Chapter Eleven #3
“Come with me. Please. We need you as queen, Coralys. It was your loss that started this madness.” He’s suddenly angry. His furious words gust hard into my face with his stinking breath. “Tradition be damned. Look what it got us. Look what madness has descended upon us.”
I can see what he means. He is no longer sane himself.
“I’ll take you to the boat,” I say calmly. “Why don’t I carry those maps?”
But he’s not willing to give them up. Instead, he leads me crab-like across one hall and then across to another, never taking a straight line but darting from doorway to doorway until we reach the gardener’s entrance. Then he grabs my arm and clings to me as we spill out onto the cobble courtyard.
I freeze.
Bodies litter the mosaic cobbles. Men and women lie where they fell in tangled garments and pools of fly-crusted blood.
They look as though they were corralled here first. This explains the empty palace.
To one side a guard tower is charred black and still smokes, and the smell of burning flesh hangs in the air.
I gag and scramble to pull the tunic over my nose and mouth.
Gods have mercy. I see a face I recognize—a chambermaid—and look hastily away, blinking back tears. But they won’t be pushed away. They streak my cheeks and I’m forced to scrub at them with my palm.
“Here,” Turbote says. “This way. Hurry. They left the palace when there was resistance in the city, but they’ll be back to finish looting it, you can be certain.”
“Who is ‘they’? We had no enemies threatening us. We had no reason to fear.”
I can’t grasp that all this has happened while I have been in my new husband’s home. It makes no sense at all.
“What does it matter who they are?” Turbote’s voice is almost a wail. “Don’t be like Gherise.”
I shoot him a quick glance. Gherise is… was… another of my advisors. Usually a rival to Turbote.
“He thought he could ask those questions. He thought he could demand answers of the raiders. Last I heard, they killed him on the docks.”
He pulls me from the entry courtyard to the gardens. There are more bodies here and there is no avoiding them.
“Where is everyone?” I breathe. “Surely there are some others alive here?”
“Fled, or dead. They drove them to the city square,” Turbote says.
Now I am trembling just like him, my hands shaking badly, but it’s not until we come to the center of the garden overlooking the turbulent sea that I find my legs won’t carry me anymore.
We keep the anchor from the first ship of our people here in the center of the garden, where it is backdropped by the roar of the sea on the rocks. It held our people fast when first they came to this island and by tradition it will hold us fast until the end.
It is here still. Holding fast.
But lashed to its crusted frame is Delarte. He’s wearing my pearl belt and crown, though they are badly askew. His dead eyes are sightless. Crusted blood traces down his chin and soaks the front of his tunic.
“They didn’t even ask him any questions,” Turbote says, hands fluttering again. “Just took the tongue and left him to die. I hid. I hid and I can’t ever forgive myself for it.”
I wasn’t here.
And I can’t ever forgive myself for that.
I wipe my sudden tears away harshly. I don’t deserve the right to them.
There’s a sound in the bushes and I look around for a weapon. The bodies have been stripped of anything like one.
I fumble for the belt pouch with the knife in it.
A poor weapon, to be sure, but better than nothing.
Both the knife and something else fall to the cobbles and I lunge after them, catching the black pearl in the tear-slick fingers of one hand and the knife in the other.
My fingers on the pearl feel hot. I look down at it and see a wisp of smoke curling out from its glossy surface.
I’m just finding my feet when an unfamiliar voice slices through the air.
“Decorative, to be sure, but it won’t last long in this heat. I prefer my monstrosities cast in bronze so that they last.”
Fear runs cold and sudden down my spine, down the backs of my legs, dragging my courage with it as I find myself face-to-face with a… creature. A thing of nightmares. It stands with a finger to its chin as it regards Delarte.
Turbote tugs at my sleeve, clearly blind to the monster, but I can’t seem to look away.
The thing is man to the waist and then his muscled torso ripples into the eight undulating tentacles of an octopus.
Or rather, I should say the six tentacles, as two end in terrible mangled stumps as if something has chewed through them.
His face is beautiful in a bold way and his skin terribly pale.
It’s pinkish in the face and neck, but slowly turns to a bluish white across the chest and belly until it becomes mottled over the skirt of his tentacles.
