“What? I saidmostly. And I did call you gorgeous.”
“You’re relieved of duty, then. Not like there’s an entire armada out here who can do your job or anything.”
Nova chuckled in a vaguely naughty way. “If byjob, you mean—”
“I don’t. Go tobed!” Yemi said quickly, despite her laugh.
“As you wish. Come knock when you’re done.”
She continued up the stairs alone to where a soldier opened the door for her. The collected commanders and their assisting staff stood and bowed as she entered.
“As you were,” she said lazily.
Once the door was shut, the room was stifling with the scents of tobacco and hearth and of bergamot someone was wearing poorly.
“Who’s overdone the cologne? Less of it, please. We’re in tight quarters. A window, someone.” Yemaya frowned as she took her seat. Chuckles and mutterings of “Yes, My Light” fluttered about the room.
A window was opened and the commanders joined her around a large, square table covered in overlapping maps secured by brass weights and a grid of leather straps. Commander Hurand presented her with a leather portfolio stacked with training results from every vessel.
“Performance and inventory,” he started. He was a jovial man. His fingers were thick, and one of them was missing from his left hand as he pointed out line items on the documents she held. “Twenty-eight new cannon, salt bombs all maintained and operational. New pyrogel looks promising. We’ll be seeking other applications for it. There’s an inquiry into a riflery contingent—”
“No,” Yemaya snapped. “We’ve been over this. Who’s made the inquiry, Commander? You? Inquiries don’t justget made. Someone makes them, and I’d hate for it to be the same someone who’s been told at least a hundred times that we are not a nation of gunners and will not be at any point in the foreseeable future.”
Hurand cleared his throat to the small smiles and snickers of the others. “I’ll… relay that to the inquiring party, My Light.”
“Excellent. What else?” she asked, flicking through the other pages for anything remarkable.
The room went silent and somewhat more tense as eyes went to Commander Nasrin, an older brown woman with a severe silver bun and an interesting backstory for the trio of slash marks slanting upward on the side of her face. Yemaya liked that she spoke plainly.
“The divers returned no sign of wreckage,” said Nasrin. “That makes the sixth Ixian ship to vanish completely just this year. The five merchant vessels and now theClodion. We’d previously considered expatriation, people seeking their fortunes elsewhere given the… prolonged state of things in our home. But we’ve got a body now, almost verifiably one of our own. This has become a situation. It’s time to consider more malicious alternatives.”
There it is,Yemaya thought, closing the brief. She sat back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap, wanting to at least be comfortable for the onslaught of passive aggression.
“Such as?” she prodded.
“The obvious thought is that Kespia’s making a play. An angle into a new war. Our navy is superior. If they target it in a tenuous peacetime, that goes a long way toward leveling the future battlefield.”
“Hmm.” Yemaya nodded. “Stealing the shipswouldexplain why there’s never any wreckage.”
“Yes, My Light,” said Nasrin.
Yemaya studied the maps on the table and the small brass pyramids that marked the places of last contact with the missing vessels. “But these target zones are farther from their shores than they are from ours. Do we think it’s practical for Kespia to come all this way to capture a few hundred bolts of silk or a ton of iron ore?”
“The iron, perhaps. For their armory.” Nasrin shrugged, the movement in itself an admission that the idea was far-fetched. That there was another option, perhaps more absurd, that she believed could be the case…
“There is another possibility,” Commander Mackey chimed in from across the table. He was older, squat, and bald, and was likely the bergamot offender to mask his penchant for dark liquors. His eyes were small but deathly serious, and he appeared to regret having spoken up at all.
Yemaya almost smiled. “Well, speak. No one’s raising hands.”
He gulped visibly. “The body. The way it was drowned, mangled, chewed up. Historically, it isn’t unheard of for the Mer to lure sailors to the depths…”
The groans and “For gods’ sakes” resounded in the little room.
“What would the Mer want with half a dozen ships?” an incredulous someone asked.
“Be still. Let him speak,” Yemaya demanded quietly.
“There are circumstances!” Mackey insisted. “The—the fish in the bay at Chairre. The catch has been dwindling for years. The waters fishmongers have to mine are now increasingly distant and more treacherous than they were before the Butterf—”
