Chapter 10 #2
In the four stops since Nova had joined the 5-car 2:20 to the city, not one train had passed them going the opposite direction.
She’d purchased a wide-brimmed farmer’s hat and poncho from a vendor cart at a nondescript pastoral station in the marshes and sat alone on a bench in the rear car.
There were few other passengers here, and they were mostly quiet, napping or flicking through books and newspapers.
Perhaps wherever they were coming from, the news of the coup hadn’t reached them just yet.
Returning to the city was a risk, but she needed to know what the people knew, and what measures were being taken to find Yemi. And the Bear King had always made a point of keeping friendly eyes in key places.
“What are you suggesting?” a woman seated in front of Nova asked the grumbling old man traveling with her.
“Something less naive, I’ll say that,” he replied.
“You think the Drakes had something to do with the queen disappearing?” she hissed, clearly not wanting to call attention to the conversation.
“Did you ever get the sense she didn’t want to rule? I didn’t,” he said testily. “I don’t see her just running off.”
“That’s grief, though.” The woman shrugged.
“What are you even tal—”
“It’s grief!” She was shrieking now. “The woman’s mother died after a long and valiant fight, and she’s expected to take her place? It might have been too much, too soon, that’s all.”
“Anne, the bridge was bombed. Let’s be serious. If she’s not dead and this is foul play—and she’s not dead, given that Cutter and Grey are also missing—war’s coming back much sooner than any of us expected.”
Nova pulled her hat low as they continued to argue. The Drakes hadn’t told anyone anything, then. It meant they had no guarantee that public opinion was on their side. The people might not even care in the end, though, so long as the Drakes were able to maintain stability in the state.
One stop short of the city brought them to the wholesale district.
Merchants bearing bulk commodities too cumbersome to transport through tight city streets hosted stalls here, most often to trade with one another.
She pressed her face against the window to peer as far as she could ahead, where a commotion was happening near the lead cars.
Shouts and a concentration of royal police uniforms told her all she needed to know.
The other passengers began taking notice, and Nova seized on the moment’s confusion to disembark via the rear door.
It was unlikely the police expected the exiled queen or her guard to board a train into the city.
It was more likely they were constructing a checkpoint on the way out.
Once the people were told why, there was no accounting for who might point her out in a crowd.
A cart bearing tall, dense stacks of earthenware kitchen goods rolled by her position headed toward the blockade. She ducked behind it and then down an aisle of textiles.
“Green, green, green, look for green…” she muttered to herself. A friendly stall would be marked by green stripes and maybe one of those adorable stone bear statuettes.
She spied a green awning on the other side of a small crowd gathered at a linen merchant’s stall.
She made to move past them when she noted their collective silence, heads angled forward in serious and somber expressions as they listened to the merchant’s radio.
Listeners were advised that the new queen had fled the palace.
The Senate was expected to convene in the afternoon under Dorian Drake to formulate some type of response, but it was unclear why he was involved in the first place.
She caught the eye of a merchant beneath the green-striped awning. An older woman. Pleasant enough, if maybe a bit nervous in the face. They stared at one another for what bordered on too long before Nova heard authoritative shouting the next aisle over.
“Anyone with eyes on Yemaya Blackgate, Miles Cutter, or Ennova Grey is to report the sighting to the nearest royal officer.”
“On whose orders?” someone demanded.
“Ain’t no queen to report the queen to!” someone else laughed.
“Any information will be rewarded,” the officer replied to the area in general.
Dismissive boos scattered throughout the aisle. Even still, others began to study the faces around them.
Nova looked again at the merchant beneath the green awning, and the woman gestured with her head for Nova to meet her around back.
The stall itself was stocked with stoneware and decorative elements including her favored bear statue in various sizes.
Nova was mildly amused by the lack of subtlety as she met the woman in her storeroom.
“I never thought I’d be needed,” the woman said with a small smile.
“But you’re alright with it?” Nova clarified. She was prepared to do whatever was necessary to make it out of this little room alive if the woman had second thoughts.
