Chapter Eight
I wake to the sound of a crash, and I sit up to the sight of a turquoise sea and a perfectly clear azure sky through the open side of the cottage.
A brisk breeze roughens the ocean and birds dive, screeching, over the water.
Everything is too bright, too perfect, too white in the pale morning light.
It is as if they conspire to mock the salt stains on my cheeks.
It feels like a hard tackle block in my throat to remember that I’m here because I’ve lost everything and that I can’t even pore over the trade numbers or discuss the problems with the harbor break wall to distract me from the empty years yawning out before me.
The door shudders while I’m still suppressing grief, and framed within it, holding up a mother-of-pearl fish whose eyes are as round as my own, is a young man.
I swallow, blinking for a moment before I realize who it is.
That chiseled jaw is exactly what I expected to see under the thrush-tail beard. And now that it is gone, the rest of his face makes for a very different sight. He has a strong nose, noble features, and steely green eyes. He’s beautiful, if I am allowed to admit it.
He’s untangled his hair and put it in a tidy knot.
A cuirass of pearls is strung in ten separate strings so that they form a garment of their own that lies across his bare chest. Even more pearls hang in long strings knotted loosely around his hips in a wide sash.
They clatter in the breeze coming in through the window.
His feet are bare and his trousers made of sailcloth—plain and serviceable against the contrast of such extravagant wealth.
And he is… formidable. Powerful. Vital in a provoking way.
He looks exactly like what he is—god touched.
I have one moment of the strangest sensation that I ought to sink to my knees, that I’m seeing something so other and distant from humanity that I am compelled to bow, but then I suppress it sharply.
I am Coralys of the Crocus Isles. I bow to no one but the gods.
It’s the red stain of blood across the left side of his trousers that yanks me out of that strange sensation and reminds me that my husband is dangerous.
Not just in the sense that he is feuding with powerful entities but in a new way.
The kind of way that makes my cheeks flush hot and guilt taste bitter on my tongue.
My eyes snap to Oke’s and his are hard as green jade, but his mouth twists with humor, and his expression is narrowing to something like appraisal.
I straighten my shoulders. If he expected swooning or simpering, he should not have married a queen. Even a drowned one.
I draw myself up to my full height, keeping my expression stony even as he lifts his eyebrows.
He can judge my reaction all he wants. I am not the one making a fool of myself in pearls.
Besides, there’s little he can do with all that appraisal when he’s still dripping blood from the bite of his enemies.
With as much dignity as I can muster, I slide from the bed, ignoring how I am now the one dressed raggedly, and hold out a hand.
He looks at my hand silently as if he does not know what I’m asking for.
“Where’s your filleting knife?” I ask, and he finally realizes I’m reaching for the fish and shoves it abruptly into my waiting hand.
“In the other chest,” he says, wrenching his gaze away from mine and frowning.
“You could spend some of those pearls for pillows without holes in them. Or a proper boat,” I tell him calmly as I lay out the fish on the table and open the other chest. The fish arcs upward.
It’s still fresh enough to be longing to live.
I know the feeling. I press it in place with one palm and feel the slickness of its skin meet mine.
The sailor’s chest is a tangle of mismatched things, all of which could be replaced by much better items by spending just one of those pearls. I am irrationally annoyed by this.
“Or you could spend them on an army to defeat these enemies you want ruined,” I say as I rise successfully with knife in hand. I give him a wry look. I think we both know his enemies cannot be defeated by mortal men.
“The pearls aren’t for spending. They’re for keeping.” His voice is thoughtful, as if he is working out a puzzle. “Here. Fill this. If you can.”
I look up and he’s thrusting something else at me. A brass thimble. It’s patterned all around the outside with waves and swimming squid. How odd. I take it in my fish-slimed hand.
I frown at him. “Fill it with what?”
He shrugs, looking away with sudden shyness. His brows pull together.
“Riches.”
I stare at the thimble. Oke’s beard may be gone, but he is no less cryptic than he was before. And no less mad. I shake my head.
“Why don’t you just put some of your pearls in it?” I suggest practically.