He wears a silver torque and nothing else—and now surely this must be a dream, because I recognize him.
This is Vesuvius from the book—the one it claimed was God of the Sea.
I nearly swallow my own tongue at the sight of him. What does it mean that I can see a god?
“Is this your doing?” I ask him boldly, for I do not know how he has come to be here.
He stares at me blankly for a moment before curling a lip. “Surely not. I was always a more creative torturer than this.”
He moves toward me and I raise two fingers in a warding sign.
From the creature’s body to the pearl in my hand runs a fine tracery of white mist. I have the most terrible suspicion that the monster is tied to this pearl.
I have conjured him up, then. Somehow. Or conjured up his spirit, for the book named him dead.
“Stay back.” I am proud that my voice barely shakes, but Turbote does not seem to notice the figure. He tugs again at my sleeve.
“Come, Coralys.”
He’s right. I have no weapon but my belt knife. I cannot fight this monster or any other. I take a wavering step backward.
“We could make a bargain, ragged woman,” the monster suggests with a lifted eyebrow. “Whoever has killed your friend can be killed in turn. I was ever an excellent assassin.”
“Did you come here from this pearl?” I ask him, opening my palm to reveal it. That ghostly tendril remains.
He smirks. “Where else?”
I want nothing to do with him, though—beyond his unnerving appearance, I cannot explain why. That he will kill me when I refuse him is almost certain, but still I prepare myself for a fight, clenching my belt knife in one hand and slipping the pearl back into my belt pouch to free my other hand.
The vision vanishes with that action, leaving only my dead cousin hanging from the anchor—the symbol of the destruction of the people of the Crocus Isles lashed to the symbol of all our strength. I swallow, waiting for the nightmare to return.
I wait for one, two, three breaths and then—with a sense of overwhelming relief—I turn my back on my cousin and whatever is left of the god-monster’s spirit, and I run.
Turbote clutches at my arm, steadying his old feet as we scramble through the gardens and down the wide stone steps toward where a small boat launch is carved into the shore.
The Crocus Isles have always been a kingdom of peace.
There was never any reason not to bring boats right to the edge of my palace.
I wonder if they arrived this way first. If they spilled from ships now hidden elsewhere, pouring over the land like darkness during a storm.
A small fishing vessel waits for Turbote, hidden in the high rocks of the launch. People huddle on the deck as if to make themselves small. I can’t see them clearly enough in my haste to recognize anyone. Unless that is Maevelys near the prow?
Beside me, Turbote stumbles. We’re still on shore and we’ll need to wade out past our waists in the water. I catch him and for a moment our eyes meet—sorrow and loss acknowledging pain and misery—and then someone calls from the boat, a sailor, I think. He’s pointing behind us. I spin to look.
We have been discovered.
Our enemies—for that is who these men must be—race down from the gardens after us.
They’re armed and soot-streaked, and I’ve never seen that look in an eye before.
It’s a look that has long abandoned mercy.
What I am in the eyes of those men, I do not know, but I am not a woman, a queen, a wife. I am a thing they have a will to alter.
I push Turbote ahead of me as fear claws up my throat and run as I have never run before. Our feet hit the surf just as the first of them clears the garden and reaches the steps.
“Hurry, hurry,” Turbote chants as we crash through the waves to our waists. There’s a better way to the boat if we stayed on land. But we don’t have time for that way.
We’re nearly there when one of the men draws level with me, his sword lifted as if to strike Turbote, who is a pace ahead of me. I don’t think. There is not time for it.
I launch myself at the man, driving all my weight into his side, shoulder first. It hurts when I connect. He’s wearing a hauberk under that surcoat. But I must have hit just right, because we go down together in the crashing waves.
I catch a glimpse of Turbote being caught by hands reaching from the boat, and then I’m in the surf, a tangle of limbs and steel and salt water. I can see nothing in the churned-up sand-filled waves. I catch a half a breath of water by mistake and everything burns—my nose, my mouth, my chest.
Gods have mercy. I will die here.
The sea catches me in its powerful embrace, dragging me under, demanding I surrender my life. I have never surrendered. I will not do it now. I will die fighting.
I try to twist my hand in a bowl shape, but it’s caught in a tangle of fabric.