Chapter 6 #2
Yemi turned to her in an aggressive whisper. “You almost died. Cutter’s going to have to drag me away from you.”
“Then shall I summon him, or will you please, for once, do what I ask the first time?” the queen said cheerily.
Yemi stood her ground, content to wait for Cutter to throw her over his shoulder.
“Do not deny me the joy of seeing you happy for once. I only ever see you smile in the papers,” her mother said.
Yemi swallowed the frustration rising in her throat. It was the first time in a surprising while she felt choked by the gold rings around her neck.
“You’ll keep an eye on her?” She eyed both Luzon and Kuro intensely.
She had only been able to provide the briefest of updates around the latest intense developments ahead of the party.
Kuro had likely received a more thorough one from Nova and Cutter, and he met her gaze with a nod that suggested this was a request he took with grave seriousness.
Satisfied as much as she could be, Yemi kissed her mother’s hand and snatched a fresh glass from a platter.
“See you out there,” she said to Luzon as she descended the stairs, though it was unlikely he would join her. As a king, he needed as little going on around him as possible for security reasons. Kuro was not a fan of parties.
She didn’t so much mingle as dodge the partygoers, plucking food from wandering trays and skirting players from a traveling night circus as they spread themselves out to perform their illusions and acrobatics for smaller crowds.
She found herself on the edge of the party before long, looking back at it from the opposite end.
The air here smelled less of lavender and sea spray and more of spent gunpowder and crudely mingled colognes. Nova was likely somewhere doing Cutter’s bidding concerning the hunt for rebels, so Yemi couldn’t exactly be upset that she was alone for now.
Before long, she and Dahlia Drake caught one another’s eyes from across the crowd, and the latter began making her way over.
“Perfect,” Yemi muttered into her glass, searching vaguely for a means of escape.
“My Qorrea,” Dahlia said with a bow. She was smiling, seemingly put at ease by her audience with the queen.
“Drake,” Yemi replied flatly.
“Beautiful night. Wonderful party. The queen is a gracious woman. Your family’s blessed to still have her with you.”
“The country, too, isn’t it? Blessed.”
Dahlia nodded wordlessly and smiled into her own glass. Yemi continued to stare beyond her, wondering what she had to do to get literally anyone to rescue her from this exchange.
“Are you ready to be queen?” Dahlia asked plainly.
Yemi looked at her now, imagining she was on fire and all the ways she would go about not helping to put her out. She tapped her glass with a dark, lacquered fingernail. “You’ll forgive me if I receive that as a threat.”
“I knew you’d be harder to win over.” Dahlia smiled. “We’re skeptics, the both of us. I’ve always liked you for it.”
“Imagine that being true.”
“It is. I participate in forums like the one you walked in on in order to understand the people. I had hoped to talk to you myself, especially before anything ugly came out.”
Yemi sighed and tried not to roll her eyes. “ ‘To understand the people.’ Are you planning to work your way into the Senate?”
“Something like that, perhaps. The civil unrest in the country isn’t going away. I just want to see us whole again.” Dahlia shrugged.
“And to you, is the country everyone but me and mine?”
“Everyone without your… power, yes.” She bit her lip. “If I may be candid?”
“We are already drowning in Dahlia Drake’s candor,” Yemi replied. She watched Dahlia choose her words, contemplating all the possible ways the night might end if she were to snatch Dahlia by her sharp bob and dash her head against the low stone garden wall.
“Imagine being owed a debt for your loyalty to your country,” Dahlia started.
“But not only do you never receive it, you are also asked—your children are asked—to prove it with blood. Your blood. Your life. Your children’s lives, and their children’s lives, and so on.
Even if that debt is just peace, at what point do you question why you were ever loyal in the first place?
When you’re returning your first child to the sea?
When you’re putting out the second fire set to your home?
At what point do you do whatever it takes to ensure your children’s lives are valued? ”
Yemi’s eyes narrowed. “We are all paying the consequences for someone else’s decisions.
Had my grandfather been a baker or a blacksmith, we would not be where we are.
