• YEMI •
Yemi nursed an anxiety headache as she watched the sea knit itself back together in the wake of theDulce. Twelve years on and nearly all of her dreams were flashbacks, hyperrealistic relivings of her father’s murder. He was still everywhere around her, for better or worse. She couldn’t imagine letting him go. Even now, she sat at her father’s desk, leaned back in his worn leather chair with her feet braced against the wood of the window frame. The ornate glass panes formed the nation of Ixia’s helm motif, the eight spokes inlaid with streaks of brass like abstract sunrays.
The waters twinkled blue in the morning light, cut by the looming shadows of the royal flotilla bringing up the rear.
In the waters beneath the window, the bald and glistening tattooed heads of local merfolk began to dot the churning waves.
“Did you follow us?” she muttered. It wouldn’t have been an easy or smart thing to do. Their long necks gave way to svelte human torsos with backs and long arms covered in shining patterned skins like a motley school of reef fish. Their dark glass eyes gazed curiously, pointedly, up at her.
Something about those eyes always gave her the uneasy feelingof being too high above the surface of the world and in immediate danger of falling.
A knock at the cabin door startled her back to calm.
“Enter,” she called in her best bored commander’s voice. She turned her head enough to glimpse her guest.
Nova stepped inside and quickly issued a slight bow by way of salute. “There you are,” she said cheerily.
“Where else would I be?” Yemi grunted.
“Well, you weren’t harassing the helmsman, so you could have been anywhere. Made me look bad that I didn’t know for sure.” Her boots clicked against the wood floor as she approached, punctuated by the crunching sound of what revealed itself to be an apple.
“I mean, it’s a ship,” Yemi replied. “A finite area. I was bound to be around somewhere. You have another one of those?”
“That’s what I told the commanders, but I got The Face, so off I went,” Nova said, presenting her with a second apple. “Told me to come get you since we’re almost home.”
“I can see that.” Yemi nodded at the Fanged Coast, a stretch of jagged black rocks jutting nearly a hundred feet out of the seas on the southeastern coast of the continent. They shielded the palace atop the cliffs from naval attack and marked minutes to the city’s docks.
“I told them that, too. What’s this? You holding court?” She waved the apple at the merfolk beneath the window.
“No, they just showed up.” Yemi frowned and bit into her apple. “They do this sometimes, the gather-and-gawk thing. Do you think they know who I am? By sight, I mean.”
“Do I think they went from ship to ship looking in windows until they found you? Doubtful. They have to knowofyou, though, right?”
Yemi said nothing. For all she knew, they thought her a freak, a finless spectacle on exhibit in her pretty glass window.
Just as well. Men didn’t think much of Mer anymore, either.
“You alright? Did you have the dream again?” Nova’s voice pierced her thoughts.
“I’m fine. Not thrilled to get back to the Rock of course, but…”She shrugged, which was its own end to the sentence.But duty. But Mother needs me. But where else would I go?
Nova’s dark brown eyes warmed like amber in the sunlight as she inspected Yemi for lies. They’d grown up together. It was hard to keep anything from her.
Whatever she noticed, she didn’t pry. “We’ll have Moss take the long way home, then,” she said.
Yemi nodded as the bells rang them into port.
A nice young soldier Yemi recognized as new to the naval fleet rapped on the doorframe, his posture rigid in his bow and eyes downcast nervously lest he mess up any one of the dozen reporting procedures before royalty.
“My Light, we’ve arrived at the ports in Chairre,” he said quickly.
“See,heknew where I was.” Yemi tossed Nova a mocking smirk.
Nova shrugged. “Ship’s a finite area.”
“Thank you, Hadeen, I’ll join you all in a moment.”
“My Shield.” The young soldier clapped his fist over his heart, performed an aggressively clean about-face, and disappeared from the doorway.
