Selah just looked at her.
“Alright, then.”
Yemi decided she didn’t mind silence. This promised to be a rare—possibly the last—quiet moment she would have until she had her throne back.
“When she sent you to me, the sea witch, what exactly did she say?” Selah asked suddenly. Her tone was casual and curious, but Yemi was sure she’d been thinking about the question awhile.
“?‘When you need me, come find me. Your witch knows the way,’?” she replied.
Selah nodded. “And what makes you think you need her?”
Yemi nudged rocks out of her path and considered her response first, knowing it would be near impossible to get information out of Selah if she presented the wrong motivation here. “I have reason to suspect she was in on the coup. That she aided it for some reason. I want to find out why. If she lent the Drakes her power, removing her from the equation might be the key to weakening them enough that I can take back what belongs to me.”
It wasn’t a lie. Not exactly.
“?‘Removing her from the equation’?” Selah repeated with a hint of intrigue. Yemi was pleased. “You mean to kill her?”
“If it comes to it. Even gods can be held accountable.”
Selah scoffed. “She’s no god.”
Someone else Ursla has pissed off, then,Yemi thought. She cycled through a series of twirls and lances of her spear as they walked, activating the core and singeing the tops off a long line of reeds.
“You have much need to wield spears in the palace?” Selah asked.
“No,” Yemi replied. “But I trained alongside Nova. I’m… effective with it.”
“Have you ever taken a life by your own hand?”
“Only recently, out of necessity.”
“So you took no joy in it? It didn’t satisfy you in any carnal way?”
Yemi blinked at her. Selah was inspecting her closely, disapprovingly, the way she used to when she entered or left the palace.
“Excuse me?”
“Your mother. She never mentioned the bloodlust to you?”
Yemi paused. “The what?”
“The Requinas, the royals of Mer, are the descendants of—”
“The condemned King Peris and Merrine, the Old God of the Seas. I’ve had that lore oozing from my ears since I was six. What are we talking about?”
“Well, the descendants of Merrine inherit the hunger of her favorite form: the megalodon. Blood in the water, blood in the air—it would be the same. When it’s triggered, it makes you ravenous. We first saw it in your mother as the Battle Queen. Killing made her hungry in a very gruesome way. Your father’s spear, when it’s hot? It leaves no blood for a reason.”
Yemi said nothing at first. What sort of sane person would admit to something like that? But she did think of the tales of her mother fighting valiantly alongside their countrymen. Her legendary prowess, her blood-spattered armor, the heads that rolled literally by her own hand. For years, her mother had refused to expose her to violence. Yemi had always thought it was because a personal defect might be awakened, not something so hereditary and so vicious.
Still. There had been that moment back in the border camp. That body of the soldier Nova had killed.
“Doesn’t sound familiar?” Selah cocked an eyebrow. “Well, maybeit’s thinned out by now. There could be enough human in you. Your grandmother didn’t have a violent bone in her body, so we’ll never know if it started out stronger.”
“My mother talked more with you about our Mer blood than she did me,” Yemi admitted. She was shocked to find that it hurt her.
“Most of our visits, she talked about you,” Selah assured her. “She wanted as much time as I could give her to see you grow into whoever you were meant to be. You worried her. When I heard you had chosen the Mer as your animus, I knew why.”
“I chose it so no one could accuse me of running from who I am.”
