Chapter 5
· YEMI ·
When Cutter did not join them for dinner, Yemi thought he might be playing games to spite her.
The prison was in the bowels of the palace’s west wing, accessible only by a dozen staircases weaved into the tiered western gardens. The entrance faced the cloud bridge, the ornate stone structure that connected the Rock to the military’s plateau over the Kept’s temple far below.
The guard standing watch outside the prison doorway did a double take before presenting arms as she moved quickly past him and down the stone steps.
She was met with a wall of damp heat, the scents of stress and rust and sweat.
The ceilings were low, the hallways narrow.
Renovations here were a low priority, and there was little ventilation for the heat of torchlight.
The stationed officer, a Captain Balast, had just finished scooting a meal tray into one of the few occupied cells when he saw her.
“My Shield!” he yelped. He was stocky and pink-cheeked, sweating in the sweltering narrow corridors of his station.
“Good evening, Captain,” said Yemi, as pleasantly as she could in case he’d been instructed not to give her what she wanted.
“General Cutter’s notes on today’s interrogations.
I’d like to see them. And we don’t have to do the thing where you insist I don’t and then I insist you do and we realize who outranks whom here. You can just take me to them.”
He led her past a line of cells along the left wall.
The elaborate crescent patterns etched into the doors provided glimpses of moving shadows within them.
These were the would-be usurpers, in limbo until sentencing was meted out.
Long-term residents would be moved to the back hallway in cells facing the cliffs over the Fanged Coast.
They veered around a corner down a long hallway with a window at the end.
The unfettered sea breeze whipped the torches hanging in sconces and provided relief from the odors of sweat and despair clinging to the walls.
These halls were usually empty, as Ixia was trying to progress from a carceral system.
None but the offenders to the Crown were housed here.
Petty criminals paid in fines and civil service down in the city. But treason was another thing entirely.
They ducked into a warm office the size of a closet, where Captain Balast pointed to a desk with a single sheet of paper on it. Yemi flipped it over to see two words scrawled in Cutter’s handwriting:
Nice try.
Yemi sucked her teeth. “Alright, old man,” she muttered.
Captain Balast looked on, trying not to be embarrassed for her or to find it too funny.
“Thank you, Captain. I’ll see myself out,” Yemi told him. He bowed and stood aside, and Yemi moved back out into the hallway toward the entrance, where she knew the traitors were still locked away. She’d told Lain she would speak with the prisoners and intended to keep her word.
She slowed her marching pace to look closer at the prisoners in their cells.
Only three of them were in this front area, two occupying cells side by side, a man and a woman barely recognizable for the sinister expressions and reverence for her clearly long gone.
The third seemed separated into a corner cell, an invisible collection of shuffling noises and gently jingling chains.
“It’s strange,” she said, her voice carrying in the quiet. “I know your faces, and yet I’m looking at strangers.”
“Soldiers, tench-hut. There is a queen among us,” a voice said mockingly from the dark corner cell. Yemi squinted in its direction to see only a mop of damp dark hair framing dark eyes set in a disfigured face glistening with either blood or sweat.
“Not quite,” she replied.
“What brings the Little Fish of Ixia into the bowels of hell?” said the shadow.
“Curiosity,” Yemi replied. “I was told there were more of you.”
“Other side of the wall.” The woman across the room pointed with her head. “The ones Cutter got ahold of? Ain’t no use to you no more.”
Yemi glanced toward the wall. She knew the cells beneath the Rock were haunted by the things that happened in them. Her own curiosity had never been so intense as to take her there.
“I see. I’ll begin with this: Is there anyone here who thinks they shouldn’t be? That they weren’t intent on engaging in anything criminal? Or are we all standing nobly in our truths today, bold and willing to die for them?”
All was silent but the crackling torchlight, the ragged, raspy breathing of some faceless no one in their cage.
“I appreciate your honesty. Now, did you come into our queen’s service tainted, or were you seduced to this other side after you swore your oaths? Did they have to work hard to turn you from us, or were you weak from the beginning?”
“We’re tired,” said a baritone off to her left.
“Excuse me?” Yemi said, silently thrilled for any response. He was an older man, mid-forties, still with his military bearing. He squatted against the back wall, less beaten than his compatriot, but he did look tired.
