Mami grimaced and hurled a stone into the shallows with the force of a boulder.
The armada held off for a week, but when none of the prophesied waves and storms arrived, they made their cautious way forward. Laarin’s reputation could protect it for a while, but reputation would never match Tanger’s ambitions. Only a show of force would turn them back. And our force, our most reliable ally, Yemaya of the kingdom below, had abandoned us.
Daddy did not pass a moment sober. He kept to the new house, and not the taverns, where the sailors and fishermen and smugglers waited in icy silence for him to order his wine and depart. They knew. We all knew. This was Laarin, after all, and we had always been Yemaya’s. He began to vomit, and there was no one but me to clean it. So I did; I had practice. I was my father’s daughter and I loved him, as much as Mami loved him, as much as he loved the both of us.
“I wish we were dancing again, like last year,” I said.
His eyes rolled bloodshot past me, steadied, and came back. “Your mother would never dance.”
“You never gave her a chance.”
“I asked!”
I heard my mother’s voice in my head as though it were my own. A calm certainty steadied my racing pulse and cooled my disgust. “You cannot ask for that which you have already compelled.”
He closed his eyes. I left him there. It was not a long walk to the ocean. It never is, in Laarin City. We are Yemaya’s, first and forever. But I walked out along the mangrove coast and then slipped myself into the muddy water. I felt Yemaya around me, buoying me up, lighting my path with a swirling tail of phosphorescence. I was her granddaughter, but now, for the first time, I entered her domain alone. As I swam, the water and the moon and the clouds came together in a solitary baptism. I was fifteen, that night I became a woman. The moon had moved a thumb in the sky by the time I reached that tiny mangrove island that marked the limit of the bay. I climbed their thickly tangled roots and sat with my back against a trunk. A crocodile peeled its eyelid back and we exchanged a long look before it slid into the water and away from me. I laughed softly. I was so afraid. From here I could barely make out the breakwater and the masts of the nearest ships of the Tanger armada. They would be here within a day.
The air was as still and thick as soup, faintly but unmistakably spiced by the sulfur of foreign gunpowder. We would not survive. Ofu might stave off the Tanger battalion on their southern border, but not if Laarin was overrun in the north.
“Yemaya!” I called, though not precisely that, because in her language her name is the sound of water itself, a rushing accretion of force that rips through the vocal cords and plummets like an arrow into the ocean.
She appeared to me in a blink, in the heart of the mangrove. I fell back into the water, all terror and wonder.
“He will pay for what he took!” Her voice through the mangrove crackled like burning tinder and ripped at my ears.
“But we will all die in the morning, when those ships come.”
“He will pay!”
I dipped my head below water; the pain was too much. “And if I promise myself in his stead?” I said. My words wrapped themselves around the thousand legs of the mangrove island. They held them tight.
A solitary sea cow with skin as white as a pearl swam out from their protective shadow. Her face was my mother’s, her face was my mother’s. She kissed my forehead and swam away.
I barely made it back to shore before the storm did. I found Mami sitting alone in our old straw-thatch hut, Daddy’s iron chest at her feet. The rain lashed the mud walls like the drumming fingers of an angry god.
“We have to get to higher ground,” I said.
“Your father will come for this.” Her voice was shorn and clipped again, that remembered spear of disquiet from a childhood I hadn’t understood. She did not look at me. Of course she didn’t. But it mattered less, now.
“Let’s go, Mami,” I said. “Leave the damn box.”
“I loved him, Nena. You can’t imagine how much . . .” Lightning hit the sea with two fists. Her head jerked up. Her eyes were wild, the whites had disappeared. They’d gone black as pebbles. Like those of the sea cow who had claimed me by the mangrove. “What did you give her, Nena?”
“The only thing I had.”
We ran from that place with just the clothes on our backs. We ran with hundreds of others whose homes were too close to the shore, who knew as well as my mother did that Yemaya had, at last, sent us her storm and that her aid would not be without price. We passed Daddy, shocked halfway sober. He was running in the wrong direction. I begged him to come away with us, but he ignored me like he always had when she filled his vision.
“I’ll get it back,” he told Mami. “Don’t you leave me now.”
Mami’s eyes still hadn’t gotten their irises back. I wondered if Daddy even noticed. “Stay with us,” she said. Just that, but it was a plea as fervent as the rain that stung our cheeks.
He shook his head. “Take care of your mother,” he told me absently. Dismissed, like that runty fish left over from the catch, like a child gasping and forgotten.
He started running back down the road. That spiky thing inside me snapped and flowered. I sprinted to catch up, grabbed his wrist, and hauled him around. He had a wild look, lips pulled back from his teeth, chest heaving. I wondered if he would hit me. But I raised my own hand, pulled a thread of lightning from the rioting sky, and told him, simply, “Try.”
He froze, staring at the crackling light sparking against my fingertips and palm. I could kill him right there if I wanted. The joy at being powerful, being more, being seen at last was so intense that I felt the spark of Yemaya’s flame leap from my outstretched fingers to his wet curls. I pulled it back, the acrid stink of scorched hair thick in my nostrils. Daddy stammered my name.
“Just leave it,” I told him.
“Your mother—she won’t—you don’t understand, I have to—”
“Let her go, then!” I yelled. “Stay for me!”
I might as well have asked him to stay for the seaweed, to stay for the sand. He stared at me, confused, searching. For a moment, I hoped—but his gaze grew distant again. He hugged me, though my hand still glowed with lightning and my whole body buzzed with friction. Then he was gone, running down the road as the floodwaters came up.
That was the last time I saw him alive.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The storm sank every ship of the Tanger armada right at the breakwater. Lined them up like hens in a market stall. And our divers have been making good use of whatever we can scavenge for the last three years.
After Daddy drowned, I took the key from the tangled hide cord that had strangled him to death in the confusion of the flooding. Together, Mami and I opened the chest.