Chapter 14
· YEMI ·
They traveled south along the coast of Ixia, watching the barnacled hulls of fishing and merchant vessels drift by overhead in the early-morning hours.
Ixian lore had made it seem like the world beneath the surface was teeming with sea giants, demigods of every stripe, each with a story.
But the sea was mostly a dizzying deep-blue void.
They were careful to stay near the rocks for when an exhausted Yemi needed any one of her hundreds of breaks.
It was the swimming motion that came naturally to her. The stamina, not so much.
“Your mother really did you a disservice, keeping you from the sea all your life. Imagine a fish too tired to swim,” Ursla mused as they stopped in a cove just north of Chairre.
Yemi winced at the term fish, so used to it being wielded as a slur against her.
“You know, we don’t have to speak,” she groaned, dragging herself onto a flat of rocks near the beach. She never imagined pining for sun-warmed stone against her bare skin, but her body seemed to drink in the heat, converting it into energy and relaxing the muscles in her tail.
“I can’t seem to figure out the source of this venom you have for me,” Ursla said, head perched atop her hand.
“Can’t you?” Yemi replied, flexing stiffness out of the hand that had been clenching the spear this entire time.
“I considered it might be the coup, of course, which is justifiable. But we’d already met by then, and you were just as pleasant before as after.”
“Your reputation precedes you,” Yemi muttered dismissively.
“Is that all? Feels personal.”
Yemi stared off into the sky, watching clusters of dark birds alight on tall trees, until it became apparent that Ursla wasn’t going to stop blinking expectantly at her.
“You manipulated my grandmother. Took a piece of her in exchange for something I believe you knew would unravel our world. And what’s happened since then, since your carelessness, has been years and years and years of violence. It’s robbed me of my family.”
“Really? What is it you believe I took?”
Yemi said nothing. She was being baited into a game.
She knew better than to let the witch upset her, but her face began to flush all the same.
Glimmers of ancient moments with her father and less ancient, intermittent joyful ones with her mother flooded her mind.
Ursla said nothing, merely nodded as if Yemi had a point.
“Whatever history has taken from you, it did give you a throne,” said the witch.
She started in a slow drift around the rock cluster, completely relaxed, whereas Yemi felt like a tick about to pop.
She imagined activating her spear, dangling it into the water, and letting Ursla drift merrily into it.
“Did you get what you wanted? Out of that deal?” she demanded instead.
“Would it please you more if I said yes or if I said no?” Ursla asked.
“Wouldn’t matter. You’re a monster either way,” said Yemi. She knew it was a foolish thing to say, even if it was true. An opportunity to expel some of her simmering rage, though. Anything to get a rise out of her. An angry enemy was preferable to one who clearly didn’t take her seriously.
Ursla stopped swimming in circles, and Yemi was almost salivating at the thought of a fight on her hands. “How blunt of you. How bold,” the witch deadpanned. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry for your suffering. You shouldn’t be enduring it, because you shouldn’t be here.”
“Excuse me?” Yemi blinked.
Ursla sighed and traced a finger over the rocks.
“Your grandmother is the one who played me, not the other way around. She offered me her firstborn in exchange for her chance at love.” She chuckled slightly, as if it were the most ridiculous thing.
“Her future, her progeny. Without the piece of your grandmother that I was given—freely, I might add—your mother, and by extension you, could not exist. And now here we both are, ruining each other’s mornings. ”
“You took her ability to conceive?” Yemi said. “Sloppy work.”
“Well, we both know what it’s like to be betrayed, don’t we?” Ursla shrugged.
“Betrayed by whom?”
“So sorry, but you and I are not friends enough for that conversation.”
“Why don’t I believe anything you say?” Yemi scoffed.
“That’s your business. But I hope you’re equally skeptical of anything the Kept tell you.
It wasn’t true love that brought you into the world, dear girl; it was bastard magic.
What I took, I took to protect her. To protect you from the future you now enjoy.
I know better than anyone the whims of Men.
I knew no creature born of Arielle’s blood would satisfy Man’s own need to deify itself.
You, her, your mother are all reminders of an ancient order into which they do not fit.
Every horror of your young life was inevitable, so long as her ambitions did not remain contained within herself.
It was your grandmother’s greed that cursed you.
She wanted everything without having to give up anything.
