Chapter 21
· NOVA ·
It was hard for Nova to be present in her body.
She was mourning Yemi already, and the fight hadn’t even started yet.
She felt sick, not knowing where Yemi was, sicker even than the thought of everything Yemi might do because Nova hadn’t stopped her.
It had been a joke of the Blackgate household that to stop Yemi from doing something she’d set her mind to, you’d have to kill her.
That would never be funny again. But right now, she had a mission: Find the Bear Queen. She clung to that instead.
The roar of the ocean was loud on the other side of the thin rock wall.
Wind whistled through cracks worn into it over time, creating slivers of sharp cold and dust as Nova and half the Murisin Gold Guard inched sidelong through the tunnel.
Cutter came to a halt ahead of her, feeling for ridges that would indicate an exit.
With a grunt, he pressed on a segment of the wall and it fell away, permitting a salty gust and filtered moonlight to wash over both of them.
Nova peered anxiously out over the sea with little but the dark, jagged rocks of the Fanged Coast far beneath them.
The rear palace gardens and the place the Bear Queen’s statue used to stand were atop the cliff some distance overhead.
There would be climbing involved, and the sea awaited them in its churning chaos if they did it poorly.
“This exit? Of all the exits,” she shouted.
“You rather fight your way in?” Cutter asked.
“That a trick question?”
“We’re about fifty feet from the top of the cliff. A lot farther from the bottom,” he called to the Guards in the wall. “They’ve been alerted, so security may not exactly be light. But they’re looking for ships, not for us.”
“Clear the gardens,” Nova ordered. “Assuming we find the Bear Queen, we evacuate her through another tunnel near the crypts. You’ll join us there on my signal. When you’re there, you’re done. Your obligation to us is completed.”
“We’ll stay until the queen is back on the throne,” Shiro assured her.
Nova wished there was some subtle way to tell them it wasn’t worth it, that Yemaya’s goals were unsound curses and they’d be better off with their hands clean.
“We have your back,” he reiterated, perhaps noticing her apprehension.
The others nodded in the dark. The your was pointed, a soldier’s agreement to see one another through a thing, whatever its abstract.
Queensguard didn’t know camaraderie. The gesture settled some of the vibrating happening just beneath her skin.
“Right.” She nodded her appreciation and then took a deep breath. “Well, don’t fall.”
They followed Cutter out onto the sheer rock face, a violent eastern wind whipping them as they found footing on worn ledges. Nova looked upward to get a sense of the distance, but they might as well have been climbing the starry night sky itself. Reflexively, then, she looked down.
“Shhiiii—” She shut her eyes and tightened her grip on the rocks, pressing herself so hard into the wall the sharp edges carved into her ribs.
“This is a terrible idea, Cutter. Why would you have me do this?” she hissed at him quietly.
Cutter raised a finger to his lips to shush her as the Gold Guard fanned out to their right, placing themselves at wide intervals so they’d emerge covering more ground.
Once they were in position, all eyes went to Cutter, who looked at her patiently, the way he had when she’d had a hard day training as a child.
“Fuck. FUCK!” She pressed her head against the wall, breathing quickly to psych herself back up. “Come on!”
Cutter lowered a hand to offer her assistance, the old muscles of his other giant arm flexing to keep up the rest of him with what appeared to be very little effort.
“I hate you,” she spat, refusing his hand.
He smiled before moving away himself. “Good. Up you get.”
They all began climbing at once, keeping a similar pace with eyes toward the upper edge.
“I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this.” Nova cursed the dark and the slick and her own apparent lapsed sanity for agreeing to any of it. The wind wanted her up there even less than she did.
They paused just before the ledge. The glow of a hand lamp illuminated sea mist just over her head.
She looked to Cutter, now some twenty feet away, who nodded that he’d seen the same.
When the light drifted over his head, he reached forward, gripped a guard’s ankle, and flung him over the cliff. The scream was lost on the wind.
They clung to the side of the mountain in silence for a few moments, and Nova let her anxiety be traded for adrenaline before she raised herself enough to peer over the edge.
No one else was coming. The palace was lit, and more hand lamps marking guard positions around the edges of the garden told them of their targets.
But she was free to climb without being noticed.
