Chapter 21 #3
“I am not the one who came here with fire,” Yemaya replied.
“I brought the power of water. I brought the fish back. I am the validation of our faith.” She turned to see what he saw, but likely with a different interpretation.
To her eyes, this night was a beginning, not an end.
She smiled down at him. “You will see how the ones committed to the queen’s peace are rewarded. Or not. That will be up to you.”
Shiro appeared, coming down the mountain pass where the Ixian army would have streamed into the city by now.
“Shiro,” Yemi summoned with a pointed look. He glanced around for her familiar form before making quizzical eye contact.
“Queen Yemaya?”
She nodded. “How are we?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
“Your base is secured,” he replied, approaching apprehensively. “No small thanks to your… friends here.”
“You are the friends,” she told him.
He shrugged his discomfort. “Thoughts on if we run out of room here?”
“I’m not sure we’ll have that problem.”
Shiro hesitated before nodding once and moving away to see to his men.
Yemaya jumped back into the bodies of ghosts to take stock of their progress.
The explosions had all but died away, but the ground fighting was still fierce.
Hers was a country of warriors, after all.
She returned, ready to try the siren game on Caphree, but grew distracted by an interaction between a ghost and a woman, set against the smoldering ruin of a bakery nearby.
The ghost was a man, tall, spindly, with heavy keloid scarring down his left arm.
He peered down lovingly, placing his face into the trembling hands of a small woman.
It was impossible, of course, to tell who was older or from when in their lifetimes they’d known each other.
Whatever the chaos around them or the cause of it, whatever the impossible odds, they’d found one another again.
For a moment, fleeting and vulnerable, she felt pain.
Not the warring kind, but heartache. Hadn’t the last time Nova touched her been something like this?
Back when she’d found her on the beach? Hadn’t the last time she’d seen love and longing like this on display been when both her parents were alive?
It was here she was jarred back into her own body.
She felt her blood stop moving and fell to her knees in the cabin.
For a span of a heartbeat, breath wouldn’t come, and an unsettling sensation carved at her core, as if the stone in her gut had grown sharp spider legs.
She beat a fist against the wood and muck once, twice until air dragged into the body she occupied at a wheeze and she was back behind a giant’s eyes again.
Able to breathe again, she peered around with stinging, watering eyes to find the ghosts and living around her had all frozen in eerie curiosity, watching her spectacle.
Get up, she demanded of herself. Only the ghosts knew it was her, the queen, in the undead body. But now was no time to show the living there was any weakness.
Get up.
It was a struggle to get back to her feet, but she did it. What had just happened? Had observing the one moment of tender affection somehow faltered her resolve?
Impossible. She was a rock.
She shook her head violently and left the ghost’s body, returning again to the silence of the ship in the dock.
Her own body felt foreign as she stepped out onto the deck, but the familiar Ixian air brought her back.
The smell of new death was farther inland.
What she took in now was the low orange glow of the city on fire, the salty sea air, the heady scent of blooming wisteria, and the quiet of the lapping seawater in the bay behind her.
Quiet?
She looked to the Rock and registered that the turrets had stopped. Nova must have gained control of them. Good of her not to abandon the mission.
Only a couple of hours until sunrise. A well-timed success. It was time to take her throne back.
She took up her father’s spear, finding it curiously light in her divine hands. Summoning a small cadre of ghosts, she disappeared into the trees and up the Rock.
· NOVA ·
Nova frowned as one of her half staffs crushed a guard’s skull with an audible crunch and he fell to the floor in a heap. A small spray of blood arced along the wall and the side of her face.
She’d separated from Cutter a while ago and left the Gold Guard to secure the roof. It was too great a risk to have them join the fight and ultimately be confused with her targets.
She was now wandering the residential wing in search of Dahlia or the Bear Queen or someone, anyone, to make her feel like she was accomplishing something besides slaughtering people.
There was no sign of Yemaya yet, either, though the brief trip she’d made to the palace gates showed the city on fire.
With mere hours until daylight, who knew if there would be anyone in the capital left to rule.
At least reinforcements from the base hadn’t shown up yet. That meant they were winning.
In the distance, sounds of fighting still bled through the halls.
