“Do you not know how to find her?” Yemi asked, worried now that the sea witch had sent her on a dead-end mission, something that would keep her in the country long enough for Dahlia to find her.
“No, I do,” Selah assured her. “Though when I offered my assistance, this isn’t what I had in mind. Get cleaned up. We’ll talk in the morning.”
Yemi watched her head back up the stairs while Nova’s joyful cries from the bath rang out behind the door. She thought about pressing for answers, about examining what was behind the other doors. But neither of those things had the allure of the bed in the room Selah had shown her, and she decided that yes, some things could wait for morning.
Yemi woke violently clawing at her throat. Dahlia’s hands had been there in her dream, with her black eyes and mad grin. She’d felt her fingernails pierce her skin and become thick tentacles that choked her from the inside out as they wormed their way up through her nose and mouth.
Her heart pounded in her chest with a force she thought might crack her ribs, and it took full minutes to register where she was and that she wasn’t being strangled. Slivers of daylight pierced the roots and vines outside the long window. Scents of cooked fruit and browning butter wafted in from beyond the closed door.
“Selah’s house,” she whispered to herself, using the words as a balm. Nova slept peacefully beside her, sun dappled and snoring. Her father’s pocket watch put the hour at just past noon.
She took deep breaths and touched the places on her neck where she could still feel Dahlia’s fingerprints. Careful not to disturb Nova, she extricated herself from the bed and padded to the bathroom to check the mirror for the extent of the damage. Three red lines ran the length of her neck in varying states of distress, and there was blood beneath her fingernails. Apparently she’d scratched herself to bleeding in her panic.
Her hair was bundled into a thick pineapple on top of her head and secured with thin gold ropes she unraveled to ease the tension collecting there. She cleaned herself up gently and doused her face in cold water in an attempt to relieve the lingering anxiety that made her skin feel like it was quaking. Nothing like this had happened since right after her father died.
You’ve been through a trauma. Nightmares are normal,the experts had told her then. She repeated the words now to herself in the mirror, inspecting a blob of red in the corner of her eye. This was new, as if something had burst within it. Nightmares had never manifested physically on her body, yet now she felt an invisible hand, touching her, fingers running along her insides beneath her skin, pinching and pulling. Testing her. Control of herself seemed sometimes to shift outside her body, some dissociative state. Maybe this was trauma’s work, too. But it didn’t feel like it.
“Enough,” she growled at her reflection. She had no time or patience for useless panic. She commanded her nerves back to calm and headed back out into the hallway toward the smell of food and themuffled blare of a radio. Selah was near the top of the stairs, smoking another cigar and staring emptily at a wall more than the newspaper in her lap.
A radio.Yemi hadn’t had access to one in days, but it might be the best way to get an idea of how the country was receiving the pretender on her throne. She loved Nova and trusted her to relay the information that would keep them safe. But she was used to being handled. Some part of her needed to know how the world was changing, without the filter of the people charged with keeping her calm.
The main floor was brighter and breezier than she thought it might be. It smelled freshly cleaned, like bergamot and citrus floor wash. All that was left of the man in the tree was a glazed, rolling eye and a set of twitching fingers thrumming against the windowsill. Selah blinked out of her trance just long enough to take measure of her as she came up the stairs.
“You’re awake,” she said. “Not that you look very excited about it.”
“I slept well enough. Thank you again for your hospitality,” Yemi replied, looking around for the radio and finding it amid a stack of books and potted succulents on a small round kitchen table. “May I?”
Selah eyed her curiously for a moment before nodding. “Go on.”
Yemi twisted the dial on the little red speakerbox until she found conversations being held in a serious tone. Politics were always discussed in a humorless drone unless someone was irate.
She recognized Luc Derring’s voice, a grumpily muttered greeting before a radio host read off the news items of the day. The Harpy Queen spent her first day after coronation in session with the Senate. Action items, according to Assistant Orie Abilet, included approving funds for the modernization of roads and the rebuilding of townships destroyed in the wars. There was talk of incentivizing the search for “Queen Yemaya” as well. Commentators posited theories about where she might be now. The prevailing assumption was Muris or beyond. Luzon hadn’t made an appearance at Dahlia’s coronation. “Didn’t send so much as a stick through the post as a gift.”
They debated the Drakes’ motives, falling short of outright accusing them of treason but landing diplomatically: The Drakes were pillars of the community, weren’t they?
“The very bottom line,” Luc said testily, “is that this coup wasnot sanctioned by the people.” Yemi heard their agitated slaps on the desk at every syllable. “It was helmed by zealots and malcontents never elected to speak for anyone, and an affluent family—merchant-royalty—capitalized on it to elevate themselves to even greater power. The Drakes have made us a nation of traitors either to our natural monarch or to their own appointed queen. But you can’t rule half a country in grace and the other in fear. We’ll be back to the Bear Wars before the year is out.”
Yemi was proud of Luc and regretted giving them so much shit all these years. She turned down the volume as they led into some horn-heavy song, grateful at least that Orie was still alive and that Luzon was protesting in his own way. It was hard to feel happiness, though, at the idea that only half the country might be in her corner. Even Luc—who seemed to defend her—didn’t seem to do it out of any particular fondness, which she supposed she didn’t really need as long as she was respected.
Selah placed a cup of tea in front of her. “Here. Drink.”
Yemi obliged absently, still in thought over what it might mean to issue an announcement of some sort that could bolster faith in her as the rightful queen and let them know she was coming back. The tea smelled like mint and honey but went down thick and viscous. Yemi gagged.
“Whatisthis?” she asked.
“Medicine. You’re a walking infection. I patched up your guardian last night; she mentioned you might have the same injuries.”
She was right. Yemi wore a somewhat oversized blue linen shirt plucked from Selah’s closet. It was soft enough but irritated the lacerations that wrapped her torso thanks to the combination of wet skin and subarmor. The itch was maddening.
Selah lifted Yemi’s chin with a long finger and inspected the slashes on her neck. Yemi snatched her head away, uncomfortable with the familiarity.
“This looks fresh. What happened?”
“It’s nothing,” Yemi said quickly, swigging what remained of the tea in one giant gulp so she wouldn’t have to do it again. It coated her throat, and she could almost feel it oozing down into her stomach. Immediately the itching began to subside, though, and a soothing warmth accumulated in the places she knew were scratched and bruised. Presumably she was being healed, but it seemed equally plausible she’d be sprouting roots here any minute. “Anything else happen while I was asleep?” she asked, covertly grazing her torso to feel for any unwanted changes.
“Nothing important. We sent word to your man in Muris that you’d arrived. Discreetly, of course,” Selah replied, turning to water a hanging plant. “Your guardian seems to have as hard a time with the concept of rest as you do.”
“I wish rest were a priority, but there’s a lot to do if I’m to get my throne back. You said we’d talk about finding Ursla today.”
