Chapter 17
· YEMI ·
The witch did not live close. Yemi swam westward into the small hours of the morning, popping above the waves intermittently to check the fading stars for her course. Above water, the moon was bright, but she didn’t have to descend far to lose the light.
The glimmers of sea giants illuminated by her sporadic humming were the only proof she had that she wasn’t simply treading water in an abyss.
Whales bounced their songs off her, some wandering curiously close by, knowing as well as she did how strange and dangerous it was for one so small to be so far from shore.
She’d been warned so many times, and now she swam alone in the dark, imagining the disapproving faces of Cutter, Selah, and Nova sure to greet her when she returned empty-handed.
Even her mother had a way of calling her smart that often seemed to beg the question of why she was behaving foolishly.
And now here she was, a fool fully realized.
Unless.
She flexed the fatigue from the hand gripping her spear.
She could barely feel anything past her hips.
No one had chased her from the city, but that hadn’t stopped her from moving like someone was.
What she had now was less a plan than the vestiges of an insomniac’s half-formed fever dream, but it was better than the fruitless nothing promised to her otherwise.
If Ursla hadn’t misspoken and a royal—any royal—could hand her the Mer throne, Yemi as a descendant could give it to her.
And every relationship with a witch was transactional.
She would have to offer something in return.
The question of what had happened to Hurand only had one answer.
Ursla’s magic had turned him. How he’d ended up at her mercy in the first place was a question for Dahlia Drake.
The hours of swimming allowed her to convince herself she wasn’t ethically bound to preserve Helene’s position, even if Nova might insist she was.
The Mer queen hadn’t treated her with any kinship.
Her rule had ground the Mer nation to dust, and she was mentally unfit to continue.
She hadn’t produced any heirs. What Yemi did now was not only for her benefit, but for the future of Mer.
For Lirik. At least, that was what she told herself.
Somewhere in the dark around her, she felt her mother’s spirit sigh in her doleful way, the way that said Yemi knew better, but what could be done once she’d made up her mind?
The open water suddenly had a floor only a few feet beneath her.
Luminous green-gray sand stretched for miles, dotted with shelled scavengers scuttling over remnants of deader things.
Smaller carcasses gave way to massive skeletal structures of mandibles and bared teeth, alabaster ropes of sea serpent spines with scant scraps clinging to their pin bones so thin they looked like film more than flesh.
Well, found the bones, Yemi thought.
The outside of the sea witch’s den was marked with black rocks with vague forms carved into them as if the mason had quit their commission.
A green glow marked its entrance, algae spinning at the center of concentric whale ribs outlining the mouth of a cave.
Yemi kept her humming to a minimum here, for fear of waking some guardian creature in the dark.
Kelp swayed in the mouth of the cavern as she entered it, and Yemi followed bends in the path until it emptied into a round room illuminated by jellyfish floating near the high ceiling.
Shorter archways shot off from this central chamber in all directions between towering shelves filled with obscure objects.
Ursla sat on a stone throne the shape of an actual chair, not a chaise like Helene’s.
She seemed distracted and held her head like it hurt.
“Ursla?” Yemi called gently. This felt like a place for quiet. Compared with the opulence of her temple, her monument in Sol, this also felt like a place for loneliness, the physical embodiment of the exile Yemi felt within herself.
The wall behind was lined with kelp that tickled her back unsettlingly unless she moved farther into the center of the equally unsettling room.
“I have to leave,” she said when Ursla didn’t acknowledge her.
“So do it, then. Please,” Ursla groaned.
Yemi watched her curiously. It was the first time the witch wasn’t ready with a quip. Something in her seemed broken. Tired.
“I—something’s happened, and we need to talk,” Yemi tried again.
Ursla looked at her for the first time, a glower of violent impatience. “I do not have the patience for your little melodrama today, so if you could get to your point?”
Yemi pressed on. “You said you can’t take the Mer throne; someone of royal blood would have to give it to you. Does that have to be Helene, or is it something in my power?”
