Chapter Eight #2
I set the pearl in the thimble. There. He has his first chunk of “riches.” I stare at it, thinking of another black pearl. One that Lieve wanted to buy for me set in silver.
“It’s too extravagant,” I’d told him. “I don’t need to wear wealth. Better to use it for the good of the isles.”
On a whim, I get up, dig into the chest, and come out with a weatherworn belt of green leather that has a small pouch affixed.
I saw it there before, but I had nothing of value to keep safe.
Now I do. I jam the thimble and pearl into the pouch and look around, because I am loath to have a pouch on my belt that is only for the trivial, and when I see a chipped belt knife and a flint I add them in as well.
Everyone should have a knife for practical tasks like cutting lines or lighting fires.
I snug the belt around my hips and go back to work. Opening the first book at random, I read it with furious intensity.
It tells the story of Kilinippa, a princess—it’s always a princess—who had to do five impossible tasks to free her husband from the halls of the underworld and release him from the wrath of the gods.
She must have loved the man very much. If suffering can win you a boon, she’d earned a lot more than one soul by the time she was done with these tasks.
Poor thing. She would have been better off born a merchant’s daughter or married to a fishmonger.
People of simple backgrounds are never dragged into these terrible stories.
Their stories are hard enough—full of empty bellies, sick children, and death in childbirth, but at least no one makes them mix with gods and madness.
But these are the kinds of stories I need. Though this one tells nothing about how to find the underworld or any other god-inhabited place, it does indicate that one exists.
Someone has slipped a little piece of parchment between the last pages of the story. I pull it out and run my eyes idly over a penned list upon the scrap. It reads like a task list a madman might make. Or like a selection of notes for a new myth.
Win a god’s oath.
Wed the drowned queen.
Collect the dead to serve.
Fill a thimble with riches.
Heal the crown of the sea.
Turn the betrayer’s heart.
Mend time with golden stitches.
Drink the ocean dry.
Spin moonlight into silver.
Split the seven seas in twain.
This list is eerily similar to something I’ve read before.
Five of these tasks I recognize as Princess Kilinippa’s.
She spun moonlight into silver on a drop spindle she stole from the goddess Glorian.
She used gold to buy back the home of her husband’s ancestors lost to them by treachery, thereby “mending time with golden stitches.” She made the one who betrayed her beg forgiveness before the king.
For returning the spindle, Glorian agreed to give her children peace.
And… yes, there it was… she drank a tavern called “the Ocean” dry by means of marching an entire town through it in one evening.
Not all that impossible, it seemed, though I have the feeling that if by doing this she earned some kind of magic for herself, then it must not have been very potent since she was clearly relying on creative misinterpretation to fulfill some of these tasks.
But the other things on the list… I feel like I’ve heard of them, too. I frown for a moment.
Plector!
It takes me some time and three more books from the shelves before I find the passage from the historian Herolithus on the deeds of Plector, an ancestor of mine.
According to the text, Plector was tasked by the gods with five great tasks for the overturning of what was called a “curse upon the seas most terrible.” Unfortunately, Herolithus seemed more intent on explaining the political turmoil of the islands and the various players there and less on the actual tasks, which he deemed fanciful and more of a ruse of Plector’s to win the hearts of the people than any true deeds done for the gods.
He did note one of the tasks involved marrying a “drowned queen.” To fulfill so grim an order, Plector had sailed to a far-off land, drowned a queen there with his own hands, and then staged a mock wedding at the local temple.
It was an act Herolithus assured the reader was very unlikely to be true and certainly only a tale told by bards who made their coin on “thrilling and horrifying the base populace.”
But there it is. Written down. And my strange husband who holds magical power in his palm and claims to be wounded by the gods had called me “Drowned Queen.” A coincidence? I doubt it.
He’s also handed me that fool thimble.
I study the list again and my mouth goes dry. Mad or sane, this is clearly my new husband’s list. Filling the thimble is fourth on the list. Wedding the queen is second. Does that mean he thinks he’s fulfilled the other two? Has he won a god’s oath? Has he collected the dead to serve him?
I snort at myself. I must be dazed with grief and loss to cast myself in such a ridiculous sailor’s tale.
But I am starting to believe it was not coincidence that brought Oke to my docks.
I am starting to think that he names me “Drowned Queen” to make me so.
That he saw what the gods had done to me and swooped in to take me on purpose.
I swallow against a dry throat and shoot a furtive glance to the door where he loomed just hours ago in all his pearl-encrusted glory.
If he is following some mad plan laid out in myths to gain himself an otherworldly power—well, that makes him worse than mad.
It makes him worse than dangerous. It makes him a tool of indolent gods.
I know full well what it is to involve yourself in the workings of gods…
and what it will take from you. And I am alone here on this island with a man neck-deep in the business of gods.
A book falls from the shelf and I jump, letting out a shuddering breath.
Now I am the one manufacturing stories and leaping to foolish conclusions.
Shaking my head, I go back to the shelves and return the fallen book to its place along with the others I’ve taken out.
There are plenty of stories here. I’ll not be bored in days to come.
But I do not think I’ll find the means to my revenge here. Or a hint to my husband’s loyalties.
I trace a finger down the spines of the books a little sorrowfully, my mind back in my own library listening to Lieve read aloud to me. It feels like a lifetime ago.
My finger catches on one book that sticks out farther than the rest. I push it back to make it line up with the others, but it does not budge. Frowning, I draw it out.
The Twelve Furies of Vesuvius.
I have never heard of Vesuvius. I open the book. The first page is a woodcut of an angry-looking god holding a trident. He’s bare-chested, and where he ought to have legs there are octopus tentacles. Beneath the woodcut are the words “Vesuvius, God of the Sea.”
But that is not right. Okeanos is the God of the Sea. It was in his temple where I bargained for my people’s lives.
The book is old. Too old, I would have thought, for this kind of binding. It is bound like a modern book with fine stitching and good-quality vellum, the leather tooled carefully across the exterior, though the edges of the pages crumble and the story within speaks of lands I’ve never known.
Perhaps it is a tale spun to tell of a time that never was. I am about to put it back on the shelf when I see what was keeping it thrust outward.
A lever.
I look around as if someone might be watching, but I’ve never been very good at banking my curiosity. I hardly wait a moment before I pull the lever. To my surprise, the bed hanging on chains rises into the ceiling, and the chains I thought were affixed to the floor pull up a trapdoor.
A trapdoor with steps leading downward.
Hidden lists. Hidden levers. Hidden steps.
I take a step toward the trapdoor, but I’m arrested by the sound of someone on the step outside the door.
I spin around, jam the lever back in place, cover it with the book, and I’m there panting and blessing the gods that the trapdoor shuts quietly when Oke slips into the house with a shy smile on his face.
“There’s a bloom of jellyfish,” he tells me as if my heart isn’t racing. “Come and see.”