Yemi smiled and turned to Lirik. “Splendid, then. After you.”
Minevra gave Lirik a severe look and spoke so that they could both hear her. “Return not a moment past moonrise.”
But Lirik was already pulling Yemi toward the exit.
“Sorry about her,” she said.
“I’m sure she’s just doing her job,” Yemi replied. “I recognize you, you know. You’re one of the ones following my ships sometimes.”
Lirik turned and beamed at her. “You remember me? Sorry, I just—I’ve heard so much about your family. Humanity in general is terribly interesting, isn’t it? By the time the Mer-made make it down here, they’ve forgotten so much, I never get all my questions answered.”
“?‘Mer-made’?” Yemi repeated.
“Mm-hmm. There are the Mer-born—the ones like me born to Mer parents—and the Mer-made, the ones saved by the Drowned Mother.”
“Ursla,” Yemi clarified.
“Yes!” Lirik chirped. “Looks like we can answer each other’s questions.”
Yemi found Lirik’s joy infectious and began to relax. She was relieved that at least someone was enthusiastic about her presence.
Lirik gave her a tour of several large, empty ballrooms. The palace of Abyssa did not have a banquet hall. They needed no tables at which to sit and dine and fritter away with idle conversation. The tall walls were lined with curios stored behind mottled sea-glass panes and delicate netting so they didn’t drift away. Sea fruits, barnacles, and live shellfish were stored in pockets backlit at this hour by waning sunlight.
Yemi was invited to help herself to whatever suited her while Lirik reclined on a stone bench and plied what appeared to be cherries from a bundle in a cubby near the ground. Yemi stared and swallowedhard at the shelves of shrimp and scallops. They were the closest she’d been to meat in ages, but the former’s still-twitching antennae and the promise of the latter’s raw sliminess undid their appeal, and she groaned, selecting the fruit instead.
There wasn’t a boar on the continent safe from the spit when she returned home.
She took in the bright coral floor worn smooth by time. The gold glinting chandeliers twinkled amid jellyfish swarms near the ceiling. It was a liminal space, empty and unused, but designed for large gatherings of joy and kinship, like any place purposed for food. Her grandmother must have dined here for years’ worth of better days. Or, knowing her, she’d been chased through here and every hall of the palace in some game or following some prank. There had been joy here, once. Or at leastlife.
Yemi peered through the clear netted backs of each cubbyhole to the grounds surrounding this side of the palace. They were void of any indication of a training field, barracks, or armory. She sighed and twirled the fruit pit in her hand, hoping she really hadn’t come all this way for nothing.
On their way out, Lirik told the story of the palace stalks. The very walls, she announced, were etched with the accounts of Mer history: its early days in the lower levels, newer ones high in the coral towers. When Yemi remarked that Men had libraries full of history, and that libraries were composed of books, which were leaves of paper and ink bound in wood (the stalks of trees) and leather (the treated hides of walking beasts), Lirik gasped and grinned as she drank in every word.
Yemi was allowed to retrieve her spear, and then they spiraled outward from the palace with not so much as a glimpse of military training grounds or a soldier not on guard duty. It was difficult to conceive of a royal outpost without need of a standing—well,swimming—army. There had to be an explanation.
“I suppose we should’ve begun at the beginning, but oh well,”Lirik said as they came to a halt between the edge of the garden and another deep-blue canyon on the palace’s southern side. It was a corridor separated from the city by tall orange sheets of fan coral. “This is the Valley of the Crown.”
Giant limestone statues lined either side of a trench, depicting Mer’s—Yemi’s—royal lineage. As massive as they were, they were dwarfed by a mural of Ursla at the far end, her tentacles spread with gemstones mimicking their luminescent spots. Her eyes were either closed or cast downward, appraising the giant orb of amber pressed between her hands.
Yemi floated between the statues. Faces of each royal’s offspring were carved in relief into each of the bases, though their details were worn away by time. The ones who went on to ascend the throne were marked with a red dye. And each king or queen held a trident with gold-tipped prongs, the staff ornate, like her father’s spear. She wondered if the same smith was responsible.
The statue of Helene was freshest, the algae barely collected on her shoulders. There were no children marked on her base. Beyond her, King Triton stood dour and imposing, heavy gold chains layered around his neck and a scar over his right eye. Yemi’s chest tightened when she looked at his base.
“There are seven faces here. Or were,” she said quietly.
“Yes, for King Triton’s seven children.”
Yemi swallowed hard, racking her brain for memories of her grandmother mentioning these names, alluding to any sibling but Helene. In all her stories about the grandeur of Abyssa, of divine life among the world’s most exquisite creatures, how was it that she’d escaped details of her own family? Yemi approached the statue and ran her hands gingerly over the space where her grandmother’s face should have been, but where there was nothing but scarred stone, as if her likeness had been violently removed. And unlike the other statues, Helene’s base was littered with rubble, like something had been knocked down to place her there.
“Who’s scratched her out here?” Yemi asked.
Lirik’s face fell for the first time since they’d met. “There are no surviving likenesses of Arielle in Abyssa,” she said apologetically.
“By Her Majesty’s decree?” Yemi asked bitterly. Lirik didn’t answer immediately, but she didn’t need to. Yemi drifted upward, taken with the glittering ocher halo of cliffs surrounding the city above the surface, and emerged in a coral grove teeming with brightly colored fish and the creatures who fed on them. Tendrils of anemone swayed gently in the current, a poor substitute for a breeze. Yemi was surprised to find herself missing the scents associated with the gardens at the Rock. A curious thing, as she’d never truly pined for a place before, only a time.
Abyssa was, in fact, in the heart of a sunken atoll. Above the water’s calm surface, the city was ringed by jagged pillars of red rock, like a crown too treacherous for Men to traverse. Low hills of long grass were submerged along the outer edges, linking shallow ponds and tide pools where seabirds pecked at tiny crabs and baby octopuses.
“I am sorry you weren’t better received,” Lirik said, appearing beside her. “My mother means well, but…”
