Chapter 9
· NOVA ·
Nova muttered every curse she knew as she scrubbed the deed from her hands. Her mind raced to cut off any repercussions, close any gaps of knowledge before the news of the man’s de-tonguing spread and became something larger than she could protect Yemi from.
“That girl and her fucking temper,” she hissed. “Why did he have to spit?”
Captain Balast appeared in the doorway, the limp and paling tongue in the palm of his giant hand. “What should I do with this?”
“Pitch it,” Nova snapped. Balast flinched but nodded his reluctant understanding. Nova took a breath and dried her hands on a shop towel. “You and I have a secret to keep now, don’t we?”
Captain Balast swallowed visibly and nodded.
“This will need cleaning up. If this—if it gets out… I need your word that it won’t. Her Majesty is still grieving. Everything is unstable. Please say you understand.”
“Yes, Commander. You have my word.”
She eyed him a moment and took his measure. He seemed trustworthy. If he said he could handle it, she would take him at his word.
“I’m sorry to put you in this position,” she assured him.
He sighed. “Not your fault.”
Well, it’s got to be someone’s, she thought. She wondered at the training of jailers and if their consciences were as primed for killing as guardians’. His post was not a peaceful one, but there was still an innocence to him, as if this was a vocation but not a passion.
“I can handle them myself in the morning, if you’d like,” she offered. “You don’t have to be burdened with it. Your silence will be heavy enough.”
“No need, Commander.”
“Good man,” she said finally and moved toward the exit past Wall, silent in his cage for once.
“Commander?” Mr. Caphree called.
“What?” she snapped.
He shook his head as if she were in a pitiable position. “You see it, don’t you? The need for change.”
“I can’t be recruited.” She stalked up the stairs.
“That wasn’t a no,” he called after her.
She marched back out into the open air, nearly rounding the corner to catch up with Yemi before she paused and decided she wasn’t actually keen on seeing her just now. Instead, she turned in the opposite direction toward the tiered gardens.
What is there to even say? She huffed. Night lights of the barracks over the cloud bridge twinkled nearby. The deed is done. But the man can’t possibly stand a public trial without a tongue and no explanation for it…
Maybe he had to die. She tried not to think about it.
Out in the dark, someone whistled. It wasn’t unusual, but still, she stopped. Shadowed figures moved about the near edge of the cloud bridge.
“And what are we up to this evening?” she called, her voice casual, though something felt off as no one moved to respond.
She whistled herself and edged closer. “Who’s there?”
Two people. One of them wore a dark cloth mask over their face as they turned toward her. Behind their hunched bodies, a spark, a sizzle, and smoke. Two more black-clad figures raced across the bridge and up toward the palace, calling for these two to join them.
“Wait,” Nova said, mostly to herself. The sizzle and smoke registered as a fuse. Her hackles raised too late. “Stop!” she yelled and ran after them, but she got no closer than the bridge’s edge before it exploded, hurling her backward into the bushes and stone wall of the palace.
Her ears rang and eyes burned with dust and gunpowder as she got to her feet and emerged from the bushes.
The ground rumbled as the marble of the bridge undoubtedly crashed into the temple below.
She could make out figures darting among the palace foregrounds, but not whether they were friend or foe.
She coughed, desperate for air that didn’t singe her lungs.
I failed, she screamed in her head. I didn’t get all of them.
But they weren’t trying to free their friends. The dungeons were behind her. Foreign-sounding pops resounded off walls, terrifyingly close. Guns. They had guns.
Yemi.
Nova heaved and blew dust-caked snot from her nose so she could breathe.
A garden fountain allowed her to rinse her eyes quickly before she ducked into a tunnel behind it, one of the secret spaces beneath the Rock created for emergencies that had truthfully never come. She was grateful for them now.
This one let out in the west wing near the kitchens and library.
The pops continued, echoing along with shouts and the sounds of chases in marble hallways.
She found herself behind a ventilation grate on the back wall of the kitchen.
The etched iron was slick with grease as she maneuvered the panel downward and climbed out over one of the stoves.
The room was empty but not yet clean. Dishes still waited in the sink.
An unfinished plate of food sat abandoned on a prep table near an overturned stool. The staff had likely fled.
