Chapter Nine
They’re beautiful,” I admit as he guides the boat through the jellyfish bloom, sailing slowly, silently over the undulating masses of translucent bodies. They’re layered one over another, as beautiful and transient as the days of life that layer in much the same fleeting way.
I hang over the gunwale, letting myself be mesmerized by what I see.
The movement, the gentle rock of the boat, and the warmth of the sun on my back lull me enough that for a moment I can push everything back inside and drift.
I am nothing but this moment. I am no one but the beholder of languid patterns and intricate flows.
I am not a grieving queen but only a pair of eyes beholding in wonder.
“What did you do while I was gone?” Oke asks me in a gentle hush. He has a hand on the tiller, but he’s stretched over the side of the small boat, too, his eyes tracing the jellyfish. A crease in his brow tells me something troubles him.
“I read your books,” I tell him idly, and it is a moment before I realize he has turned to me.
His hair has spilled free of its knot and it catches on the breeze and blows around his face as if to hide emotions he does not wish to share with me.
I push on boldly. “And I discovered my husband was making notes from the deeds of legends.”
The hardening of his expression is enough proof that I have hit the mark.
“Ten impossible tasks,” I challenge before turning my eyes back to the moving jellyfish.
I want to dive in with them and drift just like that until my legs and arms cease to be full of bones and edges.
Until I am nothing but a ripple in the current of this life, here and then gone again.
It has nothing to do with this conversation.
It is an ever-present thing, never-healing like my new husband’s wound.
I throw all caution to the wind. What does it matter?
“I saw your list, Oke, and I read the books. The tasks of Plector. The tasks of Kilinippa. You put them into one list. Ten is the number of the gods. The number of the holy. The number of the impossible.”
“Impossible is not a thing that exists,” Oke says fervently, edging toward me. He’s let the tiller go and the boat float where it will. We have no sail up and there is not much current.
“That’s what I’ve always said,” I murmur.
His voice has a note of appeal in it when he says, “Nothing can be truly impossible when pitted against an unyielding will.”
“And do you have such a will?” I ask him in a way meant to provoke. I am annoyed because making wild claims about strength of will is usually something I do while others look on wide-eyed. I mislike having my tactics turned on me.
He doesn’t answer straightaway and I can tell he’s startled by my tone, but then surprise fades to something warm in his eyes that I read as attraction. His lips part, and I realize I don’t want to hear what he will say. I slip past him and take the boat’s tiller in hand.
He watches me, amused, but he does not comment, simply settles into tying the loose end of a knot as if we two always work together. Eventually he says, “I have the will to do whatever I must. What is it to you, Drowned Queen?”
His easy manner only makes me more agitated. “And will you do those things you listed? Those wild tasks? Moonlight to silver? Gods’ oaths?”
His brow furrows and his expression flickers from mood to mood as if he is trying to make a decision about something.
We stand side by side under an azure sky above a writhing mass of one of nature’s wonders.
It would be almost a tranquil scene if we did not each have secrets hanging over us like storm clouds waiting to drop rain upon the water.
Instead, our conversation feels portentous.
“What would you say if I admitted that out there, I have people I care about, too? A people tormented and hounded. A people who need someone to protect them,” he says.
“I might be relieved,” I say. I want him to tell me more. I want him to tell me everything.
“Relieved?”
“Who are we if we love nothing at all? I was a queen. I was a beloved wife. I was honored and powerful only yesterday and now I stand here barefoot in a threadbare borrowed tunic. My only comfort is that I saved my people. I may have lost all else, but they are safe.”
“Exactly. That is exactly it, Coralys,” he says.
“You, of all people, understand what it is to give your comfort, your safety, your entire heart for the good of someone else. So, if I tell you I have… goals. Plans. That I am undertaking a great act of wonder, can you not agree there might be some purpose or even necessity to that?”
He seems to be holding his breath, but I will not answer him. Of course his motivations sound noble. That is not what I’m questioning.
“This is beyond the realm of good reason,” I tell him frankly. “Surely there are other ways to help your people than to try to perform an act of power.”
He makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, rubbing his shaven jaw as if he is annoyed there is no beard to pull. I get the distinct impression he is hiding something from me and struggling to answer without revealing it.
“Trust me when I say to you this is what is needful. What must be accomplished. And only I can achieve it.”
“And where do I fit in these star-spanning dreams of yours?”
“You, Coralys,” he says, reaching forward and slipping a stray strand of hair behind my ear, “are precisely in their center.”
As if that is not wildly troubling. I lean back so that his hand must fall away.
“And do you have the backing of a god?” I ask with a bitter snap to my words because even now he is hiding the most important part.
That he serves a god—and likely the one who ruined me.
“Tell me, Oke, do the gods condone your unattainable mission? Do they applaud you for trying to achieve what the scholars call impossible?”
He shakes his head and I look up into his impossibly deep eyes. “There is no one striving to achieve this but me, Drowned Queen.”
“Not even the god you serve?” I say, daring him to tell me the truth.
“And who would that be?” His refusal feels defiant.
And the way his jaw hardens and his lower lip divots with displeasure makes my breath catch. Anger suits him. I hope I look as well-dressed in it.
“You tell me,” I say with the quiet of true anger.
When he will not answer honestly, I go back to staring at the jellyfish. He can keep his secrets, but then I will keep mine.
We watch the jellyfish for a long time, both lingering in silence. It is the kind of silence that acknowledges we are two ships sailing different courses, even if we are temporarily thrown together. He sighs as the stars are coming out.
“You would not be so beautiful if you were not so furious with me, I think, Queen Coralys,” he says mildly.
“Then I shall strive to remain so,” I tell him, but his acknowledgment and compliment have served to soften me. “Better angry than sorrowing.”
He nods. “Sorrow is the gift you give what cannot be or is not anymore. It is a gift to the past. Anger is the gift you give the future, a sacrifice offered to unrelenting gods in hopes they’ll choke upon it and you can rebuild the world as you like it from their bones.”
I look at him sidelong. “How long have you been waiting to share that thought with someone?”
He waves with two fingers, dismissing it as nothing. “Oh, not more than a decade.”
I snort a laugh and it breaks the tension between us, and when he looks at me again, he has softened, too.
“Be as furious as you like. Burn me to cinders with your fiery gaze. But know this, Coralys. I hide nothing from you that I will not eventually expose when the moment is ripe.”
Something about how he has worded that makes me have to swallow hard and I hardly notice when he takes the tiller back from me and steers us to land.
He leads me up from the shore and then we go and clean fish.
“Like this,” he says gently, all traces of belligerence gone when he puts his big hands over mine and shows me how to slide the filleting knife through the fish more smoothly.
We pile the flesh of the fish up silently together, my movements flowing into his as if I have worked alongside him all that decade he was thinking up his theory of sorrow and fury. We move from one task into the next in tandem.
“We work well together,” he suggests with a beguiling quirk in the corner of his mouth when, after the fish are clean, we coil ropes side by side so smoothly that it is as if we can read one another through movement alone.
I remain silent, lest a single word betray the conflict churning in my heart. It is not enough that we can laugh at the same dark jokes. It is not enough that we seem made to be harnessed together like a pair of draft horses. None of it is enough if he will not speak the truth to me.
“I’ll buy you new clothing when next I am near a market,” he offers as we make our way home. And his cheek dimples when he says it. He’s being charming. And accommodating. Generous, even. But none of that is enough to fully cool what burns like a hot ember in my chest.
I do not trust a man who keeps secrets from me.
And were I able to trust, there would still be the yawning gape in my heart to contend with.
Every kind thing he says, every compassionate gesture hurts because it is someone else who is supposed to be here saying these things to me, doing these things with me, and my real husband will never be here again.
We eat together and we retire together—both once more to our separate sides of the massive bed.
I try with all my considerable will not to shudder my way into the sobs that try to catch hold of me.
But when I inevitably cannot sleep and he is shifting and suppressing groans once more in lieu of rest, I do not wait for him to go out in the boat alone like he did before.
Instead, I am the one to abandon the bed and creep out into the night.