Ursla squinted. “You’d qualify. Why?”
“Helene,” Yemi said, relieved. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Poor thing’s got a bug in her ear, I hear. A century of loneliness can do such unfortunate things to a person.” Her posture had changed to something bordering on interest.
“Well, she’s unfit. Went into absolutely incoherent hysterics. Paranoid and stealing Ixian ships because she thinks they’re looking for Mer or something. I haven’t been able to parse that out. She won’t help me because she thinks I want her throne for myself. Half your people—”
“Our people,” Ursla corrected.
“Half of them are starving monsters in the dark being used in exchange for the promise of a moment’s sunlight.”
“It’s not your kingdom. Why do you care so much?”
“There’s a woma—merwoman. The steward’s daughter. She deserves a future. So do the rest.”
A salacious grin began to creep over Ursla’s face.
“And I’m sure the fishing is gone from the north because Helene thinks she’s punishing my mother. She’s fucking around in both our worlds.”
“Looks like she isn’t the only one.”
“Enough.” Yemi’s teeth clenched. “If I gave you—gave you back—the throne, you could set this right. My question is this: What can you offer me in exchange, by way of returning me to the throne you helped steal?”
Ursla hesitated, her fingers now tapping on the arms of her throne. “You realize you may be the only queen in history to ever back a coup.”
“Yes, yes,” Yemi said impatiently. “I have to get to Muris urgently. My people are waiting for me there, and the people here, for all I know, are hunting me. So if we can do this as quickly as possible—”
“How is it that you’ve overstayed your welcome so fast? Is it a talent?” Ursla smiled that maddening smile.
Yemi was incredulous. “Fine. Forget it. I should have known you’d have nothing to offer but your tricks. No wonder you can’t get people to acknowledge you even exist anymore.” She turned to leave. Maybe this was possible with Muris’s army and whatever allies she had left in Ixia after all.
“I admit I thought you might consider taking the sea throne for yourself,” Ursla called after her. “You’d have an easier path down here than up there.”
Yemi turned back in time to see the witch drift off her throne and glide along the cracked mosaic floor toward a wall of shelves off to the right.
“I can only handle being seen as the illegitimate queen on one throne at a time,” Yemi replied warily.
“You’re sure? All that unpleasant business gone.
” Ursla snapped her fingers. “You could leave your pretender in Ixia to direct her people in adoration of yours. We could even bring your guardian down so you’re not devastatingly lonely.
Unless the steward’s daughter would have something to say about it. ”
“Do you want the Mer throne or not?” Yemi snapped.
“If you insist,” she purred, reaching for a small corked bottle from some shelf above them and what looked to Yemi like a needle.
Ursla pricked her own finger and bled black blood into an upturned vial.
She then put it and another bottle containing crushed leaves into a leather satchel bound with string. “Your witch, Selah.”
“Your daughter.”
Ursla only paused a moment.
Yemi relished the disturbance of her calm, however brief. “She didn’t tell me on her own, if that’s worth anything to you.”
Ursla watched her with careful eyes, as if determining if Yemi were putting on a ruse of her own. “Yes, my daughter. She stole something from me a long time ago. A stone. It contains the power you need to do what you’re asking.”
“The catch?”
Ursla grinned with the satchel clutched in her hand.
“Good girl. Sunrise to sunrise, you must maintain a day’s worth of confidence.
Not the flimsy mortal sort. You must remain in control of yourself, your senses, your temper.
You cannot doubt the soundness of your purpose.
A conflict of the mind expresses itself as an ailment in the body.
You lose yourself, this weapon becomes that ailment.
I cannot begin to describe what that would look like for you, but suffice it to say that if you are corrupted, only a fraction of you will sit on that throne. ”
Yemi thought of the stone beckoning her behind the door in Selah’s home, but she frowned in confusion. “I know the stone. It’s known as my line’s fertility stone. She never mentioned it was stolen. Why would she do that?”
“Why would she admit to being a thief? Why would anyone?” Ursla shrugged.
“No, why steal it in the first place?”