Chapter Nineteen
I wait in the darkness, clutching to my chest all my little certainties. I must be right to do this. There is no other way.
I keep coming back to the same thought. Who do I really care about?
The people who depend on me even now to return and save them, or one faulty man with a boyish smile?
I know my duty. I know what is right. Fortunately, they align, even if my weak flesh balks at the idea of staining my hands in his rich god-blood.
We all of us worship gods. Some we make. Some we inherit. Some by necessity. Some by design. But there comes a time when we must set them aside, or if they will not be set aside, then they must be slain.
Okeanos is warm beside me, and the way his breath moves in and out carries the comfort of sleeping next to another person.
My body is drawn to the safety implied in that.
Without meaning to, I move closer and closer.
Close enough that my cheek touches his hair.
And then his breath evens out, and as I tense to spring up, he moves, suddenly, and flings a leg and arm over me in a sleepy, possessive cuddle.
He’s warm and soft with life, heavy with muscle.
His even breath is against my cheek. I feel the scratch of his barely there beard tickle my ear.
His forehead nuzzles against my temple like a small child might nestle into comfort.
He smells of salt and faraway spices and man.
Not like a god at all. His limbs, long and lax in sleep, are heavy on me.
Vulnerable, like a puppy cuddled on my lap, but this puppy is a dangerous one.
Dangerous, not only for all he has done and will do, but dangerous because he is making my heart hurt.
He’s bleeding on me. He’s warming me. He tugs me in tight against him without waking as if it gives him succor to draw so near.
My belly flips and rolls as if I’ve swallowed a mackerel whole and living and it seeks its way out. I want to be sick. I will be sick and sick and sick forever.
But my mind brings back the image of Delarte strung across the anchor, his tongue cut out, the scent of blood thick in the air.
Of Lieve disappearing beneath the waves and his body cold and lifeless in my arms thereafter.
Of Turbote driven mad by horror, his hand clutching at me.
And with those images fresh behind my eyelids, I slip out from under Oke’s tender embrace, away from where his warm chest softly shifts with his breath, and out into the cold of the night.
The moon watches me—the only one who does—her eye wide open with scandalized anticipation. Waves beat upon the shore outside our bedroom, as if they might hammer on a door to wake my husband in time. But they are too slow.
Everything is too slow except me.
Already, I have slipped from the bed, my feet cold on the mosaic floor. Already, my hand wraps delicately around the shaft of the fishing spear.
I creep back up onto the bed, the silk of the bedcovering sliding under my limbs, but this time I do not lie down. I stand, shifting to secure a strong footing. I will have only one chance. I must do this well.
I pick my spot.
Okeanos wears no shirt to sleep, only the pearl cuirass. I see every rib. I choose a place between them.
The spear feels weighted with a thousand intentions when I lift it high. I do not yet know if I can kill like this.
My throat is suddenly clogged. It’s hard to breathe.
I choke for a moment until I remember it was hard for Lieve to breathe, too, when the waves clawed down his throat.
The thought is enough to decide me.
I plunge the spear down as hard as I can.
I hit my mark, lean my weight into the spear, and feel it pierce through the resistance of vulnerable flesh, glancing off bones, through viscera into the clogging thickness of the feather mattress below.
And I hold the haft firm and unmoving just as I have been taught to do with a great fish on the end of a harpoon, leaning all my weight into the intention.
Okeanos spasms against the spear. His blood spurts hot down his side, spilling across skin made pale by moonlight and soaking into the sheets.
And just as my breath crystallizes in my throat, his eyes spring open like twin traps and he drags in a choking inhale before coughing—hard—body curling possessively around the spear shaft, hands fumbling for it until his fingers catch and stick.
Blood droplets decorate his pretty lips and spatter my pillow.
“Cora,” he gasps. “Coralys.”
I cannot breathe.
His expression is panicked and his head jerks in a rough circle, his arms flailing out and knocking over a waist-high vase positioned beside the bed. It smashes on the floor, making me flinch at the clatter, and then his eyes find me and he sags.
I realize, a little sickly, that he thought me harmed, that he was panicked for my sake, not the sake of the spear I’ve thrust through him.
A wave of nausea washes over me, my stomach heaves, and my eyes smart sharply, but I came here for this.
It’s been my only hope since I lost Lieve.
I’d be both craven and gutless to come to the task and refuse it now. Wouldn’t I?
“Oh god,” I say in a gasp. “Oh god, I’m so sorry.”
What irony—to pray to your god as you murder him.
