Chapter Fourteen
I slip from Oke’s warm bed into the chill of the hour before dawn. The cold nips at my flesh and a last stealthy glance at him bites at my conscience, but whatever I owe him for these past weeks pales beside what I owe my people and the memory of Lieve.
I mean to leave Oke then, but he rouses, his eyes narrowing when he sees me creeping from the bed. He’s quick to join me despite his wound. I try very hard not to look at it. It will be my one advantage against him if he becomes aware of what I mean to do.
“I must leave to deal with a matter today,” he says mildly as we check my nets for fish, hauling them up dripping and heavy in the rose-pink light of morning.
My fingers are growing calluses like his from handling the rough ropes.
He guides my work, teaching me as we go with small gestures and nods.
“Would you come with me? Or would you remain here and when I return we can discuss together my plans to build a refuge for our people?”
It’s an offer of a truce. And I wish I could take it. But when I think of his refuge, all I think is Refuge from what? For is he not the source of so many of my people’s woes? Is he not the one who has brought storm and calamity upon us?
He will be dead and that will be the end of it.
“And where do you go, husband?” I ask, begging my face not to show the path my mind has taken.
I gather the fish from the net and put them in a reed basket.
They flop and dance in the crisp morning air, flinging arcs of water droplets out like golden strings of pearls in the morning sun.
I must brace my feet on rounded stones as I catch them and slide them back in place.
And I realize in this moment that it is not only that I am angry and hurt beyond expressing.
I am also afraid. I see in him the end of my people, my culture, my very islands.
All at the hand of their god. For who is there on whom to call, when your god cannot help?
Where do your prayers go, when your god is not listening?
And I cannot leave my beloved people to the fear that has me so tightly in its grip. I must go. I must set this in motion. And I must not let him know what I am about.
“I must treat with my enemies,” he says gently, an echo of my mental list, but he does not look at me. Gold burnishes his face and glints in his green eyes, and he is so sober he could be one of the guarding statues. “I must carve out a little more time for us to act.”
“I wish you well,” I say, not meeting his eyes, tasting the lie on my tongue.
He bobs his head in acknowledgment but says nothing more.
And yet he still hovers at my side all day—there as I clean fish and cook them, as I wash clothing and hang it to dry, as I sweep the house.
When I turn, I brush against him; when I lean over something to study it, I feel his breath on my neck.
He helps me at each task with gentle efficiency until I feel like I might scream.
I need him to go. I do not dare twist my hand and shift realms with him here.
He would follow. I know it. And then what?
Would he guess my purpose? Would he find a way to stop me?
I think this is exactly why he remains so close and so sharp-eyed.
It is midafternoon and the day has grown bright and furious when I finally run out of things to do and he moves in front of me so that I have to look into his jade eyes.
“I beg you forget your revenge,” he says, and his jaw clenches as if this is taking an effort to ask. He hunches forward as he speaks, the muscles of his shoulders seeming larger with the movement and its accompanying intensity.
He knows, then. Or he suspects. A surge of cold fear lances through me, flooding me from forehead to feet.
“You wish for it still, do you not? To have your revenge on me. To destroy my plans and bring me down. Because of the calamity your people face, the death of your husband, the loss of your crown.”
I say nothing.
“You know I am your god and your husband, and yet you plot against me. You will not take my word that I am bent on your good and the good of those you love.”
To my utter surprise he leans close and draws me to him with a hand at the small of my back. He is warm and firm with muscle. I’m so taken aback that I gape at him like a fresh-caught fish. I see in his eyes the unexpected. Longing. Desire.
“Hostility is the last thing I wish to see grow between your heart and mine. Leave it, wife.”
“And what will I be, then?” I ask, a little breathlessly. “Faithless? Fickle? I am neither of those things.”
I shiver against his touch, regretting that I must reject it and him in the most violent way possible.
“You’ll be my wife.”
“What would you have me do? What?” I press, frustration acid on my tongue. “Forget my dead husband and my suffering people, and live a happy life with you here in the sun and by the sea?”
