But Nova ignored her, too.
A moment’s thick hesitation and Selah released her. “You two need to leave.”
“Wait. Things were fine before I went to sleep. Why don’t I ever know what’s going on?” Nova asked.
“We will. As soon as you give me what I came here for,” Yemi replied.
“Naturally,” Selah said. The anger in her face had given way to disappointment. The mysterious door opened again and she gestured for Yemi to go in. The stone was gone from the place it had been on the floor. Selah and Nova followed her inside. A single wall sconce illuminated the small room lined with shelves of jars and dusty books and macabre curios Yemi inspected only to find the stone. Elaborate hemispheres of chalk arched along the base of one wall, small stone bowls brimming with sand and spent incense at their centers.
“What was that I saw? The red stone,” Yemi asked.
Selah pulled the stone from the pocket of her skirt. “The seed of my power. And your family’s fertility stone. It shouldn’t have called to you. It’s concerning that it did.”
“That’s going to be useless to you this round, I’m afraid,” Yemi said.
“There are no useless things,” Selah replied. She rummaged through a small ornate chest at the far end of the room next to a hanging serpent’s skeleton and returned with a round gold pendant on a length of leather cord.
“If you meet Helene, give her this.”
Yemi took it and ran her finger across its surface. It was heavy and fairly thick, the broad side scalloped like resting water. Worn letters had been carved into its outer edge and a chip the width of a fingertip was missing from a lower quadrant. “Who is Helene?”
Selah shook her head dolefully. “North. Through the Hot Gates, you’ll find the City of the Sun.”
“First seat of the Kingdom of Ixia,” Yemi murmured, trying to remember details from a decade of compulsory Ixian history lessons. Nova had them pause a moment and went back to their room. Yemi took the opportunity to hang the medallion around her neck for safekeeping, even if Selah was determined to tell her nothing more about it. Nova returned and spread their map across a long nearby table, then marked the city where it lay on the coast.
“Day and a half’s ride, maybe two, but it’s not through the friendliest territory,” she said.
“In what way?” Yemi asked.
Nova pointed to a pale area marked by glyphs indicating a small mountain range and a jagged strip of river. “These are the Rakelands, just before the Hot Gates. What was left of the rebellion after the Ixian wars migrated there, mostly. The most direct route is a twenty-mile stretch of Obéid and people who regularly use your name and terms likeflesh leatherin the same sentence.”
“Wonderful,” Yemi groaned.
“And after that,” Selah continued, “the old city is all flooded ruins now, but you’ll find what remains of Ursla’s temple on the other end of a blood orange grove. Halve one of the fruits and wrap it in a tobacco leaf as an offering, then drop it into the water beyond the shallows and wait there. She will come for you between dusk and dawn.”
“Should’ve kept the horses,” Yemi said. Nova folded the map and left to prepare.
Yemi moved to follow and to collect her few things but turned back, feeling her mother’s nagging disapproval for the way she’d treated someone who’d been objectively helpful. “Thank you,” she said.
Selah nodded and waited with her hands in her pockets, presumably for her to leave.
Yemi continued for want of the satisfied feeling that came when she knew she’d done the right—or at leastsufficient—thing. “The captain of my guard, Cutter, is in Muris as a guest of King Luzon. If you need a place to go, you’ll be safe there.”
“Kind of you.”
Yemi turned to leave but stopped again when the witch kept talking.
“The difference between a witch and a god is that a witch can’tcreate,” Selah called. “Not from nothing. We can only manipulate and transform what already exists. The Drowned Mother is no god. The minute you remind her that her power has rules like the rest of us, you’re a target, not a pawn. Be smart.”
Yemi nodded. If her mother had always made a point of telling her she was anything, it was smart.
13
• YEMI •
The farther east they walked, the more the lush plains gave way to the stone lands. Ancient rock formations re-created images from Ixian mythology through forced perspective, so the landscape itself told stories of the Old Gods and long-dead legends even the evolving world hadn’t forgotten just yet. A string of rose quartz mountains known as the Crown of the Land God sparkled a dusty pink beneath the northern sky. The fork in a rushing river called Sandoval’s Broom recalled the demigod who swept clean the wild lands to make way for Man’s expansion beyond the coast. It marked the entrance to the country’s quarries and copper mines as well, which meant more workers and material transports along the road, and less forest cover for Yemi and Nova to cloak themselves in.
They stuck to ridge lines as far from the roads as possible. The trees here were thin and the route was long, but it was the safest vantage point to watch for anyone looking for them.
