“But if they are involved, it’s an act of war.”
The queen sighed deeply. Not in dismissal—resignation, perhaps? “No one is going to war with the sea.”
Yemi picked at salad leaves on the edge of her plate. The rate of ship disappearances hadn’t seen a marked increase as far as she knew. It had happened occasionally all her life. But a Mer problem—especially one interfering with commerce—was not one she wanted to inherit. Not as a half-Mer queen.
“You can’t compare human flesh to a pig’s.”
“Hmm?” Yemi replied, distracted.
“You know our history, what immediately comes to mind.”
She knew her mother wasn’t referring to the Old Gods and their demands for human sacrifice before the emergence of the Obé. More than a few frescoes littered the alleyways and back walls of shops in Chairre’s interior, depicting Her Majesty, gorgeous and victorious in battle, standing amid heaps of mangled bodies with the blood of her enemies dripping from a grinning mouth of jagged teeth.
But Ixia had won the war. She’d been the leader they needed: a Bear Queen. And the people loved her. Some of them, though, could do without the reminders ofwhatthey loved.
“It won’t happen again,” Yemi promised.
3
• YEMI •
The Kept’s open-air temple occupied the low space between the Rock and the military plateau. The ancient staircase connecting it to the palace amounted to a pilgrimage in itself. This was a polished ruin, all bleach-bright marble laced with gold veins where the cracks had been. The walls themselves were the stone of the mountains. Creeping vines wrapped tall alabaster columns that held up nothing. The remnants of a shattered stained glass ceiling collected in moss beds along the temple’s edges. On winter afternoons, their colors danced and refracted up the mountainside and onto the underside of King Rafale’s cloud bridge, which connected the palace and military plateaus overhead. It was carved from brilliant white stone that legend insisted was the spine of the last great sea dragon found crashed and decaying on the site where they’d built Ixia’s palace.
A single blood orange tree grew twisted from the rocks of an outcropping that dipped over the sea. It was beneath its branches that Yemi humored the Kept’s midday ritual, inheriting it when her mother could no longer make it down so many stairs. Once a week at about noon, a paunchy Brother Weaver would trip over the same crack in the marble floor on his way to deliver materials for the rite. Therewas oil. Honey. Flowers in the flower seasons, ash in the others. And always a blood orange offering. They’d become a symbolic alternative to the living blood required long before Yemi’s time.
Cerro doused Yemi’s hands and prayed over the drippings until he broke a sweat. They were prayers for peace, for fish, for acknowledgment of his piety and her own divinity.
Yemi stood in the moss, sprayed by the sea, braided hair whipped by the wind and her hands dripping until the last of the oil met the rocks below. She sought Nova’s amused face in the thinning crowd of faithful and gave her a bored look. Their expressions always transformed into politely horrified ones when Weaver presented Yemi with a washing bowl for her hands and the assembled priests proceeded to pass it around, drinking the sweet, perfumy, sometimes ash-laced concoction.
The rite complete, citizens clothed in white each bowed before her as they filed out of the temple and down a shorter, wooded set of mountain stairs back to the city.
Yemi gazed up at the winding mountain staircase, dreading the climb as Nova joined her. Construction of a lift had been started, to the disapproval of some of the priests, who saw it akin to blasphemy, but she had threatened with some profanity to pull out of all ceremonies otherwise.
Yemi groaned. “I’m not needed, right? What if we grabbed lunch in the city instead?”
“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” Cutter grunted behind her.
Shit.Yemi dropped her head. Cutter wasn’t exactly a true believer, but he’d apparently come to every one of these ceremonies since the Bear King’s assassination. Maybe they provided him with a measure of peace or some semblance of absolution for having failed his king. Yemi was certain, however, that at least part of it was rooted in wanting to keep an eye on her.
“I’d really like to go into the city. Absorb some local color.”
“You know how vital it is for you to be close to home right now,” he said in a persistent low voice.
“Cutter, it’s just lunch. Honestly, you have the rest of your life to observe me aloft in my gilded cage or on a battlefield someplace. All I’m asking for here is a break long enough to eat a sandwich and maybe have a polite conversation with someone who isn’t in uniform.”
Cutter glanced at Nova as if asking if this was perhaps a game the two of them were playing. Nova shook her head as if answering. Yemi waited patiently for the captain to give in and realize that there was no real way he could refuse her. She loved him as she imagined one would love an uncle. His failure to protect her father wasn’t something she held against him, but it did make him all the more serious when it came to her safety.
Visibly annoyed, he whistled for the usual small cadre to accompany her.
Yemi raised a hand to stay them. “No need for all that.”
“You’re joking,” Cutter scoffed.
“They’re all exhausted, and I don’t want to make this a thing. Nova will be enough. I’ll stick to the Green Zone, and you can promise Mother that Moss will have me back by dinner.”
Cutter appeared to chew the side of his tongue for a moment. “You’ll wait for Moss downstairs to take you into town.”
“Agreed,” Yemi replied.
