Chapter Five
I am personally offended by the wind today. It is gentle and caressing as if it wants to seduce me into believing it is my friend after all it’s done to me. But I know the truth. I know that at the behest of the gods it gutted my nation and swept away my heart and my future.
My new husband steers the boat. His head bobs in a way that worries me. He looks as if he might lose consciousness at any moment. It’s only his white-knuckled grip on the tiller that tells me he’s still with me.
I search the boat for a waterskin or food or anything I might use to sustain him, but to my horror there are no supplies.
I clench my jaw. Fool of a woman. I should have examined the craft myself before we set out.
I should have ensured we were supplied. I allowed myself to grow distracted by emotion, and now look where I am.
Alone with a dying man in a barren boat.
Alone with my sorrow for the loss of my best friend.
“You seem distressed.” Oke’s words are mild.
I meet his eye and once more a strange heat washes over me. I do not like this feeling of being seen to the bones. Lieve never looked at me like this. It makes me more naked than I was in that marriage pool. But I am Coralys of the Crocus Isles. I do not look away.
“We are not prepared for any length of voyage,” I say carefully. “We have not so much as a skin of water aboard.”
He nods gravely, but his eyes are glassy and I wonder how much he’s even paying attention.
“You are an observant woman.”
I make a sound that is half scoff and half snort. “Don’t try to distract me with flattery. We must turn around and get supplies before we go to wherever your home lies. We aren’t too far out yet. It will be an easy thing, if humiliating, to go back and beg some water and food from the dockmaster.”
I glance across the tufted waves to my emerald jewel islands. Already my mind is thinking of them as a foreign place, no longer my home.
“My home is very near,” Oke says, amused.
There’s a smile dancing around the curve of his mouth and I realize with surprise that it has a nice shape.
Were it not hidden by his dreadful beard I might even name it comely.
“Do not fear, wife. I agreed to see to your care when I put my clothing on your back and I will do it.”
I draw in a long breath. “I want very much to trust you,” I say, as a precursor to what I really want to say, which is some version of “you’re an idiot” or “you’re going to get us both killed,” but I don’t get that far.
Instead, his eyes widen and the glassiness fades for a moment into a focus so intent it pins me in place as he says, “You want to trust me? After all that has befallen you?” Each word feels weighted, almost hopeful. I fear a wrong answer will set me down an irrevocable path.
“Yes?” I say.
He nods and swallows as if he’s making a huge decision.
“That might be best,” he says to himself. “That might be best, yes.” And then his gaze shoots to mine again and his timid smile is almost boyish when he says, “I’d like to trust you, too. I would like to tell you everything. But you need time to heal and mourn.”
“There are some things you don’t need to tell me,” I say a bit dryly. “First being that you need someone to see to your wound.”
He forestalls me by raising two fingers together between us. It half looks like a warning and half like a reverent ward against a devil.
“It is a godwound,” he says, gaze still fixed on me. It’s as if he’s tied a line to my soul and I cannot look away.
“What is a ‘godwound’?”
He ignores my question. “You’re not to try healing it. To do so will not work and it could make everything worse. Godwounds are never-healing.”
“I may not know what a godwound is, but I know nonsense when I hear it. I will heal it if I get the proper supplies and the opportunity.”
He opens his mouth, shuts it, frowns as if studying a difficult puzzle. “I have not indulged in marriage before. It seems such a fraught thing.”
I draw back a little, offended. “Fraught? Or practical?”
He glances up at me almost shyly, a small half smile on his lips. The expression seems incongruous when set against his rough beard.
“Binding two disparate souls? You find this practical?”
I don’t want to tell him that my marriage to him is nothing but grim practicality.
To the degree that my last marriage was for friendship and affection, so this one is for convenience.
If he feels some measure of wry humor in our circumstance, well, he’s entitled to coping with an unwanted bond in his own way.
He moves to reach for a coiled rope that has slipped out of place and is tangled. I reach past him and coil it for him, frowning when I look up and see satisfaction in his eyes.
