“This is Loft’s district, isn’t it? Isn’t she always going on about manpower for quarry security?” Nova asked.
“Yes. We doubled it at least in the last year,” Yemi replied.
“Well, where are they?”
“What?”
“We haven’t passed an active outpost, transport checkpoint, nothing.”
Yemi thought a moment. Large transports had military escorts as a matter of protocol. The senators had lobbied for added security for months, and she’d heard more than one story about copper bandits. But as she searched the valley below them for patrols that should have been circulating for at least the last hour before the sun started rising, she found the only lights flickering were those lighting the edges of dig sites to prevent people tumbling into them in the dark.
“Dahlia’s consolidating forces in Chairre in case I come back for a fight, you think?” Yemi suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” Nova replied, though she didn’t sound convinced. “But it feels like a trap. What if the Obé is the one who laid it?”
“She deals in deals. All we want is an audience with the Mer queen. Ursla is only a conduit—we have her direct me to the Mer queen, pool her resources with Muris’s, and take back the throne.”
“What price are you willing to pay for that? You know there will be one. What if it’s steeper now because you refused her the first time?”
“That’s why we have Muris,” Yemi assured her. “The less we rely on the sea witch, the smaller the price will be.”
The lengthiest stand of trees ended abruptly on a hill overlooking the Rakelands. It was an objectively beautiful place with the bluffs and high edges of the riverbeds lined in fully bloomed blood orange trees. A moderately sized town of dark wooden buildings on stone stilts had been built in the mouth of a dry delta now filled with crops in various stages of growth and harvest. It all slept now beneath a drifting morning mist.
“Welcome to the worst place you could possibly be,” Nova muttered.
“I can think of a worse one.”
“Not by much. They bulletproof their houses here.”
“What?” Yemi studied the buildings again. The walls that appeared to reflect the sun were indeed metal.
“They’re pretty sure your family’s going to violate the treaty first. Or figure out they want to violate the treaty first. So they’re ready for anything. In fact, this is too pretty a perch to go abandoned for long. There, see?” She nudged a patch of singed leaves and dry grass with the tip of her boot to reveal more than a few spent cigar ends. “Probably a sentry post.”
“Where’s the sentry?”
Nova shrugged. “Best-case scenario, they’re a little less on guard with you not on the throne anymore.”
Yemi frowned. This was an upside, of course, but it was hard to see past the insult.
“You know that’s part of their thing,” Nova insisted, reading Yemi’s face.
“I know,” she assured her. The Obéid differed from the Kept in their faith. The latter was certain the Butterfly Queen had come to the throne through the will of Ursla; the former insisted it happened in spite of her. It was the root of the civil rebellion of the Butterfly Wars. The fact that Ursla had conspired with the Kept and not the Obéid in the most recent coup suggested the truth lay in one direction.
These people didn’t know that, however.
“Whatever their security situation, if we’re identified here, they won’t turn us over to the MPs. And that’s not a good thing,” Nova said.
“Mymilitary police, but understood.” Yemi returned her mind to the matter at hand. “So, which one of those looks like tobacco?” She pointed to the crops. Lines of hemp and arundo grass plotted at the edge of the town turned into lavender and canola and then low greens stretching long into the distance, lining the riverbeds in columns separated by stone-paved walkways and irrigation canals leading to the sea. It could take hours to sample it all if they weren’t sure where to begin.
“The green bits, hopefully. She really gave you a trinket for someone else and not a tobacco leaf to use for this?” Nova asked, desperate to get through this quickly.
“I may have antagonized her a bit,” Yemi admitted.
“This would be easier if you hadn’t,” Nova chided.
The bulk of the town was nestled in the western delta before a waterfall, which only dribbled to a stream this time of year. A single bathhouse and large utility and storage buildings straddled the riverbeds as the centers of wooden bridges.
Nova pointed to a central building of deep-red polished wood straddling the mouth of the largest riverbed. Its broad chimney birthed a thick white mist. “That’s steam. A bathhouse.That,” she said, pointing to a row of buildings toward the town’s interior with chimneys belching something darker, “is smoke.”
