“Are you?” she asked.
Nova stared ahead and drank barely anything before handing the skin back to Yemi. “Yeah,” she said finally. “Tired.”
They kept moving, and Yemi watched her.
“Are you going to tell me about Van?” she asked gently.
“Family,” Nova replied after a while. “They were close to me and Illowé before we were all adopted. Even though they grew up Obéid, they spied for me, for the Crown, this whole time. And today, they gave me what we needed and let me escape even after I threatened to kill them in their own home.”
Yemi didn’t know what to say that didn’t feel hollow. So few years had passed before their lives had ended up more or less lived together, she’d never had many questions about Nova’s life before her service. She had questions now, though—not the curious sort, but the kind that would help close a gap she felt was opening between them.
“I’m sorry,” she told her.
Nova simply nodded and gave her a look as if reading her mind. “No more questions about it, okay?”
“Whatever you want.”
Sol was a sprawling ruin. Stone structures reclaimed by a dense, creeping carpet of ivy and flowering vines stretched along the coastline. Few of the clay tile roofs were intact. Those that remained were laden by long grass baskets and the trappings of bird nests.
Nova halted beside a caved-in doorway and rotated her grip on her spear.
“Eyes open. We may not be alone,” she said in a low voice.
Yemi peered inside to find the remains of a campfire. It wasn’t exactly fresh or smoldering, but someone was still coming to this place.That knowledge disrupted the quaint tranquility of the abandoned neighborhood. As Yemi looked closer, she could see walls were peppered with strings of divots like bullet holes. At least one building had been toppled violently, shattered, and smeared with the charred residue of an explosion. Ivy had been pulled down in some places to make space for the crudeTRAITORscrawled in stone and then furiously crossed out.
They ventured as close as they could to the shoreline but found the sea had crept inland far enough to swallow a block of buildings up to their rooftops.
“That the grove?” Nova asked, nodding west toward a rise lined with trees edging toward a cliff dropping sharply into the sea.
“If it is, the temple’s that way, too,” Yemi replied.
They made their way across the ruins, navigating sinkholes and scrabbling over bricks slick with algae. Ragged boats bobbed listlessly and half sunk in the shadows of a collapsed dockyard with webs of rope keeping them tethered to one another. Something about them made the city seem like a place that was fled rather than abandoned over time.
A domed cathedral stood crooked on the waterfront. Its pillars had outlasted its walls, and the stained glass ceiling still shimmered in shades of rose and gold, drinking in the afternoon sunlight. Yemi cursed as she tripped over the warped wooden boards of an ancient walkway. She caught her balance against a pillar, causing something to shift and groan, and a flutter of white birds flew screeching from a hole in the roof.
Nova startled and looked back as if ready to save her from the collapsing building, but Yemi held up a hand, the pang of helplessness still something she was content to run from.
They rounded the corner on a sunken amphitheater. The first few stairs were visible in the shallow water. They descended before the unmistakable tips of giant white stone tentacles forming a crown around an algae-crusted island in the shape of a woman’s face turned up to the sky, her ears sunk beneath the lapping waves.
“This… looks like something.”
“If that’s Ursla’s face, this has to be the temple.”
They stood in awed silence for a while, gazing at the site. Yemi tried to envision the grandeur of the filled amphitheater, the entirety of the statue beyond just Ursla’s head. Songs and prayers would have lifted from voices other than those of a small cadre of somber, white-clad priests. These would have been joyful occasions, the actions committed out of love for the Mer.
That love had been dwindling a long time before her grandmother was cast as Ixia’s great villain on the throne.
Nova stepped to the water’s edge and splashed her face and arms clean of the blood and caked body salt that stained them. “They thought the world of Ursla once,” she muttered.
“And then they abandoned her,” Yemi replied. The cool sea breeze shook her free of the sadness that had crept up on her before she turned back up the hill to the orange grove.
“What was that?” Nova asked as she followed.
“What was what?”
“?‘They abandoned her.’ The sympathy for the sea witch.”
“It isn’t sympathy. There’s just precedent for Men ceasing to honor the things they once honored,” Yemi replied.