But he was a king, like a hundred others before him, and now there’s a problem?
We govern by right, according to centuries of your people’s rules.
We didn’t force anyone to adopt Mer law, and we didn’t ask for any special loyalty. ”
“But if it’s not there organically, shouldn’t you earn it?
” said Dahlia. “You have Ixians fighting for your cause only because it keeps them in their homes and out of the yoke of the unknown. The country hasn’t flourished in over fifty years.
The best it’s managed is recovery, but that’s only until the next war, isn’t it? ”
“My father was Ixian. Are these not also my people? Has my mother not fought for and alongside all of you, despite the othering of her blood?”
Dahlia shook her head pitifully. “My Light, you are fruit of the poisonous tree.”
“Careful,” Yemi seethed, feeling violence twitch in her muscles.
“The careless union that destroyed our nation’s peace is best undone, or it might kill us all.
It will kill us all. These people will not back the Blackgate line forever.
If you have any love for your country, you’ll consider a…
a different future for Ixia,” Dahlia insisted, though her final words felt fumbled, as if she’d considered a dozen ways of putting it and landed there sloppily.
A different future. Yemi nodded sagely. One where I’m not a part of it, naturally.
She looked around at the carousing beyond their little corner, the polite clinking of delicate glasses, and the raucous laughter that followed.
Boxes of fireworks were being shuffled up stairs and around corners.
Nova watched them carefully from a low wall nearby.
It was interesting to her that Dahlia had yet to present her own views and had gone with the angle of messenger. She wondered if she was expected to believe any of this.
“So this isn’t about your family’s failure to marry into the royal line?” she asked Dahlia. “Your grandmother being brushed aside when mine came ashore and took root in a space she thought belonged to her? You have no feelings about that one way or another?”
Dahlia stood speechless, something in her eyes suddenly cold and dark.
Yemi smiled. “See, you didn’t take the knee.
It was a specific, personal decision you made to defy me and didn’t have a single fucking thing to do with bringing the people’s grievances to our attention.
You wanted me to know that you oppose whatever it is you think I stand for.
And now I do. So enjoy your night. And be grateful that all of this happened while the Bear Queen is on the throne. You would not be ready for me.”
She didn’t bother extending the ring. Instead, she sipped from her own fluted glass and waited as Dahlia Drake bowed—ever the good girl—and departed without another word.
Nova approached with a curious smirk.
“Finally,” Yemi groaned.
“How’d that go?” she asked.
Yemi shook her head and watched Dahlia mingle without a care apparent on that alabaster face of hers. “She’s too comfortable.”
“It’s a party, and she thinks she’s won over the Bear Queen of Ixia. She has no idea she’s being handled. You, on the other hand, are not comfortable enough. We can fix that, though.”
“What do you suggest?”
Nova stepped back in an after you gesture and ushered Yemi toward the performers.
It was subtle, but Nova kept her hand on the small of Yemi’s back as she guided her through the nameless nobles and other drunken guests.
So few people were allowed to touch her, and Nova relished doing it in these small, intimate ways that made Yemi smile in secret.
She pointed to a woman in a top hat with a feline effect to her eyes who told stories and puffed colorful smoke that took on the shapes of fish swimming in a fog around their feet.
Someone in a massive dragon mask took in various liquors and blew out flames of different hues that turned to showers of glitter over their heads.
A dapper man who introduced himself as Vannish, Master of Ceremonies, explained the science of it to an enamored Nova.
A woman with a toothy grin self-immolated to everyone’s panic, and a hunched old man who may or may not have been an actual monkey ran over to douse her with what turned out to be a bucket of confetti, but the fire—and the woman—disappeared.
The crowd waited in gravid, horrified silence, staring at the pile of ash, then gasped as it twitched, and screamed as a hand grew out of it.
Yemi had Nova’s arm in a vise grip as the hand extended to an arm and a torso and a head, until the woman had fully formed again as if she’d simply climbed out of an ash-covered hole.
The monkey man threw a teal-colored robe over her shoulders as the woman rose.
The crowd erupted with applause as she took her bows.