“Yes, of course. My whole family, we’re loyal.”
“Thank you for that. You know who I am?”
“Yes, Comman—”
Nova shushed her and pointed to the thin fabric walls around them. The woman nodded her understanding.
“I’m Dina. Whatever you need,” she added in a lower voice.
“Dina, what have you heard?”
“Nothing. The three of you are in the wind.” Dina leaned against a shelf. “Is she… Are you all coming back, or…?”
“She’s not dead. We haven’t gotten much further than that. We’ll need transport. Do you have connections to any safehouses near the border? Ideas on how to get there?”
“I don’t know the network. Transport will be tricky. The train’s probably not safe. I can secure you an ambler.”
Before the packard, there was the ambler, a ten-foot-tall, six-legged mechanical vehicle ideal for traversing much of Ixia’s variable terrain without need of care and feeding like a horse. Nova had seen one topple over and crush a man’s legs once.
They would need at least two of them, and she couldn’t guarantee when they would be returned.
Nova handed her the sack of gold coin and had her fetch clothes for two regular people and one giant.
Food for the same. She watched the aisles from a split in a green curtain until Dina returned half an hour later looking somewhat flushed.
“Any trouble?” Nova asked as she changed into the clothes Dina brought her.
“Not for me, but you may have a fight on your way out of here. It will take me an hour to fetch the amblers, and officers are everywhere. There will be more before I return. I don’t know if they’ll search the shop.”
Nova sighed in annoyance and gave Dina what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Don’t you worry about me and a fight. As long as I can trust you not to be bullied by anyone out there, you just tell me where to meet you in an hour. Can I trust you?”
Dina appeared to steel herself with a deep breath and nodded somewhat boldly. “You can.”
· YEMI ·
Yemi woke beneath a starry night sky and half a cracked stone slab of ceiling in the lighthouse ruins.
Every muscle ached and seemed reluctant to function as she propped herself up.
The flicker of a campfire and Cutter’s tired face was visible through a hole in the wall.
She dusted herself off and cursed her throbbing headache as she made her way out into the open air.
The fields were awash in moonlight, and hearth smoke billowed from the chimneys of homes whose window glows winked like lonely stars embedded in the hills.
“Rested?” Cutter grunted.
“Something like that. Where’s Nova?” she asked, the words carving their way from her dry throat.
“She’ll be back. Went out for supplies.”
“Is that safe?”
“She can handle herself. There’s chicken. Eat. Get some more water. We leave when she gets back.”
She hungrily plucked at the half chicken resting on the day’s newspaper. It tasted like smoke but was in that moment the best thing she’d ever eaten.
Cutter was tinkering with his spear, the tip newly cleaned but cracked and absent the lava-orange glow of its activated state.
“How’s the spear?” she asked between bites.
“Better.” He used his battle glove to ratchet up its heat by rotating a key column in its staff until he was sure it wouldn’t spark, then turned it off again. “Could use a date with a blacksmith, but that can wait. Just glad it didn’t blow up in my hand.”
“It would’ve blown up?”
“Oh yeah. When we first got these, your father and I went on this spree to see what all we could cut through. We took down trees for firewood, ran through all the targets at the training yard, sawed a muzzle off a cannon, that kind of thing. Your father took his to some stone at the quarry and cracked it down to the core. Put it to the side maybe twenty minutes later to go get a drink, and it exploded just leaning against a wall. Your mother lit him up for almost blowing himself to pieces.” Cutter chuckled. It was nice to see him smile.
“That’s why there are only two?”
“Yeah, she didn’t want anyone else blowing themselves up on a battlefield. Your dad made sure he got a new one before they shut the program down, though. Half genius, half madman, always.” He twirled the spear, swiping the tops off a line of wildflowers at the edge of the clearing.
Yemi’s own smile faltered as she imagined the ghosts of both her parents wandering a home that was no longer theirs, the braziers to her mother’s monument going unlit for the first time.