She wiped her hands on a discarded rice sack and armed herself with a kitchen blade as she approached the doorway leading out into the hall.
“But why would she do that?” Cerro whispered aggressively on the other side of the wall. He was accompanied by another set of frantic footsteps, but there was no second voice. “There are priests down there! I could have been down there! And she drops a bridge on them?”
Nova braced for Cerro to turn the corner so she could put a kitchen blade in his throat, but they scurried past toward some other destination.
She crept out behind them, following for as long as she could to get a sense of where they were going.
It appeared to be the throne room. Cavernous. A ridiculous place to hide.
An ideal central location for a rendezvous, however.
A skirmish tumbled out of the library doors ahead.
She identified Brother Lain, his white robe stained a dark red, wrestling with an assailant who seemed to be brandishing a letter opener.
Nova rushed over and signaled to Lain to back off so she could take over.
She kicked the blade from the masked man’s hand and flicked an iron fan open near enough that the blade grazed his throat.
She held it there and he froze as she crouched over him.
“You know who I am?” she asked. He nodded slightly.
“You wrecked the bridge?”
He nodded again.
“On whose orders? A Drake?”
He gulped.
“Where are they now?”
His eyes darted, and a finger pointed shakily in the direction of the throne room.
Nova tapped the base of her fan with her fist just hard enough to drive it a severing distance into his throat, and then stepped over him to check on Lain.
“You hurt?” she asked him, pointing at the blood on his robe.
“I—no, it’s not mine,” he replied, breathless.
“Good. Stay in the library. Lock the doors. Have you seen Yemi?”
“I assumed she was with you.”
Nova stalked off toward the throne room and the sounds of roaring and clashing metal.
All of this was her own fault. She hadn’t been thorough enough in her search for the rebels.
And now Yemi was alone. She might never have made it inside.
It would have been nothing for them to launch her over the garden cliffs.
Cutter came barreling out of a storeroom with his spear swinging.
She counted eight, ten, more attackers who seemed to converge on him.
It made sense. He was a giant wall of a person, the physical and metaphorical embodiment of the shield of the crown.
And if they were bothering with him, it meant they hadn’t found Yemi yet.
Nova whistled to announce her arrival and joined the fray.
“You’re here? Where’s the queen?” Cutter roared over the cracking and squelching of bodies.
She couldn’t bring herself to say she didn’t know. Not to him.
“You must go find—”
“After,” she told him.
· YEMI ·
The corridor was empty but for the dust being shaken from the ceiling by thundering footsteps.
Distorted rectangles of moonlight splashed a stone mural of old kings and older gods along the long wall.
Yemi moved quickly to the secret door to the east wing on the far end.
Shadows moved in the flickering light beneath it, and she could hear moaned pleas for mercy, voices familiar and yet foreign in their desperation.
She opened it slowly and stepped into the darkness behind it, careful to shield herself from the harried murderers and mutineers darting up the hallway.
A royal guard lay slumped against the wall near her mother’s bedroom, the rise and fall of his chest increasingly quick and erratic.
A man with a bloody dagger drawn exited the room panting and skidded to a halt in the pool of guard’s blood he pretended to ignore.
Another rebel approached him at a furious pace.
Yemi was sweating as she inched out of the shadows, her body low and coiled so tightly she thought she might seize with cramps.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Not here,” said the man with the dagger.
“Yes I am,” she growled as she thrust her spear in through the base of his skull and jerked it out before he started his descent to the ground.
“You.” She pointed at the other one with her spear. “Where is your master? I’d like a word.”
“The… the Bear Queen?” he stammered, backing away on his heels.
Yemi had forgotten she was wearing her mother’s mask. “Yes, if you’d prefer, it was she who killed you. What are you? Not a soldier, not with that stance. Did the Drakes send a baker’s boy to kill a queen?”
A darkness came over him, and he stopped backing away as if imbued with some confidence that it was not the Bear Queen, only his target.
He tugged the pistol off his hip and moved to aim it at her chest when Yemi whacked him hard on the trigger finger—sending the bullet sideways into the wall—and then along the jaw, the sharp metal of the spear tip carving a slash in his throat deep enough to rupture an artery.