What is this?She groaned, swallowing rapidly to keep from throwing up again. Blood had never affected her this way—not when it hung in the air, drifting from the infirmary for days after battles. Not when it was her father’s and pools of it, smears of it, stained everything it touched. She was as accustomed to it as anyone with a set of functioning ovaries might be past the age of twelve. It had never made her feel so violently… hungry.
Had this been what her mother feared would come from her visiting the prison?
The sensations faded the farther she got from the prison doors. And by the time her mother’s statue came into view, she felt herself again, albeit winded and no less furious with Nova for her insubordination. One of the soldiers, a woman whose name Yemi couldn’trecall, emerged from the crypts carrying a torch toward the braziers. The soldier faltered in her footsteps on seeing Yemi march toward her.
“Give me that,” Yemi snapped, motioning for the torch. “You are relieved.”
The soldier bowed and quickly retreated, leaving Yemi alone with the night and the wind through the archways.
She took a steadying breath. It seemed wrong to approach the monument in a state of anything other than calm.
Slowly, she made her way through the arches to her mother’s statue, lighting the braziers along the way. The winds were all sea spray and juniper and tart drop-blossom as the petals drifted in showers to the west. At the end, she walked to the cliff’s edge and tossed the torch over it, watching until it doused itself in the sea below.
When she turned back, a dark figure cloaked in blue leaned against the nearest archway, a cigar cherry illuminating the wide whites of long-lashed eyes and a grin of pearl-white teeth beneath the billows of smoke she exhaled.
“Nowthatwas a queen,” she said, pointing the cigar at the statue with long fingers. The voice was deep and unfamiliar. A chorus of gold bangles around her wrist glinted in the moonlight. “A woman who saw the ship of her country sinking and filled the cracks with herself. Good luck crawling out of that shadow.”
“Who are you?” Yemi demanded, circling slowly around the far end of her mother’s statue.
“Oh, whoaren’tI?” She laughed, a loud, mad sound, her head tossed back as if by the force of it. Yemi couldn’t be sure, but the waves in her periphery seemed to jerk and sway to match it. The hood came down as she laughed, revealing a round face and a head of long white locs dotted with gold cuffs.
“Think of me as your godmother,” she purred. “Many years ago, your grandmother came to me as a lovestruck merchild, and now here you are, the most powerful ruler in the world of Men.”
Yemi frowned, suddenly very aware of being unarmed and so near the cliff’s edge, so far from a guard post. “You’re Ursla. The sea witch.”
“Careful with that word.” Her eyes grew dark, and for a moment, the sea flickered to stillness. The glow of the cigar cherry warmed her blue-black skin in the dark, iridescent as if moonlight pooled in her pores. The smoking was clearly an affectation, something to do with her hands, her lips, in the silent moments she used as a gauntlet thrown at Yemi’s feet. She did not look as ancient as Yemi knew the famed sea witch must be, and so she thought better of taking her at her word.
“Your locs,” Yemi said. “The Mer don’t have hair.”
“They don’t have legs, either, but here we both are.” She raised her robe and kicked playfully to reveal one of two thick, glistening legs. “Good to know you’ve been taughtsomethingof your people, though. When your grandmother came here and began to grow those ruby-red curls of hers? Oh, the girlsgagged. The seas bloomed envy green for a month.”
Intrigued as Yemi might have been by the promise of new stories about her grandmother, the sea witch’s reputation had preceded her. Yemi remained guarded, eyeing the drifting tendrils of the monument’s trees for signs anyone else had magically appeared.
“Why are you here?” she asked curtly.
“I avail myself to all my children. I met your mother on the passing of her mother.”
“She never mentioned it.”
“And I am absolutely heartbroken about it,” Ursla said in a tone that insisted she was not. “Imagine if this wasn’t her fate? I told her what I’m telling you: You may find your way forward to be a lonely one. A treacherous one. If the rumblings of our worlds are accurate, even a short one. But it doesn’t have to be. If you seek me out, I will help you.”
“For a price, no doubt.”
“Not everything should be free, should it?”
Something about those words singed her, either that the witch somehow knew she’d used these words herself, or that they’d been revealed to have a thought process in common.
“Well, you’ve delivered your message, so here’s mine: I can assure you that I have no use for you now or in the future. And if you come here again, I’ll have your head for my animus.”
“You sound like your mother after all.”
Yemi started to move away.
“I’ll leave you with this then, little bear: What happens when a new queen comes of age in a time when her country does away with royals?” Ursla called at her back. “It happens sometimes, that the world changes and even the young become relics. Where is her place then? She could be the death of the monarchy and that is all, unless she finds a way to be the birth of something else. When you need me, come find me. Your witch knows the way.”
Yemi stopped between the arches. It occurred to her in a flash of light that maybe the sea witch was an untapped source of intelligence. That maybe she’d known of the attacks on her parents, and these rumblings she spoke of might provide insight into what awaited her in the form of Dahlia Drake.
But by the time the idea fully formed, she turned to see the Obé had gone, half an inch of cigar left glowing at the foot of her mother’s statue the only proof she’d been there in the first place. Yemi ground it into the dirt.
