Chapter 13 #5
She’d been obsessively picking over the scene for the better part of the day. Van bleeding red. Their eyes clear as they spoke before the end. When had the change happened? How much of their actions had been within their control?
Were their final words a confession that they’d die willingly for the Obé?
There was guilt, too—not just about how it ended but how little time Nova had spent understanding Van well enough to know these answers.
The moon was high, and the sounds of the foreign landscape piqued her fight instinct.
Carefully—but not too carefully—she extricated herself from beneath Yemi’s head and replaced her lap with their lumpy sack of dwindling supplies.
The wind was cold, but they couldn’t risk being seen with a fire, not this close to the Rakes and their new mountain of dead.
Their only alternative was to keep moving.
She made her way to the water’s edge, shin deep in frigid muck, and tipped up corners of moldy, half-drowned boats, searching for anything intact and silently floating questions of how to kill gods and of sailing into the night on her own onto the water. What she wouldn’t give for certainty.
· YEMI ·
Yemi woke shivering in the grass, staring at the endless night sky. Nova was gone.
She sat up in a panic, convinced she’d missed her window and that Nova had finally left her, when she appeared coming up the hill.
Yemi sighed in relief. “What time is it?”
“Late. Sorry there’s no fire. I didn’t want a beacon letting anyone know we were here,” Nova said. In the moonlight, Yemi could see she was wet from about the knee down and fairly pissed off about it.
“I’m not complaining,” Yemi assured her as she stood and collected her spear. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked.
“Sleep is for the royal and the dead,” she replied, which was a guardian’s way of saying, I’m exhausted, but this is the job. “Found a boat that won’t sink, probably, but I need help getting it free of the docks.”
Yemi nodded and followed her silently down the hill, trying to shake the feeling that something was wrong, to convince herself that Nova was only tired and nothing disastrous had happened while she’d slept.
The tide had come in, and the cluster of boats near the temple had loosened itself somewhat. They set about untangling one of the few intact dinghies with oars from its web of rope and rotted things and began hoisting it over to clearer water.
“What if she doesn’t show? Is there a backup plan?” Nova asked.
“I don’t know why she wouldn’t. But… I did tell Selah I meant to kill Ursla when I found her,” Yemi admitted.
Nova either dropped the boat or threw it down, and it thudded on the soft ground. Yemi jumped. The expression on Nova’s face was a degree of fed up she hadn’t seen before.
“At first, I just said it because I thought she’d tell me more if she thought I was eliminating a common enemy. But now I’m thinking… what if she refuses or sets the stakes too high? It might be the only way.”
Nova shook her head and began muttering to herself as she picked her end of the boat back up.
Yemi bristled. “Something on your mind?” She was used to being questioned, not ridiculed. Not by Nova.
She dropped the boat again, definitely on purpose this time. “You sound fucking insane, Yemi. Okay? You’re killing gods now?”
Yemi gasped. Insane?
“Glad there’s no honesty lost between us,” she replied bitterly. “And you’re still here.”
“Well, you’ve had more sleep than I have. Make better decisions for both of us,” Nova hissed.
Yemi bit back tears, rubbing hard at the side of her finger. “Do you not want to be here?” The question left her lips before she could finish the thought. “I—”
“I don’t!” Nova said desperately. “I don’t want to be here. But I took an oath, so I’m fucked until Her Majesty unfucks us. Please pick up the fucking boat, Yemi.”
They stared at one another for a long time. Yemi didn’t know what she was waiting for from Nova, but some part of her felt like it should be an apology. On Nova’s face, she could tell that all that was expected of her was to pick up her end of the fucking boat.
She waited for Nova to blink and convinced herself that her features softened once she did. They commenced hauling the boat again, grunting with the effort.
“Explain it to me,” Nova said quietly as they inched toward open water. “Ursla dies how, exactly?”
“Selah says she’s not a god,” Yemi said. “So one can assume she bleeds like the rest of us, and maybe no one’s gotten close enough to try. She appeared before me casually and unguarded. I can make use of that kind of hubris.”
“You don’t think she’d say the same about you?”
“In which case our thinking alike is also an asset.”
“Sure,” Nova deadpanned. “So Ursla dies, and then what?”
“Best-case scenario, it weakens the Drakes,” Yemi panted. “Remove Ursla’s power and make Dahlia an easier target. If she even has anything to do with that.”
