Chapter 20 #2
“The Old Gods exist to create,” Selah spoke faster.
“She is not one of them; she has to destroy first. Yemaya, she would have purged us all and created new servants from Men once she drowned the world. I stole the seed of her power to make her weaker, but I was caught before she could be killed. I used it to come here, beyond her reach. If I so much as spoke her name, if I stepped my toe back into a natural body of water, she would find me. That’s why she needed you to do this.
You have access. It has nothing to do with believing in your cause.
The rage you feel for what you’ve lost? She knows of it, infinitely deeper.
That’s how she is playing you. You give her that stone, and we are all undone. ”
“You haven’t known your mother in over a century,” Yemi spat. “And it isn’t because she was taken from you like you took mine from me. It’s because you abandoned her.”
“It is not a lie that you are divinely chosen. But there are forces at war within you: the blood of the Old Gods, and her magic. The magic that created the Mer and wakes the dead.” She choked as the stone crested the bottom of her throat.
“They are as opposed now as they were in the very beginning. She has everything to fear if you ever discover how to use them together.”
Yemi gritted her teeth. There was sense, perhaps, in what Selah was saying. But there’d been too many lies and secrets kept until now, and a cornered creature could only be trusted to bite. “You were a fool recruited to betray your own, and now you think I’m a fool as well.”
“Are you sure that isn’t you?” Selah replied calmly. “Recruited to betray your own.”
Yemi pressed the blade to just behind Selah’s chin hard enough that even its bluntness pierced what remained of the tender flesh there.
“Your mother… I tried to take it back.” Selah sipped air between the words, eyes wild. “The creeping stone… it had her lungs. It’s why no one could hear her screaming.”
“Shut up!”
“I tried… to take it from her. Heal, not… treat. It didn’t work. I couldn’t… let her suffer. When you see her… ask,” Selah said.
“You’re a liar, and she’s dead.”
“She’s not.” It wasn’t fear in her expression, though she winced in discomfort as her face began to immobilize. “The spell you were given… doesn’t cast a new hex. It displaces… an old one.”
Yemi felt the floor drop from under her and staggered back a step. Her breaths came in short, hollow gasps. Black stone swallowed Selah’s head, leaving her eyes with their intense gaze on her for last. She’d removed her mother’s curse by placing it on Selah.
There was an understanding in the witch’s final expression. A patronizing patience that said she understood Yemi to be a wounded child, deserving of a moment’s grace. Her mother had given her that look countless times. Yemi dropped the letter opener onto the rug.
At least the witch’s death appeared to be by her own hand. One less body the others could lay at her feet.
Yemi pocketed the stone alongside Ursla’s tea sachet and strode from the room, content to let the curse have her.
Her heart pounded chaotically as she bounded down the stairs.
The roaring fire in the great room created a stifling bog of heat on the lower floor, and she was already struggling to catch her breath.
“Yemaya?” Cutter jumped up from where he’d been reclining on the sofa, surprised and concerned to see her up so early.
“Ready the Guards,” she commanded without looking at him. “The Bear Queen is alive. We leave at dawn whether we receive the signal or not.”
She didn’t wait for questions. She could barely breathe to answer them. The Gold Guard monitoring the radio in the dining room glanced up as she grabbed one of the portable windup radios amassed on the credenza beside the front door and went outside.
She didn’t so much approach the campfire she’d spotted from her window as wind up there through the imposed will of her body.
Her mind was entirely elsewhere, on the looming moment of truth, on Selah’s betrayals, on the state of her mother’s body.
Alive might well have been an overstatement for her mother.
She could have reverted to flesh, but who was to say that flesh wasn’t in parts, chum dashed against the rocks of the Fanged Coast?
The air outside was still thick and damp, but it was cool and quiet.
Yemi slowed at the water’s edge. The fire was indeed a campfire, and a healthy one at that.
A wire mesh grate was propped atop columns of stone surrounding it, as if someone had used it for cooking.
On a rock beside the firepit rested an upturned tin mug and a mismatched kettle she didn’t recognize. There was no sign of who’d left it.
She rubbed her fingertips together curiously, remembering the dirt that had tumbled into the sink earlier. The prints in the trampled earth surrounding the firepit seemed to match her boots.
