Chapter 20 #3
Footfalls crushed soft earth behind her. They were easy, relaxed. Not a threat. Yemi turned slightly to confirm it was Nova before standing and placing her mug on the rock beside her as deftly as possible.
“Derring brought you a gift. They were a little terrified to give it to you, though.” Nova handed Yemi a red saddlebag.
Yemi wordlessly opened the flap and rummaged for an opening in the bundled dark fabric within it.
Her fingers finally found a smooth, hard surface, muted silver in the glow of the fire.
She freed it from the bag to find it was her coronation mask, only mostly completed.
“They wanted you to know whose side they’re on, in case you had doubts,” Nova added.
Yemi said nothing. The surface of her metal visage was etched on its left half in scalloped scales.
Thick stripes the texture of rivers flowed from beneath the black mesh eyeholes and straight down its face, ending in a rolling wave pattern that adorned the outer edges.
Yemi ran her hand across the unetched surface.
In a proper world, she’d have seen the inside of it first as it was affixed to her face and bound behind her head by its broad strips of crimson silk.
This side, she was meant to see in a mirror.
A lovely gesture. Meaningless if her mother lived. She wasn’t proud of the thought. She wanted her mother alive—she just didn’t want to be forced back into her shadow.
“The letter was just broadcast. How many have left?” she finally asked, mounting the mask to one shoulder by tying its ribbons beneath the other.
“No one yet.” Nova leaned against the trunk of a thin tree.
“Good.” Yemi’s nerves seemed to vibrate, anxious as she was for the coming conversation to end. It was labor, keeping the whispers at bay.
“I think everyone knows you aren’t planning to sack a city with twelve commandos, a tired journalist, two dapper guardians, and a witch who doesn’t like you very much. Though they’re assuming it’s safer to be on the side of you and your mysterious trump card than anywhere else.”
“Good of everyone to put that together,” Yemi replied.
“I’m not,” said Nova.
“Not what?”
“Assuming it’s safer on your side.”
Yemi let out a long, dreading breath. “Nova, please.”
“No one knows where your head’s at anymore, but we took oaths, Yemi. Of conduct. Principles,” Nova insisted.
“You took oaths of service,” Yemi reminded her.
“Yeah, and it’s feeling lately like we’re being punished for that.”
Yemi closed her eyes tightly against another thing to worry about. “In less than a week, I will have time to be invested in your collective feelings. Right now, it’s all just a storm.”
“Then wait. Collect yourself, come up with a better plan than martyring half a city. There is no rush.” The pleading was present in her voice now.
“There is no waiting. My mother is alive.”
Nova blinked. “What? How? Inside the stone shell?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Yemi muttered. Best not to get into the finer details of Selah’s end.
“This might be a rescue mission. Or a discovery mission to find her body, whatever condition it’s in.
I don’t know that yet. What I do know is the longer I wait, the more Dahlia’s influence solidifies.
The larger the shadow over me grows no matter where I end up, the more my mother’s legacy disappears.
You think Dahlia will let up on her erasure efforts when she finds out I sent her father off?
It’s already in motion. There’s no way to stop now and still win. ”
“But there might be, if you just—”
“I said no!” She spun around. “Gods, Nova, can you for once pretend something I’ve said isn’t up for negotiation?”
“Last time I did that, the tongue in question put us here,” Nova snapped.
“Cutter, me, the rest of us—we all have to live with whatever comes next. Your father may have met his end prematurely, yeah, but with honor. Whatever’s happening with your mother will be the same.
She has gone or she will go to some extent loved.
There is no future like that for you or any of us if you do this. ”
The part of her that wanted to be talked out of this, that found comfort in Nova’s practicality, was buried beneath years of grief and resentment and impatience. Yemi found herself searching for it in the silence, but being driven away by the hiss of her hunger and the lure of the stone.
“I understand feeling useless,” Nova continued gently. “I felt it watching you go with Ursla to someplace I couldn’t follow. You’re the only person in the world with more pride than me, so I imagine you feel that powerlessness even worse.”
“I was never powerless,” Yemi whispered, but Nova continued.
“I get it. I get the seduction, her promise that you won’t ever have to feel that way again—”
“I was never powerless!” Yemi screeched. “You don’t know what I know.”
