to listen respectfully to him when anyone else would be dismissed.
“Now, you have never been tested like this before,” Lain continued. “These people, whom you have now caged for something very personal to you, were speaking privately as all Men are permitted to do under every law.”
“The plots to kill my parents, your queen and your king, began as whispers in dark places, too,” she replied grimly.
“That was an entire other set of people who have been dealt with.”
“You didn’t see… You’ve never seen…” Her face grew hot, the key nearly carving into her flesh as she squeezed it. “It ravages her body. Her pain persists to this day. Who’s to say her enemies don’t?”
“They’re reacting to having their families taken from them,” Brother Lain pleaded.
“Radicals are almost always born from suffering. You are the closest we’ve ever had to the ideal, to our gods living among us.
Your mother understands this. But you must put away your fear and bitterness. They are beneath you. They have to be.”
“If you believe that, it isn’t my problem,” Yemi scoffed. She would not be guilted into pitying violent rebels, not while her mother’s suffering was diminished.
“I don’t. I know your humanity. I’ve seen it. You are the queen they fear. But you should aspire to that holy light the faithful see in you. Talk to your prisoners. They are human, just like you, and prone to pain. Find some mercy to give them.”
Yemi exhaled herself back to calm. The man had a point, whether or not he realized it was for the wrong reasons.
It had been his job to imbue her with love for humanity through exposure to culture and history and Man’s engagement with nature.
It wasn’t his fault the world itself kept the lessons from taking.
“There, we agree. I will speak to them. If there is mercy to be had, they will have it,” she told him, perfectly certain there was none.
He frowned, inspecting her for signs her words meant something other than what he’d heard.
“Is that all?” she snapped.
“Of course, My Qorrea.” He bowed slightly. “I look forward to hearing more about whatever you discover.”
The priest left her. Yemi unclenched her hand painfully and traced the violent red divots the key had left in her palm with her thumb.
She entered her office quickly, inhaling the solace of the warmth.
The small room had been a refuge after her father’s assassination.
It was a storage closet then, offering broken bookcases and dusty chairs just lightweight enough to be rearranged into hiding forts when the world felt too big.
The garden vine that had snaked its way in through a crack in the outer wall then was now coiled along the one long window over a desk, scattering the afternoon sunlight.
The shelves repaired, they were now filled with her father’s journals and favorite books, their spines soft, creased, and worn either from his obsessive devouring of them or Yemi’s need to absorb them into herself.
They were volumes on war and diplomacy and the histories of other places.
His journals brimmed with his poetry and family photos used as bookmarks.
She’d tried her own hand at poetry over the years. The words descended into doodles.
In the library of the Bear King, there’d been very little in the way of imaginative fiction for reading material, which meant that the stories he’d told her were all his own.
They were lush and far-flung and stood apart in their strangeness from even the most obscure of Ixia’s lore.
And yet, he’d never written them down. She knew this because for two years, while her mother waged war in mourning, Yemi had scoured every inch of the property—here and in Holicrane House—for pieces of her father to squirrel away here.
It became a shrine. She scrambled to fill his last incomplete notebook with what she remembered of his stories. She had been terrified to forget them.
Nova had found her here, hiding on her sixteenth name day.
When her mother heard of the room, the queen had the leak in the ceiling repaired, and a rug and the dead king’s favorite chair placed where it used to drip.
The locks were made fresh and Yemi was handed the one key.
It was now the only thing in the vast palace grounds to belong solely to her.
“Hey, Daddy,” she whispered, as if he still lived in all the pictures she had of him.
Among his things, she tried despite herself to see her own loss as the same losses her people were experiencing.
Her father would have encouraged it. But what kinship could there be?
The Blackgates didn’t kill their own people.
War did that. And yet they were somehow the enemy, the convenient target for all the sins war tends to wreak.
And the Drakes, who had lost nothing, were weaponizing the country’s grief.
Oh, she would talk to them, she grunted to herself, stripping off her long coat and rolling her shirtsleeves as she collapsed into her father’s chair. The prisoners first, and then the Drakes. But it wasn’t a matter of whether heads would roll. It was a matter of how many.