Had she done this? Had the fugue part of her that longed to be released from her royal compulsory civility woken in the night to encourage her to consume the stone and give in to its demands for the power she craved?
Yemi held the fertility stone—no, the seed of Ursla’s power—up to the firelight and watched the flames seemingly invert themselves to swim inside it.
It was warm to the touch in a way that was soothing, not threatening, as if it were alive and content to be in her grasp.
Almost mechanically, she lifted the kettle and, finding it already filled with water, placed it on the grate over the fire.
She took its place on the rock beside the lake and cranked the little radio until it crackled to life.
And then she breathed as she listened, leaning forward over her knees and watching intently for the steam to begin rising.
The late-night hosts’ banter was different from the day shift, in that it was evident they weren’t expecting too many listeners.
Nothing about Dorian Drake yet. Yemi sighed as she watched steam rise from the kettle and the hosts threw to commercial. She brewed her tea in the tin cup, watching the stone sizzle and disappear into the liquid dark.
Suddenly, there were radio sounds of shuffling and poorly muted voices, as if someone had partially covered the mic with their hand, and then the hosts returned, much more awake.
“Uh… friends, we’ve received a letter from someone claiming to be Queen Yemaya.”
“Wait, what?”
“It doesn’t bear the royal seal, but—”
“Of course it doesn’t. My ring was stolen,” Yemi muttered bitterly to no one.
“We have confirmed a handwriting match. This is a letter from Queen Yemaya, delivered anonymously as far as I know, and dated yesterday. I’m reading it now, and—”
“For gods’ sakes, just read it aloud.”
“Will you relax? I want to be careful. It’s a very—”
“Read it!”
“Fine! Fine. Just make sure the Harpy knows who to come after when she gets wind of this. Ahem.”
To the Beloved and the Traitors of Ixia:
My apologies for having left you so unguided these few weeks. Theft, it seems, is the preferred mandate of rule in some countries. Only recently has ours been one of them.
I was distressed, to say the least, to be forced into a position where my responsibilities to you had to be abdicated or else my life was forfeit.
I was even more distressed to learn of your disappointment in the penalty of a traitor in my care.
While my decision may have been regrettable, I believe that if asked, he would say he’s grateful to be alive to regret his own.
If asked, perhaps he would record for you the vicious tirade against my murdered family that lost him his tongue.
None of us has had proper time to mourn the death of the Bear Queen, and yet news has reached me of the organization of committees determined to rip her from our national memory.
What will come of our shared history, our sacrifice, the blood of your kin and mine mingled together on our battlefields, if such a thing is allowed to come to pass?
She cannot be erased, just as you cannot be erased.
And yet Dahlia Drake pursues the impossible.
I will not pretend I am as endearing as my mother or as sweet as my grandmother.
I am not as jovial as my father, nor as given to whimsy as my grandfather.
Like many of you, I was bred in war. My constitution is molded by it.
And so, I respect the Ixian people enough as warriors to be direct with you: My interest has only ever been in justice.
But I require it as much for myself as any of you.
You should know that my return will be aided by all the divine and terrible forces owed to me as a descendant of the Mer.
Together, these are forces against which there is no worldly defense, though my hope is that those of you who have slurped down the Drakes’ poison will try.
It will be fortunate for you who remain that my allies are Ixia’s allies.
Those who seek the peace and prosperity of a united Ixia should greet my legions unarmed and in praise or supplication.
The rest of you will be dealt with accordingly.
Either you are loyal to your queen, to your gods, and to your country, or you are conspiring to self-service with the backing of a pretender. Either way, I am inevitable.
Her Royal Majesty Yemaya Blackgate
Mer Queen of Ixia
Yemi clicked off the radio. The time when she’d have cared to listen to the commentary on her actions had long passed.
Her mouth dried and a chorus of excited hisses rose in her ears.
Even her skin prickled as her nerves primed themselves for the adrenaline rush of a promised fight.
It was strange to hear her words from someone else’s lips.
She eyed the tea nearly boiling in its cup.
Dawn would come soon, and with it the expiration on Ursla’s offer.