She breached Yemaya’s bedroom and found no one of consequence inside.
The walls had been stripped of their art.
Nova’s gaze lingered on the giant square bed, its linens folded and stacked with the tall window drapes as if this were little more than a storeroom for the laundry staff.
On any given night, this had been her bed, too.
“What am I doing?” she whispered. Her shoulders dropped, weighed down by either sadness or nostalgia or muscle fatigue by now.
She closed the door quietly, the way she always had when she snuck away from Yemi to begin her daily duties.
And then the blood dripping from her staff and pooling at her feet caught her eye.
She flung it clean against the door and collected herself, wiping her face on her arm before opening the door to her own room across the hall.
A war cry in the dark, and then “Orie, no!”
Nova backed behind the door just in time for a vase to come crashing down where her head had been.
She readied her staff and threw the door open, hoping to hit whoever was behind it.
Her heart lifted when she saw Orie’s round, deeply apologetic face.
Enna stood with a pistol on the far side of the bed in the middle of the room.
“Nova!” Orie cried and flung her arms around her. Nova closed the door behind her and hugged her back.
“You’re both alright,” she sighed in relief.
“In a word.” Enna winced.
“Sit, sit,” Nova commanded. Enna gingerly lowered herself to the floor on the other side of the bed and Nova made her own way over.
“Where is she? Is she back?” Orie whispered excitedly.
“Down in the city, but should be here soon. Cutter and I and some of the Gold Guard are just here clearing the way.” Nova checked Enna’s bandages for signs of distress. The girl was tough. There was no way she should have been out of the infirmary yet.
“It’s just you? I don’t understand. How are you doing this?” Enna asked.
“That is a story for lunch. Or at least a very, very late breakfast,” Nova deflected, getting to her feet. “Have either of you seen Dahlia? I find her, and this all wraps up a lot quicker.”
They both shook their heads.
Nova was disappointed. Maybe the Drakes knew more than she thought about the tunnels beneath the palace.
“The Bear Queen’s statue, then?”
“The crypt,” said Orie. “One of the masons’ storerooms. I don’t think Dahlia could bring herself to drop it off the cliff.”
“Sweet of her.” Nova replied flatly, but she was quietly thrilled to have a place to start.
No need to get into why for now. She turned to Orie.
“Well, plenty in here for you to bludgeon people with if it comes to it. Wait here and stay out of sight. We’ll come back for you when it’s safe. I’ll knock next time.”
Nova placed herself on the other side of the door and sighed, fingers anxiously thrumming her staff. There was still the queen’s quarters to check, maybe the throne room. If Dahlia was still in control of the military by the time they ran out of the sea witch’s magic, the mission was lost.
An explosion shook the ground again, and Nova’s feet were moving before she’d willed them to.
Finding Dahlia—or Yemaya, for that matter—came second to the duty she had to Cutter and the Gold Guard here in the palace.
There would be fighting until there was no longer a need to. And she was here to fight.
· YEMI ·
The palace gates were jarred open by a body.
He was only half dead, propped against one door with the lock cast into the dirt beside him.
His hand clawed uselessly at the dark painted dirt, mixing his blood into it like a paste.
Yemaya noted that he’d likely dragged himself there, judging by the blood-smeared cobblestones leading to the palace entrance.
She knelt beside him, inhaling deeply and letting that familiar, intoxicating feeling wash over her.
It made the stone in the pit of her stomach small again.
She could hear his heart slowing, the thickness in his throat as he swallowed.
Not a Nova kill. She’d have had the kindness in her to finish the job.
Yemaya caressed his face and the gash at his throat, then pulled away her thumb and licked the blood from it.
Fair to fine, she thought with something of a shrug. Not as fresh as it could have been, but that was hardly his fault.
Scattered gunfire popped in the distance more than the clash of metal.
A group of people burst out of the administrative annex, ushered by Brother Lain in his moonlit whites.
Innocents. They kept their footsteps light as they raced across the courtyard, presumably toward the relative safety of the garages or the infirmary down the hill.
She got to her feet and pushed the gate aside, tipping over the dying soldier and drawing Brother Lain’s attention.