Chapter Fourteen #2
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize . . .” Distraught, Naia held out her hands in apology. “Please, tell me—what became of him?”
The storm god. She was asking about the storm god.
The back of Einar’s neck prickled, and he realized Aleksi was watching him with an odd intensity.
Could the Lover see the uncertainty that lurched through Einar’s heart every time he compared himself to that ancient figure of legend?
Perhaps, judging by the sympathy that softened Aleksi’s gaze.
It was sympathy better saved for Naia. Her face was stricken, her hands trembling as she released Agata only to twine her fingers together. And for the first time, Einar truly understood.
Naia didn’t simply have the memories of the goddess.
To her, those memories must be as fresh as if she’d simply awoken from a long dream.
How many days did it feel like to her? A handful of weeks?
A few short moons? Did it feel like only yesterday that she’d walked this island and stood in this temple?
Since the storm god had stood at her side?
It was madness to feel this odd jealousy of a man who had to be thousands of years gone, but how could he not when she looked as if her heart was breaking?
Agata bowed her head again. “I can only tell you what Tona wrote of the Kraken. After you fell—”
Naia flinched and closed her eyes.
“—he stayed on the island to help the people rebuild, and to teach them how to live in the new world.”
Naia released a shuddering breath and reached behind her, bracing herself by grasping the edge of the altar. “He lived.”
“Yes, my lady,” Agata replied.
For a moment, she sagged with a relief Einar could feel in his bones. Then the words Agata had spoken seemed to penetrate. “You said new world,” she said, her face draining of all color. She seemed terrified to ask the question. “But the people . . . Surely I did not fail?”
“No!” The glass in Agata’s hair clinked as she shook her head in forceful denial.
“Oh, no. On this, there is no doubt. Her journals say clearly that not a single life was lost to the maelstrom. But after . . .” She shook her head again, this time in regret.
“No one knows why, but the currents changed. The island grew colder. Within a few generations, it was as you find it now. A land of mostly winter.”
“And Theron taught them how to survive.” That had not been a question.
“Yes, my lady. How to fish these waters, how to build homes sturdy enough to survive blizzards. There are even legends that he brought plants and animals from his home to this island, when the crops and beasts that only thrived in warmth began to falter.”
Naia’s soft, gentle smile was wistful enough to make Einar’s chest ache. “That sounds like him,” she said.
Agata smiled in return, a smile laced with sorrow. “I wish I could tell you more, my lady. But no one knows his ultimate fate. The stories simply say that one day he was gone.”
“The stories?” Naia asked, bewildered. “What about the records?”
“There are few records from those centuries. After Tona died, no one had the heart to continue. The journals were meant to be a history of the teachings of the goddess. Those who came after . . . We dedicated ourselves to keeping the memory of your teachings alive.”
Naia went pale and swayed on her feet. “Then no one knows.”
Tears shimmered in Agata’s eyes. “I am so sorry, my lady.”
The sound that escaped Naia was that of a wounded creature.
Einar swayed, every instinct screaming at him to go to her.
Fear held his feet frozen in place. Should he step forward to comfort her?
Would she even want it, while she was grieving another man?
A man whose sigil and legend Einar had stolen for his own?
Aleksi had no such compunctions. The Lover strode forward to catch her before she could crumple to the colorful tile. “Come, little nymph. Don’t lose hope. I made you a promise, didn’t I?”
“But how?” she whispered, distraught. “There’s no one left.”
The words made no sense, leaving Einar adrift, shut out of whatever private moment they were sharing. His heart was racing, and he didn’t know why. Only that something was building inside him, a tension, a pressure, as if something vast and unfathomable was rising.
He dreaded feeling it break free.
He longed for it to break free.
“Aggie!”
The cry shattered the moment, and Einar swayed as the tension unspooled in time with the sound of running footsteps.
Agata’s eyes went wide. She turned in time to watch the crowd part as Petya raced up the steps. “Pet—”
It was as far as she got before Petya wrapped her arms around her, all but lifting her off the ground.
A laughing sob shattered the breathless silence of the temple, and Einar didn’t know which of them it belonged to.
