Derring gave her a sympathetic look and sighed. “It’s important you understand this isn’t the whole country against you. But emotions are running high. You can’t win over the people right now, even if you get the palace back.”
Yemi stared at the crackling fire.Who are you?the little voice in her begged. The only thing she’d ever heard it say that wasn’t about flesh.
I am their queen.
She started slowly, fingernail tracing the well-worn grooves on this edge of the table. She kept her gaze level and voice even. “I have known most of you my entire life. And, having known you, I know there are three specific words you’ve always wanted to hear me say: I am sorry.” She clicked her nails on the table. “I am sorry for having listened to any of you over my own instincts. Giving in to your groveling for me to be patient, appeal to Men’s better nature. My mother fought, bled, and died for them. My father fought, bled, and died for them. My grandmother loved them so much, she gave up a life of loving her own people to lead them. Whatbetter naturedo those who would desecrate a tomb possess?”
“My Light, if you just—” Cutter started.
“Be fucking still!” she roared, a fist slamming into the table. “Your queen speaks,” she snapped in a voice she hadn’t used in a very long time. The pretense of diplomacy was gone. “This was no monument, no statue carved in my mother’s honor.This was her own flesh turnedstone!You would demand I make peace with people who hurled my defenseless mother’s body into the—”
She stopped. Something in her would explode if she finished that sentence. She stood and turned her back to the room, unable to stop picturing the ways her mother’s body fell, the parts of it that broke off when it hit the ground, the pieces kept as souvenirs. Her father’s sarcophagus, which would be emptied soon. Did what they have in mind for his body pale in comparison?
No,she thought. She would not allow it.
She spun back, drinking in the fire with her eyes. “No, our plans have changed,” she told them. “Derring, when you leave, you will take Dorian Drake’s head with you.”
“What?” Derring blinked.
“My Light—” Cutter started.
“That’s impossible. There’s no way to guarantee the safety of the messenger,” Nova countered.
Yemi ignored them. “It’s to be delivered to his daughter. You will also take along a dispatch to be delivered on radio to the people, who will be provided their only opportunity to choose a side. We move when we hear the broadcast. We lay siege to Chairre. We take the palace, and we comb the streets of every traitor, every cancer, everycommittee. We root out the evil permanently.”
“With what army?” Cutter laughed.
“Notifying the palace and putting them on guard is going to make our job harder,” Nova offered flatly. It was clear she was tired and doing her best with what little energy she had.
“Well, which do you prefer?” Yemi asked. “That I punish all of the city or just some of it?”
Nova gave her a look that said they both knew nothing about this was right. Yemi felt her rage boiling again over her wordless defiance.
“What kind of leader will you be if this is how you—” Selah started.
“I don’t want to lead,I want what’s mine!” she screamed. The table flinched. “If they want peace, they will have it, but not before me. I am their queen. I am theirgod!”
“What’s yours will be a nation run into the ground, salted, and set ablaze,” Cutter yelled.
“Then I will rule in hell,” she said, her gaze burning into his. “Flee by morning or stay and shut up.”
Barely able to breathe, she tossed a chair aside, sending it shattering into the far wall as she bounded up the stairs. She slammed the door of her parents’ room behind her. Her pulse pounded behind her eyes, each furious beat just short of blinding. Slivers of interwoven thought fragments, memories, plans, tightened themselves into a knot around her brain and threatened to suffocate her from the inside out.
She all but attacked the rolltop desk wedged between her parents’ wardrobes, hands scrabbling for a pen. This would be a decree—no, a manifesto. She would craft her promises with all the menace befitting her will, if only she could find a fucking pen.
She finally caught one at the back of a shallow drawer. But when she pressed it to the soft paper of the royal stationery… nothing. The inkless trails of failed lettering taunted her. She growled as they became a blank spiral she ground into the pages furiously until they ripped, and then hurled the pen at the wall.
She dropped to her knees and screamed so hard that the windows rattled. There was nowhere else for her rage to go; the open air was the least violent place for it.
Spent, she found herself curled into a ball on the floor. No one had come to check on her. Chances were they knew better. She kept failing. She’d allowed her throne to be stolen. She’d taken so long to get it back that it had become a disrespect of her family, a desecration of their graves. At every turn, she’d allowed herself to be talked out of what she’d always known: that Men only understood violence.
Her weakness had done this. But no more.
“I will fix this,” she promised herself. “Even if it’s the death of me.”
20
• YEMI •