His hand at the small of my back tightens in what I think might be matching turmoil, and the movement hitches me a little closer as he shakes his head.
His brow so close to mine that I can feel his hair brush my cheek.
He is very alive. Almost inhumanly alive, and I feel myself pulse in time with the rhythm of his heart.
His words are forced, tight, frustrated.
“I would have you stand by my side and be my wife in more than name.”
I’m surprised that he would bare himself so knowing I must shatter any hope of such a thing.
That he would draw so near to she who waits like a snake in the grass.
Surely he realizes. Surely this is why he has hovered so near and waited so long.
Did he truly believe he could seduce me into trusting him? Now? When my heart is set?
I slip from his arms, putting distance between us, and the look I give him is firm and set.
“Had I not so great a cause, I might very well have given you that. But it is too late.”
He nods. “I must attend to my duties, then. As you must attend to yours.”
And I feel every place that he no longer touches like the shock of cold spray on the skin. His pleas have changed nothing except for how much it will hurt us both when I take his life and all his dreams from him.
He gathers his things quickly and I watch from the cottage as he leaves on his boat. The wind is rough today, and it shakes the little craft in sprays of silver as it drags it off to the deeper sea.
And then—at long last—he is gone and I’m free.
I make my way back down to the water—not the beach and not the rocky steps where I bathed in the sea.
Both those places are too full of Oke, and to betray him there feels doubly wrong.
Instead, I slip out in a different direction past the statue where I called up Vesuvius, down the toothlike jagged rocks that make me feel as if I am crawling into some great creature’s mouth, and down to where an unhappy sea foams against the shore.
All along this half bay, the waters have washed up spew from lands beyond: battered timbers, tumbled bits of glass, a handmade buoy with the sign of Okeanos carved painstakingly into the surface and then worn away by the waves.
Little tokens of lands far away that I’ll never see now that I’ve chosen this course.
I step into the surf and let it tickle my shins.
Now that the moment is here, I find I’m not quite ready.
But I do not have the time nor the patience to wait for my heart to be ready.
I screw up my mouth, fix my courage, and take the black pearl from my pouch and stare at it a moment.
I’m not sure I want that horrible dead god with me for this after all.
I leave it clenched in one fist, close if I need it, but unopened.
My hand is shaking as I raise it in the cupped shape Vesuvius showed me. I know I am afraid. But is anything truly worth doing not a little terrifying?
Before I can think my way out of it, I twist my hand the way I was shown. The world around me shimmers and reels, and I blink hard to recover myself, expecting to be in the home of the gods.
I am not.
Instead, before I can gasp in a breath or see my surroundings, water rises in a forceful swell, sweeping my feet out from under me, curling upward and then crashing down again like the mouth of a monster bent on destroying me.
I am swept up and rolled under the powerful wave.
Panic clutches me, but I fight it back and scramble for footing.
There was ground beneath my feet a moment ago.
I find it suddenly as the water recedes and pull myself upright between sharp rocks that rise through the water like the spine of some great dead creature.
I gasp for air and claw against one of the rocks, choking and heaving on the salt water I swallowed. I must be in the wrong place. I must have done it wrong. As my anxiety rises, the water rises, too, and then I’m smashed again under an angry wave.
I lose my grip on the rock and tumble, knocked hard on the head so that I nearly lose my grip on the pearl.
For the second time in a fortnight I think I may very well drown.
By luck alone, my grasping fingers find the rock again and I claw myself free of the drag of the dark waters and suck in a breath, forcing myself to remain calm until the wave recedes and my heartbeat becomes manageable.
I must find higher ground.
I drag myself up the spinelike rock, only to have the waters chase me upward yet again, until I’ve climbed twice my height and I’m still ankle-deep in water.
I wobble there on the top of one of the rocky ridges and look outward at a string of white islands connected to this spiny ridge as if they are the ribs of a massive dead creature.
I think I see structures carved from the white stone on some of them, and in the distance there is a rock that rises high above the rest, but I am drenched and bedraggled and to reach it I must swim from rock to rock along this jutting spine.