He shifts suddenly as a wave hits our prow a little more forcefully than the rest, and my hand stretches out to support him before I realize what I’m doing.
All my mind can see is that terrible injury to his thigh.
I wince in harmony with him as he takes up a cross-legged position on the hard bench.
That can’t be comfortable. The wound needs stitches at the very least. How has he not yet bled out?
“Is your wound magical, then? An act of a god?” I ask.
He makes a gesture of acquiescence. What kind of fisherman tangles with those powerful enough to inflict such damage?
“How did you come by the wound?” I press.
“I have enemies. One surprised me. In the dark. When I thought I was in a safe place.”
An injury made by an enemy who has the power of a god? This is a disaster. I can barely get my next words out. “Which god has wounded you? Or was it one of their god-touched servants?”
Oke lets go of the tiller and leans forward.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“If we are to trust, then one of us must trust first.” His earnestness is almost innocent.
It stands in stark contrast to his physical power and dangerous secrets.
He has a strange way about him, a stillness like the calm beneath the surface of the sea.
It colors his every flicker of expression, his every movement, shading them with a depth and purposefulness that speaks of consideration and suggests more premeditation than I’ve seen in any other man.
Perhaps he is not as old as I judged him to be.
Perhaps it is only this strange depth that makes him seem so.
Now that I’m sharing such a tiny boat with him and watching him sway to its every movement, he seems younger than me.
His torso moves easily with the boat, and it is tanned, lean muscle and taut, firm skin under all that bruising.
The only lines around his eyes are the lines of sun on the skin, not of age. He is not an unattractive man.
Regardless, more than any husband, distracting or not, I need an ally.
He clears his throat. I blanch a little as I realize his wound has soaked through his trousers again. I don’t care what he says, he’s going to need that tended. Or he’ll die and leave me in this hulk alone.
“The truth is,” he says suddenly, looking furtively around as if he might be overheard. “What is coming next may be too unsettling—even for you, who has been a queen and dealt in power for all your life. I do not want you to recoil from me when you see it. I would like you to be an ally.”
“As you’ve said, husband, I am…” I stumble here.
“I was a queen. I am certain that with time I will learn your profession. I respect your work upon the water.” I spread my hands as if to indicate that all this is his.
Flattery? Perhaps, but I do not want to offend him from the very start.
“But I can assure you there is very little you will have seen in the rest of the world that I will not already know. And whoever your enemies might be, they are mine now, too, and I will not flinch from them.”
His mouth quirks into a half smile. Not offended, then, but not believing me, either. “You’ll learn my profession?”
I smile a little queasily. “If you wish it.”
“I do.” He sounds very sincere in the fervent way of the young, whom life has yet to beat into a more measured approach.
“But not right away. And we will not discuss my… dangerous entanglements… immediately, either. I know grief. I know it most intimately.” The sympathy in his eyes makes a lump form in my throat.
“I would not burden you yet. Not until you’ve had time to make your peace with your loss and your new station. ”
That is surprisingly kind. But I am not yet ready to speak of my loss; it fogs my mind and blots out all other sentiment. I try to change the subject.
“Did you say you’ve never been married?” I ask gently. “Have you never, then, been in love?”
He frowns. “That is my tale to tell. And love does not factor in. Instead, I’ll speak to you of my home, which is not far from here.”
We’ve set a course due west of the Crocus Isles.
I frown, trying to bring up sea charts in my mind.
What is nearby? There is the Isle of Glass, which some say had been made so during a terrible cataclysm—but that is nothing but a smooth green stump of glass that rises only far enough out of the water to be a hazard for ships and a landing place at low tide for passing birds. I can think of nowhere else nearby.
“There is little close in this direction,” I say warily.
His smile grows anxious. “It doesn’t have to be close. It is a small place—small and secret and all my own, and I never let anyone else within it. I only bring you there now because you are my wife. Do you understand?”
I nod, but I do not understand. What kind of life does he live that he receives no visitors?
