Nova lingered just long enough to say, “I’ll be outside.”
Yemi ignored her and placed her arm where it fit in her mother’s hand as the door closed, leaving her alone.
“And bring me the fucking witch!” she yelled.
7
• YEMI •
It was a sunny day thirteen years ago. She was thirteen and standing beside a photographer. Her new collare was stacked either too high or too tight, and her jaw ached from smiling despite it. The photographer corralled a group of officers into position on the basilica stairs for a photo celebrating their triumphant return from one of a dozen battles in the latest war. Her father was among them. He laughed at a joke uttered somewhere behind him. She always remembered that his teeth were remarkably white. She couldn’t remember when he’d been so handsome.
Her neck was stiff, so she couldn’t make out the source of a commotion somewhere off to her left. An explosion in the square. It was a distraction. Before the shields could fly to their positions and the dust cloud consumed them all, Yemi made out the hulking form of her mother’s personal guard, Lidia, as she placed herself between the king and a masked gunman. Yemi swore she could see the bullet as she was swept off her feet and tackled to what remained of safety.
It was just the one bullet that passed through Lidia and then exploded at the end of a crude four-inch tunnel through her father’s skull just shy of the line where he parted his hair.
The world was silent. A violent tableau. Her screams built to a vibration that threatened to crack it open, but she couldn’t hear them.
She could remember her mother’s assassination attempt with less clarity. Maybe because she was less a child then. Maybe because it’d been a failure.
It hadn’t been Mer that killed them. And her mother’s assassin, at least, was Ixian. Human beings were capable of such treachery. Any one of them could have smiled in her face, kissed her ring, dined at her mother’s table, and then slit their throats. Discerning friend from enemy was so tiresome.
As she stood near the cliffs at the edge of the south garden, watching the preparation of rites on the temple grounds far below, this wasn’t the first time she’d considered ending them all. It was, however, the first time she’d had the power to do it.
“She was quite a woman. She didn’t deserve her suffering,” Selah said, her voice like a smokestack. She’d been droning in Yemaya’s ear in a quiet, sad tone she found easy to ignore.
“Always full of surprises. Always had that daring in her, that adventure. In many ways, she helped raise your grandmother, you know. Turned her into an adult. Made her human. She ended up being my best friend. Myonlyfriend.”
“Why are you still here?” Yemaya croaked. Her dry throat made the words come out darkly. Painfully. She hadn’t forgiven the witch for failing to save her mother. She wouldn’t look her in the eye for it.
“I made Circe a promise to help you succeed. Keep you safe,” Selah replied.
“The one of us that needed your help is dead,” Yemaya snapped.
Selah winced. Yemaya was comforted slightly to have stung her.
“Even so,” the witch replied gently. But no other words followed.
They stood together awhile in silence, watching the movement below. In peacetime, tradition dictated that Ixia mourn its dead royals for fourteen days: six days of respectful quiet and stalled commerce, a send-off on the seventh, and then a week’s preparation for the line’s ascension culminating in a feast day and coronation.
Yemi’s father and her grandparents had each died in wartime, when the world could not be stilled for a week of silence. And so the tradition they were able to observe now that her mother had ended the war felt foreign and disconnected from her own grief. It was all meant to serve the people. She was just next in line.
Bodies were traditionally taken to sea and set adrift on a barge that sailed on fire into the sunset. The faithful—and thus Ixia, officially—maintained that from the seas they’d all come, and to the seas they would return. Royal bodies, on the other hand, were replaced with sacrifices in their animus amid floral effigies sent to sea, and stone statues of their likeness placed in a gallery outside the basilica in Chairre. Citizens and foreign dignitaries were invited to salute and mourn them before the bodies were relieved of their animus and returned to their families in the palace to be entombed in the walls of its crypts.
The Bear Queen would not be sunk or walled away. Yemaya was having her body-statue placed standing on an elevation at the edge of the gardens. Behind them now, stonemasons chiseled away at the base of the stone that would bear her.
“You and I have a rite to complete on your coronation,” Selah said. “There’s the matter of your fertility stone and—”
“Enough,” Yemi commanded, looking at her for the first time. It surprised her to find the witch looked nearly as mournful as she felt. “Please. Go home. Orie will send for you when it’s time to progress.”
Selah paused as if there might have been something else to say, but thought better of it and turned back to the palace. Yemi watched her hobble toward the service corridor, where an attendant stood by to escort her away. She’d always found Selah strange, though perhaps that was the nature of witches. It was curious that she’d been around Yemi’s entire life, and still she knew nothing about her save for an apparent love of the Bear Queen.
Below her, Cutter’s hulking form appeared to ignore the proceedings. He stood before the orange tree at a distance from the cliff’s edge that Yemi recognized as yearning. She thought he might jumpand in so doing reveal to Yemi her own way out. He had been tasked with keeping his best friend and king alive and, in failing to do that, set about looking after his best friend’s wife as penance. They’d both been lost on his watch. It was possible that grief carried its own incomprehensible weight.
Perhaps it wasn’t just her. Maybe they wereallalone, and the only way not to be was to be one of the nobodies below, able to sing and dance and pray their way through it. It was hard, for the moment, not to loathe them for their peace.
She watched, breathless, as Brother Lain approached Cutter. Took his arm, pulled him back toward the assembly. He followed the priest with grudging steps. Yemi stepped back from the edge herself, a tear falling where her feet had tottered on the edge. She wiped her eyes furiously and huffed not her last breath.
Another day, perhaps. But not this one.
