“They’re reacting to having their families taken from them,” Brother Lain pleaded. “Radicals are almost always born from suffering.Youare the closest we’ve ever had to the ideal, to our gods living among us. Your mother understands this. But you must put away your fear and bitterness. They are beneath you. They have to be.”
“If you believe that, it isn’t my problem,” Yemi scoffed. She would not be guilted into pitying violent rebels, not while her mother’s suffering was diminished.
“I don’t. I know your humanity. I’ve seen it. You are the queen they fear. But you should aspire to that holy light the faithful see in you.Talk to your prisoners. They are human, just like you, and prone to pain. Find some mercy to give them.”
Yemi exhaled herself back to calm. The man had a point, whether or not he realized it was for the wrong reasons. It had been his job to imbue her with love for humanity through exposure to culture and history and Man’s engagement with nature. It wasn’t his fault the world itself kept the lessons from taking.
“There, we agree. I will speak to them. If there is mercy to be had, they will have it,” she told him, perfectly certain there was none.
He frowned, inspecting her for signs her words meant something other than what he’d heard.
“Is that all?” she snapped.
“Of course, My Qorrea.” He bowed slightly. “I look forward to hearing more about whatever you discover.”
The priest left her. Yemi unclenched her hand painfully and traced the violent red divots the key had left in her palm with her thumb. She entered her office quickly, inhaling the solace of the warmth. The small room had been a refuge after her father’s assassination. It was a storage closet then, offering broken bookcases and dusty chairs just lightweight enough to be rearranged into hiding forts when the world felt too big. The garden vine that had snaked its way in through a crack in the outer wall then was now coiled along the one long window over a desk, scattering the afternoon sunlight. The shelves repaired, they were now filled with her father’s journals and favorite books, their spines soft, creased, and worn either from his obsessive devouring of them or Yemi’s need to absorb them into herself. They were volumes on war and diplomacy and the histories of other places. His journals brimmed with his poetry and family photos used as bookmarks. She’d tried her own hand at poetry over the years. The words descended into doodles.
In the library of the Bear King, there’d been very little in the way of imaginative fiction for reading material, which meant that the stories he’d told her were all his own. They were lush and far-flung and stood apart in their strangeness from even the most obscure of Ixia’s lore.And yet, he’d never written them down. She knew this because for two years, while her mother waged war in mourning, Yemi had scoured every inch of the property—here and in Holicrane House—for pieces of her father to squirrel away here. It became a shrine. She scrambled to fill his last incomplete notebook with what she remembered of his stories. She had been terrified to forget them.
Nova had found her here, hiding on her sixteenth name day. When her mother heard of the room, the queen had the leak in the ceiling repaired, and a rug and the dead king’s favorite chair placed where it used to drip. The locks were made fresh and Yemi was handed the one key. It was now the only thing in the vast palace grounds to belong solely to her.
“Hey, Daddy,” she whispered, as if he still lived in all the pictures she had of him. Among his things, she tried despite herself to see her own loss as the same losses her people were experiencing. Her father would have encouraged it. But what kinship could there be? The Blackgates didn’t kill their own people. War did that. And yet they were somehow the enemy, the convenient target for all the sins war tends to wreak. And the Drakes, who had lost nothing, were weaponizing the country’s grief.
Oh, she would talk to them, she grunted to herself, stripping off her long coat and rolling her shirtsleeves as she collapsed into her father’s chair. The prisoners first, and then the Drakes. But it wasn’t a matter of whether heads would roll. It was a matter of how many.
5
• YEMI •
When Cutter did not join them for dinner, Yemi thought he might be playing games to spite her.
The prison was in the bowels of the palace’s west wing, accessible only by a dozen staircases weaved into the tiered western gardens. The entrance faced the cloud bridge, the ornate stone structure that connected the Rock to the military’s plateau over the Kept’s temple far below.
The guard standing watch outside the prison doorway did a double take before presenting arms as she moved quickly past him and down the stone steps. She was met with a wall of damp heat, the scents of stress and rust and sweat. The ceilings were low, the hallways narrow. Renovations here were a low priority, and there was little ventilation for the heat of torchlight.
The stationed officer, a Captain Balast, had just finished scooting a meal tray into one of the few occupied cells when he saw her.
“My Shield!” he yelped. He was stocky and pink-cheeked, sweating in the sweltering narrow corridors of his station.
“Good evening, Captain,” said Yemi, as pleasantly as she could in case he’d been instructed not to give her what she wanted. “GeneralCutter’s notes on today’s interrogations. I’d like to see them. And we don’t have to do the thing where you insist I don’t and then I insist you do and we realize who outranks whom here. You can just take me to them.”
He led her past a line of cells along the left wall. The elaborate crescent patterns etched into the doors provided glimpses of moving shadows within them. These were the would-be usurpers, in limbo until sentencing was meted out. Long-term residents would be moved to the back hallway in cells facing the cliffs over the Fanged Coast.
They veered around a corner down a long hallway with a window at the end. The unfettered sea breeze whipped the torches hanging in sconces and provided relief from the odors of sweat and despair clinging to the walls. These halls were usually empty, as Ixia was trying to progress from a carceral system. None but the offenders to the Crown were housed here. Petty criminals paid in fines and civil service down in the city. But treason was another thing entirely.
They ducked into a warm office the size of a closet, where Captain Balast pointed to a desk with a single sheet of paper on it. Yemi flipped it over to see two words scrawled in Cutter’s handwriting:
Nice try.
Yemi sucked her teeth. “Alright, old man,” she muttered.
Captain Balast looked on, trying not to be embarrassed for her or to find it too funny.
“Thank you, Captain. I’ll see myself out,” Yemi told him. He bowed and stood aside, and Yemi moved back out into the hallway toward the entrance, where she knew the traitors were still locked away. She’d told Lain she would speak with the prisoners and intended to keep her word.
She slowed her marching pace to look closer at the prisoners in their cells. Only three of them were in this front area, two occupying cells side by side, a man and a woman barely recognizable for thesinister expressions and reverence for her clearly long gone. The third seemed separated into a corner cell, an invisible collection of shuffling noises and gently jingling chains.
“It’s strange,” she said, her voice carrying in the quiet. “I know your faces, and yet I’m looking at strangers.”