“We’re tired. Our families are tired, what remains of them. Tired of fighting, of waiting for the next fight. There can be no lasting peace with Mer blood on the throne.”
“Your name?”
“Caphree. She’s Tenerive. He’s Wall.”
“Mr. Caphree, we have been in peacetime for eight years. You all are the first whiff we’ve had of an insurgency in that time.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Only so much time will pass before Kespia starts a new campaign.”
“Or the Rakelands are on the move again,” Tenerive added from the cell beside him.
“Either way,” Caphree continued, “a new fight will come because of who is on the throne. And it’ll be us that’s paying for it again.”
“And you have a plan to keep that from happening? An endgame? Or is it all bluster and idle chitchat?”
Nothing was said, but Caphree and the woman were exchanging threatening stares. It was likely no one was supposed to talk. Yemi was surprised anyone had.
“Your situation can only improve from here if you’re forthright with me,” Yemi assured them.
“It wasn’t going to be a fight. The Drakes were going to get you to step down. Abdicate peacefully,” said Caphree.
“They were,” Tenerive scoffed. She chuckled and paced to the other side of her cell. “But now, who knows? After yesterday, they’ll be on the defensive.”
“Give me numbers. Some idea of what they’re capable of,” Yemi said quickly, not wanting her goodwill to run out.
Caphree shrugged. “Dozens. A hundred, maybe. Mostly civilians. They’d be capable in a fight because they’re used to it. But like I said, there was no plan for one in the beginning. They’d need time to coordinate something.”
Tenerive approached the wall between them, staring Yemi down, sweaty but apparently cooperative, judging by how clean she still was. “We told Cutter what he wanted to know. We’re not inner circle with the Drake woman. No one here knew anything about a plan,” she said.
“Smart of her. For all she knew, you were loyal,” said Yemi.
“You have to know it wasn’t personal. Many of us see a future for you and for the country. Just not together,” said Caphree.
“ ‘Many of us’ in the queen’s ranks or in your circle of traitors?” Yemi asked.
“Idiots. Trying to talk sense to the sea-thing,” Wall grumbled from the corner cell.
Yemi stepped forward until the flickering light showed her a man’s beaten face, busted lips curled in a sneer, dark spit dribbling from the crevices where a tooth or two used to be.
“I see that mouth’s gotten you in more trouble than you can handle tonight,” she remarked.
“I’m a living Man, and speech is still free. Who gave you your rights, fish?” he replied, tilting his head back to look down his nose at her.
“You did,” said Yemi. “We live in a society, the rules of which recognized you as a soldier and citizen at one point, and me your Qorrea, appointed and divinely favored. And we respect those roles.”
“Divinely favored.” He chuckled. “You know when I knew the Kept’s divinity promises were shit?
When they started pulling nothing but bones out of the water.
We were promised prosperity when the Butterfly King took his bride.
More of us have suffered and died since you creatures got here.
The seas give us nothing but a few warmongering queens high on their own divinity.
Fuck the Kept. Whatever they’re praying for, it isn’t us. ”
“Your queen fought beside you in every campaign, willing to bleed as much as anyone else was asked to.”
“You mean she took the opportunities she could get to butcher men by her own hand. An animal doing animal things.”
What a strange little man, Yemi thought. She should have been furious, but her mind was working too hard trying to mirror the acrobatics he must have managed to believe anything he was saying.
“Well, if you’re determined to cling to that absurd narrative, don’t let me stop you,” she said.
“Why are you here, Qorrea?” Tenerive asked behind her.
“I promised someone I would speak with you. Gauge your perspectives. Determine if mercy is in order.”
“I think the prison light suits you. You deserve to be down here with us more than you’ve belonged anywhere,” said Wall.
Yemi laughed. “Well, which is it? Am I a creature, or am I just like you? You idealists with your rhetoric. It’s never consistent, is it? It always boils down to either your own anger or fear. And you’ll dump all of that at the feet of whatever principle will make you feel superior.”
“Whether that’s true or not, know if the Drakes do come, it’ll be for you,” Caphree said grimly. “Arms or negotiations, they don’t want a third generation of this. And they won’t make the Bear Queen a martyr.”
Yemi considered this. Dahlia clearly saw herself as Yemi’s rival, but she’d given her little troupe a different narrative, one they could be invested in. A pity—she could have respected the purer motive these two soldiers seemed to possess.