Agata grasped Petya’s face, and their lips met in a tearstained kiss so intense, Einar almost felt he should look away to give them privacy.
But he couldn’t. Petya’s joy was incandescent, so powerful Einar wondered how Aleksi hadn’t toppled over from the force of it.
Finally, Petya pulled back, framing Agata’s face with shaking hands. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How are you still alive?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” Agata replied, wiping a tear from Petya’s cheek. “After you left that night, I never thought to see you again.”
Petya laughed. “It’s Einar’s ship. After he manifested his powers . . . Well, those who sail with him don’t age.”
“Of course.” Agata turned the full weight of her gaze on him for the first time. “I should have known.”
At the doorway, Gwynira cleared her throat. “While I appreciate more than anyone the joy of being reunited with the one you loved and lost, I admit I am also curious to hear the story of how you survived.”
Einar imagined she was. Here was the answer to the question that had plagued him since he had arrived on the island—and that had likely perplexed Gwynira for far longer.
Spite for Sorin might have led to her studied obliviousness to the way the local island’s culture thrived, but she must have wondered how it persisted with such fervor.
Still clasping Petya’s hand, Agata turned to face Gwynira—and the crowd of islanders beyond her, who watched with hushed reverence.
Her voice lifted, her first words falling into a rhythm Einar recognized in his bones—the cadence of a priestess telling one of the traditional stories.
“On the night the island fell, I kissed my wife goodbye and led the people into the mountains, where we hid from the invaders. That night, I had a dream. A dream where the heart of our island spoke to me.”
Murmurs from the crowd. But no one interrupted her. “The dream whispered to me that the years to come would be hard, the hardest we had ever known. But it also said that hope was not lost.”
She released Petya’s hands and walked toward the entryway.
She descended the three steps to place her hand against the trunk of the tree that towered over the path to the temple.
Einar imagined that once it must have given shade to all who sat on the benches beneath it, but its branches were bare and twisted now. Dead.
Agata still stroked that dry, cracking bark with reverence before glancing back at Einar.
“This tree bloomed for the first time since the death of the goddess on the day you were born. We took it as a sign of good fortune to come—perhaps even a sign that you would be the one to finally drive the Empire from our shores for good.”
But he hadn’t. A scant week after his birth, the island that had resisted Sorin’s attacks for generations had been crushed beneath Imperial boots.
“The night the island fell, I awoke from my dream with a single truth burned into my heart. I knew that you would be the one to deliver this island from Imperial rule. Our goddess-touched prince would return, and the goddess with him. It was my job to be the memory of the island, to keep the old ways alive no matter what the Empire did to try to extinguish them. To prepare the people for the day you both walked among us again.”
No wonder the islanders remembered what they should not.
Agata had sat at the heart of Rahvekya for century after lonely century, sending out acolytes to remind each generation of the goddess who had once walked their shores, the prince who had been spirited away, and the promise that both would return.
Agata turned her back on the tree, the weight of her gaze falling squarely on Einar.
“At first, I expected you to return as a mortal man. But as twenty years passed, and then thirty . . . It shames me to admit that doubt crept into my heart. The only thing that sustained me was the fact that I was not growing older.” A small, wry smile curved her lips.
“Rahvekya was clearly not finished with me, so who was I to doubt the task set before me? I retired to the temple at the heart of the island to guard the eternal flame, and to wait.”
Einar had not realized it was possible for so many people to be so silent. He wondered if the assembled crowd was even breathing. Or if they could hear the racing of his heart.
“It was the summer of my one-hundredth year when the first whispers came from the shores of the Empire.” Agata smiled again, but this time there was a vicious edge of glee to it.
“Whispers of a ship that made war against the Emperor under the banner of the Kraken. A ship captained by a man who had become more than a man. A man named Einar.”
Einar could remember those first decades all too well.
The Kraken had been a fishing vessel at the start, crewed with those hard and reckless enough to follow him into Dead Man Shoals to hunt the giant swordfish who made their home there.
One trip could earn a brave soul more than a year on the ships that trawled the warm waters of the South Sea, and his crew had been very brave.