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 queensheknew 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.”
“Sheloses 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.
A few dropped their weapons and moved aside without hesitation. The others charged forward and met swift ends. The Gold Guard were quick with blades, and Shiro felled a beanstalk of a man who collapsed, gutted, against the stuck storeroom door. Nova thought to use their assembled strength to try the door again, but the turret blasts overhead continued to shake the world. Every round could mean Yemi’s death.
She stared at the door as Cutter led the others to the stairwell that would take them to the turrets.
Yemi would come back. She had to come back.
• YEMI •
Yemaya was at sea. She stood on the dark, slime-slick deck of a ghost ship, staring forward into the night. The ocean had calmed its chaos for her and the fleet of a hundred ships in her wake, but she could still hear its roaring churn and spy the edges of its whirlpools just beyond her reach.
When she raised her hand to view Chairre’s cliffs through a spyglass, the limb was not her own. Bare, archless feet sank in the muck and algae and held tightly to the worn wood.
She could turn her head to see the dozens of other captive ghost warriors in their tattered rags, most staring forward into the maw of the mission, others marveling at the return to their corporeal form,however gaunt and cursed they appeared. With a whisper of her will, Yemi could climb into any of their heads, see through their eyes. She could dream any order and watch their bodies move, puppetlike, to do her bidding before returning to her own body sheltered in the posh, if waterlogged, cabin of the lead ship.
Thiswas control. She reveled in how natural it all felt. Her heart pounded not from anxiety but from excitement. Her breathing came as easily as her smile in the dark. Was this what it meant to stand in her power? Was this the divinity she was always meant to feel?
She could see the city lights now. Chairre was in the hours between dinner and dreams, doors to flourishing businesses locked in peace until dawn, bellies full, limbs ready for comfortable rest. The picture of a prosperous nation enjoying the fruits of her shunned mother’s leadership. How, with everything, had they decided they’d been given nothing?
Never mind,she thought. This wouldn’t be a good night for sleep anyway.
Angling the spyglass toward Chairre’s docks, Yemaya spotted a black barrier of Ixia’s warships, formed to bar an attack from the coast. They were still being tossed violently by the sea’s unrest, but heavy anchors in shallow water kept them in their places.
With what amounted to a whisper, she commanded the tattered sails of her ghost fleet collapsed. The centermost vessel of traitors—her father’s ship—was the first to fire. Warning shots. Intermittent, booming bursts launched cannonballs at the front of her line but they fell short by a frustrating matter of yards. No one knew the reach of her father’s cannon like she did.
Yemaya turned her head just slightly, signaling a segment of her forces to climb overboard. Half the ghosts on her decks lowered themselves into the water. They would sneak onto the Ixian ships and liberate them from her traitors, opening her path to the docks. She waited patiently, letting the enemy’s confusion mount. The ghost ships were relics. There would be no radioing for identification or demands. The hulls were wood, held together more by magic than matter. Their armamentswere few. There would be no firing on Ixia. What they lacked in advanced weapons, they made up for in sheer numbers and haunted immortality.
The spyglass revealed dark shadows climbing through portholes and onto crowded decks. What followed was a chaos of panic. War cries and clashes of metal sounded out over the rushing waters. Small fires and larger explosions backlit the tossing of bodies overboard. In a matter of minutes, the firing stopped and the flags were lowered. The ships gave up their broadsides to make way for her to land. Yemi smiled as she signaled forward.
“Clear the streets,” she commanded her legions. “Slay those who take up arms against you. The others, ask the name of their queen. Take to the basilica anyone who answers ‘Harpy.’?”
By and large, the citizens of the Green Zone fled at the sight of her legions. The ghosts went building to building and home to home, kicking in doors and demanding an answer to the question “Who is your queen?”
The taller buildings of the Green Zone, with their manicured stoops and green-tiled rooftops, tapered as Yemi led her legions to its outer edge and approached the city sprawl in the body of a giantess. The entrance, it seemed, had been violently abandoned—tall wrought iron gates and stone pillars singed with ash, the small gatehouse barely more than a shadow on the building behind it after having been burned down. Beyond it lay Broad Street. A narrow drainage canal ran down its cobbled center, intended to funnel rainwater back to the ocean. Tonight, it was a battle line.
On the other side of it, the contingent of Chairre’s citizens who intended to play the role of opposition gathered between and on top of terra-cotta buildings, scowling and looking her in the eye before they spat in the street at her feet.
Yemaya scoffed as she stopped before the gates, her own army at her back. She recognized their leader it seemed from a past life, one where he’d been mostly wrapped in shadows in a cage beneath her palace. Beside him, an equally familiar tongueless heathen brandished a hooked blade and vicious sneer.
