Chapter 13 #2
Around a series of corners and up another set of stairs, Van shut the door of a small, clean home behind them.
It was minimally but comfortably decorated and smelled of sandalwood.
The vent over a stone hearth had been carved to echo the chambers of a nautilus beside an altar bordered by dried herbs and the rinds of fruit.
The wooden floors were well polished, and the open slats of the eastern wall looked out over the crops in the riverbed before Van shuttered those as well.
This must have been their home. Nova stowed the guilt she felt about never having seen it before.
Van crossed their arms and stood tense in front of the hearth, their breathing evidently sensing the urgency even if they couldn’t know why just yet.
“I heard—well.” They waved the obvious away with a hand. “You’re here? Why?”
“I hadn’t expected to, exactly, but I need your help,” Nova said quietly, eyeing the herbs over the altar.
“Looks like the Obé’s kept you after all, if you made it here.”
“Fuck the Obé.”
“Ennova!” Van snapped. Nova cursed herself silently and pressed her hands together in an aggressive wordless apology. “Explain. Quickly, before you get my house burned down,” Van insisted.
Nova plucked a coherent, bare-bones sequence of events from her head. “We’re in exile. For the time being, you understand—”
“We?” Van’s eyes widened. “Where is sh—oh no.” They moved to check the view from the far window as if Yemaya were standing just outside.
“Stop, just listen. The Drake family has usurped the throne, and the Obé is involved somehow. We’re on our way to Sol.”
“The Obé… removed her from the throne?” Van processed this. “Then Dahlia Drake is her chosen?”
“Now, wait,” Nova insisted, alarmed by the turn this was taking. “The Obé appeared to Yemaya, too, and offered… I don’t know, something. We have to make an offering to redeem it, do you understand? I need a tobacco leaf. And whatever else you know of that makes this easier.”
“This… do you understand what this means?” Van asked breathlessly.
“It means the witch is fickle and playing some sort of fucking game I’m also sworn to play because my queen demands it, Van.”
Van began to pace the floor, chewing a fingernail and shooting glances at Nova that were, frankly, concerning.
It hadn’t occurred to Nova that these events could have anything to do with the Rakes’ old faith or that Van might have any difficulty navigating those implications.
There was a lifetime between them, a gulf of duty and experience, and Nova was beginning to doubt that the love they’d had for one another as children, before their paths diverged, was enough.
“Do I… have to ask you to choose me right now?” Nova asked, trying to be gentle even as her heart raced. A map of the town and routes for a quick, strategic exit began to form in her mind. One route had her fleeing with Van’s blood on her hands.
“I can’t help you,” they said finally.
Nova felt her breath leave her. “What are you talking about?”
“You know the word,” Van said evenly. “Arielle was a betrayer. That isn’t Yemaya’s fault, but if the Obé removed her fruit from the throne, then it is just. It’s more than just—it’s everything the Rakes have prayed for.”
The plan for the outlying factor began to solidify in Nova’s head even as she fought, panicked, to dismiss it:
She would have to kill them in order to leave this room.
“Van, please,” Nova pleaded, a decade of training behind her eyes as they searched the room for weapons, a method, against her will. “That can’t be the endgame. She’s made promises to Yemaya, too. There is more to this.”
“I have to tell them,” Van replied.
Nova took a step toward them, a burn in her throat even if tears wouldn’t come. “Please. If you have ever had any love for me. Tell them anything. Tell them what you need to, but give me the time to get her out of here. Let me save her.”
They were both silent for a long moment. The town outside was beginning to wake up. Neighborly greetings were exchanged over and between the sounds of commencing chores. Someone remarked over the lamps gone unlit in the dense fog.
“You know, I was there for your earliest training,” said Van. “I know that set in your jaw when you’re prepared for a fight. There’s normally a gleam in your eye, and it goes dead when you’ve set your course. Like the light in you has to go into hiding before you strike and kill someone.”
Nova hadn’t had many occasions in life to feel shame.
It was the singular perk of the certainty Cutter always demanded of her.
