Chapter 12 #5
The question of what Ursla wanted from Yemi was a fair one, she admitted, but only insofar as it provided her with leverage for a deal of her own.
There was no sign of Selah on any of the porches when Yemi finally reached the house.
She did not take root in the courtyard and the trees there didn’t consume her as she bounded up the stairs and back inside.
Things on the main floor remained just as they’d been left.
Her teacup was still in the sink. Selah was nowhere to be found.
“Shit,” Yemi muttered, racing downstairs to the lower level. Nova snored gently, stretched out on her back in bed.
“Nova!” Yemi called from the doorway, and Nova snorted herself awake.
“Huh? Wha?”
“Have you seen Selah? Or heard from her?”
“Not since this morning.” Nova yawned and looked toward the window. “What time is it?”
“Late. She’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“I don’t know, she just…” Yemi made a poofing gesture with her hand, but her attention turned to one of the unnamed doors across the hall where something was tapping.
There was something else, too: the sensation of being watched, menaced in a way that raised the fine hairs on her arms, though there were no eyes in the hallway.
Warily, she approached. The tapping stopped as she placed her hand on the door, but became a scrape as she moved it, and she could feel it following her.
It clattered against the floor as she reached for the knob.
She opened the door barely inches and the sliver of light from the hallway exposed objects on shelves along the wall.
The air within was warm and smelled of old earth.
A bloodred stone the size of her palm glowed on the ground.
As she bent to pick it up, the door slammed and her hand was seized, a force grabbing her by the wrist and pressing her against the wall. Her spear dropped at her side.
“What are you doing?” Selah’s voice sounded hollow and sinister as she glowered from the base of the stairs.
“You disappeared!” Yemi said quickly, remembering the soldier with the broken neck now a smattering of sodden ash beside the lake. “There was a noise behind the door. I thought it was y—”
“If there was ever a business you shouldn’t mind, it’s mine,” Selah growled.
Nova appeared with a blade at the base of Selah’s skull, but the witch didn’t flinch.
“What is this?” Nova demanded. “Release her. I’d rather this didn’t get messy.”
Selah ignored her and seemed to be working out who here could be trusted. She looked different now—more focused, more dangerous—but not out of malice. There was something in that room that she was protecting.
“You won’t kill me,” Yemi told her with as much confidence as she could muster. “It violates the deal you made with my mother. I swear to you on my life that I meant no harm. I was only looking for you. Nova, at ease. It’s fine.”
But Nova ignored her, too.
A moment’s thick hesitation and Selah released her. “You two need to leave.”
“Wait. Things were fine before I went to sleep. Why don’t I ever know what’s going on?” Nova asked.
“We will. As soon as you give me what I came here for,” Yemi replied.
“Naturally,” Selah said. The anger in her face had given way to disappointment.
The mysterious door opened again and she gestured for Yemi to go in.
The stone was gone from the place it had been on the floor.
Selah and Nova followed her inside. A single wall sconce illuminated the small room lined with shelves of jars and dusty books and macabre curios Yemi inspected only to find the stone.
Elaborate hemispheres of chalk arched along the base of one wall, small stone bowls brimming with sand and spent incense at their centers.
“What was that I saw? The red stone,” Yemi asked.
Selah pulled the stone from the pocket of her skirt. “The seed of my power. And your family’s fertility stone. It shouldn’t have called to you. It’s concerning that it did.”
“That’s going to be useless to you this round, I’m afraid,” Yemi said.
“There are no useless things,” Selah replied. She rummaged through a small ornate chest at the far end of the room next to a hanging serpent’s skeleton and returned with a round gold pendant on a length of leather cord.
“If you meet Helene, give her this.”
Yemi took it and ran her finger across its surface. It was heavy and fairly thick, the broad side scalloped like resting water. Worn letters had been carved into its outer edge and a chip the width of a fingertip was missing from a lower quadrant. “Who is Helene?”
Selah shook her head dolefully. “North. Through the Hot Gates, you’ll find the City of the Sun.”
“First seat of the Kingdom of Ixia,” Yemi murmured, trying to remember details from a decade of compulsory Ixian history lessons.
Nova had them pause a moment and went back to their room.
Yemi took the opportunity to hang the medallion around her neck for safekeeping, even if Selah was determined to tell her nothing more about it.
Nova returned and spread their map across a long nearby table, then marked the city where it lay on the coast.
“Day and a half’s ride, maybe two, but it’s not through the friendliest territory,” she said.
“In what way?” Yemi asked.
Nova pointed to a pale area marked by glyphs indicating a small mountain range and a jagged strip of river.
“These are the Rakelands, just before the Hot Gates. What was left of the rebellion after the Ixian wars migrated there, mostly. The most direct route is a twenty-mile stretch of Obéid and people who regularly use your name and terms like flesh leather in the same sentence.”
“Wonderful,” Yemi groaned.
“And after that,” Selah continued, “the old city is all flooded ruins now, but you’ll find what remains of Ursla’s temple on the other end of a blood orange grove.
Halve one of the fruits and wrap it in a tobacco leaf as an offering, then drop it into the water beyond the shallows and wait there.
She will come for you between dusk and dawn. ”
“Should’ve kept the horses,” Yemi said. Nova folded the map and left to prepare.
Yemi moved to follow and to collect her few things but turned back, feeling her mother’s nagging disapproval for the way she’d treated someone who’d been objectively helpful. “Thank you,” she said.
Selah nodded and waited with her hands in her pockets, presumably for her to leave.
Yemi continued for want of the satisfied feeling that came when she knew she’d done the right—or at least sufficient—thing. “The captain of my guard, Cutter, is in Muris as a guest of King Luzon. If you need a place to go, you’ll be safe there.”
“Kind of you.”
Yemi turned to leave but stopped again when the witch kept talking.
“The difference between a witch and a god is that a witch can’t create,” Selah called.
“Not from nothing. We can only manipulate and transform what already exists. The Drowned Mother is no god. The minute you remind her that her power has rules like the rest of us, you’re a target, not a pawn. Be smart.”
Yemi nodded. If her mother had always made a point of telling her she was anything, it was smart.