She signaled Cutter, who signaled the others, and then pulled herself up.
The six of them moved low through the gardens, plucking off guards in silence, catching lanterns before they could clatter on the ground.
The Gold Guard replaced those they dispatched, standing in their stations so any onlookers wouldn’t notice the absence of bodies.
Cutter joined Nova at what remained of the Bear Queen’s toppled statue: a cracked base, but no sign of the rest of her, stone or otherwise.
“Think they tossed her?” Nova whispered, gesturing back toward the cliff.
Cutter frowned but shook his head, pointing instead to the grass where what appeared to be heavy drag marks carved a crude path up between the darkened braziers and into the crypt.
They exchanged wary glances, and Nova’s eyes flicked to the roof line, where shadows were moving among the turrets.
Her skin prickled. They could be running out of time and the Gold Guard was hiding out in the open.
They made their way quickly up the path, steering clear of the flagstones in favor of the much quieter grass.
The drag marks stopped where the ground became brick and they crouched at its end, listening for any movement within.
Moonlight only penetrated so far beneath the crypt’s arched entrance, but beyond what Nova could see, all was still.
The pair moved inside, sticking to the shadowed edges of the corridor.
There was no sign of anything out of place in plain sight, so they moved along the inner wall, quietly breaching the doors of the masons’ storerooms.
“My queen,” Nova hissed into the dark but received no response. Dim, filtered moonlight dripped through high transoms connecting the rooms together along their shared walls, making only the outline of half-manipulated stone blocks and sharp tools hanging from rafters barely visible.
She met Cutter back in the hallway, where they briefly exchanged disappointed glances before moving to the next room.
Nova pushed on a fifth or sixth door with the same firm, quiet force that had opened all the others, only…
“What’s wrong?” Cutter said.
Nova gave it another shove and then gave him a meaningful look. “It’s stuck.”
They were silent a moment, Cutter’s eyes wide and chest visibly heaving in anticipation.
Here. She’s here.
Cutter practically shoved Nova aside to leverage his own weight against the door. “My Ligh—Circe?” he whispered as forcefully as he could through the door. It wouldn’t budge. He may as well have been trying to move the wall itself. “Cir—”
“Shh!” Nova hissed. They froze. Distant footfalls on stone, someone’s unintelligible yelling. Booted feet swept through the grass at the other end of the crypt. Guards were running.
Shit, Nova thought. Shiro and the others.
They crept back toward the entrance, prepared for a fight. The shouting continued above them around the turret track. Shiro and the Gold Guard had all left their positions and gathered near the eastern cliff’s edge, gazing out at the sea. Nova moved to join them but stopped short.
An eerie moonlit armada approached from the east, on a tract of calm water despite the churning whirlpools surrounding the ships. And they were coming in fast.
“It’s her,” Nova said breathlessly. Cutter stood silent beside her.
Nova felt a twinge of something—pride, perhaps—seeing what Yemaya was capable of.
The queen she knew would find this moment an affirmation, a silencing of everyone who’d underestimated her competence and overestimated her cruelty.
Nova regretted not being able to share it with her only for a moment, but then she finally admitted to herself that Yemi was capable of as many terrible things as great ones.
Rescuing the Bear Queen would be the only thing that could stay her power now.
“Six hours until sunrise,” she reminded Cutter. “We lose all of that in six hours, and all that’s left will be us.”
“She loses all of that,” he replied.
“She’s still my queen, Cutter,” Nova said.
Any further chiding was interrupted by someone’s clear roar of “FIRE!” and the jolt of the earth as the turrets blasted incendiary rounds out at the eastern sea.
Nova felt the same instinctive urge to protect Yemi as she’d always felt.
There was no telling which ship she was on, but not even Ursla’s magic could keep simple flesh together if it was blasted apart.
She traded her small blade for the sticks on her back and whistled at Shiro.
“Shut ’em down!” she shouted, pointing up at the turrets.
“On me!” Cutter called and ran them all back toward the crypt. They were met with resistance, a cadre of maybe a dozen soldiers who peered at them from behind hand lamps and brandished spears.
“Commander Grey?” the lead soldier asked.
“Move or be moved. I don’t have time to sort you,” she snapped.