The feeling now, of being willing to kill for Yemi, to kill family and have them read it on her so readily, was itself stiflingly violent.
But the certainty that she must and would, for once, frightened her.
It occurred to her to ask about Sanji—whether he or they had known anything about the coup.
But her reasons for it wouldn’t have been pure, and they were far beyond investigations.
Something in her needed Van to have been a part of this. Maybe then she would be justified in…
Van turned to the altar and plucked a hanging bundle of tobacco leaves from the wall, and Nova exhaled so hard her knees nearly gave out. Van put it in her hand, the look in their eyes something Nova could only read as disappointment.
“I suppose it’s good to have something you would kill for. I would only know who I would die for,” they said.
They allowed Nova the space to speak, but she could find no words.
“Obé keep you, Cousin,” they said with tears in their eyes. Nova recognized it as a goodbye.
She hugged them, hard, and died ever so slightly when they did not hug her back.
She left the house at a speed somewhere between fleeing and needing not to be detected.
A dry sob escaped her when she entered the arundo grass again, her mind such a whirlwind that she did not recall the journey back to the thicket before she reached for Yemi’s hand to help her down the slope.
“We move. Now,” Nova grunted, unable to look her in the eye.
Yemi frowned. “What happened?” she asked.
“Later,” Nova replied with some finality.
They slid down the hill together, careful to avoid large rocks and exposed roots that threatened to trip them.
They emerged in the valley between tall rows of hemp and arundo grass, ideal for cutting across the fields amid some semblance of cover.
The world beneath the fog was dark and humid, the sun cutting in from the east painting the tops of the plants in red light as if they were on fire.
They moved quickly and cautiously, sticking to the lanes between the crops.
A horn sounded, loud and bone-tremblingly deep. A breeze rippled through the crops and piqued Nova’s nerves, as it became impossible to tell if workers were nearby.
Without warning, she shoved Yemi into the hemp stalks and hoped she had the sense to stay there.
Nova froze on the path and locked eyes with a dark, looming figure some fifty yards ahead of them, their face obscured by the feathering leaves.
“Morning, friend. Oh. Friends.”
What she’d thought was one person had turned out to be three. “I’m just passing through. Not here to cause any trouble,” Nova called. She stuck her spear standing in the dirt beside her and showed her empty palms.
They crept forward out of the arundo grass across the way with shambling steps and strangely twitching limbs.
Farmers, from what she could tell. Their boots were caked in mud, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and stained with sweat.
They gripped spears and short blades in massive hands laced with violent black veins.
Nova clenched her jaw. This was bad.
A twig snapped somewhere in the hemp off to the right, and Nova took up her spear again at a twitch.
A fourth farmer emerged, burly and barrel-chested and impossibly tall in a way that threatened Cutter’s standing as the largest man she’d ever seen.
He stood still and, with a series of audible popping noises, turned his head to where Nova knew Yemi was hiding.
He didn’t move toward her position, though.
He set his gaze forward on Nova, and the little hairs on the back of her neck stood as she peered into dark, empty eyes for a moment before he continued out onto the path.
“I would truly rather not fight. We all deserve an easy day here,” Nova called, drawing one of her iron fans and flicking it open. It was a trigger, and the standoff ended as the farmers stalked toward her.
Shit.
Yemi leaped onto the path and gave chase, but Nova was surrounded.
Two more farmers had closed in behind her and engaged her first. It was as if they didn’t see Yemi at all.
Nova was now a flurry of iron fans slinging streaks of black blood in long arcs in every direction, pushing them away from Yemi.
But none of them were going down easily.
For the listlessness in their gait and their dead-eyed expressions, they were deft with their weapons, swinging them with powerful, deadly intent in combinations Nova was having trouble parrying.
She launched herself into the air and punched the giant in the throat with the leading edge of a fan, sending his head flying into the long grass.
Yemi tried whistling to distract the nearest one to her and plunged her spear into the soft flesh of his belly when he turned around.
Only, it didn’t do much.