I lean my weight hard on the spear, not giving an inch as our eyes lock, and to my horror he grips the spear in both hands and uses it to slide his body up the wooden haft so he can face me nearly nose to nose.
The iron scent of blood hangs thick between us and the droplets on his lips are black as inkblots in the moonlight.
He feels his side, lifts a hand, and looks at how it’s dark with blood. Pain fills his face before he turns again to me. I know what he sees: me with lips parted in horror, eyes wide, and yet unmerciful.
“I hoped for better from you.” His words are punctuated with rough breaths as if they are vital to say before the end and he must force them out.
My own voice trembles like grass in a gale. “This is the best I have to give.”
He nods sharply, as if he accepts that, and then with one hand he wrenches the pearl cuirass from his throat and thrusts it at me.
“Yours,” he gasps, pain etching lines on his face that were not there before. “You must take them.”
A few pearls spill free of the string, but I reach out and take the rest from him. Slick as they are with his blood, they are hard to hold. I string them through my belt.
To my horror, he has climbed the spear farther.
He is unthinkably strong. And now he grips my jaw in one bloody hand.
His breath is ragged just like mine. My bones feel terribly delicate in his powerful grip and my breath flutters like a bird.
I think he could break me even now with a snap of his wrist. But he only looks at me for a long moment before shuddering.
“The clock,” he says, as if whatever he saw in my eyes compels him.
He’s struggling to speak. “It’s in the clock and the book.
Look in the library. Finish the work. Save our people.
Whatever you think you’ve gained here is only loss, but perhaps it is not too late.
Four tasks are already complete. Remember that. ”
He lets go of my face as suddenly as he forced the embrace.
I am shuddering with the horror of what I’ve done.
“Now flee,” he gasps, the strength of his face stark in the moonlight. “As fast as you can.” He bites back a moan. “Your safety lies in the sea.”
It’s only when he slumps that I realize how much effort it took for him to stay upright. He lets go his grip on the spear and falls into the bed, his arms sprawled limply akimbo, and there’s no more tension on the spear anymore. There’s no more light in his glassy open eyes.
The sound that escapes my lips is more of a faint cry than a sigh.
But someone is scrambling up the rocks that lead to our island. They must have heard the breaking vase.
“Okeanos?” a male voice calls.
I’m choking on my own breath, it’s coming so quickly. I let go of the spear and feel for Okeanos’s pulse and there’s nothing there. Nothing.
Panic claws up my throat and the waters are rising.
I can’t be discovered like this.
They’ll be certain I killed El’Dorian, too—that I’m this god-killer they so fear—and I don’t know what that will mean beyond certain execution.
I scramble from the bed, tripping on the sheets, and stagger across the stone floor, running and skidding to the edge of the island as fast as my feet can carry me.
Behind me, I hear another call. The voices are getting closer. Someone gasps a curse.
But I am quicker.
I reach the edge and I fling myself into the water below as one might fling a line of rope, only to remember that I don’t know how to get back. I hit the water with a slapping belly flop and then rise, fumbling with my belt pouch as I hear a second person scrambling up the rocks.
“What’s happened, Markanos? Is he there?” The words are harsh and male, but I don’t know whose they are.
I pull Vesuvius’s pearl from my pouch and it takes no effort to wake him. Not when my tears are flowing so freely. I almost drop the pearl twice I am shaking so hard as I bob in the waves.
“What is—?”
I silence him with a quick gesture. He looks past me and his eyes widen with sudden delight.
“Tell me how to get out of here,” I demand in a harsh whisper even as the voices behind me rise.
Above me someone curses even more loudly and he’s joined by the second voice. They’ve found Okeanos.
Vesuvius laughs soundlessly and the contortions of his face and body repel me even as I gesture again for silence. With a shrug and a triumphant grin he shows me a new hand movement, and the moment I see it, I copy it, praying I’ll escape to anywhere but here.
Footsteps slap on the rock above me as the world spins in its almost-familiar way and shifts me between planes.
I rock with nausea as I grip the deadly black pearl in one hand and what’s left of my sanity in the other, and I hope, hope, hope they cannot catch me.
I’ve left a husband dead. Sprawled on his own bed. Murdered by my hand.
And there is nothing before me but bleak emptiness and the heavy guilt I’ll carry forever.
His death was supposed to heal the world of ill. It was supposed to fix all the mistakes that came before—maybe it still will—but right now it feels like it’s not just me or my islands drowning, but all the world, and I am queen of the flood, queen of the drowned, queen of damnation itself.