“Not that kind of riches.”
“If you say so.” I set the thimble on the table and go back to looking in the chest. I’m hungry. Maniacal tasks like filling thimbles with riches can wait until after I butcher, cook, and eat this fish.
“Thank you,” he says quietly. “I must be fishing. I will return as soon as I may.”
I’m still looking for a board to cut the fish on, and by the time I look up again he’s gone.
I walk over to the door and watch him retreat down the boardwalk. He’s moving at speed despite his wounded leg, as if he’s fleeing a fire, practically sprinting through the striped morning shadows of the judging statuary.
I bite my lip. I’d like to figure this man out. Oke may be an ally, he may even become a friend. But right now, he is a riddle, and unless he soon tells me who he serves and who he opposes, I must discover it for myself.
Besides, I cannot live my life overwhelmed with grief, and a puzzle will give me something else to fix my mind upon.
Already I feel the rolling breakers of loss threatening to sweep me away again, as they did last night, and I know if I let them, I might not be able to claw my way back to the surface.
My lower lip is already shaking and tears are welling in my eyes, but I don’t have time to dwell.
I give his bookshelves a determined glare.
They are incongruous in this vagabond place, and they are where I will start once I have filled my belly and made something of this hovel where I am to live.
Surely there will be some clue to his allegiances there.
I work to light the small fire set in the hearth.
I cook the fish. I’m not much of a cook.
I had servants for that when I was queen.
But I’m blessing my mother’s soul today for deciding it was important for my education that I spend one year helping each branch of the palace servants for a week.
Most of my time in the kitchens was spent chopping vegetables and washing dishes, but I watched a fish cooked and so I can cook one. To a degree.
What I can’t do is anything else about the state of this house. There are supplies—a broom, needles and thread, a bucket and rags—but an examination shows me it’s not dirty, merely shabby. Not in disrepair but rather extremely old.
That’s fine. I’m not here to keep house or charm a husband.
I’m simply biding my time until I’m ready to destroy a few gods.
I wonder if they can be killed. There’s tale after tale about it, and where would such tales spring from if not history?
And yet I’ve never known someone before Oke who claimed to even meet a god, never mind hurt one. It seems an almost impossible task.
But “impossible” has never been a word that applied to me.
I’ll take this little by little, like the old proverb. How do you eat a great whale? One mouthful at a time.
I need a weapon before anything else.
I would pray for one, but the irony of asking the gods for a weapon to destroy them is too much for even me.
I did not believe in gods before, but I made a bargain with them all the same and I heard their voices in the wind.
They are out there and they are responsible for all my calamity.
And I will feed them their own sorrows and return back to them tenfold the destruction they have wrought on me and mine.
In the end, I pick up that strange thimble as if it might be a clue and turn it round and round between my fingers as grief for my beloved takes a moment to wash over me.
I let sorrow unmoor me for a few minutes before I stuff it back down and carry on.
Like the tide, I expect it will rise often, and like the tide it will have to recede. I refuse to accept anything else.
Grimly, I wash the other tunics and the dishes, eat my fish, and finally go to the bookshelves.
These books have been shelved in no discernible order.
A book on the campaigns of the Orange Fleet is shelved beside a book of epic poetry and that is beside a book of maps of the Crocus Isles.
I want to pull that out, but I need to focus.
There’s no clear theme between the selections that might offer a clue, and there’s nothing on theology, which would have been the most helpful in destroying the gods, but there are two books of myths that I pull out in hopes that one of them is based at least in part on truth.
As I draw out the second book, something small falls off the shelf, hits the ground, and then rolls under the bed.
I chase after it. It is another pearl. A black one with no setting. If Oke had only mentioned he had an enormous wealth in pearls, we could have properly outfitted his boat before we left my home.
I bring the pearl to the table with me along with the books of myths. I should put it back. Even if my husband has so many that he loses track of them and they fall out of the bookcase, still, stealing is stealing.
But revenge can be expensive, too.
“What is mine belongs to you,” I murmur, quoting Oke’s words from last night.