“You mean your family.”
“I mean the institutions they created. Their worship practices. Their royalty. There are real people, real beings, at the center of these things who are cast aside for the caprices of mankind. I’m one of them. It isn’t hard to imagine she could be, too.”
Nova said nothing, and Yemi looked back, sure she was being given some judgmental glare.
“Well, am I wrong?” Yemi asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Nova assured her.
“Right. You can’t, because I’m not.”
Nova stopped. “She killed Van, Yemi.” Her tone was incredulous, and her eyes seemed to hold a fury she was trying to contain. “I mean,I did… what I had to do, but it was the witch in them that brought them to that field and fired that flare. And I think Ursla did it on purpose because she knew… she knew what it would do to me, and she wanted it to do something tous—”
“Why would she—” Yemi started, but Nova shouted over her.
“And I can see that happening when you say shit like you can fuckingrelateto her!”
“Whoa!” Yemi soothed, holding Nova’s face. “Okay. I get it, I do, butweare going home. Together. Whatever else they take from us,wewill remain. Forgive me. You know Mother always insisted that I develop my empathy. I applied it the wrong way to be a smart-ass sometimes, and now the habit’s stuck.”
Any retort was halted by Yemi’s backward squelching step in a mire of rotted fruit.
“Shit,” she muttered, gagging on the pungent odor. She swatted furiously at the flurry of flies that spun up into her face. That managed to get a glimmer of a smile from Nova, so she considered it worth it.
They made their way to the cliff’s edge. The water below was a calm and glittering blue, the line between the shallows and the deep clearly defined.
Yemi pierced the orange with her spear and crushed it slightly in her hand to allow it to bleed before binding it with the tobacco leaf. Nova then launched it off the cliff, and they watched it hit the water in precisely the right place.
They sat in the grass away from the fruit-sodden patches of earth and reclined against a cluster of rocks. Yemi took the first deep breath she had in some time, surprisingly refreshed by being so near the ocean again and content to be making progress.
“What do you think is the significance of the blood orange?” Nova asked as she stretched her legs over the soft grass.
“The blood part, probably,” Yemi replied, putting her head in Nova’s lap.
The waters here were calm, separated from the more violentocean by towering karst islands of cobalt-blue stone. They fortified this particular Ixian coast from naval attacks, and from certain angles they formed myth-like constellations.
“I have never been so exhausted.” Nova yawned.
“Right. Wait, no. Pop’s fortieth, when you ran the Torrine with… rabbit pneumonia?” Yemi said.
“Hare fever. Did I win that one? I only remember being completely dehydrated.”
“You passed out, love.”
“Ah. Right, right.”
“Like, two steps in.”
“I got it.”
Yemi laughed, her breaths coming easier. The sun was warm and the breeze was easy, mellowing the scents of muddled fruit and Nova’s sweat.
“Have you thought any more about elopi—what?” Nova gasped.
Yemi’s “Noooooo” had started quietly enough, but she was shouting it at the sky now.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s more ridiculous now than it was the first time you brought it up!” Yemi insisted.
