Nova eyed the other usurpers, none of whom seemed inspired to aide him. On their faces just fright and embarrassment. Every fringe element had their extremists, she supposed.
“Gods willing, this one’s the most intelligent of you,” Nova told them, and then launched her voice across the drill pad. “The rest of the Twelfth Order is confined to quarters until our investigation is complete.”
The quartermaster took over the dismissal amid confused murmurs. Nova felt Cutter’s eyes on her and glanced upward to find a glimmer of approval on his otherwise serious face.
“We haven’t had cause to do much interrogation work,” he said. “But you seem ready.”
Nova nodded. She was always ready for anything. But then she sighed. “Cutter, Stoney was there.”
Cutter gave her a confused look as if he hadn’t heard her correctly, then looked to Stoney and back as if to ask if she was sure. He also knew she was. In tutoring her in her queensguard role, he’d made it a point to make sure she knew she was trusted, and the burden of trust meant certainty of judgment. The consequence ofuncertainty would inevitably mean someone’s death.
She knew it hurt. She didn’t claim to know these people intimately, but for Cutter, someone who’d fought wars beside his generation and lost a good number of them… well, this had to feel like another loss. But an elder in the rebel ranks was a unique danger for the information they possessed and the connections they’d made by virtue of seniority.
“I can sort it for you,” she offered. He shook his head before she could get it all out and signaled to another set of guards to follow him to collect his friend.
He paused and gave her a meaningful look. “Your interrogation experience… it would be best pursued some other time.”
Nova frowned, somewhat startled, but Cutter turned away instead of explaining. Was he protecting Stoney?
No. She cursed herself silently for even thinking it. He was protecting her from witnessing what he felt he had to do.
Nova watched as her military dispersed around her, and she swallowed her doubts before joining Cutter and the escorts to the dungeons.
• YEMI •
The year after the Bear King’s assassination, a lamp-oil salesman—perhaps grim on the future of his profession—stood in the gravel forecourt of the palace entrance and made a snide remark about women rulers in the absence of their men, and how the dead king must have found relief from his shrew of a queen in his grave. Yemi, then eleven years old and within earshot, touched her archer’s practice arrow to a brazier. She loosed it into the merchant’s cart and watched, stoic, as liquid fire consumed him.
The tale of it said she smiled as he melted and palace staff streamed from inside the corridors, at a loss for how to stop it. She didn’t remember smiling, just thinking that he’d deserved it, which may as well have been the same thing.
They’d put her on the spear after that. And the legend of her anger grew. These Senate sessions alongside her mother were designed to give her practice in ruling her own mind, and to show her countrymen that she was capable of leading their future.
Somewhere between signing off on monument commissions for the umpteenth fallen soldier and moderating a heated debate on appropriations for an expanded armory versus the treatment and cleanup of shell-shocked birds wreaking havoc on some formerly pristine balconies, Yemi’s posture began to crumble. Her arm was asleep from her elbow down, and she’d nearly put out her own eye as her chin slipped off the tingling, tenuous base of the palm she’d beenusing to hold up her head. She’d only checked her pocket watch once so as not to seem rude, but the sunlight and shadows shifting in the room told her it was well past midday. The inspection was likely over, and she had much more interest in the outcome of that than whatever was being discussed in front of her.
“My constituents’ crops are blighted by these creatures blasted out of the sky by military testing, and then by the pests who feast on their carcasses in the fields! And my gods, the smell!” Senator Robin frowned. He was a squat man with thinning white hair and a complexion somewhere between tomato and eggplant, depending on his frequently elevated blood pressure. He’d been raving for a while now.
“Now’s the opportunity to replenish Ixia’s stores!” Senator Loft declared. She was lanky and thin-lipped and perpetually severe in demeanor. “Invest in readiness, in new weapons technologybeforeour enemies seek us out again. Birds will always do bird things. To allocate even a fraction of our defense budget to something so frivolous—”
“Surely it’s the quality of life that makes it worth defending,” Senator Robin countered.
“Do you hear yourself? I’m talking about preparation for our nation’s next wars, and you’re on about rodents?” Loft huffed as the other senators exchanged waryhere we go againglances.
“You’d care if your district was more than holes in the ground,” Senator Robin blustered.
“Yes, Ixia is built by our quarries. Odd of you to find that an insult,” Senator Loft defended.
“And its weapons from your mines, but I’m sure there’s no bias there, either,” Robin scoffed.
Loft glowered. “Youaristocrats who can’t—”
“Farmers!” Robin cried, finally a shade shy of aubergine.
“Aristocratswho can’t be bothered to put a little extra energy into cleaning a bit of nature from their homes,” Loft hissed.
Robin crept closer and shook an equally purple finger in Loft’s face. “May every grape some lusty degenerate heathen pops into your mouth be coated entirely in crow shit.”
“That’s enough,” the queen interjected, her tone jovial if tired. She turned to Yemi. “Daughter? A solution?”
“Hmm?” Yemi blinked. “Oh. Well, we’re nowhere near depleted in our armory, but I’d still like the names of engineers pioneering weapons advancement. Funnel funds to them for their development and spend only on what we need without getting gratuitous about it.”
