“Then why are you asking me?”
The queen stabbed her spade into the dirt. “Because I’m trying to have a conversation with my daughter—one where she doesn’t blow up halfway into it. These threats are as much a matter of state as they are personal, and you need to get some kind of control over yourself if you’re going to handle them appropriately. Journalists catch you bloodying noses in a soldier bar, and we’re back in a fight for public opinion.” Her tone never shifted from that affected tranquility, the peace she’d been advised to embody so as not to aggravate her condition.
Yemi scoffed. “Right. Are you having a conversation with your daughter or grooming your Qorrea?”
“Damn it, both!” the queen snapped, slamming a stone-plated hand into the bench. The silence that followed was thick as she visibly tried to regain her calm. “On my life, Yemaya, I’m not trying to pick afight with you, but these people are your subjects, not insects you can put down at your displeasure. You have a responsibility to them as much as they are obliged to love you. That is the only way this works for us. The less I have to remind you of that, the more time I can spend on the mundanities of how your day was.”
Yemi threw up her hands. “What do you considerappropriate handling, then? Because as I stood there, listening to them berate and betray you, our family, our country, I couldn’t come up with anything my queen might deem ‘appropriate’ that would also satisfy me. Dahlia Drake stood alone against me and refused to take the knee—stared me in my face and kept her ground while I was collected like some child who’d wandered where she didn’t belong.”
“And hers is the only face you remember.”
“Of course.”
“She’s smart.”
“What?” Yemi blinked.
Her mother sighed. “Help me up. Finish this, if you could. Seedlings are there.”
Yemi, in her rage and confusion, was tempted to refuse. If Dahlia was smart, was she somehow stupid? Instead of asking, though, she helped her mother get seated on the bench and took her place on her knees in the dirt. Since the monarchy had been relocated from the northern coast, every royal had added to the palace gardens. The Bear King had his poppies; the queen was more of an arborist. And since he was no longer here, she felt his garden was her responsibility.
“While you focused on her, a dozen more forgettable people she’s rallied to her cause took the knee before you and, in doing so, hid their faces,” said the queen. “She drew your ire so that the men she might send later to do her bidding could do so with some degree of anonymity. Her father was there?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Interesting. It is something he’d have taught her.”
“I don’t understand,” Yemi replied, burying the last of the roots. “You know the Drakes as a threat and still had them here for lunch?”
“I have a healthy suspicion of everyone.” The queen smiled. “That’s it, that’s enough. Come.”
She rose with the help of a heavy black staff gifted to her by the former king of the allied nation Muris to the north. Her right foot and most of its leg were all but solid black stone, but somehow her poise, despite the weight, made her seem taller. The damage was slowed by an intervention of magic, though there were few witches in Ixia now. The pride with which the nation had once credited its evolution to its gods and their magic had been turned to fear when Arielle conceived. The royal armorers, the witches, any souls touched by the gods’ gifts were banished, lest the Obé tap them to do her bidding. It had never been clear why Selah was allowed to remain, but she alone was responsible for mitigating the slow creep of the Bear Queen’s curse and had kept her alive and mostly flesh for the past eight years.
Yemi took her other arm as they strode toward the queen’s quarters. The hallways were still lit by firelight, whipping in the breeze behind metal screens.
“I’ve always told you that the things we’ve been through aren’t all about our blood,” said the queen. “When my mother came into the picture here, her union to your grandfather disrupted the order of things. Marriages form alliances, build wealth, amass resources. These things were all in play before they fell in love. The Drake family was one of those promised certain things, certain powers they didn’t get when your grandfather took an unexpected bride. They’ve had no new opening, either, since we can have children. I wouldn’t put it past them to be stoking the fires against us to create one for themselves.”
The royal guard opened the heavy oak doors to the queen’s apartment and shut them again behind them. Yemi knew from her earliest lessons about the history of the kingdom the sacrifices made to make this life work. Her grandmother, a Qorrea for the Mer, had bested a sea witch in a deal that saw her made human to capture the affections of a man she’d—for all intents and purposes—obsessed over. The deal, by design, withheld the ability to have human children. That feat took aseparate agreement with a more foreign, perhaps more sinister magic. And her grandmother had greeted it with the childlike abandon that inevitably cursed them all.
The room was tall, with a coffered ceiling painted like shallow water on white sand. The light curtains were drawn but thin enough to still see the sunset through them. A family portrait hung over the large fireplace. Yemi’s eyes were only ever drawn to her father.
She helped her mother undress before a gilded full-length mirror, gingerly removing the jewelry, the layers of lace gown and gauze underthings, the pins that kept her locs braided together in the vine down her back. The stone skin had spread across much of her upper back and wrapped around her waist. It was cracked from movement, but smooth as fresh magma.
“Dahlia Drake may have inherited their war the way you have inherited ours,” her mother sighed. “I’m happy for the certainty, though. Now we can handle them the way they need to be handled.”
“And what way is that?” Yemi said quietly, angling herself away from the mirror so her mother didn’t catch the sadness in her eyes, the tremor in her hands as she stuck pins in their cushion.
“For now, we keep our enemies close. The Drakes are attending my Day of Days festivities, and I’d prefer to know that they’re there and not elsewhere. And we find out who the rest of them are. See if Nova remembers any of them. She’s got a good head for faces.”
“Already have her on it. We were whispering about it in the hallway in case you were going to be difficult. Also looking into how high this goes. It would be bold of them to incite treason without an army, so they’ve either got foreign backing or they’re siphoning off our own.”
“My girl. Now I am supposed to impress upon you the danger your impulsive actions pose not only to yourself, but to your guard.” Her mother gave her a serious look in the mirror.
“Consider me impressed upon,” Yemi muttered.
“Nova would never complain, but—”
“Yes, she would.”