“Which we’re not sure of. Worst case?”
“We get certainty. And she pays for my family’s curse.”
They placed the boat at land’s edge with a clear shot to the spot in the middle of nowhere they were advised to target. “Curse? Being human?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know! I’m human. You being like me, like your father, that’s your curse?
” The desperate fatigue was showing in Nova’s face now.
Yemi recognized it from exasperating her mother countless times.
“What else can it be? The witch didn’t have anything to do with the rest of this.
Everything we’re going through is because of a decision someone else made—Dahlia and Dorian and Cerro.
We take the fight to them. We don’t need to do this shit that is clearly going to get you killed. ”
“Do you want the version of me you’ll end up with if I don’t do this?
” Yemi asked. The question felt like a confession.
“Scared, angry, miserable, closed off the way I have been? I want to be better for you, but I can’t let this go.
It won’t come loose; do you understand? I can finally confront my past here, find the weapon powerful enough to get rid of my enemies, and go home and be rid of all of it.
That’s what’s on the other side of this for me. ”
Nova angled her face toward the moon, and Yemi could see her eyes were glistening.
“I want to say I can do it without you, but I can’t,” she added quietly.
After a long minute, Nova sniffed and cleared her throat, shoving the boat until it floated and gesturing for Yemi to take her hand. She thanked Nova for helping her into the boat and made a mental note that maybe more frequent spoken gratitude was in order.
It was even colder out on the water. Gentle waves jostled them back toward land periodically, and Nova took up the oars to get them back to where they hoped they were supposed to wait.
They spoke little after that. An hour passed, maybe two.
Yemi distracted herself from the cold with thoughts of what to say, the careful boxes to check in any deal to be made with the sea witch.
This could be hubris, she considered. But surely Ursla could be bested.
Yemi just had to be smarter than she was desperate.
Easy.
Something thumped the underside of the boat gently, but hard enough to make Nova reach for one of her fans. If it was possible, they were even quieter now, listening intently as if danger would announce itself as a roar from the depths.
The boat continued to rock as soft thuds peppered the planks beneath their feet in no real pattern but crept from stern to bow.
Yemi’s heart raced as she gripped her spear and slowly peered over the front edge.
Between the dark of the water and her own moonlit reflection in its rippling surface, it was impossible to see anything moving within it.
Impossible, it seemed, until a grin appeared.
An iridescent arc of white teeth hovered some inches below water, creeping upward as black tentacles wrapped around the front end of the boat. Ursla emerged, a dark face framed by a mane of white locs writhing like snakes.
“Well, I’ll be a starfish,” the sea witch crooned, long fingers curving over the prow. “If it isn’t our Legged Queen. I thought you’d been hunted down already.”
“Disappointed?” Yemi asked, relaxing only a little.
“Delighted, actually. The blood of ancients in your veins demands a grander death than at the hands of some human rabble. Hello.” She waved to Nova.
Nova lifted her chin warily by way of acknowledgment.
“What brings you here?”
“You made me an offer. I’ve come to collect,” Yemi declared.
“Exile not working for you?”
“No. But I mean to get my throne back.”
“Girl after my own heart. How sure are you, though, that these people want you back? The Drake girl doesn’t seem to have been met with much resistance.”
“You know a lot for a witch stuck in the water,” Nova cooed. “Don’t suppose you have an informant running around somewhere.”
Ursla’s smile cracked, and tension flickered across her face. Yemi recognized a calming breath when she saw one as the sea witch’s features fluttered back into place to convey something more pleasant.
“You are a formidable thing, aren’t you?” she purred in Nova’s direction. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Ennova Lee Grey.”
“Be quiet then, Ennova.”
“You don’t speak to her that way,” Yemi snapped, noticing a knife fidgeting in Nova’s hand and placing herself between them.
“You, I distinctly remember saying, didn’t need me. Never would,” Ursla replied bitterly.
“I couldn’t see the future. Whereas you either can, or you set in motion the events that brought me here. Which would you prefer I believed was the case?”
There was a pause as they each gauged the other’s willpower. For Yemi’s part, she was determined to let the sea witch know that she wasn’t some child with dreams that could be manipulated. Ursla was a conduit to her Mer relatives. Nothing more.
“Either way, you wield a power that you offered me, and I require it. Do you stand by it or not?”