“And?”
She shook her head, kept on shaking it as she speared mushroom slices on her fork, stab, stab, stab. She ate them like they had personally offended her, like she had to, but she wasn’t going to like it. She swallowed it down and then reached for the glass of milk before her, drinking down half before she’d speak. Then she tilted her head sideways, waiting for a beat or two before continuing, her knuckles white around her utensil.
“It’s war out there. Like, literal war. We use the word all the time, all hyperbole. The war on terror, the war on drugs…” Her brow creased, then smoothed. “I don’t know what else to call it. The police… ‘A few bad apples,’” she said with a sarcastic voice. “As if any one group could ever be described the same way. But the bad ones, the angry ones, the scared ones. So, so many of them…” Her eyes flicked up as she regarded each person, one at a time. “They’re firing rubber bullets on the whites, spraying faces full of tear gas. People are just standing there, just witnessing sometimes, seeing what’s happening, and they converge on them. Sometimes it’s a child…”
Her eyes went wide and sightless, as if she could see what was happening on the table before her.
“There was a protest with a bunch of hippy middle-class white women in Portland, and they got fired on… What do you think they’re doing to us?”
She put her fork on the table, appearing to give in to the fight. Her head dropped down, and her eyes fell closed.
“Every time I close my eyes, I see our people screaming. For help, for justice, to be heard. To be seen as more than just the degree of melanin in our skin. To be seen as more than irritants in our own damn country that we built on our whip marked backs. To not be seen as the ghosts of slaves, our servility still required, our chains intact. But most of all, him. He cried for her, our Mother. He cried for her with his dying breath, choked by yet another knee on the backs of our necks in a chokehold they were taught to use to keep us down.”
Silence fell over the room, my vision losing its shadowy pall and replaced now by tears. Useless, pointless tears. My knees had pulled up against my chest as she had spoken, my arms winding around them. I didn’t know much about what she talked about. I’d seen stuff about what was happening in America with the Black Lives Matter movement on the news, but I’d been so bloody insulated. But her words conjured pictures in my mind, and I could see terrifying fragments created from half seen footage and my own imagination, and instinctively, I recoiled. I wanted to pull away, push the chair back, and scuttle back to my room, preferably with Aen and Marlow in tow. I could wind my body around theirs, trail Aen’s hair across my face and pretend none of this was happening.
Not this, Lilith said. You will listen to this.
“Rutherglen is capitalising on the chaos and using the anger around BLM as a means to strike back at us. Not that that shit show needs any more fuel on the fire. He’s putting guns in people’s hands, whispering in the right ears, and throwing that money around.” Quinn’s eyes flicked up, meeting mine for a second, then came to rest on Ashanti’s. “We’d already have a crisis on our hands.” She put her cutlery down with exaggerated care. “There were already a bunch of powerful men pushing the buttons. Now there’s a bunch of angry fae doing the same, because of her.”
Quinn’s eyes came to rest back on me. She studied me like I was a bug or something.
“We’re gonna do this? Put everything we have on the line for Becky over here? Bring a goddess into this world who’ll—”
“Quinn…”
“Maybe I’ll be able to help,” I said, my voice sounding just as thin and ridiculous as I thought it would.
Quinn rallied at that, her chest filling, her eyes sparking as she prepared to tell me exactly what she thought of that.
“Quinn, that’s enough. You’ve worked exceptionally hard and had to bear so much. You are excused.”
Ashanti’s voice was kind but firm, killing the conversation dead.
“Mother.” She got to her feet and sketched a quick bow before turning on her heel and leaving.
My eyes dropped to my plate, my fingers going to the rim before I looked back up again.
“If you need space for people to stay, why not in Aragide?”
Well, that got people’s attention. All of the many people clustered around Ashanti’s end of the table turned to look at me. I blinked, for a second feeling that rush of insecurity, but Lilith straightened my spine.
“There’s rooms for the consorts that I think only they can enter and my big one, but it looks like there’s accommodation for days on either wing.”
“Mother, the archives team will need to do an extensive survey of the whole complex before people are moved in,” Bea said. “The fact it was just opened without consultation…”
“We can’t afford to wait on an archaeological survey,” Duke replied. “History’s important, but I’m not leaving kids to sleep rough in our streets when there’s warm beds for them inside the palace. Take who you need, Bea, but I’m moving people in there tonight.”
“So then we have a few motions to table,” Ashanti said smoothly. “Voting is compulsory. I can’t allow anyone to abstain from this. It’s too important. Moving our people into Aragide?”
“Giving us as much time to do a survey as possible,” Bea interjected.
“Giving the archives team as much time as possible to do a survey. Ayes?” She quickly counted the hands that were raised, who seemed to have the numbers. “Nays? Well, that’s been passed. Bea, submit your requests to Duke, the rest of you, I’ll need to assist with the extractions. The United States is an obvious focus, removing our members and withdrawing to Aragide is imperative, even within a region not experiencing unrest. I want communications made with all of our sister chapters, including those in the wider Sisterhood to see if there’s any others in vulnerable positions. We leave no flank exposed.”
“On it, Mother,” several women said.
“The training of Kira and her consorts has already been voted on, so that’s to be organised by Duke around the extraction process. Perhaps you can ask Rey to do a little team building exercise, get them working together.”
She surveyed the lot of us with a well-seasoned eye, nodding at our stony silence.
“Then that brings us to the Hartley request of bringing their members here. What of course will need to be considered is the hierarchical implications. Will this court still exist? On its own or as a subordinate to ours? To Kira’s? She has her own reservoir, so will they be swearing to her?”
I settled back in my seat, my head spinning with everything Ashanti listed.
I thought we were just gonna do some kind of Olympic trial, kick butt, and tap boundless raw goddess power.
Nothing to do with the fae is that straightforward, Lilith said with a hiss.
Chapter 3
It took some time, but it all got resolved. Ashanti’s people were all assigned roles, be it housing, retrieval, or more active front line ones. They ate their breakfast, got their orders, then excused themselves to go about their business until all that remained was Duke, Ashanti and my… When I got my instructions to show Duke and his crew around Aragide, I got to my feet gladly, giving Jen and Vervain a hug as I did so.