He shifts uncomfortably. “I feel compelled to warn you, for I know how stories work. They’re powerful things. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about how they sweep you away, and I am afraid we are both caught up in one. I do not want to see us dashed upon their fateful rocks.”
He’s speaking nonsense again. Perhaps Turbote was right. Perhaps we should have taken measures to ensure we picked who would step onto that dock.
I raise an eyebrow. “Is there a tale, then, of a fisherman and a queen who sail to his island? For if there is one, I have not heard it.”
“I merely wish to warn you, Drowned Queen,” he says, watching me carefully. “So that you do not misjudge what comes next.”
I don’t need anyone else deciding for me how I will react to a thing. I can react on my own without prompting. I’ve been doing it for twenty-nine years. Grief has not robbed me of autonomy.
I return to the point, very intentionally not looking at our wretched craft, distinct lack of supplies, and tattered clothing.
The sun is already beating on my head so hard I think it might drive me mad, but all these warnings have me wary.
What could be troubling enough that he must warn me?
I can only think of one thing that could earn him both a wound of the gods and secrets he cannot share.
He might be the chosen hero of one of them—though the idea of that is as laughable as a queen marrying a fisherman.
Even so, I have to ask. “Are you god-blessed as well as a catcher of fish?”
“I am the Fisher King,” he says coolly, avoiding my question. “I see everything from the view of the sea, from the eye of the whale, from the end of the tentacle.”
“I cannot imagine,” I say dryly. “And so, you are the Fisher King. Is this the same thing as the Drowned Queen?”
“Precisely so.”
I have not yet decided if I am amused or annoyed. He is not taking my questions seriously.
“And what do you fish, Fisher King? Do you go after great schools of tuna and cod?”
He laughs, and if I must admit something, I’ll admit I love his laugh. It ripples like water now that it is no longer rusty and broken.
“I fish for possibilities.”
“And is marriage to me one of those possibilities?”
He leans forward so far now that we are nose to nose.
I feel the brush of his against mine. It’s an unsettling level of intimacy I’m not certain I’m prepared for.
It mimics too much the closeness I shared with Lieve.
And it does not help that whatever he reeked of before has been blown away and he smells now only of the sea and of a strong young man—a man who has married me and likely would have plans to bring me to his bed were he not so grievously wounded.
“It is the greatest of possibilities, Lady of the Sea, but I do not need to lay hold of what is already mine.” He draws back, watching my breath catch, and runs a hand over his beard.
I’ve seen Turbote do that when about to engage in a tricky negotiation.
“I crave your complicity, wife. I have… plans.”
“Plans?” I am careful in how I pitch my voice. It is neither no nor yes just yet.
“There are some who have wronged me,” he says carefully. “Precisely who, and precisely how, I do not fully know, and I dare not lay bare to you yet. First, we trust this much, then more later. Yes?”
“Yes,” I agree, and I swallow and match his trust with my own. “I have been wronged, too.”
“Have you?”
“And I, too, want my revenge,” I say, clenching my jaw. I want it with all the aching longing of my mourning heart.
“And will you tell me who has wronged you?” He is very grave, and I am pleased that he takes my concerns as seriously as his own.
I give him a long look. “When you tell me the names of your enemies, I shall reveal my own. Suffice it to say, they are powerful indeed.”
“And how will you take this revenge?” His voice has taken a wary edge. Perhaps he fears being caught up in a plot of murder.
“However I can,” I say grimly, but it is sorrow that fills full my voice. “A life, or a soul, or the tiniest scrap of flesh—what I can take, I will, and I will use every violence at my disposal. Will you help me?”
He runs a hand through his hair and curls his body around his wound before looking at me with a worried frown.
“I will help you see clearly. I will keep you from harm if I can. As for vengeance, that we must speak more on later, I think. When you have had time to consider if this is truly the course you must take. But know this, Coralys of a drowned crown and a storm-tossed fate, you are my wife and I will shed any blood I must for your sake, ruin any creature, destroy any bastion. I will shirk no great task that must be done for your good.”