“Did my mother ever mention a run-in with the Obé?” she asked Cutter.
“It would have happened around the time my grandmother died.”
“Not to me. Why?”
“She revealed herself to me. I was outside lighting the braziers to Mother’s monument, and she appeared. She introduced herself and offered a warning. Something about my time being short. She said she’d told my mother the same thing back when they met.”
Cutter frowned. “No specifics in this warning?”
“No, she was vague. But she offered her help with whatever the threat was. I declined—”
“Tactfully, I’m sure.”
“—and she disappeared right before the bridge exploded.”
Cutter thought a moment, allowing the river and the crackling of their fire to fill the silence. “The Drakes have never exactly been devout. I can’t imagine them working with an Old God.”
“Well, there’s something else. When I was fighting Dahlia, there was a moment where her eyes went black, hollow like two pits. And she was impossibly strong.”
“She could have been on drugs,” said Cutter, even though he sounded like he didn’t quite believe it. “Not everyone is cut out for the gore of battle. She may have needed something to get her through it.”
It was possible. She’d heard stories of the things war did to the mind. The toxic herbs and tinctures fighters used to key themselves up to fight or rid themselves of the memories could only be considered worse if you’d never known a battle. But somehow this didn’t feel like that.
“No,” Yemi said thoughtfully. “This reeked of magic.”
“So you’re thinking the Obé knew something about the attack? Orchestrated it, even?”
“I’m thinking when we were considering the Drakes being backed by a foreign entity, we didn’t consider everyone.”
The grass rustled behind Cutter, and he tensed until the sound was followed by the whistling of a cardinal call. Before long, Nova was upon them, a packed rucksack slung over her shoulder. She groaned as she put it down and began to unpack it.
“Found us a friend. Here. Coats,” she panted, tossing them each something dark, woolly, and fur lined. “Shirts without holes in them. Skins for water. We each have three days of bread and cheese, so we don’t have to stop anywhere.”
“Any trouble?” Cutter asked.
“Little bit.” Nova held the raw knuckles of her right hand against the firelight.
“It’s handled, though. Chairre’s on lockdown.
Drakes haven’t announced the coup yet, but they’re definitely assuming power.
Made it out like you disappeared into the night, grief-stricken and whatever, but the city’s being searched.
Roadblocks reach about five miles outside it but no closer yet.
Won’t be long before outposts choke the roads. ”
“Transport?”
“We can’t risk the main roads, so no car. And no trains. But our good friend Dina traffics in both stone bears and amblers. We’ve been lent two, if we leave them at this address in Beverre.” She pulled out a map of Ixia and pointed to a spot on it near the coast and northern border.
“Three, maybe five days on amblerback,” Cutter muttered. “Plenty of time for them to shut down the border. Gets us close, though.”
“Where does Selah live?” Yemi asked.
Cutter gave her a curious look. “West of Amber Lake.”
“She apparently knows where to find Ursla.”
“Wait, what?” Nova asked.
“My Light, the goal is to get you out of the country. Amber Lake is half a day out of the way,” Cutter insisted.
“Who the fuck is Ursla?” Nova asked. “You mean the Ursla?”
In no mood for another dressing-down, Yemi ignored her. “The goal is to get the throne back. She offered to help if I sought her out.”
Cutter stood up and doused the fire aggressively, sending sprays of ash into the air.
“I’m not taking you on a literal witch hunt,” he growled.
“Don’t let the pastoral setting fool you—you are in very real danger until we cross that border, and then maybe, maybe you’ll be out of reach.
Until then, I am not here to do your bidding; my sworn duty is to keep you alive.
You have three days to wrap your head around that.
Fill the waterskins. We leave now.” He stood, towering over her, and stalked off in the direction from which Nova had come, leaving Yemi fuming and the two of them staring at one another.
“Well, what was that?” Nova huffed.
“I’ll explain on the way,” Yemi replied. She snatched the waterskins from where they lay in the dirt and went to fill them in the river.