The rules of our world demand balance. She is why you suffer, not me. ”
Yemi lowered herself back into the water, her stomach rumbling violently. “I think the rest of our time together would be… healthier if you didn’t talk about my grandmother anymore.” She started off without her guide, gliding past her to see what she could of Chairre.
“Healthier,” Ursla mused. “How much longer do you intend to starve before you admit that you are, in fact, starving?”
“Unless you’re hiding a soggy chicken dinner in those tentacles, I will make do until our excursion is over.”
“The less nourished you are, the longer this will take. And while you may make it there, you certainly won’t make it back. Come. Do you hunt, or is that spear of yours more of a ceremonial toy?”
“Hunt… what?”
“Anything you want!” The witch beamed. “In this body, you are more powerful; you have more autonomy than you ever did on land, even as royalty. You are a shark. You are descended of elder gods and so forth.”
Yemi ignored her and turned around in all directions. “I haven’t seen anything to hunt since last night.” It was true. From the northern to the eastern coast, there were rocks and weeds, but all else was a lifeless void. “The fish are gone from the north. We’ve been dealing with it for years.”
“Gone for Men, maybe.”
“And there’s the matter of what’s caught needing to be cooked—”
“A limitation of your other body.” The witch shrugged. “I hear your mother had a certain… streak in her. A taste for the finer things?” She seemed excited, curious in a fevered sort of way. Perhaps it was the family bloodlust she was interested in the most.
But Yemi was not one for parlor tricks.
“Have any fruit?” she asked.
“You’re joking.”
“You were summoned with an orange.”
Visibly annoyed, the sea witch returned to the land’s edge and snatched entire clutches of plants from the sand and from low-hanging branches of short, scraggly trees. She presented Yemi with what appeared in one hand to be a bunch of immature white grapes, and in the other, a garden-variety weed.
“Coccoloba. Purslane.”
Skeptical but quietly ravenous, Yemi plucked a nub of the coccoloba from its stem and popped it into her mouth. It was gone in two chews—a blessing, because it tasted terrible.
“This is salt.”
“They are out of season, and you have the palate of a carnivore.” Ursla rolled her eyes and dangled the purslane in front of her. “Would you like to complete your shameful salad so we can get on with it?”
Yemi snatched the bushel from her and bit into its leafy bits, serrated teeth snapping them clean from their stems.
Like spinach. Sort of. It would do.
She wouldn’t give the witch the satisfaction of a disappointed expression and instead turned toward Chairre.
The morning above them was bright. Masts of ships with their sun-draught sails collapsed shot skyward toward cumulus clouds beyond the harbor.
Yemi poked her head above the water’s surface to hear the wind and gulls and creaking wood, the buzz of commerce on the docks.
Nothing disrupted. No siege, no protest, no sign whatsoever that she’d been overthrown.
The sound of someone’s laughter seemed at her expense, and she ducked beneath the waves again. Ursla was watching when she looked back. The witch smiled and had opened her mouth to speak when Yemi growled in irritation and took off across the harbor.
“Believe it or not,” Ursla said, easily catching up to her, “I’ve been where you are now. I know what it is to be exalted. Beloved. And then shelved.”
“Is that why you helped Dahlia to my throne? You wanted a kindred spirit?” Yemi asked, not masking her bitterness.
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Your priest, the tall one, brought the girl to me, and I’m nothing if not a nurturer. She has agreed to be the queen who will return her people to the worship of the sea,” Ursla said.
“And to you,” Yemi said.
“Naturally.”
“But you’d be betraying that deal by helping me.” Ursla’s endgame still wasn’t evident. Figuring it out had taken a back seat to getting to Abyssa.
“She isn’t blood,” Ursla assured her. “Whatever power there is to be gained from meddling with Men is a pebble to the mountain of what can be done through one of my own. But you and your mother weren’t what I’d call receptive when I came to you.
That night when you nearly cracked your pretender’s head open on the palace floor, I saw a ferocity, a strength in you that she doesn’t possess.
I saw myself. And so I think that when you see what your world comes to once it’s left you behind, you’ll find it in the same ruin as mine when this world left me.
And when you do, you will make whatever deal you must with whatever devil you can if it means not becoming a ruin yourself. ”
Yemi smirked. “Either way, we’re both here because you’re lonely.”