“Then tell me!” Nova insisted. “It’s my job to hang on your every word, and this is the longest I’ve ever waited for it.”
“I am descended of the Old Gods,” Yemi said.
It sounded mad even to her own ears. “Their blood courses through my veins. I know their power, their hunger. I hear their voices, even now. The crown? The title? Constructs. All of that is Men’s creation to give and take away, and even then, it’s only to rule them or hold their blame.
This power, my ancestral power, is mine. It’s always been inside me.”
Nova watched her, seemingly at a loss.
Yemi shook her head. “What’s worse is, I think everyone always knew how powerful I could become without their interference.
Keep Yemaya away from blood. Keep Yemaya calm.
Challenge her at every pass to do the peaceful thing.
The quiet thing. Don’t let her out of your sight.
” The last words came out almost as a whisper as she considered that Nova, too, had been conscripted into this scheme.
The look on Nova’s face now suggested concern, perhaps, about being caught.
Yemi laughed darkly. “Imagine going your entire life being groomed to undermine yourself because realizing your full potential is read as a threat. That every thought, every feeling, every instinct must be subdued so as not to frighten anyone. But the wildest part is that it was all for nothing, wasn’t it?
There wouldn’t have been a reason to worry about what dangerous Queen Yemaya would do, had I been allowed to be who I am and stop all of this before it even started. ”
Nova finally exhaled and shook her head, undoubtedly trying to pluck the relevant information from the extraordinary.
“We’ll come back to the part where you’re certain everyone who ever loved you, including me somehow, was engaged in a conspiracy to keep you, what?
Docile? That has to be sleep deprivation,” she said.
Yemi bristled at the dismissal. “But these voices. Where are they telling you the line is, exactly? And what if the Kept are backing Dahlia, too?”
“They won’t when they see what I’m capable of.”
“The military, then. What if fucking Kespia jumps into this? You’re saying you’re willing to go through all of them to get your title back?”
“How dare you try and make it seem like this is some vanity play,” Yemi snarled as she closed the distance between them. “They took my family from me. My ancestral home. My legacy. Our legacy. A week ago, I wouldn’t have imagined you of all people could misunderstand me so fundamentally.”
“Weeks ago, I knew you better than anyone because you wanted me to,” Nova replied gently.
“If I don’t do this, who am I but the woman who used to be queen?
” Yemi said, furious tears now rolling down her face.
“Where do I go that that’s not a stain on my name?
Nova, how do I live with myself if I just walk away?
” She chuckled grimly, throwing up her hands in defeat and licking at the tears crawling along her lip.
“You deserve justice,” Nova said. “I would never deny you that. But you keep using I like you’re the only one in this when I’m trying to get you to see that the rest of us are prepared to stand with you like we always have.
Trusting all of our lives, not just yours, to a deal with Ursla is the type of murder-suicide they write ballads about. ”
Yemi grimaced. She hated this dependence on Nova’s faith, on her understanding of just how effortlessly they could be returned home and their world righted if only she were capable of understanding Yemi’s limitlessness.
But of course she didn’t understand. How could she? She was only human, after all.
A breeze picked up and whisked embers from the firepit into the space between them. “You know, all this time, Ursla’s been the only one to come out and say she understands what I’m doing here,” Yemi said.
“Oh, and she’s been getting her ass kicked all over the countryside for you, has she?” Nova said bitterly. “They’re just words, Yemaya. She’s manipulating you. That’s what she does.”
“Stop saying my name like that! Like I’m some child you keep having to explain the gravity of the situation to.”
Nova growled, incredulous, and spun as if to storm off but doubled back with a finger wagging violently as she brought herself inches from Yemi’s face. “You know what? You’ve always been an impossible pain in my ass, but it used to be worth it.”
Yemi scoffed. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I not worthy, guardian? Do I not deserve to be your fucking job?”
Nova’s jaw tightened, and her arm twitched to suggest she was ready to slap her. A part of Yemi genuinely wished she would. It might be the only thing to break her free of this mania.
“Leave, then!” Yemi demanded, her voice cracking. She glared at Nova as if trying to convince her she was serious even before she herself was certain she meant it.
“I never thought I would want to!” Nova hissed. “Fuck, everyone else can! I have to stay. If I give up on you, if I leave, you die.”