Chapter 8 #3
Slowly, she made her way through the arches to her mother’s statue, lighting the braziers along the way.
The winds were all sea spray and juniper and tart drop-blossom as the petals drifted in showers to the west. At the end, she walked to the cliff’s edge and tossed the torch over it, watching until it doused itself in the sea below.
When she turned back, a dark figure cloaked in blue leaned against the nearest archway, a cigar cherry illuminating the wide whites of long-lashed eyes and a grin of pearl-white teeth beneath the billows of smoke she exhaled.
“Now that was a queen,” she said, pointing the cigar at the statue with long fingers.
The voice was deep and unfamiliar. A chorus of gold bangles around her wrist glinted in the moonlight.
“A woman who saw the ship of her country sinking and filled the cracks with herself. Good luck crawling out of that shadow.”
“Who are you?” Yemi demanded, circling slowly around the far end of her mother’s statue.
“Oh, who aren’t I?” She laughed, a loud, mad sound, her head tossed back as if by the force of it.
Yemi couldn’t be sure, but the waves in her periphery seemed to jerk and sway to match it.
The hood came down as she laughed, revealing a round face and a head of long white locs dotted with gold cuffs.
“Think of me as your godmother,” she purred. “Many years ago, your grandmother came to me as a lovestruck merchild, and now here you are, the most powerful ruler in the world of Men.”
Yemi frowned, suddenly very aware of being unarmed and so near the cliff’s edge, so far from a guard post. “You’re Ursla. The sea witch.”
“Careful with that word.” Her eyes grew dark, and for a moment, the sea flickered to stillness.
The glow of the cigar cherry warmed her blue-black skin in the dark, iridescent as if moonlight pooled in her pores.
The smoking was clearly an affectation, something to do with her hands, her lips, in the silent moments she used as a gauntlet thrown at Yemi’s feet.
She did not look as ancient as Yemi knew the famed sea witch must be, and so she thought better of taking her at her word.
“Your locs,” Yemi said. “The Mer don’t have hair.”
“They don’t have legs, either, but here we both are.
” She raised her robe and kicked playfully to reveal one of two thick, glistening legs.
“Good to know you’ve been taught something of your people, though.
When your grandmother came here and began to grow those ruby-red curls of hers?
Oh, the girls gagged. The seas bloomed envy green for a month. ”
Intrigued as Yemi might have been by the promise of new stories about her grandmother, the sea witch’s reputation had preceded her. Yemi remained guarded, eyeing the drifting tendrils of the monument’s trees for signs anyone else had magically appeared.
“Why are you here?” she asked curtly.
“I avail myself to all my children. I met your mother on the passing of her mother.”
“She never mentioned it.”
“And I am absolutely heartbroken about it,” Ursla said in a tone that insisted she was not.
“Imagine if this wasn’t her fate? I told her what I’m telling you: You may find your way forward to be a lonely one.
A treacherous one. If the rumblings of our worlds are accurate, even a short one.
But it doesn’t have to be. If you seek me out, I will help you. ”
“For a price, no doubt.”
“Not everything should be free, should it?”
Something about those words singed her, either that the witch somehow knew she’d used these words herself, or that they’d been revealed to have a thought process in common.
“Well, you’ve delivered your message, so here’s mine: I can assure you that I have no use for you now or in the future. And if you come here again, I’ll have your head for my animus.”
“You sound like your mother after all.”
Yemi started to move away.
“I’ll leave you with this then, little bear: What happens when a new queen comes of age in a time when her country does away with royals?
” Ursla called at her back. “It happens sometimes, that the world changes and even the young become relics. Where is her place then? She could be the death of the monarchy and that is all, unless she finds a way to be the birth of something else. When you need me, come find me. Your witch knows the way.”
Yemi stopped between the arches. It occurred to her in a flash of light that maybe the sea witch was an untapped source of intelligence. That maybe she’d known of the attacks on her parents, and these rumblings she spoke of might provide insight into what awaited her in the form of Dahlia Drake.
But by the time the idea fully formed, she turned to see the Obé had gone, half an inch of cigar left glowing at the foot of her mother’s statue the only proof she’d been there in the first place. Yemi ground it into the dirt.
Movement in her periphery startled her as she turned.
It was only a flash as they disappeared behind the drop-blossom trees, but the moon had shown her someone crouched, creeping quickly along the back wall of the palace, edging toward the crypts.
Yemi kept herself hidden as she watched through the swaying branches, her heart quickening with every moment she couldn’t identify them.
A loud blast. The ground rumbled beneath her. Smoke and the sound of tumbling debris roared over the west wing.
This was an attack. Her legs remembered the trembling of the world at war.
She was the queen. Someone was here for her.
The Drakes. The pieces clicked into place in her mind.
She was alone outside. There was no one around to shoo her to safety, to prevent her from rounding the hedges of the lower gardens as she followed the shadow to the crypts.
Nova, Cutter, what remained of those she called family were all inside, likely seeking her out to protect her. Running was not an option.
She kept herself low, squeezed between the low arcing wall of the crypt and the tombs of dead kings as she watched the shadow wander the center aisle and search for the palace entrance by torchlight.
A quick glimpse at his face revealed he was some nameless no one, all sweat, dust, and anxiety with a long-barrel pistol jostling against his hip.
A shouting voice echoed, muffled on the other side of the stone.
As he moved away, Yemi felt the surface of the tombs for her father’s spear and quietly lifted it from its dusty cutout beside his armor.
She had never killed anyone before. Not in a conscious, premeditated sense, anyway.
She’d never had cause to do it by her own hand, and it wasn’t the sort of thing to come up in casual conversation with those who had.
All she knew of it was what she’d heard once when Cutter was training his soldiers.
Best to treat them like a target, he’d said. In a pinch, there’s no room to consider their humanity.
She repeated the words to herself, crouched there in the corner. And when she’d steadied her breathing and readied her grip, she stepped out of the shadows, whistled once for her target to turn around, and launched the spear clean into his chest.
He stumbled back, all gargling and ragged breaths until he met a wall and dropped his torch.
Yemi approached behind her father’s shield in case he managed to get the pistol off his hip.
“How many of you are there?” she demanded.
He lifted his eyes, and a slow smile crept over his bloodstained lips as he made out her face.
“Enough,” he rasped, a chuckle becoming a labored cough. Yemi wrapped her hand around the spear and extracted it with a sharp tug. A squelching sound and a brief torrent of blood pumped in time with the beating of his failing heart, and his eyes listed to the left before going vacant.
Yemi stared at him for a long moment, the shouting on the floors above her drowned out by what sounded like the ocean in her ears.
How strangely still he was now, no more alive than the wall on which he slumped.
His skin puckered like gooseflesh as the blood that kept his body warm leaked into a puddle spreading in the brick grout around him.
She’d done this.
Her stomach churned, and she vomited at his feet. Twice in one night. She wished she’d eaten more lately.
There was no time, though, to wonder about his name, whether he’d left behind children or parents, who he had been before the Drakes had corrupted him, or whether he knew more words than enough. If he was meant to open a door, someone would be along after him soon.
Quick as she could with fumbling fingers, she donned her mother’s bear mask and stripped her would-be killer of his pistol, hoping her subarmor would be enough for what she was about to walk into.
The drone of a horn created a vibration in her chest, and she silently thanked the Old Gods that someone had been alive to sound the alarm.
She skipped up the stone stairs and took a breath before opening the heavy door, hoping its loud iron squeak didn’t give her away to whatever waited behind it.